Habib Azar and Michael Mayer | Marnie / 2018 [Metropolitan Opera live-HD film]

tumbling through their own sentences

by Douglas Messerli

 

Nico Muhly (composer), Nicholas Wright and Winston Graham (libretto), Michael Mayer (stage director), Habib Azar (film director) Marnie / 2018 [Metropolitan Opera live-HD film]

 

I should begin this essay by admitting that I never much liked Alfred Hitchcock’s 1964 film Marnie, mostly because of its hack psychological story, as retooled from Winston Graham’s 1961 novel by screenwriter Jay Presson Allen. I have never much liked her film-writing and doctoring, including works such as The Prime of Miss Brodie, Travels with My Aunt, Forty Carats, Cabaret, Funny Lady and other box-office successes.

     What she basically does is take important novels and plays and “re-fix” them in ways that exaggerate their characters, Liza Minelli’s portrayal of Sally Bowles in Cabaret being a perfect example (she complained that director-choreographer Bob Fosse didn’t much like the Bowles figure, and if you properly read the Isherwood book, why should you?) Although she was known as someone who might re-write and improve works, I think she often turned them into glossier versions of what were actually darker pieces of writing, and Marnie, in particular, seemed like a film, under Hitchcock’s handling, about a tortured psychotic whose problems were simply explained away with a childhood incident in which, seeing her prostitute mother being attacked by a sailor, she took up a fireplace poker and clubbed the intruder to death, the sudden remembrance of which frees her to remain with her husband, Mark Rutland, as her protector instead of facing jail time for her numerous acts of robbery in her past.

      I attended the new Metropolitan opera live-HD production yesterday, accordingly, with some consternation and a great many doubts. Although Muhly and his librettist Nicholas Wright immediately embraced the idea of turning Graham’s novel into an opera, I still feel it’s a highly confused and second-rate work. Even if we discover the heart of Marnie’s problems are quite different from the movie, it doesn’t still quite explain her hatred of all men and her insistence upon robbing them and turning much of her evil gain over to her detestable mother (a bad woman through and through as even her performer Denyce Graves admitted in an intermission interview). But, at least, in refocusing on the novel, Muhly and Wright, along with director Michael Mayer, have given us a much stronger and denser work, which takes the celebrity luster off both the Tipi Hedren and Sean Connery characters, exposing their far darker natures.

      Fortunately, Isabel Leonard (as Marnie) and Christopher Maltman (as Mark) are remarkable singers who take their cues from oboe and trombone intrusions all colored with Muhly’s lyrical explorations that occasionally remind us of Bernard Herrmann’s scores for Vertigo, and other Hitchcock scores, including Marnie.

      That is not to say that Muhly’s score is not original. In fact, along with Wright’s libretto, Mulhy pulls the work away from the great film director’s version, taking its figures deeper into the shadows of human behavior by not only repeating the heroine’s seemingly pointless behavior, but revealing the ugly manipulation of Rutland, who, after discovering Marnie’s role as a serial thief, forces her into a marriage and who, finally in frustration, he tries to rape. The end of Act I ends violently with her attempt to slit her wrists in rejection of his advances.

     The introduction of Mark’s rather sleazy brother, Terry (played by countertenor Iestyn Davies), moreover, takes us into yet another dimension. This Cain-marked man—a red patch crosses his face from birth—also allies him to the outsider if nearly-perfect looking Marnie. As Davies recognized about his character, although he is another detestable figure in this tale of anti-heroes, he is the truthteller, determined to make Marnie realize who she truly is.

 

     But, obviously—given the fact that Muhly and Wright have literally split Marnie’s character into four other madrigal singers, dressed and with hair coifed in a similar manner, simply wearing differently colored coats, representing a few of her various identities—it is nearly impossible for her to discover who she is. If Terry sees her as simply a liar, she perceives herself primarily as a survivor, someone who is attempting to stay alive by challenging all the dominant men (and women) in her world who tell her, time and again, that she is not only worthless but an evil being.

