Luis Buñuel | Viridiana / 1961, USA 1962

four forms of loving

by Douglas Messerli

 

Luis Buñuel and Julio Alejandro (screenplay, based, in part, on Benito Pérez Galdós’ novel Halma), Luis Buñuel (director) Viridiana / 1961, USA 1962

 

The announcement that after 25 years in exile Luis Buñuel would again make a film in his Spanish homeland made waves throughout Mexico and Spain, particularly within Franco’s government which held Buñuel as one of the triumvirate, along with Pablo Picasso and Pablo Casals, of the distinguished cultural opponents to Franco’s regime.

      If the Spanish government, however, looked forward to the result, what Buñuel offered them in his new film, Viridiana, was like a slap in the face, a work that once more devastatingly attacked Catholicism and the Spanish State’s brutal oppression.

      Loosely based on a novel Halma, Buñuel’s film, if read only narratively, is the tale of a young Catholic novitiate (Silvia Pinal), who almost on the eve of her taking vows, is sent by her Mother Superior to visit her supposedly ill uncle, Don Jaime (Fernando Rey), who has paid for much of her religious education. Anyone who has seen a Buñuel film knows that such a voyage—particularly one that involves a “return,” which critic Marcel Olms argues is at the core of this film—can only bode ill. When the first scene of the Don Jaime estate is represented by a young child jumping rope, with the camera lingering on her joyful exercises from the waist down seemingly forever, we already know that things can only end badly for the beautiful and innocent Viridiana.      

         Her uncle immediately perceives how closely Viridiana resembles her aunt, whom he married only to suffer her death the night of their wedding (Buñuel is careful never to tell us how such a strange coincidence might have occurred). At first all seems placid enough as Viridiana settles into Don Jaime’s wealthy, but Medieval-like antiquated estate. But as the time approaches when she will return to the convent, things quickly change. We have already observed that the elderly landowner—who far from being ill, seems fairly robust—secretly takes out the clothing he has saved from his dead wife, dressing up in the some of the articles, while obsessively stoking his wife’s shoes, foretelling the old shoe-fetishist of Buñuel’s 1964 picture Diary of a Chambermaid. For her part, Viridiana seems preoccupied with self-flagellatory acts, setting out a bed upon the floor while shuffling various crowned thorns; during a long sleepwalking incident, she deposits ashes she has gathered from the mansion hearth on her host’s bed, symbolic, she later suggests, of either penitence or his wished-for-death.    

     Don Jaime’s loyal servant, Ramona, and her nearly wild daughter, meanwhile, are expert voyeurs, who report their findings back to their employer. On the eve of Viridiana’s leaving, the old man begs her to dress up in the wedding gown his wife wore on the day of her death. After first refusing, Viridiana suddenly shows up, ravishingly beautiful, in the gown, to her uncle’s astonishment and delight. But he further repels her by proposing marriage, even if it remains, as he promises her, entirely sexless. She is about to leave, before, seemingly regretting his declarations, he begs her to stay just a little longer, promising no more assaults. She reluctantly agrees, while Ramona, brewing tea, infuses it—with the old man’s instructions—with a drug that puts her to sleep.

      Intending to rape her, Don Jaime only kisses her breasts before somewhat chastely re-buttoning her blouse and retreating, obviously being too gentlemanly to actually go through with the act. But when Viridiana awakens, determined to immediately leave, he tells her that she cannot return, for she is a changed woman, that he has “made her his forever.” With even greater determination, Viridiana dresses and calls for her suitcase, Don Jaime finally admitting the truth, that he has not raped her, and pleading for her to stay. But all of this does no good, as the novice escapes the house of horrors.

     She only gets as the next community, however, before the police stop her and demand her return yet again to Don Jaime’s estate, yet another return that symbolically serves almost as a kind of chain from which she cannot escape. The old man has hung himself with the child’s jump rope (the noose representing another image of inescapability), and has left the house and the land to Viridiana and his long ignored son from his first marriage, Jorge, a literal minded lecher who soon arrives with his current mistress.

      One might describe the rest of the film as a continuation of Viridiana’s education in the folly and foibles of human beings, representing to her the absurdity of imbuing the human species with noble qualities that the society in which they live do not allow them even imagine, let alone aspire to. It is the remarkable way in which the director reveals these lessons that ultimately makes Viridiana one of his very best works, a film in my mind that stands with Exterminating Angel as his greatest of motion pictures.

