Jean-Sébastien Chauvin | Mars exalté (Exalted Mars) / 2022

orb and line

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jean-Sébastien Chauvin (director) Mars exalté (Exalted Mars) / 2022 [18 minutes]

 

Calling up various cinematic works such as Andy Warhol’s 1964 long (five hours 21 minutes) Sleep, and Tsai Ming-liang’s Night of 2021, French director Jean-Sébastien Chauvin’s Exalted Mars lets us off far more easily with just 18 minutes of a nude beefy man (Clain Garcia Vergara) sleeping alone in a bed while around him the city gradually comes to life in a dark, hot early morning presumably in the northern suburban commune of Seine-Saint-Denis outside Paris.

    For the first 6 ½ minutes we hear mostly the man’s deep pants as he occasionally turns and tosses in his sleep, his body covered with perspiration. Outside cars a scant number of cars seem to be leaving the city with their bright lights facing the camera, while near standstill traffic with their tail lights lit up red (like the Red Planet Mars) appear to be making their way back into the city for a day of confrontational world of the workplace.

     We know next nothing about the man, although he has some tattoos that at first appear to represent Chinese characters, but upon an equally obscured later view seem to actually be gnomic symbols regarding sexual objects. Mars, as the title suggests, seems to rise as our sleeping hero breathes in and out and turns to show his hairy ass and later his penis.

 

     At about 6 ½ minutes the audio shifts to the outside world where we hear the endless roar of the traffic, the sounds of morning birds, and the general din of a city coming to life. For a moment we catch a view of neighbors in the high-rise where we presumably also lies sleeping, having breakfast and communicating on cellphones.

      Briefly our sleeping hunk seems to awaken, touching his cock.

      We see workers beginning to walk the streets. A streetlight that has evidently been off for the entire night suddenly comes to life as the sleeper breathes out heavily. A few moments later (a nearly the 12-minute frame) he has a sudden nocturnal ejaculation, the end presumably of an arousing wet dream. We hear his deep sighs of sexual satisfaction as we watch the cum flow from his cock.

     We can only begin to wonder, if this dreamer has the power in his sleep to awaken and bring the city itself back to life? Might he himself be Mars, calling his warriors back into the battle of their daily survival?

       For the first time in this film we hear the sounds of artificed music swelling to full force as the sun finally begins to rise. The glass windows of the suburban high rises, reflect the bright morning light, a world of most immigrant, North African French citizens. The sleeper’s cum begins to coagulate as the shimmers of reflected sun fall across the city and the river pushes through its center.

Los Angeles, June 2, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (June 2024).

Woody Allen | Zelig / 1983

the ultimate conformist

by Douglas Messerli

Woody Allen (screenwriter and director) Zelig / 1983

One of Woody Allen’s most likeable and fascinating films, Zelig presents, in documentary style, the story of Leonard Zelig (Allen), a man who gradually begins to develop a strange malady of becoming one with the people around him: turning black among Negro jazz players, turning Chinese in Chinatown, becoming a gangster among mafia folk, etc. Even talking to fat men makes him fat. Attending the opera he becomes Pagliacci; attending a baseball game he is suddenly seen in a baseball uniform waiting to bat. By itself this clever “device” might become tiresome, but director Allen envelopes this “Zelig phenomenon” within a broader tale of a doctor and patient relationship and, most important, weaves his narrative in language attributed to writers such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, singers such as Fanny Brice, and current celebrity commentators such as Bruno Bettelheim, Susan Sontag, Saul Bellow, Bricktop, Irving Howe, and others who comment, in color, on this fictional black-and-white being as if he were an historical fact.

      Beyond this is Allen’s a fascinating psychological metaphor about the desire for assimilation, which, in part, has been the desire of nearly all immigrant groups, particularly to Jewish immigrants who had been so shunned, hated, and forced to leave their previous homelands. The central desire of Zelig, “to be liked,” (he was hated by his father and mother, they hated by their neighbors, etc.) is the wish of many, from bullied children to alienated adults—in short nearly everyone. Allen, accordingly, creates in Zelig a kind of exaggerated folk hero, a figure who not only, like a chameleon, blends in with his background, but actually becomes those with whom he associates.

