Michael Anderson | The Quiller Memorandum / 1966

in the gap

by Douglas Messerli

 

Harold Pinter (screenplay, based on a novel by Trevor Dudley Smith) Michael Anderson (director) The Quiller Memorandum / 1966

 

 The Quiller Memorandum is by no means a great movie, Michael Anderson’s pedestrian direction often working in opposition to Pinter’s witty and clever writing. Nonetheless one is almost astounded that this film was made, given the fact that it is one of the few commercial movies of the period that has hardly any plot or even logical incident.

 

    After witnessing the murder of a supposed British agent in a Berlin street that looks like it was filmed on a dramatically lit sound-stage—the small phone booth in which the agent is shot is as lit up from within as the glowingly poisonous cup of milk delivered up by Carey Grant to Joan Fontaine in Hitchcock’s Suspicion—we are quickly transferred to the London headquarters of the British Secret Service, where its director, Gibbs (George Sanders) is dining with head agent Pol (Alec Guinness), a scene which immediately reveals Pinter’s comic intentions: asked by Gibbs if the food is all right, Pol answers, “Rather good.”

 

                        Gibbs: What is it?

                        Pol: Pheasant

                        Gibbs: Well, that should be good.

 

   And this film, indeed, is good, despite the director’s apparent incomprehension of what a radical work it truly is. Throughout this film, Pol is seen constantly eating or about to dine, a kind of perfect metaphor for the Secret Services’ apparent hunger for their enemies, and a hunger for all they might consume.

      The enemy this time round is a group of resurgent Nazis, although of a new breed, far more dangerous than the brown shirts simply because they’re so very hard to recognize. An American-born agent has been asked (“I’ve been asked to say this is not an order, but a request,” says Pol, adding “I’ll give you five minutes.”) to replace the dead agent in the attempt to find out who they (the enemy) are, and where they are hiding.

      Strangely enough, the writer presents nothing to explain what these evil men are accomplishing in contemporary German society, or on what grounds they might be destroyed if agent Quiller (George Segal) is able to sniff them out. It is simply a given that they are villains and Quiller, playing a laconically witty gumshoe, the absurd hero. Yet it is this very lack of any real evidence that these Nazi followers have done anything except secretly claim their awful namesake along with our growing doubts of Quiller’s competency to out them that permits Pinter’s script to so easily merge good and evil, so that by film’s end we hardly know who represents the Neo Nazis and who the British Service.

      Throughout much of the film, Quiller appears as a kind of wisecracking incompetent—after escaping from a Nazi interrogation, Quiller is described by Pol as “sleepwalking”; Quiller replies “I’m alive anyway,” to with Pol sarcastically quips, “Oh that’s nice to know.” His activity seems to be less that of a spy than a simple voyeur.  

 

      Trying to sniff out the Nazis in a local men’s pool, Quiller describes himself to the pool’s manager as an American coach checking out the facilities. Told that he cannot stay as an observer, Quiller dryly replies, as the camera follows the bodies of the fit German swimmers, “What a pity, I’d hope I’d been able to watch.” Shortly after, speaking to a young teacher to whom he has been introduced as someone who might be able to answer his questions about contemporary German society, Quiller spends more time talking about seemingly unrelated incidents than attempting to probe for information, describing to her Joe Lewis’ win of the second match against German boxer Max Schmeling (“Germans are a great disappointment in the boxing sense.”), indicative, perhaps, of his “watch and wait” attitude.

      As he gradually announces his presence, clumsily—if purposefully—revealing his identity, the spies begun to come out of the woodwork like ants. At times, we hardly know whether he is being tracked more by the Nazis than by the British; in one car chase, he escapes from being followed by one of his own men, only to be taken over by a car full of the villains.

     Little by little, we come to recognize that this Berlin is not so much the German city tourists visit, but a village of the mind, a paranoid’s world in which everyone is watching everyone else, and all are trying to guess each other’s next move and intentions. Pol describes Quiller’s role and position quite vividly. Placing two muffins at either end of a grape, he tells Quiller at another of his luncheon feasts:

 

                 You’re on a delicate mission. Let me put it this way. There are two opposing

                 armies drawn up on the field. There is a heavy fog between them. Of course

                 they want to see one another’s position very much. You are in the gap. Your

                 mission is to signal their position, but if in signaling that position you signal

                 our position they will gain a heavy advantage. That’s where you are, Quiller,

                 in the gap.

