Fritz Lang | M / 1931

trapped between

by Douglas Messerli

 

Fritz Lang, Thea von Harbou, Paul Falkenberg, Adolf Jansen, and Karl Vash (screenplay, based on a newspaper article by Egon Jacobson), Fritz Lang (director) M / 1931, USA 1933

 

I cannot imagine of work of 20th art more appropriate for this year’s volume of My Year, with the subtitle “Murderers and Angels,” than Fritz Lang’s memorable 1931 film M. One of Lang’s first titles for this work, “Murderer Among Us,” is eerily close to the title I had first considered for my volume, “The Murderer Next Door.” And the subject of this film, a child murderer on the loose in an urban environment, has an uncanny relationship with my own introductory essay.

    But before I even begin, I must insist that despite this film’s inclusion of many an LGBTQ list, the central figure is not gay, bisexual, or anything else we might identify under the LGBTQ flag. He is a heterosexual monster preying on female children, and there is no possible way to associate him with the gay, bisexual, or transexual communities.

    For all of its thematic of murder and violence, however, Lang’s film is strangely non-violent in what it presents on screen. In the first few scenes, indeed, Lang might almost be presenting an innocent world, as children play in the courtyard of a Berlin apartment building. But the game they are playing is far less idyllic than it first may seem, as one by one they eliminate each other, chanting about a child murderer. Once more Lang slightly misleads us by presenting a woman setting a table for her daughter about to return home from school. But his prowling camera reveals a wanted person’s photo of a serial killer who has preyed on school children, as, very gradually, the woman, Frau Beckmann (Ellen Widmann) begins to perceive that her daughter is late, going to the window and eventually to the door to look for her.

     The murderer is revealed soon after, as we see Hans Beckert (Peter Lorre), whistling the somewhat frightening Grieg tune from Per Gynt, “In the Hall of the Mountain King,” approach the young child, Elsie (Inge Landgut), buying her a balloon from a blind street-vendor, her ball, soon after, rolling emptily in a patch of grass, the balloon having been trapped in the telephone lines overhead.

     Lang establishes in spare images the basic theme of the film, reiterated in the movie’s last moments by Elise’s mother “One has to keep closer watch over the children.” Berlin, 1931, is clearly a dangerous world. Actually, as critics have pointed out, however, the central “murderer,” played to perfection by the pop-eyed Lorre, is not seen that much on the screen. Appearing only in these early scenes, in a wonderful moment, soon after, when, facing a mirror he attempts to mimic the dreadful face with which the press has described him, and in the last few scenes of the work, in the startling chase and trials which bring an end to his actions, the killer of this film about murder is mostly absent.

     The real villains of Lang’s work, both the members of the police force and the underworld of the city’s criminals, see themselves as the saviors of the society—albeit for different reasons. But Lang makes clear, without saying a word, that these men and women representing different social forces are perhaps far more dangerous than the murderer among them.

      As Roger Ebert has argued, it is in “the horror of faces” that the director reveals his disdain for his fellow countrymen, who, one must remember, were gradually being transformed into the figures of Nazi destruction. I’m not sure I’d completely agree with Ebert’s characterization of faces of these actors as being “piglike,” but, as they each go about their business, they are certainly not very pleasant or engaging. Both the societally-backed police and the hidden underworld meet in smoky backrooms as they determine their strategies. The police intensify their searches of psychiatric patients and frequently raid operations of the underworld, which, in turn, forces the criminal bosses, believing the social authorities to be idiot bumblers, to organize their own search for Beckert. Business is hurting.

     Beckert, meanwhile, is obviously a man of the middle class, living in a modest apartment, traveling through the city like an overworked member of the middle class, peering into shop windows, becoming a monster only when he almost accidentally crosses a child’s path.

 

    Without knowing it, Beckert is trapped between these two worlds, as he begins following yet another young girl, the beggars and other street-people closely following him. When they become frightened that he may get away, resulting in another murder, one of their group chalks his hand, depositing the imprint of an M upon the murderer’s coat shoulder. When the young girl notices the strange imprint, Beckert must again go on the run, and he darts into a nearby office building to hide.