      The worst of these is her own mother who has convinced her daughter that she has jealously suffocated her baby brother soon after his birth—an absolutely horrific possibility completely exorcised from Allen’s screenplay. But Mark’s own mother (Janis Kelly) is not much of a less monster for him, deciding that despite her distaste for his appearance and morals, that Terry is perhaps more ruthless and, accordingly, better able to run her son’s printing operation. If Kelly, in an intermission interview saw her character as only being “strong” instead of evil, the book, in which Mark’s mother is secretly buying up stocks in the company in order to oust mark, makes it apparent that she too is a kind of monster. In short, no one in this opera version is a truly good person. Each wants something from the others.

 

    Strutt, the first we see among the many Marnie has robbed, wants only payment, presumably endless, for her having broken the illusion that she was an extension of his ego. Others in her past creep out of the woodwork, represented by the group of black-suited men who dance always around Marnie and her four symbolic selves (with wonderful choreography by Lynne Page).  Is it any wonder that Marnie hates men?

      Relocated from Virginia and Maryland back into its original location of the English countryside, it makes total sense for Marnie to be a horse woman who prefers the beast to men. Her horse, Florio, she luminously sings, is the only being she truly loves. But even here she is betrayed as, when she is disgusted by the hounds who are attempting to rout out a vixen from her den—surely a cornered beast with whom she can identify—she turns Florio away, sending him on a wild race away from the hunt, which ends in his disastrous stumble over a wall, Mark’s own fall into a hospital bed, and Marnie being forced to take out a gun and kill the only thing she ever loved.

     She is now finally ready to continue her criminal career, stealing Mark’s keys and breaking into his safe. Yet something has changed; she can no longer put the easy money she discovers into her purse. Perhaps the very fact that he has stayed by her side, even knowing the truth, has altered her perception of men. He may have brutally used her to capture her as a bride, yet he has remained a kind of gentleman of sorts.

     The discovery of the truth, after her mother’s death, that it was Marnie’s mother who herself strangled her newborn, the central character of what we now realize is a kind of study in morality in a world with little morality to offer, beauteously thrills of her freedom at the very moment that handcuffs are placed around her wrists. Again, unlike the film, Marnie is not “saved” or even protected by Mark’s chauvinistic actions but must now make her own decisions of how to salvage her life, becoming perhaps the only character who is truly free from the ugly controls imposed upon others. If in her robberies she might have imagined she controlled the men for whom she worked, she now perceives that they simply ruled her behavior, and in that recognition becomes a kind of feminist figure able now to go her own way, wherever that may lead her.

     Marnie may still not be a great opera, but it is certainly a fascinating one, where the composer and librettist rarely permit their characters to sing out full sentences in a world that won’t entirely allow them to speak out any true emotion or truth. Tumbling through the mostly exuberant score, the singers come at last to a kind of peace with their own inabilities to express the fullness of their lives. And Muhly’s opera transcends its own somewhat pedestrian story.

 

Los Angeles, November 11, 2018

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (November 2018).

Akira Kurosawa | 蜘蛛巣城 (Throne of Blood) / 1957

the spider who knits the net

by Douglas Messerli

 

Shinobu Hashimoto, Ryūzō Kikushima, Akira Kurosawa, and Hideo Oguni (screenplay, based on Shakespeare’s Macbeth), Akira Kurosawa (director) 蜘蛛巣城 (Throne of Blood) / 1957

 

It is rather amazing that, perhaps, the best adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth would come from a Japanese director, the great Akira Kurosawa. Translating Macbeth’s foggy Scotland heaths to the equally foggy Mount Fuji and Izu Peninsula, but resetting it in the more ancient culture of feudally-controlled Japan, the director brilliantly makes it almost appear that the great English bard, had he known of the Japanese feudal world, might himself have chosen to set his play into this context.

