John Madden | The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel / 2011, USA 2012

everything will be all right

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ol Parker (screenplay, based on a novel by Deborah Moggach), John Madden (director) The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel / 2011, USA 2012

 

Madden's feel-good film, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, is an affable work in which a group of aging adults suddenly are forced to come to terms with where they are in their lives. After years of a docile life as a housewife, Evelyn Greenslade's (Judi Dench) husband has died, and, much to her surprise, finds there is not enough money for their debts. Selling their home, she is forced to awaken from her kind of "sleeping beauty" life and determine her own future. 

     Douglas Ainslie (Bill Nighly) and his wife Jean (Penelope Wilton) also find themselves in the unfortunate position of not having enough savings after investing in their daughter's failing internet company. Muriel Donnelly (Maggie Smith), we discover later, has simply been let go after years of service as house-keeper for a wealthy couple; she also needs, and cannot afford, a hip replacement. Norman Cousins (Ronald Pickup) is an aging would-be lover, studying the Karma Sutra and Madge Hardcastle (Celia Imrie) is a well-off woman on the search for a man. Graham Dashwood (Tim Wilkinson), a high court judge, suddenly resigns, deciding to retire. This unlikely group inexplicably find themselves in Jaipur, northern India, attracted by a brochure for a retirement hotel that looks little, in person, like the pictures represented in the folder.

        

     The plot is fairly predictable. Each member of the group must come to terms with something that he or she has not been facing or has hidden from others. Evelyn, forced to find employment, must learn to become self-dependent and face the fact that she has, once more, fallen in love, this time with the equally self-dependent but martially unhappy Douglas. His wife must come to terms with her own sour personality and her inability to face any change. Muriel must reflect upon her own bigotry and narrowness of vision. Norman must deal with his aging body, and Madge with the fact that she may find no one to love. Graham, soon reveals that he is gay, and has returned to India for the first time since his youth, when he was in love with an Indian man whose life was shamed when the two were found together.

      Writer Ol Parker (basing his script on Deborah Moggach's novel) adds to this potpourri the young Indian manager of the hotel, Sonny Kapur (Dev Patel), a charming and well-meaning entrepreneur who unfortunately is incapable of hotel management and, more to the point, a failure in life, refusing to even admit his love for the beautiful Indian girl Sunaina (Tena Desae).

     Each of these characters is destined, in the chaotic, colorful, and almost claustrophobic atmosphere of the city, to rub up against precisely that which they are refusing to face. And one by one, although some more slowly than the others, each of them come to terms with their radically new lives. Perhaps only the unpleasant Jean, who is also the only one who returns home, refuses the challenge of the often frightening but just as often exhilarating world into which they have suddenly discovered themselves. But then she does come to recognize that she is a veteran complainer, unhappy with everything in life.

     These various psychological and physical encounters are perhaps enough for anyone to describe this film as highly enjoyable. Yet it is just the clichés and even stereotypes of their confrontations that weaken the work overall. Evelyn, perhaps the most passive of these figures for most of her life, finds that she is remarkably resilient, able not only to cope but to prevail over the most complex of situations, including her new job and her budding love. She is, in short, just the kind of independent, open-minded woman that Judi Dench loves to play. So too is Muriel the close-minded, sharp-tongued figure who Maggie Smith has spent a career portraying. Of course, she gradually comes round to liking the subcontinent and its people that she so strongly dismissed. But it is difficult, despite her aptitude for organizing things, to imagine, at film's end, that she has become this decaying hotel's manager, sustaining the likeable Sonny by allowing him to radiate his faith in future life. As he beamingly proffers early in the film: "Everything will be all right in the end...if it's not all right then it's not the end."

      Obviously Graham will reconnoiter with his former lover, now married, with whom he spends a pleasant day. But the fact that the plot requires that he suddenly die—while he has told everyone that he gay, he has not told anyone that he has a heart condition—strikes me as a kind retribution for his young abandonment of love. And traditionally, of course, the sinner (the sexual deviant, often gay) must pay with his or her life.