     With far greater competency than the police department, the criminals search the building from top to bottom, eventually capturing the murderer and bringing him to their underground court, replete with a “lawyer” who bravely argues Beckert’s case as opposed to the large “court” gathering who demands his death.

     Beckert’s impassioned pleas that he cannot control his actions, arguing “Who knows what it’s like to be me?” has no meaning in a world of men and women who knowingly and purposely murder, without being driven from within. Just as the mob is about to fall upon him, the police arrive. The five judges at film’s end pass their judgment, sentencing him, it is apparent, to death. But Lang has signified in a manner that evidently the Nazi rulers themselves did not perceive, that the more dangerous murderers are still very much among the society at large.

     Only a year later Lang’s film, The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, would be described as an anti-Nazi film, cited by the Nazis as “an incitement to public disorder,” and banned. A year after M appeared in the US, Lang escaped from Germany, later to make films in the US. Some of his later film noirs and other films are quite notable, but none reached the clearly-wrought horrors of his first “talkie,” M.

 

Los Angeles, October 21, 2013

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2013).

Matin Scorsese | The Wolf of Wall Street / 2013

selling a pen

by Douglas Messerli

 

Terence Winter (screenplay, based on the book by Jordan Belfort), Martin Scorsese (director) The Wolf of Wall Street / 2013

 

As the last several essays in this volume have suggested, many of the movies I saw by coincidence and most of the movies that were released during 2013 strongly dealt with obsessions. And most the year’s major motion pictures focused on despicable people, greedy hustlers, liars, drug addicts, and just plain socially incompetent beings. When one thinks for even a few moments about the characters presented in Blue Jasmine, The Dallas Buyer’s Club, Nebraska, American Hustle, August: Osage County, and Inside Llewyn Davis, not to forget 12 Years a Slave and Her, one has to wonder what has happened to American heroism or just plain normality. And then there were the foreign-language films such as I’m So Excited and The Great Beauty! What are we to make of the characters these films present? Do they resemble us? Even if we might perceive that what is often described as “normality” is equally as dangerous and false, what are we to make of the values and motivations of these mostly immoral and failed human beings? It often seemed as if in 2013 the cultural world was presenting us with absurdly camp versions of our more ordinary lives, which includes even me!

      The most extreme of these was Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street, based on the life of a being representing all the qualities I list above. Scorsese’s film is a work of excess, presenting a world in which its central figure, Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio) lives a life of obsessive excess, trying, so it seems, daily to top the “over the top” day previous, transforming simple fraud into million-dollar hustles, taking drugs from inhalation of cocaine, to crack meth and powerful Quaaludes that allow no bodily movement, moving from sexual copulation to mass orgies in which the writhing figures stuff every orifice in sight. Simple wealth is not enough; like endlessly consuming monsters Jordan and his fellow associates—Donnie Azoff (Jonah Hill), Mann Riskin (Jan Favreu), and Nicky “Rugrat” Koskoff (P.J. Byrne), along with all of his workers—fiendishly consume everything in sight, from palatial Long Island mansions, to yachts, helicopters, beautiful women, servants—anything they can swallow up!

 

    But Scorsese’s film is, alas, not simply about excess, it is a film of excess. Playing for three hours, Scorsese not only captures the frenetic pace of Belfort and his colleagues’ wild drug-leaden celebrations but is itself swept up with them. Time and again, Scorsese tells his story only to repeat it, sometimes in order to adjust the reality of his narrators’ drug-confused stories, but at other times just to cinematically show us what we have already been told—as if, we too, like his characters, could not comprehend the oral component of human speech.

     Indeed, Scorsese’s work does not believe in what people say. How could it, when every word from its character’s mouths represents a fabrication of the truth? We never see the poor folks who are being lied to, but evidently they are the most gullible people on earth, ready to spend their life’s savings on penny stocks for companies that barely exist? The presumption is that these folk, like us, are just as “hooked” on fantasy as are the super-salesmen of Belfort’s self-created firm Stratton Oakmont. And behind that, it appears, the director supposes that we will all be similarly “hooked” on the magic of his filmmaking, buying (like Belfort’s dupes) his story simply for the rush of its American Dream-like sensuality.