      Such a figure is naturally loveable, by both the audience and the psychiatrist attempting to cure him, played hilariously by Mia Farrow. Indeed, in Allen’s fiction the whole nation temporarily embraces Zelig, the movie’s composer and choreographer creating wonderfully authentic songs and dances of the late 1920s and 1930s in celebration of this human chameleon.  Showering him with unconditional love, Farrow’s character finally discovers the man behind his transformational mania, while in the same moment figures from his past, some of whom he has married or hurt through his various pretenses, turn the morally aghast country against him.

      Allen further darkens his tale, as Zelig, discovered in Germany, is seen in deep regression, having become a Nazi attending one of Hitler’s rallies. Not so very different than the central character, Marcello Clerici, in Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist, Zelig—in his need to blend in, to be seen as “normal,” even when normality actually becomes abnormal—is, as Bettelheim muses, “the ultimate conformist.” So does Allen’s seemingly comic mockumentary become something far more profound and, in its metaphoric ripples, represents a substantial statement about desire and power.

 

     The director—long before the computer technologies which make such transformations far easier—has also created a marvel of cinematic magic, cooking up a sense of reality for his imaginary movie by inserting Allen’s image into various historical photographs and old film clips. Using, at times, the very cameras of older eras, at other times scratching and crinkling their film, Allen and his crew wondrously recreate a believable world that further legitimizes the sincere sounding observations and assessments of his contemporary celebrity intellectuals.

     Because in Zelig Allen takes his art so seriously, at film’s end we see the work less as a comic gesture than as a kind of reality, despite the implausibility of events, that could have existed and has more seeming “reality” behind it than many more emotionally manipulative documentaries. So while Allen’s work is certainly an “imaginary” movie, a movie that is more about its creation than what it ultimately represents, it is, in some respects, utterly believable. Zelig may not exist in a single individual, but certainly exists in our communal consciousness and hearts. 

       

Los Angeles, March 1, 2013

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2013).

Lina Wertmuller | Pasqualino Settebellezze (Seven Beauties) / 1975, USA 1976

a man in disorder: a rotten comedy, a lousy farce

by Douglas Messerli

 

Lina Wertmuller (screenwriter and director) Pasqualino Settebellezze (Seven Beauties) / 1975, USA 1976

 

Although I saw Wertmuller’s Seven Beauties sometime after its American release, I remembered little about it, although a kind a queasy feeling prevented me for years from revisiting it. After watching it again the other afternoon, I now perceive the reasons for my postponement. For this film might be described, as Wertmuller has a character say about his wartime experience, “it’s a rotten comedy, a lousy farce.” The very audaciousness of basically creating a comedy, much of which takes place in a Nazi concentration camp, is almost unthinkable (although figures from Charlie Chaplin to Mel Brooks have approached the subject similarly), something for which Wertmuller was condemned by figures such as concentration camp survivor, Bruno Bettelheim, when the movie first premiered. Others hammered the openly macho attitude of its central character, Pasqualino Frafuso (Giancarlo Giannini) and others could not forgive its focus on such an absolutely self-serving figure as its “hero.”

     Of course, Pasqualino “Settebelleze,” brother of seven quite ugly sisters, is not truly a “hero,” but as critic Roger Ebert has described him, is an absolute fool, a man who is “not brave, or bright, or even cynical or cowardly.” Pasqualino is a Neapolitan braggart who might be metaphorically described as a walking, talking penis, whose only mission in the world is to penetrate and pleasure itself—and, obviously, to recreate itself—in short, to survive. He is, as Pedro, an Anarchist Prisoner (Fernando Rey) describes a potential savior of the race, “a man in disorder.”

      Pasqualino, a local hood, who goes about with a gun strapped to his pants, is inexplicably loved by all the local women, whom he equally seduces and abandons. He has only one somewhat laudable value, “family honor”; but given the unpleasant appearance of his sisters and the prewar economy—his whole family shares a large room with several other families—it is a pointless virtue. The eldest sister is already performing, quite miserably, at a local dance hall, and, soon after is helped by her pimp boyfriend to join a brothel. Egged on by the local Comorra head, Pasqualino kills the pig in his sleep, cutting up the large body, packing it into three suitcases, and shipping them each to a different destination. His efforts, however, have been for nothing, for he is soon arrested, tried, and—after admitting, one might even say bragging that he committed the act—found insane. Working in the hospital ward of the asylum, he attempts to rape a woman bound to her bed, and is given shock therapy. The only way out is for him to join the Fascist army.