 

                 [Pol picks up the grape and puts it into his mouth.]

 

     By the end of this tale, we truly no longer know who is good or who is bad, what is accidental or what is intentional. As the Nazis release him, holding the young teacher, Inge Lindt, as hostage, Quiller is followed down the same street we have seen in the first scene by a legion of other men. In one delirious moment, as the American agent crosses a small bridge, we see scores of others trailing behind, as if he were a pied-piper of spies leading them to—well there is only one direction to go, to his death.

      This is, after all, still a commercial movie, and that death is only a spiritual one; discovering a bomb under a car which the other side has planted as his vehicle of escape, Quiller blows the car up and hides nearby.

       Reporting to headquarters, Quiller announces the location of the Nazi leader, Oktober, who, with his henchman, is quickly rounded up and taken off to justice—whatever that might mean in such a morally relativistic world.

       And the young schoolteacher, held as hostage? Quiller finds her back in the school room, quite safe. She has, she reports, been lucky: “They let me go.”

       It is clear that she, herself, has been one of Nazi group.

 

                        Quiller: We got all of them. Well, not all of them perhaps. Most

                                     of them.

 

And shortly after, we warns her of the future she must face: “If I ever get back to Berlin, I’ll look you up.”

      This brilliant fable of moral incertitude seems quite insightful given today’s global context where Americans have been transformed from saviors into torturers, from Cold War heroes, to brutal men shooting down everyday citizens with guns.

 

Los Angeles, July 4, 2008

Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (November 2008).

Albert Lamorisse | Le Ballon rouge (The Red Balloon) / 1956 || Hsiao-hsien Hou | Le Voyage du ballon rouge (Flight of the Red Balloon) / 2007

red balloons

by Douglas Messerli

 

Albert Lamorisse (screenwriter and director) Le balloon rouge (The Red Balloon) / 1956

Hsiao-hsien Hou and François Margolin (screenplay), Hsiao-hsien Hou (director) Le Voyage du ballon rouge (Flight of the Red Balloon) / 2007

In Albert Lamorisse’s wordless classic of 1956, The Red Balloon—a movie I saw as a young man and watched again the other day—a bright cherry-red balloon is retrieved from a balcony by a young French boy, who befriends the object to such a degree that he risks being late to school (he is not allowed to take the balloon on the streetcar) and puts it into the hands of the school janitor for safe-keeping until the end of the day. By the time he has reached home that evening, the balloon and he have developed such a close “friendship” that the red globe patiently waits by the boy’s window until it can be retrieved, and the next morning plays with Pascal, following, rising above, and darting ahead on their voyage through the streets of Monmartre.

      The Monmartre of Lamorisse’s film is a post-World-War II landscape that reveals many of the buildings in decay and collapse, where the narrow side-streets are filled with boys, like the Roman raggazzi, looking for trouble and a good fight. Accordingly, the young hero and his beloved balloon are not simply involved in a relationship of admirer and admired but soon come to represent an alternative to the high-spirited street boys, who repeatedly attempt to shoot down and destroy the dancing globe on a string. Lamorisse’s red balloon is thus quickly transformed from a bouncing toy into a magical image of freedom and potentiality, and his simple tale rises to the level of fable and myth. Traveling the city with his new-found friend, the balloon’s adventures seem as limitless as the boy’s love and trust.

      When the street urchins finally hit the mark, deflating the balloon and destroying it with a sling shot, all the balloons in Paris free themselves from their posting, coming to the boy’s aid and, as he gathers them in, buoying him up into a fabulous ride above the city itself, symbolizing a wondrous escape of the narrow confines of the past.

       Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien’s The Flight of the Red Balloon is at once an understated homage to this great film, a film of formal beauty, and a strangely amorphous work of improvisation. Although Hou and co-writer Margolin provided the cast (the young boy, Simon Iteanu; his mother, Juliette Binoche; and his new nanny Fang Song) with a detailed scenario and back stories of the characters, cast members were asked to improvise their dialogue. One can imagine such a loose structure producing disastrous results; several critics of this movie felt that it lacked any structure or significant “meaning.” But, in fact, the film has a great deal of significance—it is only that it says what it has to say in terms of cinematic images rather than long linguistic interchanges.

 

      That does not mean that the characters have nothing to say. Binoche, in particular, presents us with a wide range of actions and reactions that clearly signifies a woman on the edge. As a single mother (her companion has bolted to Canada with her other child, a young girl), faced with financial difficulties (she works as a puppeteer for a children’s theater), Suzanne is forced to balance her obvious love and devotion to her child with having to face the daily frustrations of a tenant (a former friend of her boyfriend/husband) who refuses to pay rent while assuming that he has the right to use her kitchen to cook grand gourmet and outrageously messy meals for his girlfriend and other guests. Her small, cozy apartment is for her thus both a cave of protection and a terminal where all those who might bother and threaten her gather. Binoche brilliantly alternates her gentle ability to survive and love with explosions of frustration and rage; her search for order—represented most clearly in her hiring a nanny to oversee her son—continually is coming into conflict with the disorder of her life represented in the clutter of her overstuffed rooms and her personal ruffled, disheveled appearance which, at times, she is able to stylishly allay. With a dyed blonde head of hair that looks as if she has just risen from her bed, she compensates with layers of clothing, beads against shoulder bags, leather rubbing against silk. In short, she is a volcano of emotional stress, gracefully bending to embrace her son Simon a second before she explodes into anger over the lawsuit she must bring against the man who lives below. It is as if all the dangerous, winding, streets of Lamorisse’s Monmartre had been encapsulated into one room, one life.

 

     For all of that, we also recognize these crowded rooms as warm, life-giving centers as the innocent Simon and the amazingly calm and centered Song come to better know one another and form a close bond. The balloon of Lamorisse’s film is in Hou’s film largely symbolic, appearing primarily at the beginning and the end of the film, popping by for quick visits only now and then, floating mostly unnoticed outside windows and doors. Song, the nanny, is in fact what the balloon was in the earlier film. Herself a student filmmaker, she tells her young charge about the earlier film, explaining that she is filming a movie about a red balloon. The imaginative world created by the balloon in The Red Balloon is in The Flight gently imparted by the nanny, as she gradually extricates the private world of the lonely Simon and enters the intimate secrets of his life. And just as she invokes and shares the magic of the Paris streets with her charge, she translates the stories and wisdom of a Chinese puppeteer for Suzanne, whose new production involves ancient methods and themes.

     Whereas in Lamorisse’s work people in general, unable to accept and comprehend the message of the balloons, were to be feared and shunned, in Hou’s version people must find their freedom within themselves, the balloon is merely a thing, an abstract symbol. It is as if in the fifty some years since the original film, the anthropomorphized object has learned to stay away from both little boys and slings and arrows of those around them. Hou’s red balloon hovers over a museum gathering of children as a simple confirmation of the interpretive interchange they have just had with art. Only in the mind can an object carry meaning and in the mind alone can an object effect a human life. 

 

Los Angeles, January 5, 2008

Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (February 2008).

José Manuel Carrasco | Pulsiones (Drives) / 2009

friends

by Douglas Messerli

 

José Manuel Carrasco (screenwriter and director) Pulsiones (Drives) / 2009 [10 minutes]

 

In many respects, Drives is a charmingly slight comedy. A handsome young Spaniard, Guillermo Martín about to marry in a month his girlfriend of 7 years, Carolina. The trouble is ever since high school he has also had “drives” as the translation puts it, for gay relationships. There was a friend in high school, another in college, and later one of his coaches. Determined to discover whether he is truly or just to get it out of his system, he hires a professional male prostitute, Félix (Marko Mihailovic) to have sex with him.