      I’m sorry to report, it almost works. Such out of this world images of the wealthy and utterly greedy are almost fascinating enough that, particularly with the charismatic nonsense of DiCaprio, and the oafishly comic blundering of his friends, one is momentarily swept up in the mess of their lives which offers something to everyone: straight, gay, transgender, or just plain nerdish. Even Belfort’s somewhat normal parents (played by Rob Reiner and Christine Ebersole) are temporarily caught up in their son’s mania. 

    The problem is, as always, that after just a few orgies, a few too many nights of forgetfulness, several arrestments, and the endlessly plodding FBI investigations, that—for all of the ridiculous excitements—the wild life Belfort proposes is absolutely uninteresting, even boring. It may be addictive, but that does necessarily mean it’s truly pleasurable. And, unfortunately, after an hour or so of watching these obsessive shenanigans, so too does Scorsese’s well-made contraption of a movie seem to sputter and lose any energy it meant to convey. Violence, attempted kidnapping, and divorce can only follow.

 

     The director and DiCaprio, given their newspaper commentaries, would argue that that’s just the point, that the wildly obnoxious and destructive lifestyle of Belfort was truly empty, as opposed to the simple honesty of FBI agent Patrick Denham (Kyle Chandler), who rides the subway home instead of taking a stretch limousine. Unfortunately, in its own excessiveness, the movie really doesn’t show us that. In real life, Belfort was sentenced to only 22 months before he was back on the street, teaching other would-be hustlers how to sell a pen. His acolytes presume that in order to attract their customers to the pen they must find some special quality in the object itself. But it is the function of the thing that truly matters. Most people don’t realize that they need a pen to sign away their lives—or an unthinking afternoon at the movies to abandon their own consciences.

 

Los Angeles, January 3, 2014

Reprinted from Nth Position [England] (February 2014). 

Abbas Kiarostami | ライク・サムワン・イン・ラブ (Raiku Samuwan in Rabu) (Like Someone in Love) / 2012, USA (general release) 2013

the gulf

by Douglas Messerli

 

Abbas Kiarostami (screenwriter and director) ライク・サムワン・イン・ラブ (Raiku Samuwan in Rabu) (Like Someone in Love) / 2012, USA (general release) 2013

 

When Howard asked me the other day what I was watching, I responded “A French-produced film in Japanese by Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami.” He simply shook his head, a bit in disbelief.  

     Despite the fact that the director had to work with a series of translators, Kiarostami’s 2012 film, his final work, is quite convincing and moving. A bit like A Taste of Cherry, this work concerns someone near death who discovers a final joy in living. In this case the elderly hero is Takashi (Tadashi Okuno), a retired sociology professor, living on the outskirts of Tokyo. He has lost his wife some time ago and is now good to family members only for help in writing promotional fliers and other small tasks; his neighbor, who has long been secretly in love with him, spies constantly on his comings and goings. Just before the particular night with which Kiarostami’s movie begins, he has met up with an old student, Hiroshi (Denden), who now works as a kind of high-class pimp for several call girls, and has promised his former mentor a young girl, who is also a sociology student at the university, who works nights to bring in money to pay for her education.

      The poor girl, Akiko (Rin Takanashi), is not only attempting to balance school with her nightly activities but is trying to break off a relationship with her garage mechanic boyfriend, Noriaki (Ryo Kase), who has become increasing controlling and is now demanding that they be married.

       Noriaki is angry because, having not told him of her life-style, Akiko has obviously been lying and turning off her cellphone during evenings so that he cannot reach her. Indeed, the film begins with Akiko’s voice on her cellphone as she attempts to convince Noriaki that she is in another establishment with her friend Nagisa (Reiko Mori) instead of being in the café out of which Hiroshi works. She is not very convincing, even though part of what she says, that her grandmother is visiting and that she must cram for a test the following morning, is true.

     Now, having promised her to Takashi, Hiroshi has entirely different plans for her, despite her insistence that she is dead tired and has other obligations. In fact, it becomes immediately obvious, in Kiarostami’s film, that Akiko’s entire life is being controlled by men. Even a photo taken of her to attract clients has begun to show up all over the city, allowing her no privacy in her life.