     With Evelyn and Muriel's help Sonny stands up to his dominant mother and announces his love to everyone. Norman gets his woman and, for a least for a few seconds—when Sunaina, thinking Sonny is waiting in the bed, crawls in with her—Madge gets her heart fluttering again.

     If you can't go home, so it appears, at least you can start your life over. Too bad these stage types seldom exist in "real" life and that everyday living remains as confusing as a Jaipur street scene.

 

Los Angeles, June 18, 2012

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2012). 

Alberto Lattuada | Il Cappotto (The Overcoat) / 1952, USA 1953

object of obsession

by Douglas Messerli

 

Alberto Lattuada, Giorgio Prosperi, Giordano Corsi, Enzo Curreli, Luigi Malerba, Leonardo Sinisgalli, and Cesare Zavattini (adaptation and screenplay, based on a story by Nikolai Gogol), Alberto Lattuada (director) Il Cappotto (The Overcoat) / 1952, USA 1953

 

The story, as any reader of Gogol knows, is a deceptively simple one. An obscure government worker, long in need of a new coat, spends his life-long earnings on a beautiful overcoat which, in turn, changes his whole conception of himself as he is transformed from a menial lackey into a proud and handsome man. But the transformation lasts just for a day, for as he stumbles home on New Years' Eve he is approached by a stranger who steals the coat, resulting in the central character's death.

     Director Alberto Lattuada and his several co-writers transform Gogol's freezing government clerk into a small northern Italian calligrapher, Carmine de Carmine (played by the wonderful comedian Renato Rascel) working for a corrupt and pompous mayor (Giulio Stival) who, in his attempt to become a senator, ignores all the petitions and complaints of the citizens in order to further tax and fine them so that he might rebuild the center of the city in order to please the visiting emperor.

     Unlike his co-workers, who appear to do little work unless the general secretary or the mayor enters their confines, de Carmine has the gift of creating beautifully formed alphabetical characters, noted by the mayor himself. But his calligraphic gift is a product of slow, quiet process, not the frenzied note-taking to which the mayor assigns him while meeting with a local professor—who has just discovered a small object from antiquity—and with other city leaders, who together conspire to cheat their citizens. Freezing in the windy, open air, expected to not only get the gist of their conversations but proffer them up in a misrepresentative rhetoric, de Carmine fails notably, and is even threatened with being fired.

     On top of this, his co-workers have mischievously conspired to tell daily petitioners that they must contact the powerless de Carmine. At home, his neighbors berate him for their new taxes and fines simply because he works for the government itself. Attempting to mend a hole in his coat, the overwhelmed nebbish becomes distracted by a beautiful woman in the apartment across the way—Caterina (Yvonne Sanson), who coincidentally is the mayor's not-so-secret lover—and cuts away a large part of his already fraying and hole-ridden coat! His coat has so deteriorated that the local tailor refuses even to mend it, trying to convince the poor calligrapher that he needs a new garment.

     When he again encounters the same beautiful woman in a nearby shop, she does not even notice him! As critics have suggested, it is not simply that de Carmine is cold, he has been frozen out of existence. Looking as if he were a penniless street person, he is fed a few coins from her purse.

     Yet the cost of a new overcoat is unthinkable, particularly given his precarious position. When the next day he is called into the undersecretary's office, presumably to be dismissed, he cannot even enter the room; other officials stand before the door arguing with one another as they remark of the undersecretary's scandalous behavior. When de Carmine finally enters, he is, in fact, fired; but in explanation for his late entry, he repeats what he has just overheard and is suddenly given a bonus and returned to his job. Without his knowledge, his silence has been bought.

     But now, at least, he can put down the money for a new coat! Lattuada's wonderful interludes between the timid and perpetually perplexed government worker and the gangly, excitable tailor are absolutely delightful as the two play out a sort of Abbott and Costello-like routine. As critic Dave Kehr has noted: "The scenes in which the tailor flutters about him, throwing out his spindly arms and legs like a Disney flamingo, are wonderful studies in motion." Both conflicted and confined in small frame shots the two work together with comic relish.

