James Parrott and Fred Guiol | Their Purple Moment / 1928

another fine mess

by Douglas Messerli

 

Stan Laurel (screenplay, uncredited) H.M. Walker (titles), James Parrott and Fred Guiol (directors, Guiol uncredited) Their Purple Moment / 1928

 

Just before Oliver Hardy and Stan Laurel got married to each other’s sister in 1933, in the silent short of 1928 they were both married to wives who each week demanded that they had over their entire pay checks.

      Both had attempted to keep back a couple of dollars for their own expenses, but Ollie’s wife (Lyle Tayo) quickly discovers his hidden cache. It appears at film’s beginning that Stan Pincher (San Laurel’s name in this short) has been luckier, having stashed away a number of bills in a wallet he hides within a secret panel in a painting. While attempting to put his new dollar bill with others, however, he wife (Fay Holderness) observes his activities and sneaks back into the room later to replace his cash with paper tokens she’s been saving up to buy a pitcher.

      Sharing his good fortune with his friend Ollie, Stan and he decide to spend an evening on the town instead of hanging out their wives who have gathered to gossip, the neighborhood gossip (Patsy O’Brien) stopping by to join on the gab fest.

      Pretending to go bowling, the two run off to a nightclub with great steaks and performances by a group of little people, The Doll Family midgets.

        As they are about to enter, two men are thrown out of the place for their inability to pay, and their dates (Kay Deslys and Anita Garvin) are being held by the restaurant manager demanding payment, along with the Taxicab Driver (Leo Willis) who has been running the taxi the entire time their dates have been inside.

       Knowing that Stan is flushed with money, Ollie cavalierly offers to pay for the meal and for the taxi if the two women join him and his friend, a deal which they cinch by flirting with the two unsophisticated husbands.

       Ollie orders up large steaks, potatoes, beer, and sits ready to totally enjoy himself, when the cab driver returns to remind of the ongoing bill, even inviting him to join them in a meal.

       Meanwhile, “Miss Mischief,” the town gossip, has been walking by the restaurant at the very moment when Ollie and Stan enter it with girls on their arms, and she rushes off to report the news to their wives whom she has just left.

       As the tab increases, Stan checks his wallet just to be sure that his small financial windfall is still in place, discovering that they bills have been replaced by the tokens. He has a great deal of difficulty in trying to signal Ollie about their new situation, and when he finally does, the two determine to sneak out as the lights are lowered for the Doll Family’s performance.

       At that very moment, however, the waiter comes by with a full try, tripping on Stan’s crouching body, spilling it contents to the floor and forcing Stan to suddenly have to return to his chair as if nothing has happened.

       When the act is over, the two despair, wondering what could be worse—at the very same moment they spot their wives at the entrance, evidently set on having their own dinner at the place while forcing their husbands to suffer their impending shame.

        Another act is beginning, and again, as the lights dim, they attempt to make their escape. Once more at that very moment the waiter passes by, tripping over Stan’s semi-prone body, spilling everything to the floor and arousing the wrath of a nearby diner. And yet again Stan returns to his chair to pretend he is innocent of any involvement.

        Soon, however, the two bolt, running out and in through another door, racing past their wives who soon join the manager, waiter, and various others on their tail. Reaching the kitchen, their trapped, reacting the way any comedic actor worthy of his cinematic name does, throwing a pie into the waiter’s face, an egg at the cook, and other foodstuffs at those also chasing after them.

       Finally, their wives come to retrieve them, but we know for certain that they will remain in familial prison for months, even though Ollie tries to pretend that he was led astray by Stan, and he had no idea where they had been going or why the girls suddenly showed up to their table. Stan Laurel, as he so often is, remains speechless in the injustice of it all.

 

Los Angeles, October 7, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2021).

Raúl Ruiz | Le Temps retrouvé (Time Regained) / 1999, USA 2000

bending time

by Douglas Messerli

 

Raúl Ruiz and Gilles Taurand (screenplay, based on Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past), Raúl Ruiz (director) Le Temps retrouvé (Time Regained) / 1999, USA 2000

 

Raúl Ruiz’s Time Regained, is not, as its title suggests, a film based on the last volume of Marcel Proust’s great Remembrance of Things Past, but rather a kind Proustian-like cut-up of the entire series of books, seen through the eyes of the character Proust (Marcello Mazzarella) in the last days of his life. Through photographs and the associations of the great writer’s mind, Ruiz brilliantly deconstructs Proust’s fiction, telling a grand story not through chronological events or even through a consistent narrative logic, but presenting us with a series of haunting and beautiful images of a world gone by, a world of floating women dressed in beautiful gowns and well-groomed handsome men haunting and taunting them with their affairs with other women and men. This gossipy, chattering, vengeful and often politically blind Parisian society creates a kind of dark symphony—what Proust describes as “a music that keeps coming back”—throughout the film which, with the poignant music of Jorge Arriagada, suggests themes which are embedded, repeated, and forgotten.

      At moments the director creates overlapping images which suggest multiple realities overlaying each other. At other times the film repeats itself, slightly altering the flow of occurrences. Surrealist images—including a room filled with black top hats each holding a pair of white gloves, a scene in which the partygoers are turned to stone for the child Proust’s cinematic entertainment, and a scene in a male bordello that features a sadomasochistic beating of the Baron Charlus (a beating which dissatisfies him in its timidity) by a young street-boy with Proust voyeuristically peering in on the action from a ceiling window. But mostly Ruiz’s camera focuses on the lavish parties and funerals of these wealthy Frenchman, in which people, along with hundreds of canapés and glasses of champagne, are swallowed up and spit out with sarcastic spite. Behind it all, we perceive, are the trenches filled with the dead men of World War I, a reality which will soon completely bring this close-minded society to its end. But as in Proust’s long work, the figures of his belle-epoch do not have clue about what lies ahead, and in fact are clueless about anything including the significance of their actions or lack of. Any coherent “meaning” we might glean from Ruiz’s stunningly gorgeous piece of cinema can come only from how we ourselves interpret these images, what we make of them. And as the critic J. Hoberman has pointed out, the film almost seems to be a film about a man who through his words created a kind of cinema himself.