      Hiroshi shuttles her off in a taxi, while Akiko plays back her cellphone messages, most of them from her pleading grandmother waiting for her at the Tokyo train station. Demanding the taxi driver take her past the station, she spots her waiting grandmother, which brings tears to her (and our) eyes. There is no place for family loyalty and love in her current life.

     Falling asleep in the taxi, she finally shows up at Takashi’s small apartment, on top of a small restaurant and bar where he is seen purchasing food for a dinner the old man has planned for them.

      The two fall into a comfortable conversation, but soon after she retires to the bedroom expecting him to join her. It is clear, however, that all Takashi has been seeking is a dinnertime companion and conversation. He stays up alone, drinking wine and listening to American love songs, including the film’s title-piece “Like Someone in Love.”

      Having little to do each day, he offers to take her to the university (where he also taught) and even waits for her to finish her exam, so that he might drive her to a bookstore for a new text.

      Almost from the moment she leaves the car, he notices Noriaki coming out of the shadows he trying to prevent Akiko from entering the building, a quite violent encounter; but, fortunately, she escapes into the school building.

      Observing the waiting elder, Noriaki insists that he enter the car, where the two have a somewhat testy conversation. Presuming that Takashi is his girlfriend’s grandfather, he attempts to talk about his love for Akiko and asks, offhandedly, for permission to marry her.

 

    Without revealing his true identity, Takashi attempts to dissuade him from the idea, arguing that Noriaki does not yet know enough about love, suggesting that only when he can stop demanding Takashi tell him where she is at all moments, will he be truly ready for a relationship.

       After finishing her test, Akiko, obviously surprised by Norikai’s presence, joins them in the back seat, the boyfriend saying he will get off along the way. Soon after, however, the boy hears a ping in the steering mechanism, and asks the elderly man to pull over. Looking under the hood he sees that the fan belt is about to break and argues that he should stop by his garage so that he can immediately fix it.

       Noriaki calls ahead to order up the part, and expertly repairs the car, but at the last moment another customer pulls up, recognizing Takashi has his former professor. Although Takashi can assure Akiko that he has kept their secret, she cannot be certain that the other man will not now explain to Noriaki who the driver of the car has really been.

       In fact, she has reason for fear, and soon after, as she enters the bookstore she is confronted again by the angry boyfriend, who this time brutally belts her in the eye. We do not see their encounter, only observing a crying Akiko after the fact, who calls Takashi, who, having just returned home, drives back into the city to pick her up, taking her once again to his apartment for safety.

       By this time, we certainly realize that, if Takashi has not fallen in love with the young girl, he has most certainly taken on the role of her protector, and proffers her a different kind of love that she has apparently not had since she has left her small village.

 

     Noriaki, in the meanwhile, has followed them to Takashi’s house and loudly demands that Akiko come out. Takashi quietly locks the door, but hearing a loud noise outside, goes to the window only to be hit by a missile Noriaki has hurled through the window. The screen goes black.

       Obviously, we cannot know what has happened to the old man; has he simply been hurt or has he been killed? One could argue that perhaps he deserved his fate, having procured the young girl for his own selfish reasons and intruded himself on the lives a two younger people who needed to work out the problems in their own lives. In a sense, his behavior with Akiko has not been so very different from his neighbor’s constant intrusions upon his own life. Yet we cannot but see the sad irony of the situation, and certainly Akiko might now fear for her life.

        If nothing else, the great director reminds us, once more—both through the visiting grandmother and Takashi—that, even with all their wisdom, the old cannot truly “help” the young after a certain age. The problems they face will always be of another time, or, as one of the Jets of West Side Story argues against the ministrations of Doc, “You were never my age!”

       This elegiac film reveals the gulf between young and old, along with the helpless isolation and loneliness of the individuals on both sides. Any attempt to reach out can only be perceived as a simile, “like someone in love,” instead of actually offering a direct commitment. As even Takashi realizes, through the ridiculous sophistry of the famous Doris Day song, “Que sera sera / Whatever will be will be.”

 

Los Angeles, November 26, 2013

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2013).   