     With the tailor's complete abandonment into his creative act, moreover, we come to understand the utter joy of the recipient. Unlike Gogol's tale, the director here portrays the calligrapher's stroll into the world with his new layer of skin as gleefully as game played by a child, the tailor trailing after to spy on the reactions his new creation receives. Suddenly, the obscure nobody is transformed into a handsome man-about-town. For the first time, people suddenly notice him and even praise his mien. That evening, he is invited to the undersecretary’s apartment with the mayor in attendance!

     The event is a certain disaster as the changed man suddenly finds the courage, clothed in his coat, to dance with the mayor's girlfriend and even to present the petition to the mayor handed to him by an aged veteran who has been waiting for 40 years for a pension. With complete irony, Lattuada conveys his little hero's grand delusions as opposed to the utter disdain of his actions by his superiors. So obsessed is de Carmine by his new possession—clearly the only thing of worldly value in his life—that he is suddenly convinced that he has charmed everyone, when, of course, his character has only charmed the motion picture audience being told his tale. So does the director reveal the vast separation between a story and what the story relates as art.

     We know the ending; there can be no other possible way to rid one of such a delusion. The coat is stolen, de Carmine going mad and dying. Writers and director take their tale even further, as officials and leaders throughout the town begin to find their coats being pulled from them, buttons being stolen. Even if the film's final scene—in which the mayor, encountering the ghost of the nobody whom he has berated, promises to mend his ways—is unconvincing, we are struck by the quiet power of this seemingly insignificant man who has come to life, died, and come back to life again through the artistry of the tailor's creation.

 

Los Angeles, June 17, 2012

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2012).

 

Tyson FitzGerald | The Bash / 2013

courage

by Douglas Messerli

 

Tyson FitzGerald (screenwriter and director) The Bash / 2013 [6 minutes]

 

A gay couple Luis (Ka'ramuu Kush) and Chris (Shawn Carter Peterson) exit a movie theater, having just attended a revival showing of Sidney Lumet’s 1978 film The Wiz. The movie was great, “It’s a classic,” responds Luis, but he’s still pissed.

    He’s angry about Chris’ uptight feelings about showing any affection in public. “Would it kill you to hold my hand in a movie theater?” He asks his companion. 

     “I sat right next to you. I’m sure we bumped elbows at some time.”

     Luis is not amused. “Sometimes I don’t think you even give a shit about me.”

     Chris observes that there were people sitting right to next them, and he, of the old school, doesn’t like to be so “obvious.”

     But Luis makes the problem clear: “Obvious? We’re two dudes going to a midnight screening of Diana Ross of The Wiz. I hate to break it to you, but I think the secret’s out.”

     Chris is embarrassed even to have such a discussion in public. Afraid, as Luis puts it, that a homeless person might know that he sucks dick.

      Pulling him into an alley to continue the discussion, Chris only proves his reticence to reveal his sexuality in any public setting. But there’s something deeper about Chris’ embarrassment we realize when Luis argues that it’s been two years and he still hasn’t met Chris’ mother.

       Almost as suddenly, Tyson FitzGerald’s comedy, however, turns into real drama, as a group of three hoods standing at the end of the alley, clap for their performance, ready to do them in for being fags. Before the two can even begin to try to finesse their way out of the situation, punches

are pulled, as our queer friends begin being beaten to a pulse. And soon see even worse about to happen as Derek (Reggie Watkins), the group letter, gets hit, and plans serious revenge as he picks up a heavy piece of lumber.

       FitzGerald quite brilliantly turns everything briefly into slow motion as Chris, seeing that his lover is about to be clubbed and possibly killed in the process, immediately finds out what doctors have long told us about cortisol and adrenaline.*

     In a second, Chris is able to slug off the punk holding him down and rush over to attack Derek, forcing him to drop the club, while Luis pushes away his attacker and grabs a stone hitting Derek in the head and knocking him out. Now, with the plank in his hand he is about to strike his attacker again until Chris calls out to him to stop.

