André Téchiné | Les Sœurs Brontë (The Brontë Sisters) / 1979

becoming ghosts

by Douglas Messerli

 

Pascal Bonitzer, André Téchiné, and Jean Gruault (screenplay), André Téchiné (director) Les Sœurs Brontë (The Brontë Sisters) / 1979

 

French director André Téchiné’s 1979 film, The Brontë Sisters, focuses on the daily lives of the famed Brontës while basically ignoring their literary contributions. Of the three featured sisters and one brother, Emily (Isabelle Adjani), Charlotte (Marie-France Pisier), Anne (Isabelle Huppert), Branwell (Pascal Greggory), Branwell’s art is commented on and actually shown. The fiction and poetry of his own and his sisters is briefly mentioned, and, at one point, Charlotte and Anne do travel to London to convince one of their publishers, Mr. Smith (Julian Curry), that their writings, published under the pen-names of Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell actually represent their and Emily’s work.

    Yet, I would think it might be safe to say that if a young viewer had never read the original novels or seen the movie versions of Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, or The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, he might wonder what all the fuss is about. These provincial daughters of a religious leader living on the moors, although seeming basically intelligent and pretty, seem to lack the talents which might allow them to easily survive within society. Although Anne finds a position with a local gentrified family to educate their daughter, the others seem, as Branwell argues, to need to get out and see the world.

      Perhaps recognizing this fact, Charlotte convinces their moneyed aunt to pay for her and Emily to travel to Brussels to study French which, hopefully, will allow them to return to teach that language to locals.

      The journey ends in a kind of disaster for both. Although Charlotte loves the school, secretly falling in love with the married and rather heartless Monsieur Héger (Xavier Depraz), Emily is terribly unhappy faced with the bourgeois young Belgian women who make fun of her plain and English manners.

     She prefers the moors, where, often dressed as a man (it allows me to walk faster and more easily, she argues) she wanders, at times accompanied by Anne. Emily likes the hardy and plain holly, while Anne prefers roses.

     Their Brussels episode, however, is interrupted by the death of their Aunt Elizabeth (Alice Sapritch), which Emily appreciates as an opportunity to return home, while Charlotte, when they arrive too late to see their aunt before she dies, chafes at having had to return, rushing back to Belgium and the unresponsive Héger.

      Perhaps it’s inevitable that the director of numerous gay-themed films should, instead, focus on the male of the family, Branwell, an alcoholic and, later, opium addict, upon whom his sisters dote. Emily (and later even Charlotte) wait up nights to allow him secret entrance back into the house after he has wasted his evenings at the nearby Black Bull Inn. Ann even procures him a job as tutor in the same house in which she works, for the Robinson family’s young son.

      Indeed, we might at first suspect that Branwell is confused about his sexuality, particularly given the immense effect that his sisters—two of whom, not portrayed in this film, died while he was still a child—had upon him. Téchiné even toys with this idea in presenting his relationship to the sculptor Leyland (Jean Sorel), whom Branwell describes not only as a would-be mentor, but as a man of great beauty and power. Clearly, the proud Leyland was also taken with Branwell, deigning to even visit the young artist later in Branwell’s life, when he no longer had any talent and could offer the elder no intelligent company. Even the biographers speak mutedly about his possible gender problems, although to me it sounds like an issue that less concerns gender than it does his sexuality, his attraction to the male sex, so missing from his life.

      But it was the flirtatious wife of Robinson (yes, just like the Mrs. Robinson of The Graduate) that led to his downfall. Although Téchiné’s film shows us some rather racy scenes, particularly given his lowly position—and especially in the eyes of her cruel husband, who she dares not cross—we are never quite sure just how much of their passion has been realized. Mrs. Robinson, in fact, complains bitterly about his own lack of commitment to their relationship; she too, apparently, is a Romantic, seeking a man who might simply kidnap her, allowing her to escape her husband’s boorish world.

       What is clear is that Branwell is not that man; and seeing her mistress toy with her brother as he falls for her wiles, Anne quits her job with the household, Branwell being fired soon after. In one of his opiate fits, the Brontë brother removes himself from his own portrait of his sisters. He has become a ghost.