      While Jorge (Francisco Rabal), living in the main house with his mistress, plans to re-farm the land and upgrade the general estate, Viridiana, living in the out-houses, brings together a band of outrageous cripples, dwarves, whores, a possible leper, and other outcasts who have been living on the street. In order follow her personal vows of mercy and, perhaps, to redeem their lives, she has these arguing, lazy, lying, and outright violent figures, some of whom soon leave, unable to bear one another’s company. Those who remain in the company of the “generous lady” take advantage of her largesse. And when she demands that they each choose jobs to keep them busy and that they join her each day in religious ceremonies, it is clear that her piety is warring thin, as their abuse of one another and the two children who have arrived with them increases. When Jorge and Viridiana are called to the city one day on judicial business, the former beggars break into the mansion house, spread the main table with expensive tableware and celebrate with stolen lambs, wine, and other foods as they gradually fall into a kind of drunken orgy that only someone like Goya or….Buñuel, of course, might have whipped up! Not so very different from Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures of only two years later, these scenes brilliantly satirize the big-studio bacchanalias by revealing the ordinary coarseness and sloppy sentimentality of events. With Handel’s “The Hallelujah Chorus” blaring out from the gramophone, these miserable would-be miscreants behave like children imagining themselves in the shoes of the landowners and authorities who have kept them for all these years in social and even bodily bondage.

      Upon the unexpectedly early return of Jorge and Viridiana, most of them scatter away like the bad children they have been, but two, more drunk perhaps and certainly more violent, remain, threatening Viridiana with rape and rendering Jorge unable to protect her. At the very last moment, Jorge returns to consciousness, convincing the co-conspirator to kill his fellow rapist before he completes the act.

      It hardly matters, however, that Viridiana retains her virginity, for she is now, through the psychological terrorism she has suffered, truly a “changed” woman, incapable of even imagining the acts of mercy she once aspired to.

     The last grand operatic scene of this grand melodrama ends in Jorge’s room as we see him about to bed the servant Ramona, with whom he has developed a relationship since his mistress left. Just as they are about to begin, there is a knock at the door. It is Viridiana, now with her hair down and carefully brushed, clearly ready to enter into a sexual liaison with her “cousin.” When she sees Ramona, she is about to leave, until Jorge calls her in to join in a card game with the two of them, suggesting that he has always known that they would “play cards together,” Buñuel’s camera pulling back out through the open door.

      When Spanish censors refused to permit Buñuel to film the scene as he had originally planned, by having Viridiana enter Jorge’s room and closing the door behind her, the wily director changed it to the much more evocative scenario I describe above, which, in its clear implications of a soon-to-be sexual ménage-a-trois, is far more risqué than the original.

      The film showed out of competition at the Cannes Film Festival, but unprecedentedly won the Palme D’Or nonetheless. The Spanish representative at the festival immediately declared the film Spain’s 1961 official entry; but after the event, Spain dissociated itself from the work, banning the film, and going as far as to burn any outtakes that Buñuel had left behind. The film was not shown in Spain until 1977.  

      The manner in which I have contexualized the film above is a variation of most of the critics’ reactions to this film, almost all agreeing that Buñuel, in this work, was once again excoriating church and state. Perhaps Marcel Martin summarized this position most eloquently, writing:

 

                          He [Buñuel] is a great social moralist who has no illusions

                          about human nature but who understands and makes us understand

                          (like Brecht) that people are too often corrupted by the con-

                          ditions of their lives and that you have to reform society before

                          you can hope to transform human beings.

 

       Even if I agree that this is the major trajectory of Buñuel’s narrative, however, the film, in its ebullient almost Bosch-like satire of the human species, seems somehow to ignore the humanist filmmaker that we had seen previously in some of the Mexican films of the decade before. Is the world so corrupt, we must finally ask, that there is no alternative for a woman like Viridiana but the cold, sexual fling with Jorge (and, apparently, Ramona) that she, at film’s end, is about to embrace?

       If Viridiana is primarily a kind of harangue against corrupt power, I would argue, it is also a more caring study of the possibilities of human relationships. If instead of looking at the film as a kind of ongoing flow of narrative events centered upon the young novice, we were to look at the work in terms of its explicitly delineated episodes, we might easily perceive it as an investigation into different forms of love, with the director exploring their effects upon the individual.