      His discomfort with the meet-up is immediate and he attempts to explain the situation, the friendly prostitute, who works for an agency, attempting to find a way to best approach him. Kissing doesn’t work for Félix, who has, in fact, given another name. A massage simply makes Guillermo (who has also lied about his name) chatty, and he explains that he usually has known his previous male sex mates as friends before their sexual encounters.

       As the hours pass, and Guillermo talks, he begins to fear for the upcoming marriage—“I’m a top but Carolina says I’m sluggish”—as Félix, beginning to care about his customer, argues that he’s just insecure about the marriage, noting that he too has a girlfriend.

     Guillermo turns the tables, so to speak, asking whether or not he’s told her about his line of employment, in which he has been engaged now for most of his life, beginning with giving head to his teacher in high school to pass a course. Félix admits he hasn’t told her since some women “get off,” he argues, in having a rent boy as their boyfriend, and he doesn’t want to into that in his relationship with her. And he doesn't to lose his girlfriend.

      The two continue talking and before long Guillermo suggests that he really likes Félix, and that he’s a good man despite his profession. Before long, the two, hinting at their respect for one another, realize that they have become friends, and finally begin to kiss and have what appears to be perfect sex.

     As Félix leaves, he hands back the money paid to him, insisting that he doesn’t charge friends. Guillermo watches him leave somewhat sadly. And in the very next scene, we have a repeat of the first half of the film, as Guillermo has obviously called up again for Félix’s services once again, the two sitting on the couch almost as uncomfortable as the first time, but in the ending laughing at the situation, knowing that the real reason he is there is because Guillermo wants a repeat performance with is friend.

        As the credits begin to scroll, however, an end narrative states that Guillermo married Carolina on the date they had planned and 320 people ended the wedding. I agree with Walter Neto’s comment on Letterboxd: “I've never seen anything as pointless as the text that appears on the screen by the end. Why not have an open ending?!”

       Indeed, it has turned the comedy into a kind of tragedy, representing yet another situation where a man with obviously homosexual or bisexual inclinations has entered into a heterosexual marriage where he will ever be fully satisfied, and perhaps like many of kind will begin to seek out gay sexual situations once again. Certainly, he’ll never have as good of sex as he did with the well-hung prostitute “friend.” We already know that the two men will certainly desire to meet up again and again, despite the women in their lives. The result after the marriage will probably be disastrous.

       It appears that Carrasco hasn’t thought out the implications of what he has done in this film unless he is intentionally making precisely the point that I’ve just brought up. As another Letterboxd commentator, Christopher Velasco observes: “Of course, they end up together.”

 

Los Angeles, July 27, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2024).

Luchino Visconti | L'innocente (The Innocent) / 1976

 

the monster

by Douglas Messerli

 

Suso Cecchi d’Amico, Enrico Medioli, and Luchino Visconti (screenplay, based on The Intruder By Gabriele d’Annunzio), Luchino Visconti (director) L'innocente (The Innocent) / 1976  

 

Unlike works such as Obsession (1943), The Earth Will Tremble (1948), White Nights (1957), Rocco and His Brothers (1960), The Damned (1970), Death in Venice (1971), Ludwig (1973), and Conversation Piece, in all of which openly homosexual director Visconti featured gay issues, in the manner of his costume melodramas such as Senso (1954), and The Leopard (1963), his last film The Innocent retreats to mainly a heterosexual romance with very little if any gay content.

 

    The story, one might argue is in fact about a truly sexist, wealthy straight man, Tullio Hermil (Giancarlo Giannini) who has long ago left his pretty bride Giuliana (Laura Antonelli) to engage in sexual affairs with other women, the most recent of which is the beautiful Teresa Raffo (Jennifer O’Neill), a affair resulting in such an obsession that he tells his wife quite openly that he is leaving her for a while to explore their relationship, insisting that she remain in the family mansion in Rome while he moves quite literally in the mistress.