      He quickly deserts, along with a friend, Francesco (Piero Di Iorio), the two of whom we first encounter in the film within a German forest, where they come upon a mass murder by Germans of Jews, from which they run in horror. While Francesco is disgusted with his own inability to “spit into the faces” of the perpetrators, Pasqualino becomes even more determined to survive, breaking into a German cottage to steal bread, meats, soup, and fruit. The robbery is apparently reported, for while the two are enjoying their repast, Nazi soldiers arrest them and take them to a concentration camp.

    Wertmuller’s depiction of the camp is rather more disturbing than Pasqualino’s behavior. The entire camp is represented as a large, quite theatrical set, a white chalky dust floating through the air as prisoners are randomly rounded up and shot, their bodies stacked into piles—all overseen by a highly stereotypical German Prison Camp Commandant (Shirley Stoler), a large, scowling woman with an ever-present whip in her paw. Such exaggerated conceits merely aestheticize the tragedy of reality, while seemingly turning the unspeakable into a kind of comic set up. For we know, by now, that the desperate survivor, Pasqualino, will inevitably try to find a way into the heart of this disgusting image of a woman. He does and succeeds, if you can call their desperate groping and posturing a sexual “success.” But she, with a heart even colder than his, sees through his transparent deception, punishing him by putting him charge of his barracks and demanding that he choose six of his fellow prisoners for the firing squad.

    As Pasqualino goes about the grisly business, Francesco and the Anarchist are so disgusted with him that they volunteer to be among the dead. Pasqualino “saves” them only to have the Anarchist rush forward, throwing himself into a pit of shit and Francesco publicly begging Pasqualino to shoot him as a friend. Pasqualino obliges and the six he has chosen inevitably are shot.

     In the final scene of this deeply troubling movie, Pasqualino returns home, the War over. Waiting for him are his mother and the seven beauties, along with a young girl whom he had joked that he might one day marry. All have survived through prostitution. What can he say when he has led a life more deeply dishonest than them. He is still a penis: “I want lots of children” he yells out to his young fiancée.

     Strangely, for all of Pasqualino’s swaggering stupidity, he is also loveable. As he admits, he is not handsome; as we perceive, he is not admirable. Like some Rabelaisian figure, Pasqualino represents the worst in all of us; and because we can still laugh or at least smile at him, this sacred clown, this disordered being, salves our wounds for being part of the spiteful, hateful human race.

     So too does Wertmuller’s film come alive in the whirling vortex of her abhorrent images. This is not reality, she reminds us, again and again, but a kind of theater of the absurd, a representation of a world so criminally brutal that it cannot truly be represented. It is a nightmare from which we seemingly can never awake. It all makes for a rotten comedy, a lousy farce, but it remains both a comedy and farce nonetheless.

 

Los Angeles, November 11, 2012

Reprinted from International Cinema Review (November 2012).

  

Jaco Van Dormael | Mr. Nobody / 2009. USA 2011

alternative lives

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jaco Van Dormael (screenwriter and director) Mr. Nobody / 2009, USA 2011

 

Nemo Nobody (Jared Leto) cannot remember his own past, and therefore does not exist. Perhaps because the angels forgot to give him the gift of forgetfulness upon his birth, the story told us through hypnotism by Nemo's doctor and an interview with a young journalist determined to discover the "history" of the last mortal man on earth—all other living people having achieved "quasi-immortality"—is not a single, linear story, but a statement of some of the possibilities for this man's life, each of them producing a different fate for our "hero." Moving through several different genres—science fiction, love stories, psychological tales, and lectures—Belgian director Van Dormael explores, sometimes comically and other times more tragically, the 9-year-old boy's question: "Why am I me and not somebody else?"

     To discover that, of course, one must first know who is the "me" and what has happened to make the "me" who it is? Van Dormael's world, however, posits the concept that "Every path is the right path. Everything could have been anything else and it would have just as much meaning."