       Obviously, living in the communal world of a convent, Viridiana is like a child, not far different from the squadrons of passing school boys with which the film begins. The convent and its structures is like an ancient model of family life, with each member being told her place and duties and given instruction of how and what to think about the world. As reward for this permanent infantilism, the nuns are rewarded near unconditional love from their superiors and, for believers such as Viridiana, by God. Although the Mother Superior under which Viridiana lives has already packed her bags and made the decision about her trip to visit her uncle, she poses the possibilities of the voyage as questions you might offer a child: “Wouldn’t you like to go on a trip to visit your uncle?” It is only when the young novice balks at the idea, that it becomes clear that she has no choice, as it becomes evident that everything has been decided for her.

       Although this may represent a kind of love, it is an emotion, as we learn later, that is based on reward and, in particular, punishment, not on desire or, most certainly, free-will and intellect. It is an unthinking love that is centered on passivity, the women of the convent being forced to give up their lives—and with it any ratiocination—to God and their order’s lethal embrace. Certainly there is no choice nor reason involved with this kind of love.

       So too, do we quickly perceive, reason is missing from the kind of romanticized vision of love represented by Don Jaime. The uncle’s love is something not of the present, of the real world, but of the past, of the dead: the object of love being whisked away the moment the love is enacted. Without any reality, is a love filled with obsessions (the voyeurism, fetishism, and other uncontrollable urges that we see played out in many of Buñuel’s films) which only fuel further infatuations. Love, in this form, hardly ever results in consummation, but as in Wagner’s Tristam and Isolde, is centered upon an unfulfilled desire. As we see through the model of Don Jaime, any consummation of the act—even a lie of consummation—can only end in death. This ancient form of love, Buñuel helps us to perceive, is the most destructive of all in its inability to allow expression.

   Given her religious upbringing and the numerous homilies of church going notions of mercy, it is little wonder that, after her brush with the creepy carnality of romanticism, Viridiana chooses to enact her love in spiritual terms, bringing together a kind of impossible family, made even more loveable to her by their being so impossible to love. Although she may feel that she is offering the individuals she has chosen “something” in her very act of loving them, she cannot recognize that it is a meaningless love unless the lover can return the emotion. The beggars and cheats she has chosen may certainly recognize her kindness and enjoy the very fact that she has chosen to embrace them, but it’s clear they have no ability to truly share her saintly sensations. In fact, in loving in this manner, there need for a real object, for this love, ultimately, is a self-love, a love that rewards the lover in the very knowledge that she has able to find it within herself to proffer such mercy. Like a bubble, such a self-inflated love is always doomed to burst, as it does when the celebrants, in mockery of her Christian teachings, recreate a kind of orgiastic vision of love that Viridiana might have imagined closer to Satan’s perversities. Indeed, in the marvelous scene in which a woman beggar promises the others to take their photograph—while they pose quickly in a scene reminiscent of Di Vinci’s “The Last Supper”—only to lift her dress to reveal her cunt, the director inverts Viridiana’s vision of love to show everything it isn’t: no body, no feeling, no humor, no absurdity troubles her inflated self-infatuation.

      The final vision of love Buñuel conjures up might be described, in the context of his film, as modern love: like the popular song now being played on Jorge’s record-player, it is a love so transitory and empty that it need not even be shown or talked about. We can easily imagine it: Ramona lying on one side of Jorge, Viridiana on the other as he kisses and hugs each of them, turning to fuck them each, one by one. It will end in a few days, weeks, months, leaving nothing, not even memory, behind it.

      The director does not offer us an alternative. And, in that sense, one might argue his examination of the potential of love is just as bleak as is his overall social satire. But here, I would argue, Buñuel does ask us, as we retreat from the door of the final failed vision of love, to imagine another version of love that we might seek for our lives, a love that does not create a prison, that does entail the nonexistence of the other, that does not merely involve our desires or motives, that is not just about temporarily fulfilling our bodily desires.