      In short, this film is less about “events” than it is about the process of film-making or creating a fiction, focusing on how the mind perceives what the body’s eyes see, how it edits/processes those images, and how it puts them together or recalls them. All of Proust’s central characters—Odette de Créy (Catherine Deneuve), Gilberte (Emmanuelle Béart), Le Baron de Charlus (John Malkovich), Robert Saint-Loup (Pascal Greggory), Albertine (Chiara Mastrioianni), Morel (Vincent Perez), Madame Verdurin (Marie-France Pisier), and Madame Cottard (Dominique Labourier), even, for an instant, Swann (Bernard Pautrat)—are here, but Ruiz centers little on the continuity of their interactions, and even when it is quite apparent what they doing behind the scenes; for example Saint-Loup’s affair with the actress Rachel (Elsa Zylberstein) or his later sexual infatuation with working-class infantrymen. Events never truly coalesce into a “plot.” Indeed, Ruiz purposely, at times, mystifies the interrelationships of his figures, merely suggesting the lesbian bondings of some of his women or hinting at the Baron’s vicious political views and his pedophile tendencies with regard to the young Marcel. 

       Accordingly, even those who have never set their eyes upon a page of Remembrance of Things Past can enjoy this film. Indeed, if one has read the book, although it might help to enlighten certain scenes, it will more likely frustrate the moviegoer, since nothing comes of it. So removed from action is Ruiz’s Proust, as he shyly if debonairly winds his way through these wealthy charlatans, that he seems—as is more concretely revealed in the scene at the gay bordello—more like of voyeur than an actor. Of course, that is precisely the director’s role in filmmaking, to catch his actors “in the act” and mold them into a more coherent reality. But the “reality” here is not as coherent or orderly as a thing in process, as—much like Penelope of the Odysseus myth—Ruiz weaves and unweaves his tapestry again and again, as the various Proustian figures dance around one another as in a grand ball.  

     The point to all this, quite obviously, is that there can be no one truth, one way of seeing things, no day, as the voice of Proust asserts at the beginning, when things truly “change.” There is no true past: it gets reconstructed through memory and forgetfulness, through perception and distortion. Proust’s grand effort to “regain time” is “the frivolity of the dying.” Time is something that is meant to be lost, just as the figures of Proust’s Paris—of Woolf’s England, of O’Neill’s seaside Connecticut—would one day suddenly disappear.

     In the very last scene of Ruiz’s remarkable film, we see the teenage Proust being watched by Proust the elder, while between them the seated figure of the Baron de Charlus looks out at the boy, a demon about to descend upon his victim. We know the result. We see it in through sufferings of the elder Proust in his cork-lined room being cared for by his faithful Céleste. But there is no going back, no fixing of the clock. No matter how much one desires it, time cannot be recaptured nor held back.

 

Los Angeles, March 2, 2014

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2014).

Collen Tonderai Demerez Changadzo | Angelo (Angel) / 2024

the journalist

by Douglas Messerli

 

Collen Tonderai Demerez Changadzo (screenwriter and director) Angelo (Angel) / 2024 [27 minutes]

 

Poor Angelo (Eduard Galiá), having just broken up with his girlfriend Justina after the two had left their small hometown and moved to Barcelona. He’s not even happy with his heavenly name.

      In Collen Tonderai Demerez Changadzo’s short coming out film, however, with everything awash in a golden glow, we don’t have be sorry for long, however. Angelo simply takes out a lovely fresh gray-bound journal and begins to write, describing a life every young 20-some year-old gay man might have longed for.

     If for some time after his breakup he is lonely, dissatisfied with other women, and tired from hard work, this enterprising young man is soon visited by his high-school friend Marco, now living in England. Beautiful Marco (Sergio Pérez), so Angelo soon discovers, is now gay. And suddenly our angel is quite ready to put away his halo and the blue panties he’s kept from his relationship with Justina to try out gay sex.

 

     He’s a quick study under Marco’s gentle kisses and embraces, and within moments its clear that all the time, he realizes, that he has perhaps secretly been gay. All right, that’s not the way most of us experience coming out, with a sudden thrust of pleasure, never before having imagined that we might have contrary sexual desires, but Angelo is just lucky.

      Suddenly he begins to notice other male bodies, manly lips, buttocks, muscles—you know, all those things to which gay men are naturally attracted. And just as quickly our little angel is delighted with himself, after being a good boy all his youth, to do and feel something his parents wouldn’t have approved of. That’s called “self-identifying,” one of the first joyful things that happen to young gay men, their recognition that there’s something pleasurable in being queer, different from all the others. It’s one of the minor joys of coming out.

      But for me the major joy of coming out was simply the sex. And Angelo seems just as happy to write about his experiences from afar, voyeuristically watching the boys in the beautiful Barcelona sunlight. Somehow this writer and director can’t imagine that such a cute kid might now very much want to walk up to one of those local beauties and ask him to join him in his bed. Or that Angelo might suddenly get a yearning to visit some of the local gay bars.

 

     Poor Angelo, day and night he just keeps filling up his journal with his lovely observations of discovering the pleasures of being a gay man, apparently without experiencing any of them.

      This is a very pretty movie with far too little action.

 

Los Angeles, July 9, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2024).