      From the beginning—as he attempts to explain that she must have known of his affairs and if she still loves him she will continue to accept them, describing her as a sister, mother, and friend instead of the intelligent and suffering woman that she is—we realize just how selfish this “monster,” as Teresa describes him at film’s end, truly is. The late 1890s women like Ibsen’s Nora in A Doll’s House had few choices in a world in which were pampered and worshipped but treated like the world, as a Letterboxd commentator described it, is “filled with luxurious fabrics: wallpapers; crisply ironed; custom suits; brand new dresses; wraps and veils of the finest silks and furs and tulles” in which she dresses and is surrounded as if she were simply one of Tullio’s thousands of possessions.

 

     The wealthy upper classes of which the Hermils are part during the Belle Époque were filled with dinner parties, concerts, operas, and male activities such as fencing (in which Tullio is engaged) as well as long dinners all overseen by an immense army of servants. It was this world which brought about World War I and ultimately opened the way for the fascism of the 1930s and 40s, a world into which Visconti was actually born but later rebelled, becoming a Marxist.

       Tullio sees himself almost as a Nietzschean figure, rightly standing apart from the bourgeois moral standards of the lower classes. He stands as an atheist and opponent of their moral scruples, permitting himself, like others of his friends, to declare himself free to do what most pleases him, in his case engaging in temporary sexual affairs with women.

 

       Teresa, unlike Giuliana and her friends, also sees herself as a free spirit, a sort of ur-feminist, yet she too is trapped by her love for Tullio, unable to fully engage fully with his utterly sexist, selfish behavior.  

       The relationship between the two of them, despite their continued obsessions with one another throughout the film, ends in only a few months.

       But in the meantime, lonely, depressed, and rejected, Giuliana has begun an affair with a well-known author, Filippo d'Arborio (Marc Porel) introduced to her by the young military officer, Federico Hermil (Didier Haudepin), Tullio’s brother.

 

        That love affair, filled for her with guilt and moral compunction, also does not last long, but in the process she becomes pregnant. Now staying in the country with Tullio’s devoted mother, Marchesa Mariana Hermil (Rina Morelli), Giuliana is startled by her husband’s sudden return after his breakup with Teresa, she ordering that they sleep in different rooms.

         At first he is still someone indifferent to her, demanding she visit what was to be their original county mansion where, having lost his current mistress, he attempts to make over his somehow changed wife and more sensuous wife. But when she demands they return back to the Marchesa’s home instead of staying for the night because she is ill, his mother finally calls the doctor for her, admitting to her son that—although she has been sworn to silence about the subject—that Giuliana is pregnant, she believing that the baby is her son’s offspring.

 

      Tullio, however, knows that that cannot be case and soon discovers that she has had an affair with the noted author. Suddenly he is jealous, intrigued, and shocked, demanding that she get an abortion, attempting the reclaim her now as the mistress she has never been allowed to be in his house.

       At first, Giuliana wavers, but finally perceives his request as a kind of criminal act that despite his arguments for moral freedom and moral superiority, she cannot embrace. She returns with him soon after to their mansion in Rome, but refuses to agree to his demands of an abortion, and suddenly this totally selfish being displays his own bourgeois values, terrified of the scandal of her affair and of what raising a son that is not his night mean.

     Through his brother Federico, he attempts to arrange a meeting with Filippo d’Arborio, but Federico soon reports back that he has been sent by the military to Africa where he has contracted malaria from which soon after he dies.

       Giuliana bears a baby boy, but neither of them in their attempts to reestablish their relationship, will even see him, leaving him with the servants, although both sneaking in during nights to watch over him or cuddle the newborn.

      When Tullio, however, observes that Giuliana has been doing this, he is furious in the belief that her love of the child means that she is still in love the child’s father. In an attempt to allay his anger, she explains that she has hated the child, not loved it, and hopes that the two of them can soon leave the house and travel.

 

    While Giuliana, her mother-in-law, and the nanny attend a Christmas mass, Tullio sneaks into the child’s room, opens the window wide, pulls away the innocent’s covers and lays him near the cold air. Soon after, they discover that the child has stopped breathing.

     Knowing what her husband has done, Giuliana finally leaves him, again somewhat like Nora, to make her way alone a world that will surely be devastating for her, particularly after such a pampered life. Tullio attempts to return to Teresa, who toys with him after he has invited her into his mansion; after a few glasses of champagne explaining to him that she could not possibly again begin a relationship with such a selfish monster who, as she puts it, lifts up women with hand only to tear them down with the other.