     As far as I can see, there is no evidence of any of these potential qualities in Buñuel’s damned beings. But there is one single incidence that stands out. Given what we have seen, we could hardly describe Jorge as a commendable figure; we might describe Jorge as practical, an achiever who may even restore Don Jaime’s estate to its former glory, but he is no potential hero or model of possible restorative behavior. Yet in one instance, he suddenly appears out of character. Observing a small odd-jobber’s car to which a small dog is tied, the dog forced to trot continuously at the speed of the car, Jorge berates the driver for torturing the poor beast. The driver not only justifies his treatment of the dog, but argues that it is a good rabbit hunter because he keeps the pet hungry as well. Jorge demands that he let him purchase the dog, and takes the animal from under the cart, pulling him, at first somewhat against the dog’s will, toward him (an image that again repeats the film’s sublimated symbols of chains and nooses). Clearly, we recognize the futility of the act; a second later another car appears along the same road with yet another dog tied to its underside. Yet out of no self-gain, evidently simply out of kindness, Jorge has saved the pup and made him his own pet.

     This clearly does not represent a version of human love which we have just been pondering. But it does, nonetheless, hint at a kind of selfless behavior that does not simply reward one’s own ego. Presumably, as a pet in the estate manor, this mutt will at least have a more loving and less brutal life. And that very fact might point us in yet another direction.

      If only those ignorant Spanish censors had allowed Viridiana to enter Jorge’s room alone and close the door behind her, we might have been able to hope that, with her more visionary perception of life along with his practical, down-to-earth capabilities, the two might have been able to redeem each other, he fulfilling her sexual desires and she ministering to his spiritual emptiness.

   Well, Ramona too has good qualities, has kept this house in order for years. Perhaps the three of them can work it out!

 

Los Angeles, June 7, 2014

Reprinted from International Cinema Review (June 2014).

 

 

 

Robert Bresson | Les Dame du Bois de Boulogne (The Ladies of the Bois de Boulogne) / 1945

obsessed beings

by Douglas Messerli

 

Robert Bresson and Jean Cocteau (screenplay), Robert Bresson (director) Les Dame du Bois de Boulogne (The Ladies of the Bois de Boulogne) / 1945

 

Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne (The Ladies of the Bois de Boulogne), is a wonderful Robert Bresson film that doesn’t seem at all like a Bresson film. In his second feature Bresson—although he had remarkable cinematic abilities—still did not quite understand, it is apparent, precisely who he was. The film, a highly melodramatic work, with a truly literary and witty text by Jean Cocteau, starred the great María Casares and the noted actor Paul Bernard (unlike the remainder of Bresson films which used unknowns as actors), performing—both of them in their high dramatic extravagance—in a text based on an incident in Denis Diderot masterwork, Jacques le fataliste.     

      Hélène (the wealthy and vengeful Casares) and Jean (the weak, but sophisticated Bernard) have joined themselves in a marriage of the mind, a commitment to each other that still permits them other dalliances, but is based, so she supposes, on a sincere promise of faithfulness. A late night concert with another male friend reveals to Hélène that her relationship with Jean is not necessarily what she perceives it. As her friend observes, “There is no such thing as love, only proofs of love,” of which Hélène has little evidence. Encountering her “lover” after the event, she tests him, suggesting that, despite their pledge of love, her feelings have grown cooler, to which Jean almost leaps into agreement, declaring that his own feelings are quite similar, asking her for his “freedom”:

 

                             I give you back your freedom, and you’ll give me mine!

 

     The scheming Hélène has her answer: her lover is only too eager to leave her, to which she seemingly demurs, planning at that instant her reaction; “I’ll have my revenge!”

     That revenge involves a somewhat innocent dancer and her mother, who both once lived near her country estate. Since those apparent halcyon days, mother and daughter have moved to Paris so that Agnès might explore a dancing career. But she is no gifted ballerina, now appearing currently in a cabaret, singing while accomplishing great cartwheels, and helping to further support her career with paid evenings with her many admirers. In short, she has become a kind of prostitute.

    With the cruel sweep of a descending blade, Hélène, presenting herself as a kind of “angel,” inserts herself into the lives of this troubled duo, offering to remove them from their conditions of destitute sexuality, putting them up in a comfortable—if not glamorous—apartment, and warning the mother to help protect her daughter from further moral defilement. The two appreciate the act, and despite the evil intentions of Hélène, she is, in some senses, superficially “honest,” insisting that they remain above and apart of the sexual world they once inhabited, while at the same time arranging a meeting with the daughter and mother with her former lover, Jean, at the Bois de Boulogne.