     The two check up on one another, apologize for their stupid argument, and holding on to one another stumble out of the alley and off in the other direction to their car.

    Every year homophobia, expressed in precisely this manner and worse through guns, results in numerous hospitalizations and deaths. In 2021, for example, there were 617 anti-gay male hate crimes, 530 mixed anti-lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender, 205 anti-transgender attacks, and 161 anti-lesbian incidents, making LGBTQ bashing one of the worst of the hate crimes in the US.

      Accordingly, it’s hard to not want to applaud went, as in this short film, the queer men successfully fight off their bashers. Yet we know this rarely happens in real life, and when it does, as in the 1998 film by P. J. Castellaneta, Relax…It’s Just Sex—wherein the character named Vincey, also temporarily maddened by a mix of alcohol, adrenalin, and horniness, grabs a knife in the middle of just such attack by gay bangers and demands the white boy he’s captured to pull down his pants so that he can fuck him—it results in almost complete alienation from all of his fellow gay friends.

      In Bash there’s no sense of dread, guilt, or even the need to call the police to report the incident, as Chris and Luis simply walk away, having, as in a Western, left the villains in the dust.

      This film seems to have forgotten it’s more important theme. Why hasn’t Chris been able to express his gay love and why hasn’t he taken Luis home to introduce him to his mom? If they have found their “courage,” they seem to have forgotten the lessons of the brain and heart. Macho is the problem, not the solution, so the Cowardly Lion learns. But in all the horror and fear of the situation, FitzGerald apparently has turned, just like his characters, in a different direction.

 

*Northwestern Medicine tells us: “Fear is experienced in your mind, but it triggers a strong physical reaction in your body. As soon as you recognize fear, your amygdala (small organ in the middle of your brain) goes to work. It alerts your nervous system, which sets your body’s fear response into motion. Stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline are released. Your blood pressure and heart rate increase. You start breathing faster. Even your blood flow changes — blood actually flows away from your heart and into your limbs, making it easier for you to start throwing punches, or run for your life. Your body is preparing for fight-or-flight.”

 

Los Angeles, May 23, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (May 2024)

Michael Armstrong | The Image / 1969

lazarus

by Douglas Messerli

 

Michael Armstrong (screenwriter and director) The Image / 1969

 

Michael Armstrong’s 1969 film (shot in 1967), was David Bowie’s first movie at a point in his career when he was generally not well-known, although his “Space Oddity” did appear the same year this black-and-white art film was released.

     But Armstrong was already infatuated by the young performer, which, as commentator Alexandra Heller-Nicholas points out on-line in Kyd, is apparent in this 14-minute work.

     The film clearly has its problems, Armstrong having planned a three-day shoot, but given a series of obstacles—including the fact the equipment did not show up on the first day—he ran out of money and had to create many of scenes by slicing and pasting pieces of previous action into later film sequences. As even he points out, the process of creating the film in the cutting room perhaps made for a better film than if he had been able to shoot the more continuous narrative story as it was originally meant to be.

     Nonetheless, the movie was thoroughly panned. Bowie himself describes it with vague distress:

 

“My first true film appearance was in a movie called The Image, an underground black and white avant-garde thing done by some guy. He wanted to make a film about a painter doing a portrait of a guy in his teens and the portrait comes to life and, in fact, turns out to be the corpse of some bloke. I can’t remember all the plot, if indeed it had a plot, but it was a 14-minute short and it was awful.”

 

      Others felt very much the same way about the work. As Heller-Nicholas recounts, New Music Express “sniggered at it when it was released on home video in 1984 to cash in on Bowie’s superstar status: ‘Gasp with horror as your hero gets murdered not once not twice but five times. Gasp with astonishment as he gets up entirely unharmed. Wonder with puzzlement how his acting career ever survived the carnage.’”