       It quickly becomes clear that Branwell prefers the manly laborers he finds in his drinking buddies at the local inn. But even when Mrs. Robinson’s monstrous husband dies, she will no longer allow Branwell to visit her for having failed in his “heterosexual” commitments. Clearly, if he was homosexual, he lived neither in the right time nor place.

       It is almost as if Branwell’s debauchery, resulting in his death from excessive drinking soon after, that signals a downward spiral of the entire family. Soon after, Emily is diagnosed with tuberculosis, refusing to receive medical treatment and also dying. Anne, ill as well with tuberculosis, requests that she see the ocean before she dies, Charlotte traveling with her to the water’s edge, where Anne dies as well.

   Only Charlotte—perhaps the most romantically inclined of them all—survives, beginning a relationship with her father’s curate, Arthur Nicholls, and traveling with him to London where she sits in the opera box of British author William Thackeray (performed, in a brilliant moment of casting, by French literary theorist and semiotician Roland Barthes).

   In the end, if the director does not literally tell us about these four siblings’ actual artistic contributions, he shows them, elliptically, through their lives. We have enough of all their fictions presented—the romantic hauntings of the moors, the harsh teachings of both religious and secular leaders, the unhappy marriages of the husbands and wives who surrounded them, the near-impossibility of lovers being able to sustain their relationships, and the magical moments of imagination that allowed their fictional figures to transcend their worlds, even while being destroyed by them—that we still get a strong sense of these individuals’ literary oeuvres. If nothing else, we certainly learn the context in which their wonderful tales were hatched. The harsh world in which they lived killed them while also giving birth to their remarkable writings which history would not forget.

 

Los Angeles, May 26, 2019

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (May 2019).

Luis Buñuel | Belle de jour / 1967, USA 1968

coach without riders

by Douglas Messerli

 

Luis Buñuel and Jean-Claude Carrière (screenplay, based on the novel by Joseph Kessel), Luis Buñuel (director) Belle de jour / 1967, USA 1968

 

Rumor once had it that the producers, Robert and Raymond Hakim, had originally sought through Luis Buñuel’s Belle de jour to create a financially successful sex flick. But given the impressive films which the Egyptian brothers had previously produced (including Pépé le Moko, La Bête Humaine, Jour se lève, The Southerner, Casque d’or, and L’Eclisse) it seems highly unlikely that the two would seek out Buñuel to deliver such a “popular” work. Certainly, what they got in Belle de jour is a fascinating film that has been described by some as “kinky,” “obsessive,” and even “sadistic,” but, in fact, is quite chaste.

      As critic Roger Ebert summarized in his 1999 review, “There is no explicit sex in the movie.” If the director puts us in a seemingly “underground” world of afternoon prostitutes working out of a Paris apartment, whose customers include a jolly Chinese man possessing a small lacquered box which utters an inexplicable noise but whose contents we never see; a gynecologist who performs as a servant with a whip; a violent young gangster, Marcel (Pierre Clémenti), who falls obsessively in love with the title figure, whose nom de plume is Belle je jour (Catherine Deneuve); and a wealthy man who seeks sex with (at least theatrically) the dead—the director spends far more time presenting the afternoon prostitute playing the role of the near-perfect wife, Séverine Serizy, to her handsome, if somewhat ineffectual, surgeon husband, Pierre (Jean Sorel). In the end, it is their relationship, rather than the exotic afternoon encounters of the chic Séverine, that truly matters. In her 1968 review of Belle de jour, Renata Adler describes the film as a comedy.

      Apparently as a child—if we are to believe the several flashes of memory and dreams presented throughout the movie—Pierre’s perfect and beautiful spouse has been sexually abused by a family member, and, accordingly sees sex as something forbidden and “dirty.” What excites her about the act is not the gentle, quite passive exhortations of her loving husband, but rather the illicit brutality and violence of the act. While Pierre placidly waits for her to come round to a healthy desire for him, her dreams speak of a world in motion (almost all her fantasies involve a coach) in which her companion, frustrated by her sexual refusals, might grow impatient, even ordering her to be raped by his coachman.