      To demonstrate this the director takes his character through several scenarios, each told in disjunctive fragments, creating a tale that the audience must connect, piece by piece, in order to make meaning. But after having "come through," so to speak, no viewer will be able to find a coherent answer to whom Nemo Nobody is; indeed, as the 118-year-old Nemo tells his younger self on a video, perhaps he doesn't exist: his parents never met, or his father was killed in a sled accident as a child, or his parents couldn't conceive a child, or a prehistoric ancestor of his was killed. 

     The lives of Nemo, accordingly, are aspects of the imagination, each variant no worse or better than the others, but all very different. At the core is the fact that Nemo was never able to make a decision; as he puts it at age 9: "You have to make the right choice. As long as you don't choose, everything remains possible." But, of course, if you make no choices, you have no life in which to create a human being.

      The central choice that Nemo has had to make—at least in one version of the film—is  terrifying for a 9-year-old: when his parents divorce he must choose to go either with his mother to Canada or stay with his father. Each decision is played out: in one version, Nemo runs for the train taking his mother (Natasha Little) away, and is pulled in by mother. In that version of his life, Nemo becomes involved with a young girl, Anna (Sarah Polley), the daughter of his mother's new lover and, later, husband. The two—described by his parents as "brother and sister"—quickly fall in love, living out an illicit love affair in their own house. But when the father discovers their affair, he leaves Nemo's mother, taking his daughter away. The two promise to stay in touch, but their letters are destroyed, and when they do meet years later in a New York train station, Anna has two children with her, her own.

     In another version, they meet, again in a train station, but Anna is not ready to make up her mind about resuming their relationship, and gives him a phone number, telling Nemo to meet her two days later at the river. Rain suddenly pours from the sky, erasing the number, and, although Nemo visits the river spot near a lighthouse day after day, Anna never shows. 

     In a variation of of the central story, Nemo is unable to catch the train and stays with his father, washing and caring for him as he grows old. In this version Nemo falls in love with another young school girl, Elise, who is in love with Stephano, an older boy. In one telling of

this tale, Nemo observes her kissing her lover goodbye and speeds away on his motorcycle, which slips on a leaf, paralyzing the young driver. In a second telling, when Elise tells him she is in love with Stefano, he continues to pursue her, she finally giving in. But on their return from the wedding, she is killed in a car accident. Having promised her he will spread her ashes on Mars, Nemo writes a science-fiction tale about the planet. In another variant, he actually goes to Mars, encountering another version of Anna just as the spacecraft is hit by meteoroids and crashes. One more version tells us that Nemo works for a television studio, lecturing on the planets and other scientific subjects, one day discovering that his editor has died when his car crashes into a lake. At the funeral he meets the editor's wife, Anna.

     In one more reading of his relationship with Elise, they have three children and live in a large suburban house. However, Elise suffers chronic depression and hysteric attacks, ultimately leaving their home.

    Returning to the larger story of his relationship with his father, Nemo declares that he will marry the first girl who dances with him that night. In this case, his lover is Jean (Linh Dan Pham) with whom he develops a life as he has outlined from the start:

 

               One, I will never leave anything to chance again; two, I will marry the

               girl on my motorcycle; three, I'll be rich; four, we'll have a house, a big

               house, painted yellow, with a garden, and two children, Paul and Michael;

               five, I'll have a convertible, a red convertible, and a swimming pool, I'll

               learn how to swim; six, I will not stop until I succeed!

 

    Succeed he does, living his luxurious version. But this time around, it is he who is chronically depressed, unfulfilled with everything and unresponsive to his wife's loving pleas. Somewhat like the evil Anton Churgih of the Coen brothers' No Country for Old Men, Nemo begins to make decisions by flipping a coin, pretending to be a man called Daniel Jones, discovering himself in a wealthy hotel where two men enter his bathroom and shoot him, mistaking him for the other.

     The young journalist, interviewing the old Nemo, is understandably confused:

 

                Everything you say is contradictory. You can't have been in once place and

                and another at the same time. Of all those lives, which one is the right one?