       It wasn’t helped by the fact that Armstrong himself described it as “a study of the illusionary reality world within the schizophrenic mind of the artist at his point of creativity.” And even the director, in public conversations, has described the film as a bit “creepy.”

      Other reviewers and listings have unfortunately categorized the film as either a monster film or a horror movie. And to top it off, the British Film Ratings chose to award it with an X Certificate for its violence.

      Although it clearly shares elements of those genres, it is neither a work of horror or about monsters, and the violence that the British censors saw going on was committed against a hallucination of a painting that cannot, in fact, be truly destroyed.

     If we can agree that it is an amateurish work, it is still a fascinating piece of underground filmmaking and, in this case, looks somewhat better in the colorized version that appears on YouTube.

        Armstrong’s The Image actually has much more in common with The Picture of Dorian Gray than with any horror movie. As in Wilde’s work the artist (Michael Byrne) is painting, on a rainy cold night, a beautiful young teenager with whom he becomes enamored.

 

      Too bad the work of art, the young look-alike to picture of Bowie with hands outstretched, is a truly awful portrait painted in a mix of styles that call up Impressionism, Sunday-painter realism, and a Keane painting. The film asks us, fortunately, to imagine it as a highly-skilled portrait of Bowie, presenting us only with brief glimpses of the abysmal portrait.

         What we immediately comprehend, in any event, is that this young beauty is calling out, almost from the dead, for an embrace. And having painted the longing figure, it is only natural that the artist, as in the case Basil Hallward in Wilde’s original, falls in love with the image he has created. In this case there first appears to be no model to whom he might bequeath the beauty he has captured, but the painting itself seems to call the being, much as in the myth of Pygmalion, to life!

     Strange noises, a drop of paint from his brush onto his own sweater, and a quick flash of something passing by his studio window begins the artist’s gradual realization that his “monster” or Pygmalion-like beauty—ultimately the viewer must choose between the two—has actually come to life.

    Terrified by the images, the artist hurries off upstairs, only to spot the same vision of the living boy out his second-story bedroom window. The boy is now, fully-alive, is his studio, in the hall, wherever he looks, and he realizes despite the boy’s beauty and his outstretched hands, that the image cannot be allowed to exist if he wants to survive.

     He clobbers “the image” with a small metal bust of a classic artist inexplicably laying on the floor. The image comes back to life, and, just as NME described it, the artist takes up a knife.

     But what the magazine devoted to music evidently didn’t comprehend about the film is that he doesn’t even need to stab the young man, who willingly meets him on stairway, moving toward him in act of love that simultaneously immolates himself upon the point of the knife.

     The gesture is clearly sexual, as he moves even after being stabbed steadily closer to the murderer, laying his head upon his shoulder, before falling sliding down upon the artist’s own body to the floor. Yet he cannot die, apparently, as long as the artist himself calls him back into being. And it takes several more attacks to do away with ghost.

 

      But even that terrible act of expurgation does not seem to work, as the artist falls down upon his own painting, now truly like Dorian Gray stabbing the picture itself before finally giving up and laying down his head upon the very canvas and its simulacrum. The camera slowly pulls away to show a small photograph sitting on a table nearby of the same young man before the film rolls to an end.

       The suggestion is that the teenage boy had been his lover, a homosexual companion of the painter. But what we don’t know is whether his painting was created in an attempt to expiate for or purge his own homophobic past, the destructive actions of the film symbolically representing his past behavior; or whether the young man has simply died, and the artist, having called him up, is terrified by his own haunting memories and delusions.

       All we can know is that he has lost that young boy and in recreating him has broken his heart and soul all over again. He realizes now is that you cannot kill the past. The handsome young boy pleading for his love will be with him forever. And even if he is of two minds about that reality, schizophrenia, I would argue, has absolutely nothing to do with it.