     At another moment, Pierre and a male friend, inexplicably surrounded by bulls, tie her up to a tree to demean her as they throw the animals’ excrement across her body. Locked away in a protective cocoon of privilege and wealth, it is only a matter of time that Séverine’s inner desires will force her to escape. Instead of saintly patience, so the director and co-author imply, Pierre should demand his manly rights!

      Obviously, much of this film’s fantasy, suggesting that Séverine’s condition is that of many women, is actually the wishful thinking of misogynistic males (perhaps Buñuel and Carrière included). Much of the film, accordingly—which I recall from watching it when it first was released and saw again yesterday—left me cold, as if I were simply witnessing a series of shallow male preconceptions of what the opposite sex desires, particularly as played out by the Serizy’s “friend,” Henri (Michel Piccoli), who admittedly cheats on his wife, Renée. He regularly visits brothels while attempting, throughout the film, to bed Séverine. For him all women at heart are “sluts,” desiring the degradation they deserve. Obviously, his wife allows his bizarre relationships. Out of this belief, he even gives Séverine the name and address of the brothel she soon visits, and, after some forceful commands from the lesbian-appearing Madame Anaïs (Geneviève Page), accepts her employment each day from the hours of 2:00-5:00. 

      Despite such puerile notions of the female sex, however, I soon discovered myself getting involved with Buñuel’s work simply because of the gradual transformation of Séverine (and, by extension, Deneuve in terms of her acting) as she moves from a frozen goddess to a woman who, like her fellow prostitutes, begins to enjoy herself, at some moments even having what one might describe as “fun.”

     In the playing out of male fantasies, moreover, Séverine even develops a sense of humor, chuckling at the under-coffin masturbation of one of her fantasy-playing clients. Particularly with her passionate sexual encounters with Marcel, Séverine flourishes, growing suddenly deeper and more profound in her perceptions of life. She even finally joins her own husband in his bed, he finally feeling free to suggest that they should have a child.

      As his wife blossoms, however, Pierre regresses, suddenly finding himself inexplicably attracted to a wheel chair. It is only a matter of time, after the jealous Marcel determines to kill Pierre that the husband’s desire to play a handicapped individual—a role in which he and the males of this film have previously cast Séverine—becomes reality. Even though Séverine is warned of Marcel’s intentions, she passively awaits until that event is played out, perhaps in her new somewhat feminist position, something to be desired.

     Marcel, indeed, after shooting Pierre, is presented almost as a hero, as he is chased through the streets in a scene that can only remind one of Jean-Paul Belmondo’s violent death in Godard’s Breathless.

      Pierre lives, surviving on—in his blind, dumb, and crippled condition—as a kind of signpost, a trophy of a husband, just as Séverine has previously played a trophy of a wife. She seems perfectly at home, for the first time, in the warm plush rooms against which she had previously chafed. The only danger she faces, so it seems, is the sudden reappearance of the brutish Henri, who despite his former assurances, reveals to Séverine that he now intends to tell Pierre of her secret life.

 

    When he leaves, Séverine timidly returns to her post, crocheting a pattern upon the couch. What will be his reaction we—and surely she—can only ask. Without the ability to speak, to see, to move—without the ability to survive without her, what could be Pierre’s reaction?

      Buñuel resolves the tension with another hilarious fantasy wherein suddenly Pierre stands, insisting it’s time for a drink, bounding forward from his wheel chair; he too has been only playacting. His return to life is met joyfully by his wife, who, hearing again the sleigh bells associated with her dreams of coaches, she observes the coach passing below their window—this time, however, without anyone seated upon its bench. Either together they have exited the world of fantasy forever or have permanently entered it to share a new dream-life. Even the director admitted that he did not quite know what to make of this final scene.

     Does it truly matter? All we need to know is that, in one way or other, “La Commedia è finita!” At least the comedy between the sexes is over and the characters must now face the consequences of their lives, which, of course—as an empty coach may symbolize—must include death.

 

Los Angeles, July 4, 2014

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2014).