       Tullio, who for the first time in his life not able to get his way, takes out a gun, goes into the room and shoots himself in the heart, presumably demonstrating, once more, how right he was about his willingness to live a completely independent life.

 

      Seeing what he has done, Teresa gathers up her purse and coat and runs from the house.

    As critic Jeremy Carr noted in Senses of Cinema, “Tullio’s chauvinism engenders him as a most unlikable protagonist; he is pompous, hypocritical, and reckless.” And yet there is something painfully tragic about his complete blindness to the world around at the expense of all others. One might argue that he represents the essence of heterosexual macho behavior, while being simultaneously a representative of the world that defined itself as educated, exquisite, and refined.

      In his constant womanizing Visconti’s despicable hero could hardly be seen to have any connection to the gay world. Yet, Tullio, in his deep male relationships, his dismissal of woman as anything but objects, and particularly in his perception—despite his truly deep sense of cultural and social conformity—of himself as a true outsider echoes with some gay overtones. If nothing else the fussy, overwrought feminized house that Tullio has created—not unlike Visconti’s own very personal hands-on approach to the rich tapestry of sets his film creates—says something about his sensibility. Tullio’s sexual activities are not really so very different those of many gay men before the shifts of the new century, selfish in their attendance to only their own sexual needs and the expense of deeper relationships, many gay men and lesbians being unable to maintain a monogamous or committed relationship in their need to satisfy only their own desires. In some respects, many of us wore this as a badge, proving us different, more open, and freer than the heterosexual society. And to a certain degree this may be true, being unconfined by the institution of marriage.

      In one scene at his fencing club when d’Arborio, after fencing with Tullio, showers and appears in a full-frontal nude scene (far more explicit than the nude scenes Visconti shows of women, and this in 1976), it appears almost as if Tullio cannot keep his eyes off of him, sensing perhaps that d’Arborio, also described as somewhat of a ladies’ man, has something deeper about him than he does, and perhaps may be more manly and attractive. Other nude males appear in the background.

   Moreover, the character of Federico, Tullio’s younger brother, who has a deep relationship with D’Arborio, describes his friend in a manner that appears to be more than a simple male bonding, arguing to Tullio of the man’s greatness, the only person, he claims, who has made him ashamed.

      In part, he is ashamed for the fact that even with all of their education and money, he and his brother have certainly not offered much to the world, while at least d’Arborio has given the society literature. Indeed, Tullio’s put-down of d’Arborio, and his refusal to explain why he has so wanted to meet up with the writer leads Federico to leave the house during their Christmas celebrations, explaining that he does not like what is happening in the situation, suggesting that there is something he cannot live with in his brother’s house.

      Earlier, when Federico discovers that his brother is soon to be a father, he comments that finally he can stop his mother from constantly trying to push him into marriage—presumably to create an heir apparent of which Tullio has not been able to—marriage being a union in which he is clearly disinterested. Although he and his friends also show up to events with women, their girls in their case are clearly temporarily decoys, obviously prostitutes tarted up for a dinner with these dashing military men, who like so many soldiers, sailors and others were forced, despite their intense camaraderie with other men, often sexual, to show themselves in public with women. It seems quite apparent, if nothing else, that Federico and d'Arborio’s friendship is deeper than any kind of relationship in which Tullio is capable. And at one point, when Tullio expresses the fact that he is suffering from things he cannot talk about, Federico responds angrily, “I have my own problems.”

       If Visconti’s film cannot precisely to said to express any openly gay situations, they hover somehow in the background, casting a kind of pall across all the plots of heterosexual melodrama. Interestingly, in interviews with both Ira Sachs and his co-writer Mauricio Zacharias, both mention the influence of Visconti’s The Innocent on their own gay film Passages, in which the central character is similarly un-likeable. Sachs claims that Visconti’s film provided them with their film’s structure, and even argues that in some respects, Passages was a remake of Visconti’s film.

 

Los Angeles, July 27, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2024).