     Given Bowie’s own bisexuality and the nearly perpetual recreations of himself over the years of his later musical career “with its myriad multifaceted guises,” as Heller-Nicholas argues, “it is virtually impossible not to consider [this film] somewhat prophetic. If nothing else, she admits that its hard to watch the film, “certainly conscious of its own homeotic overtones,” not to read it from a queer perspective.

       Armstrong himself recalls that “David was a terrible flirt in the way in which he dealt with you. He did that with me. He was flirtatious, it was a part of him … He always seemed to be playing a cat and mouse game with you. I said that he would either be a giant star or make a lot of money in the Piccadilly men’s loo.”

      It seems a little disingenuous, accordingly, for Bowie to have forgotten the name of his very first director and to describe the work as merely a piffle. Actually, this amateur work catches elements of Bowie’s magnetic personality and metaphorically plays out his ability to time again, after being brought down by critics and audiences, to get up and reinvent himself in a slightly different manner, a kind of endearing musical monster/magician.

 

Los Angeles, May 23, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (May 2024).

 

Jean Renoir | Le Testament du docteur Cordelier (The Doctor’s Horrible Experiment) / 1959

queer by definition

by Douglas Messerli

Jean Renoir (screenplay, based on Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, by Robert Lewis Stevenson, and director) Le Testament du docteur Cordelier (The Doctor’s Horrible Experiment) / 1959

 

Jean Renoir’s exploration of Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde story takes the previous Hollywood motion picture route of creating his Hyde, named Opale, and his Jekyll, Dr. Cordelier, to be heterosexual fiends. His is not, as I see it, a LGBTQ movie.

     There is a moment in his film, Le Testament du docteur Cordelier, when the mother of a young man brings his case before the famous psychiatrist—just after Cordelier (John-Louis Barrault) has narratively admitted his “immoral” attraction to his young nurse—explaining that her 18-year-old son has been behaving perversely because he has been sleeping with their maid, in which we wonder whether or not the doctor, in fact, is toying with the possibility of finding a way to further corrupt the boy through his own sexual involvement. The “crime” seems so absolutely ridiculous, even by 1959 standards of moral rectitude, that when the doctor arranges for a time to meet with the boy we have to wonder what he might be planning, particularly given his own backroom activities. Why arrange to see a boy who seems to be a perfectly healthy heterosexual kid?

       But it comes to nothing. We never find out what happens or even if he actually meets with this “patient.” Does the good doctor actually believe he needs “curing?” That his actions are indeed “perverse?”

       In fact, Cordelier’s problems seems to be that he is so psychologically confused that he has mixed up normal heterosexual desire with perverse desires that must be kept under control, despite the fact that the nurse is far more ready to have of sex with him than he with her gives us some idea of the delusions which lead to his attempt to develop of a formula for releasing all feelings of transgression.

       The crimes this Jekyl, Cordelier commits as Opale, are so truly monstrous that they make that the S&M-like scratches and whip-marks of the Hyde of the 1931 and 1941 US films seem almost benign. Even the murders of Hyde in the Hollywood films are far more logical representing as they do women and men that stand in Hyde’s way or may possibly expose him.

      Except for the case of his psychiatric competitor Docteur Séverin (Michel Vitold), a man nearly as possessed as Opale, Opale kills seemingly a random men or women, even in the terrifying early scene in this film, attacking a young child—a scene that could never be realized in a US film of the period, not even perhaps in 1959.

       But perhaps, just for that very reason, because Opale is so absolutely wild and uncontrollable, he is, particularly as Barrault performs him, almost comic. If in the US films there is an odd sense, left over perhaps from the Stevenson work, of Hyde being a still compelling being—even if he appears as a hairy monster—in Renoir’s work Opale is not all “attractive,” but somehow charming and oddly appealing, nonetheless.      

      In his complete “freedom” from all sense of moral duty he stands almost a healthy alternative to the people around him, the ordinary street people who gang up for moral retribution and Cordelier’s circle of friends whose views are so narrow that they seek to protect each other from even seeming to be involved with the real world, particularly working to keep their friend Cordelier’s name from in any way being connected with Opale, to whom his lawyer Maître Joly (Teddy Bilis) fully knows Cordelier has left his entire estate.