Gary Halvorson and Giancarlo del Monaco | La funciulla del West (The Girl of the Golden West) / 2018 [The Metropolitan Opera live-HD production]

going west

by Douglas Messerli

 

Giacomo Puccini (composer), Guelfo Civinni and Carlo Zangarini (libretto, based on the play by David Belasco) Giancarlo del Monaco (director), Gary Halvorson (film director) La funciulla del West (The Girl of the Golden West) / New York, The Metropolitan Opera / the production I saw was the MET live-HD production of Saturday, October 27, 2018

 

Rather oddly, given Howard’s and my adoration of opera, I had never previously seen a production of Giacomo Puccini’s 1910 opera, commissioned by the New York Metropolitan Opera (a production conducted by Arturo Toscanini, with Emmy Destinn as Minnie and Enrico Caruso as Dick Johnson), La funciulla del West (The Girl of the Golden West). I’d heard many of its pieces on disk and radio, but never actually experienced the production itself.

     Howard, who was to have accompanied me for this MET live-HD production at the theaters in Century City near Beverly Hills, discovered at the last moment that he had committed to a walk-through of the Merion Estes show he had curated at the Craft and Folk-Art Museum near us. So, Howard returned his ticket, which coincidentally was purchased by a local gallerist friend, Ruth Bochofner, who became, quite by accident and most pleasantly, a replacement friend.

     I’d always thought about this late-career Puccini opera as a kind of last gasp, followed only by his La rondine and his series of three short operas, also first performed at the Metropolitan in 1918; yet, I now realize this was a terrible misconception.

     Supposedly Puccini thought that this David Belasco-based opera was his very best, and almost all of the performers argued for its difficulties and complexities, with Eva-Maria Westbroek, arguing that it was one (if not the) very favorite of his works in which she had performed. The personable Italian conductor Marco Armiliato, who directed the score from memory, seemed impassioned about its intricacies and argued how more contemporary, given Puccini’s highly romantically-based operas before this, it was.

     I must agree that this work, given the remarkable vocalizations of Westbroek (as Minnie), Jonas Kaufmann (as Dick Johnson), and Željko Lučić (as the sheriff Jack Rance) is something I had never before imagined. And yes, this is definitely not the usual Puccini concoction of beautiful arias and character types as in La bohème, Tosca, or Madama Butterfly—even if, clearly, there is some of the last-named opera’s exoticism that creeps into his vision of Belasco’s wild west, with many quick references to his later Turnadot, wherein, like the proud queen of Peking, Minnie refuses her love to the minors from all over the world who have gathered in their mad desire for gold to offer her their treasures.

     On the surface, in fact, they seem mostly to be good friends, almost making up the foundation, sans wives, of a future civilized community. They gather in the local bar to drink, gamble, and to release some of their aggressions, but their trust in their mother/potential lover, owner of their bar, Minnie, is so very touching that we quickly comprehend why they use the lower shelves of her bar, overseen by the gentle bar-tender, in which to hide their life savings. The local Wells Fargo rider tries to get them to bank their wealth in his company (terribly ironic today given what we know of that institution’s 21st-century actions), but the stagecoach has often been robbed by a local bandit, Ramerrez, and they trust the virginal Minnie as the better banker.

     Together they vie for her attentions, Rance believing, just because of his position as a sort-of-law-and-order ex-gambler and heavy drinker, he has the best chance of wooing her. While Sonora (Michael Todd Simpson) believes he might be her favorite, given his status as a kind of group representative of the goldminers. If the various challengers for Minnie’s love sometimes break out in violent confrontations—this is after all the violent West of Hollywood myth which still suffers brawls and violent interchanges when a gambler is found to have been cheating—they seem to be a rather affable group, with even an ability to help out a fellow, very depressed miner, who is desperate to return home to England, by taking up a collection to send him home. We might almost imagine that this will soon be the “well-intentioned” Western town of Hadleyville if only some women were to arrive. What might be the desire for immediate violence could eventually turn into a refusal to get involved if you give these crude believers enough time.

     In the meantime, the gun-toting Annie Oakley-like figure of Minnie has to serve as both the vision of law-and-order and the mentor/educator of this rough community, calling them to order, serving up their liquor, and then reading to them from the Bible about King David and other major biblical figures. She’s a tough teacher, scolding them for their lack of memory, but also a loving and caring being who, we later discover, has served as nurse, confessor, and supporter of many of these toughs.

     If we sense this mix of a lesbian-like woman facing off with a gang of randy, isolated males might become a kind of tinder-box of pent-up emotional and sexual feelings we wouldn’t be far from wrong.