Francis Ford Coppola | The Conversation / 1974

how to read

by Douglas Messerli

 

Francis Ford Coppola (screenplay and director) The Conversation / 1974

 

 The acclaimed surveillance expert, Harry Caul (Gene Hackman), is a genius at finding ways to overhear conversations where the speakers feel they are out-of-reach and totally safe. In the very first scene of Francis Ford Coppola’s brilliant exposé of late 20th century paranoia proves that our fears are justified by following apparently illicit lovers (Cindy Williams and Frederic Forrest) as they circle about Union Square in San Francisco at lunch, surrounded by amateur jazz singers,  bongo drummers, a mime, and numerous talking and gossiping San Franciscans, both lovers and the ephemeral others caught with a long range recorder directed from a nearby high-rise like a machine-gun aimed at the couple’s lips and through bugging devices planted on two of luncheon visitors. Overseeing these proceedings is Caul himself, draped in a plastic raincoat that makes him stand out in the crowd like a dowdy bag lady. He soon joins his regular partner, Stan (John Cazale) in a nearby panel truck where he is receiving and taping information coming from the various sources.

      It is a brilliant ballet (filmed by Haskell Wexler, who was fired soon after) that seems to establish Caul in the viewer’s mind as precisely the surveillance legend that others proclaim him throughout the rest of the film. Working with Stan, Caul gradual teases out nearly every sentence of the couple, and within a few days is ready to turn in the results in to the executive, simply described as the Director (Robert Duvall), who has hired him.

      Yet—despite the obvious fact that Caul is emotionally cut off from his fellow man and argues against trying to comprehend the reasons why he has been hired to undertake these sophisticated feats in tracking (he builds all of his own devices)—the clever voyeur, in this case, has serious doubts. First of all, Caul is a man of faith, if not a man of great principle. And, in the past, working for the federal government he has been responsible, indirectly, for the vengeful death of a man, his wife, and his child, killed because the man’s boss, with whom he had been involved in a fraud, in convinced no one else could have known of their plans. In short, Caul’s clever subterfuge has gotten the man and his family killed.

    After watching him in the confession box, however, we realize that his real faith lies in his professional expertise. And, in the end, it is precisely because Caul has no way to truly comprehend how to interconnect with his fellow human beings—his life is entirely consumed into the secretiveness of his employment, and he has difficulty in even answering the simplest of questions asked by his occasional lover, Amy (Terri Garr)—that he has difficulty interpreting the words spoken by the couple on his tape.

     In part, because of the woman’s simply expressed empathy—she sympathizes with a passed-out drunk lying on a nearby bench, she pleads for change to contribute to the impromptu jazz concert, and sighs deeply about conditions of their affair—Caul does not know how to read the other somewhat unrelated comments such as the male’s originally inaudible statement (fixed by Caul’s mechanical devices) “He'd kill us if he got the chance.”

    Combined by his feelings that the woman is severely saddened, he interprets the comment to mean that her husband would kill them if he knew about their relationship. And Caul, going over and over the tapes, begins to read them in new ways that suggest he is imposing more and more meaning, for better or worse, upon their sentences, while fearing that in delivering up the tapes he, himself, may be sentencing the young couple to violence or even death. Like the central figure of Antonioni’s Blowup, Caul attempts again and again to make sense of what cannot be fully perceived.

     As Roger Ebert noted, however, we soon have even more reasons to begin to suspect the expertise of this bugging “genius.” Although Caul has three locks and an alarm guarding his apartment door, his landlady is able to enter and leave behind a gift for his birthday, and later telephones him on an unlisted phone he claims not to own. She has evidently had another key made and has also opened his mail.

     Caul’s of-and-on girlfriend reports that she has observed Caul watching her from the staircase for over an hour, and she knows when he is about to enter her apartment from how he inserts the key quietly and then opens the door quickly, that he is expecting to encounter her with another man.

     At a convention selling new surveillance devices, Caul is easily tricked by a peer, claiming to be his competitor, Bernie Moran (Allen Garfield) to carry a listening device with a gift of pen.

      And then there is, again, the problem of his conscience. Although he arrives at the Director’s offices with tape in hand, ready to hand it over for his payment of $15,0000, the fact that the Director’s assistant, Martin Stett (a very young Harrison Ford), suggests he pass it on to him, makes Caul suspicious, since he has been ordered to deliver it up only to the Director; he escapes without his payment, despite continued threats from Stett.