       Certainly, the early scenes, when having bravely saved the day in battle for King Duncan (Tsuzaki Kunimaru, performed by Hiroshi Tachikawa), his loyal warriors—Washizu Taketki as Macbeth, starring the great Toshiro Mifune and Miki Yoshiaki, the Banquo played Minoru Chiaki—rush forward by command to visit the castle, titled “The Spider’s Web,” almost insistently losing their way in the forest surrounding the castle as they race their horses in various opposite directions in an attempt to find their way to their inevitable rewards. The maze in which they are both caught parallels the lives they shall soon suffer.

     The nearly endless sound of the horse’s hooves, as they run forward and backwards in search of the exit out of the nettles, sets the pace for this constantly shifting work, in which, at any given moment, alternates between the old and newer rulers and their ministrations.

      I have always thought the Three Witches "Double, double toil and trouble" invocation over a stewpot of frogs and newts was more than a bit silly, particularly in Verdi’s operatic version of the work which I saw at the LAOpera. Kurosawa resolves this scene of ridiculousness with the sudden vision of the two lost souls of a single spirit (Chieko Naniwa), who magically weaving their fates together, tells them of the future: that today Washizu will be named Lord of the Northern Garrison and Miki will become commander of the first fortress. Moreover, Washizu soon after will become the Lord of the Spider-Web Castle, but that Miki’s son will eventually inherit that role.

 

      In Kurosawa’s version, the witch’s prediction sounds less like the witches’ terrible predictions than a kind of Jean Cocteau-like enchantment. These figures are now doomed by the weave and warp of a magical history that cannot be undone.

     Indeed, those foretellings do come true, encouraging the power-hungry Lady Macbeth (Isuzu Yamada) to literally fast-speed the rule of her husband as predicted through the murder of the King. In this cinematic reading of Shakespeare’s classic, she might almost be perceived as the perfect wife, determined to help her husband rise in the ranks from his humble and faithful obedience to a position, given his courage and bravery, she believes he deserves.

       Yet her evil deeds, serving a drug to the King’s guard, placing a knife with which Washizu has murdered Tsuzaki Kunimaru in one of the sleeping guard’s hands, and screaming out the facts that she herself has incited, is one of the most horrific actions captured on screen. The guilty Washizu is almost lost in the ruckus of his wife’s behavior. If he has rather unwillingly killed the King, she has become a kind of trumpet to deflect their own guilt. In a sense, she has already turned mad, and her later almost catatonic behavior as she washes her hands over and over seems inevitable.

       Similarly, the couple must now become determined to kill Washizu’s dearest, now-suspicious friend; and, even worse, once Washizu discovers that his wife has become pregnant, to kill Banquo’s young son, the foretold future leader—all to no avail, since he later discovers his wife produces only a still-born, much like their own absurd attempts to gain power.

       If, in the original Shakespeare play Lady Macbeth’s hand-washing anguish is at the center of the work, in Kurosawa’s version, Washizu’s (Macbeth) drunkenness is what truly betrays him, as in a dining stupor he encounters the ghost of his formerly beloved friend, Miki, whom he has ordered to be killed. His behavior, as with so many couples, is quickly covered up with the easy excuse the he is simply drunk, speaking “out of his mind” so to speak.

      Desperate for a solution to his terrible visions, this Macbeth retreats again to the forest to call up the single “witch-weaver” who explains to him that only when the entire forest rises up to attack him will he lose his life. But we already know from those early scenes of the film, the forest has already done that, has confused him and forced him into the terrible actions he and his wife have since untaken.

      If he cannot imagine the forest attacking him, he soon must face it when the opposing forces of Miki’s son respond with branches cut in the middle of the night to disguise their approach. Since Washizu has shared the “ridiculous” prophecy with his own soldiers, when the forest does actually seem to rise up, his supporters turn against him, shooting him down with arrows somewhat like St. Sebastiane. As evil as we know him to be, there is something tragic about Kurosawa’s representation of his slow, very slow death. This was, after all, a hero who has been corrupted by visions and his own ambitious wife.