     But if Minnie, herself, as she later puts it, is a kind of gambler/capitalist, one of the boys so to speak, a woman who even sees herself as a kind of coarse, uneducated woman surviving through her instincts—without even realizing it, it is her true kindness and intellect that has allowed her continued existence. For she is, surprisingly, a reader, having stashed away a complete library in her mountain cabin, reading late into the night, mostly, she admits, love stories—while still rejecting the advances of many of her would-be suitors such as Rance (with the angry and moving “Laggiù nel Soledad,” her expression of an attempt to find “true” love.

     Minnie, accordingly, is a remarkable combination of a tough Western survivor and a naïve innocent, who goes through her life protected simply because of the armor of those contradictions.

     Given this rough-and-tumble world, and Minnie’s and her community’s own mixed emotions, Puccini must have realized that he had to create a different kind of opera. Here, for one of the first times in his music, beautiful wrought musical passages are again and again interrupted, as if almost suggesting a kind of modernist composition, as characters cut across each other’s would-be spiritual expressions. It’s a bit like an early intonation of jazz: the moment a phrase begins, another instrument (in this case an intrusive voice) interrupts to express his or her own viewpoint. People in this opera get in the way, constantly, of all the others, shouting down the arias they may have sung, refusing to hear any of the melodic sentiment of a standard Puccini opera.

     We are presented with wonderful flourishes of romanticism—the whooshing theme of the golden girl, the almost Rodgers and Hammerstein-like, somewhat clumsy American-intonations of the miner’s greetings of “hello,” the painful interludes between the past and present when the bandit Dick Johnson and Minnie recount their early accidental meeting as almost kids—constantly interrupted with musical expressions of the forceful, often physical and violent interactions between the miners and outsiders.

      Minnie becomes almost so girlish after inviting Dick to come to her isolated cabin in the sierras, that she truly does remind us of the corny Doris Day film when Annie Oakley tries to dress up for Wild Bill Hitchcock. It’s the trope: suddenly get out of your slickers, put away your gun, and put on a dress (in this case with a rose stuffed into your bosom) to attract the man of your dreams—even if, she quickly discovers, he’s worse that you might even imagined him to be, a simple bandit who has been consorting with a local Mexican whore.

     As one of the commentators noted between the acts of this marvelous production, this opera projects the sense of a kind of early movie, with the music and events tumbling over upon one another so quickly that sometimes you can hardly catch your breath. Musical phrases literally pile up only to collapse into more profane chords of everyday commentary. For what seems like hours, a tense three-hand poker game—during which Minnie cheats Rance to escape his intended rape of her and to assert her own attempt to claim her own man, somewhat like he was a gold mine she has suddenly discovered and determined to claim—tamps down any sustained lyrical musical refrain except for a sort of percussional tempo that is unlike anything one has encountered in Puccini’s previous scores.

      Minnie’s final song of love in Act II, after she illegally wins, might almost be perceived as a kind of mad scene out of Strauss’s Elektra or Salome.  Puccini has suddenly moved away from the late 19th century into new territory, made even more remarkable by the performance I witnessed. Even Westbroek had to admit, during an intermission chat, that she had completely “nailed” it.” It was a moment of opera to remember forever. And the audience went clearly appreciated it.

      Finally, unlike almost any Puccini opera before it, this is not a tragedy. Despite the attempt of the miners’ community to get their revenge, the impossible strong woman at the center of this work, returns, guns in hand, to righteously claim her man and help him escape the local noose, despite all the odds releasing her lover from their actual legalistically-justified arguments by reminding these locals bumpkins of all she has done for them.

     In the end, the freed couple walk off together into the rising sun to never return, perhaps moving on to a new southern paradise, I’d like to think, of Santa Barbara or the then-nascent Los Angeles. No snow there, which, after all, is what almost got Dick killed in the second act.

      I now agree, this may be, as Puccini himself believed, his very best opera, not a work that displays his immense melodic skills at music-making but expresses a kind of new Italian-Wagnerian notion of what opera can become. Had he only lived long enough to continue that transformation!

 

Los Angeles, October 28, 2018

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