      Stett, moreover, soon after seems to be stalking him at the same convention, and after the convention Caul allows a drunken party to be held in his Spartan offices, where, after bedding down with a seemingly sensitive whore, he awakens to discover that she has stolen the tape, delivering it up to Stett and, presumably, to his boss.

     When he calls the Director from his “nonexistent” home phone, the assistant telephones back, revealing that they too know his home number. Although Caul is paid, he observes both Stett and the Director listening to the tape with a kind of anger that he, once again, misreads as another piece of evidence that the young woman, obviously the Director’s wife and her lover, may be harmed.

      For the first time in his life, Caul becomes determined, so it appears, to intervene, to act on his knowledge and prevent the murders. As he notes in a dream to a figure resembling the Director’s wife, “I'm not afraid of death, but I am afraid of murder.”

      Taking a hotel room next to the one for which the couple has made an appointment in the tape, Caul uses his tools to listen in, once more, to the conversations going on the other side of the wall. Shouting and threats soon ensue, while, in terror, Caul rushes to the balcony to see if he might intervene; he faces a bloody figure and escapes back into his own room, terrified at what he has done, but still unable to actually involve himself.

     When, after hours, the noise dies down, he breaks into the couple’s room only to find it immaculately made up, with nothing out of place. A visit to the bathroom shower reveals no signs of battle or blood. Finally, breaking the seal of the toilet, he sees only pure water—that is, until he flushes it, blood welling up along with what are obviously the papers used to clean it up.

      Returning to the Director’s offices, he is permitted no entry and guards threaten him until he is forced to leave. In front of the building, however, sits a limousine inside of which sits the young woman he has supposed to have been killed. Newspapers soon report the death of the Director in an automobile crash.

      Suddenly Caul and we both know that he has utterly misread the situation, has misinterpreted the words the couple spoke, the tone of their voices, and the meaning of their vaguely expressed phrases. What might have been read as “He’d kill us if he got the chance,” probably should have been read as a kind justification for the act the couple was contemplating, “He’d kill us if he got the chance.” Obviously they are not about to give him that “chance.” We now must ask if the couple were not purposely using Caul, walking and talking in circles to allow him to tape their elliptic remarks in order to draw the Director into their lair. In short, it appears Caul has simply been used by the couple, who, in turn, working with the assistant, convinced the woman’s husband of the affair so that she might have him killed.

       Caul, without a clue of how to read or comprehend the words he captures upon his tapes, has been paid simply to lure the Director to his death, ideas which are confirmed when, confused and utterly exhausted by the terrible truth, the would-be genius retreats to his room to enjoy his only creative outlet, playing his tenor sax along with a jazz recording—once more a kind of second-hand participation. His phone rings. He answers but no one replies. It rings again, with Stett’s voice: “We know that you know, Mr. Caul. For your own sake, don't get involved any further. We'll be listening to you.” A short tape of the piece he has just played on his instrument follows.

      Now outwitted even in his own game, Caul breaks apart the phone to find the bug. Nothing’s there. He searches the few objects, the trinkets, a painting, and the record player he has in his apartment, finally even breaking apart a figurine of the Virgin Mary. He checks the ventilators, the curtains, the blinds. He breaks into the wallboards tearing through the layers of wallpaper, rips away the entire floor. With nothing left to destroy, he returns to his sax, quietly playing alone in utter despair.

     In fact, the process of the phone ringing once before a call back is very similar to a method Caul’s competitor, Moran, has outlined in a sales pitch. Is Moran, in fact, working for the Director’s assistant and his wife?  Unless Caul carries the device within the lining of his clothing (an idea once again posited at one point by Moran), the bug can only exist only within the beloved saxophone, clearly the only outlet for creative expression he has left in his life.

      Caul, finally, is left with nothing more to be listened to, even had he even been able to speak.

      If we now fear, rightfully so, the NSA intrusions into our life, it all began here perhaps, just prior to the Nixon Watergate activities and the attendant tapes that ended his Presidency. Is it any wonder that today we might all be a bit paranoid?

 

Los Angeles, August 6, 2013

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2013).