       In many respects, Kurosawa seems not only to adopt—at least in English translation—the cadences of Shakespeare’s original, but enhances the original, allowing us to further comprehend the horror of a man provoked to advance beyond his own limitations. Washizu is a strong soldier, but not a natural leader as we perceive in his early confusion during his attempt to even enter the sacred court. He has given up his natural role in order to fit the prognostications of a ghost, an imaginary figure, apparently, of his own imagination and desires.

 

Los Angeles, January 28, 2020

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 2020).

Ori Aharon | Dolfin Megumi (Rubber Dolphin) / 2018

who’s on top?

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ori Aharon (screenwriter and director) Dolfin Megumi (Rubber Dolphin) / 2018 [28 minutes]

 

A young man (Chen Hefetz) living in Tel Aviv brings a gay pick-up back to his apartment. They kiss and suddenly are transported into something nearing sexual ecstasy, as the visitor (Omri Laron) suddenly presuming the other is a “bottom,” begins to rim the first.

      When the first asks if he has a condom, he takes one out, but claims he can’t get it on. In fact, he may have attempted to put it on backwards. “Every time I put on a condom, I feel like my dick turns into a rubber dolphin.” 

       The second begins again, but it causes some pain to the first young man and they pause.

      “When did you last have sex without a condom?” asks the first.

      “On Passover.”

      “With someone you knew?”

      “Yeah, I guy I was dating.”

      “Have you been tested since?

      “Yes.” 

     So it’s a go for condomless sex, as the two enjoy a highly pleasurable experience as the first moves to the top and inserts the other’s penis.

    Their after-sex conversation is basically about the roles they presumed for each other. The first young man declares that when they met he thought the second was a “bottom,” in response to which the second man insists that he never bottoms since it hurts too much. The first comments that although it might hurt at first the pain gradually diminishes and you begin to feel wonderful with the very idea of having someone inside of you.

         Indeed, he serves as both bottom and top, declaring as someone who is often fucked he is even better at knowing how to please those he fucks. When he plays the top, he declares, he’s very self-conscious, wanting to make an effort for him to lose himself in the sex as he does. Still the second man is not to be convinced, determined, so it appears, to maintain his role as a top.

         They also talk about their first times, always the best claims the first man, a fellow soldier who taught him so very much about his own body. “After that, I kept looking for guys who would give me that feeling. And every time I had good sex, I’d fall in love.”

         Is he hinting that he may possibly fall in love again? It seems like they might make a good couple.

         The other is more cynical: “Your ass fell in love.”

       Soon the first man is attempting to show his new friend how joyful being the recipient truly is. “When you have a dick up your ass you’re not alone in this world,” he argues. “Feeling someone inside of you. That’s something most men don’t experience.”

        The second is still not convinced.

 

      They shower, play records, and the second boy dances miming the song by a female singer. They dance together. They look nice as a pair. And the first is delighted when the second asks if he can stay over for the night. The second even tells the first that he could have beautiful children, assuring him that he will soon find real love.

         Later, near morning, as the second sleeps the first awakens him in an attempt to gently engage him in anal sex, this time with him as the one who fucks. He very gently takes him through the steps as he engages, explaining when and how to relax. But the second young man cannot get beyond the initial pain and demands the other stop. Soon after, he rises, dresses, and quickly leaves.

        It is clear that if they were to have a relationship, it would be a rather traditional one, him as the top (the dominant), the other as the bottom (like a submissive wife). This is not the open and exploring person who our first young man has been seeking. Gay men often simply parrot the patriarchal system from which they originally fought so hard to free themselves, without fully exploring the terrain they have opened up.

 

Los Angeles, April 23, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (April 2024).