     If nothing else Opale serves as a wonderful counterbalance to a world in which everything is a sin and all behavior must be controlled.

     Opale, in Renoir’s hands, is almost a Beckettian fool, behaving so very bizarrely that all normal people naturally avoid him; it is he who comes after them just because they are so absolutely terrified of anything out of their narrow limits of defined normality.

      It appears that most critics read this work as a sincere lecture by Renoir of the disaster when the natural is separated from the intellect, when raw desire is segregated from rational decision-making.

 

     From this perspective it is understandable why these critics might perceive Barrault’s performance as being extreme and “lacking balance” as film commentator Tom Milne ends his otherwise quite perceptive description of Barrault as “prancing, twitching, moving with the animal grace of a dancer...creating an extraordinary, chimerical figure whose intrusion into the real Paris streets lends them a bizarre, unsettling air of menace.” For him and others, Barrault takes those qualities, however, beyond characterization. But for me that is just the point. Opale is outside the limits and definitions of the world in which he discovers himself. He is so far beyond rationality, that no one can even begin to make sense of his actions, let alone explain his possible whereabouts, or even remember what he looked like.

      Moreover, except for the physical pain Opale seems to suffer, this variation of a wolfman seems perfect happy in his perfidious behavior, almost pleased with himself, a bit cocky in his seeming imperviousness. Barrault looks truly more pained with the suave smile of Cordelier at his dinner party than he is walking like a mad Charlie Chaplin down the city street, ready to knock the first person he encounters over the head as many times as possible with his cane.

      In short, his behavior almost seems to be justified by the tightly restricted beings who surround him, forever attempting to impede his motions.

      In that sense, finally, although this Hyde, Opale and his Jekyll-like creator Cordelier seem to be locked into normative heterosexuality, we can certainly agree that Cordelier is closeted and Opale is the figure he has released. The closets of Cordelier’s own studio are constantly being open and closed, just like the doors to various rooms of Séverin’s clinic. Trucks and cars arrive en masse upon which the doors are opened to show policeman exiting and entering. Clearly, this is a world in which things are kept behind doors, and letting them out generally represents danger.

       Whereas the friends and staff in all of the English-American variations of Stevenson’s tale behave with incredible restraint and rational behavior, here people gang up in groups demanding justice, the police are called the moment danger is sensed, and even while their master suffers locked away in his laboratory, his servants all seem to be having their own mental breakdowns, unable to simply stand up and do something about the screams and shouts they hear emanating from the outbuilding. Everyone in this work appears to be suffering from a kind of hysteria, certainly Docteur Séverin and, at times, Joly. Only Opale, despite his utter unpredictably, seems slightly sane, able to carry through with action. 

      If there is no question that his actions go beyond social, political, and cultural bounds they are at least actions, not the gestures of individuals unable to imagine even how to move or proceed. They are certainly queer, but liberating by that very sense of being apart from all normality.

      In short, if Renoir’s version of Hyde is not sexually queer he is in every other sense. And, in that fact, he at least is interesting. Joly’s final insistence that Cordelier, lost in the body of Opale, must suffer his fate in punishment for his deeds speaks volumes for the society that has forced Cordelier to seek out such an alternative in the first place. And even the would-be obedient Docteur defies Joly’s dictum, destroying Opale so that he will die looking at least like the man he desires to be even if that version of himself could never live up to what was expected of him.

     And in that sense only, Cordelier “gets away” with all of his crimes. He has freed himself from the consequence of having attempted to escape. 

     In the end, we have to wonder whether the “horrible experiments” to which the English refers were not less horrific than the terrible restrictions the society itself has put upon its own existence. Even before Opale’s manifestation, Cordelier’s world was one where nearly every kind of variance in behavior was queer by definition.

 

Los Angeles, December 26, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2021).