 

    Obviously, there is no right one. And as quantum physics tells us, one can be at least in two places at the same time. But Van Dormael has so clearly made that evident by this time that we have long ago lost some interest in this fascinating mulligan stew. If we have been entertained by the perplexing mish-mash of stories early on, near the end of the film, we begin to see it as an overstated and delineated series of possibilities or alternative realities. The director has even color-coded Nemo's encounters with these various "loves," red for his deepest love, Anna; blue for his troubled life with Elise; and yellow for his golden life in the sun with Jean. Combined with the several lecture-driven themes of the film, we begin to feel ponderously lectured at, almost in the way Terence Malick has time and again hit his audience over the head in The Tree of Life. One of Van Dormael's patterns, in fact, is like a tree, the different branches representing alternate possibilities for living. Accordingly, what first appeared as fascinating variances, represented by often brilliant images, begin to dizzy us by film's end.

     The final imaginative placement of Anna in the circle Nemo has drawn near the lighthouse explodes the tale, as Nemo—the man who never was—walks a path apart from both father and mother, now dying, time reversing as smoke returns to a cigarette, shattered glass is magically repaired, and ink runs back into the pen, the universe contracting, erasing even the director's tale. His Penelope-like depiction of his story has come unwoven.  This viewer, at least, was left with a feeling of great emptiness in all these possibilities rather than satiated by the promised feast.

 

Los Angeles, March 3, 2012

Reprinted from Nth Position [England] (April 2012)

and World Cinema Review (March 2012).

Jaco Van Dormael | Toto le Héros (Toto the Hero) / 1991, USA 1992

boom: exploding life

by Douglas Messerli

 

Didier De Neck, Pascal Lonhay, Jaco Van Dormael, and Laurette Vankeerberghen (screenplay), Jaco Van Dormael (director) Toto le Héros (Toto the Hero) / 1991, USA 1992

 

An elderly man, Thomas Van Hazebrouck (Michel Bouqet as the old man), locked away in what appears to be a state-run old age facility, plots the death of Alfred Kant (Peter Böhlke), born the same day as Thomas, who—at least in Thomas’ unreliable memory—was exchanged by Kant’s mother during a hospital fire. Alfred, accordingly, who grew up as the son of a wealthy grocery-chain owner, is, in Thomas’ childhood mind, living a life he should have lived, while he must endure life next door, as the son of a poorer couple. What is unsaid, although made clear in Alfred’s taunts of Thomas (he calls him Van Campellsoup), is that in this French-speaking part of Belgium, the Van Hazebrouck’s are of Flemish background, while the Kant’s are wealthy Walloons.

     Moving fluidly back and forth in time and space, Van Dormael’s film portrays Thomas’ life, which, in fact, is a joyful one. The young Thomas’ father (Klaus Schindler) is a dashing pilot, who loves his children, Thomas (Thomas Godet as the child), his elder sister Alice (Sandrine Blancke) and the younger, retarded brother, Celestin (Karim Moussati), entertaining them with magic tricks and the wonderful theme song of the film, “Boum” (“Boom”) with its delightful nonsense lyrics. Thomas’ mother and father are passionately in love and the home seems an utterly pleasant one, while it is clear that the Kant home is less harmonious, particularly given the son’s bullying postures.

      Despite these facts, however, Thomas remains jealous of Alfred and his life, missing out of the pleasures of his own loving household. Since he is convinced that he is a changeling, moreover, Thomas falls in love with his vivacious sister, imagining a life with her as his lover and wife. Later, however, when he discovers that Alice is secretly meeting with Alfred, even that imaginary aspect of his life is taken from him.

 

    Other events associated with the Kants further grab up elements of his life. Asked by Mr. Kant to undertake a dangerous air trip to bring back bonbons for his grocery stores, Thomas’s father crashes into the sea, his whereabouts unknown to the family. Bitterness—again directed at the Kants—consumes both Thomas’ and Alice’s imaginations, which ends in the two destroying the statue of the Virgin Mary to which they have been praying.

     When Thomas’ mother leaves to check out a plane authorities have found near Dover, Thomas and Alice live for a few days in a kind of enchanted fantasy, but when Thomas grows angry over his discovery that his sister is consorting with the boy whom he perceives as the enemy, Alice determines to prove her love for Thomas by burning down the Kant house. She is killed in an explosion of the gasoline can she has dragged into their garage.

     Much of the old man’s memories—again played out in disconnective snippets and repeated images from the future and past—are of Thomas as a young adult (Jo De Backer), working, it is clear, in a bureaucratic office where the only actions we observe him accomplishing is sharpening pencils. With the report of his mother’s death, whom he has apparently not visited for several years, Thomas with an older Celestin (Pascal Duquenne) attends the funeral and takes time off from his job. At a soccer match, Thomas sees a woman who reminds him of Alice, attempting to find her again in the crowd. Later, he observes a woman in a pawn shop purchasing a trumpet (the instrument played by his sister) and he follows her, accosting her outside of her home, the old Kant house. Despite her discomfort with his stalking, she, Evelyne (Mireille Perrier) agrees to meet him between rehearsals (she evidently plays with an orchestra). A whirlwind love relationship ensues, ending with her decision to leave her husband. But when she does not immediately show up for their rendezvous, Thomas drives to the house, only to encounter the grieving husband, Alfred Kant himself. There he also uncovers a silk flower, just like one that Alice has created previously for him.

     The visit ends in his complete breakdown as he takes a train away from his home village. Was the woman actually Alice, or a woman who was so similar to Alice that both men were equally attracted to her? Although the one possibility might actually involve incest, for Thomas it hardly matters; the paramount issue is that once again Alfred has stolen an important part of his life from him. And she will now always be Alfred’s Evelyne, a kind of passed down trophy.

     What happens for the rest of Thomas’ life also matters little. As Thomas admits early in the film, he and his life have been consumed into a kind a “sound and fury, signifying nothing” Occupied by jealousy alone Thomas has done “nothing” and taken no joy in the pleasures proffered him. He hates old people, he claims, by way of saying he hates himself.

     Hearing the news that Alfred’s plans to close his grocery stores has resulted in an attempt upon his life, Thomas plots an escape from his old age home: the deed, he insists, is his by rights. He will kill Alfred, just as he had all his life plotted the heroic events of his imaginary self, Toto, a kind of film noir G-man who saves the day.

   Waiting in the reconstructed garage, Thomas’ mind moves in and out of dreams, encompassing others and himself on the prowl for Alfred, who does not show up. On the following day, when Alfred appears to have returned, Thomas pays him a visit, beginning with a playful “bang,” a murder of the imagination. Invited in, Thomas observes a man even more decrepit than he is, a man who time has destroyed. Alfred admits to unhappiness, expressing his envy of Thomas’ life, a life in which Thomas, so it appeared to him, had the freedom to do anything.

    But, of course, Thomas has chosen to do nothing, not even to run away with the love of his life, Evelyne-Alice. Alfred says that he still sees her from time to time and tells Thomas that she still thinks of him. The two, Thomas and Evelyne, now an elderly lady (Gisela Uhien) meet, touchingly kissing before she is called away by her current husband. Once again time has stolen everything from the would-be hero.

    Hitching a ride into a distant field, Thomas takes out his gun, prepared to kill himself. But suddenly  he tosses it away, returning to Alfred’s home, locking up his nemesis in one of the rooms. Dressing in Alfred’s suit, wearing his cologne, Thomas drives temporarily away and returns. The assassins have reappeared, awaiting outside the house. They telephone, and Thomas as Alfred answers it, whereupon shots ring out. The scene we have been shown of Alfred’s death time and again throughout this film, we suddenly realize, is Thomas’ death—his life gone somewhat comically into the “boom” of his childhood song. 

     Taking back “his” life, Thomas has finally become a kind of hero, accepting Alfred’s fate as his own and, in so doing, saving Alfred from certain annihilation. In this act, perhaps the first “act” of Thomas’ life, he has finally become someone, a man who has accomplished something, even if a slightly tragic event.

      If Van Dormael’s film, the way I describe it, seems to be a solemn meditation on what it is to live life, however, I assure the reader that it is not. Van Dormael’s first, and most endearing film to date, may end with a kind of a self-destructive, suicidal act, but it is a delightfully joyful experience, a kind a dark comic rondo throughout. It is only too bad that the hero has not been able to understand his life story for what it was.

 

Los Angeles, March 19, 2012

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2012).