      That meeting has its expected effects, Jean falling deeply in love with whom he perceives as the absolutely innocent young woman, Agnès, who, described by Hélène as “impeccable,” will have nothing to do with him. As he becomes more and more obsessed with the young girl—a theme one might almost imagine came from Proust—Hélène increasingly encourages the women, in what seems like concerned familial advice to stay clear of him. Knowing both figures well, however, she perceives the eventual result. Both she and her former lover are obsessed individuals. Giving up just enough information to bring the two together, Hélène determines their ultimate encounter, the mother—in one of many of Cocteau’s brilliant dialogical moments—informing Jean “I can’t ask you in. Come in.” 

      His entry ultimately results in Agnès’ acceptance of his offer to marry her, despite her suspicions of Hélène’s intentions. She cannot help but be delighted that, given her past, that she might find fulfillment in a relationship with the wealthy and sophisticated Jean.

      Of course, Hélène is not yet finished with torture of the figures upon whom she has focused, warning Agnès to say nothing of her previous life until after her marriage, and then, gossiping into her former lover’s ear about Agnès’ at the very moment the ceremony has come to a close. In a grand dramatic gesture, she has invited most of Agnès’ former lovers to the affair. Jean, ever the coward, attempts to escape, as Hélène, ever the torturer, entraps him by the placement of her automobile. Agnès, the weak of heart—and the true “angel” of this piece—faints, having already suggested that she can no longer endure serious physical activity.

      What might convince one that this is indeed a Bresson movie, and not a film by the equally talented Max Ophuls, is revealed—once Agnès has fallen into her death faint—with Jean returning, insisting that he still he still loves her, and begging her to come back to life, a faint smile upon her face suggesting that she not only has heard him but will, we hope, survive to rectify and salve the evil intents of Hélène—a true Bressonion work, redemption and salvation at its center.

      What we perceive in this brilliant film is that Bresson was working through a more traditional form in order to determine what he would soon after alter to create an indelible new way of thinking about filmmaking. But even here, in Les Dame du Bois de Boulogne, we recognize him already as a great cinematographer, even though he meets all his figures head on in a traditional frame that later will be fragmented into unexpressed gestures that even the characters themselves do not comprehend how to define them. Had Bresson continued down this path, he still might have perceived as a great director, but would certainly not have been perceived as the great cinematic innovator we recognize him to be today!  

 

Los Angeles, August 29, 2013

Reprinted from International Cinema Review (August 2013).     

Paolo Sorrentino | La grande bellezza (The Great Beauty) / 2013

the disappearing giraffe

by Douglas Messerli

 

Paolo Sorrentino and Umberto Contarello (screenplay), Paolo Sorrentino (director) La grande bellezza (The Great Beauty) / 2013

 

As some critics have pointed out, the title of this new film by Paolo Sorrentino might almost be applied to the film itself, as the director unrolls a canvas of cinematic images that quite literally makes us swoon over the landscape where the Tiber meets the Po. Indeed, this director’s film reads, at moments, almost like a sumptuous travelogue, beckoning the viewer to enter into the sway of orgiastic events the movie documents. The film begins with a quote from Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Journey to the End of Night:

 

                             To travel is very useful, it makes the imagination work, the

                             rest is just delusion and pain. Our journey is entirely imaginary,

                             which is its strength.

 

Certainly, I felt that way on my visit of Rome, and by the end of The Great Beauty Sorrentino had almost convinced me that I must make that journey again—even if it is just through revisiting this spectacular film. The film’s music, alone, is worth the trip.

     Surely the world of the film’s master of ceremony, Jep Gambardella (the incomparable Toni Servillo) is not particularly a place where I might feel comfortable, any more than I might have felt at home in the street cafés and late-night piazza strolls of Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita. Nor might I feel at peace in the midnight investigations of wealthy Italian mansions—despite all the beauteous art contained within—that both films present. Like Marcello Rubini of Fellini’s work, Jep works as a journalist out to enjoy the “sweet life.” But whereas Marcello is basically a tag-along in the all-night celebrations of Rome’s heathen life, Jep, born in Naples, has become the center of the parties he gives and attends, the first of which is a surrealist-like celebration of his 65th birthday. Jep ruminates:

 

                            I didn’t want to simply be a socialite, I wanted to become

                            the king of socialites. I didn’t just want to attend parties. I

                            wanted the power to make them fail.

 

     And that is precisely what he proceeds to do throughout the many events he hosts in his grand apartment across the Coliseum and throughout his voyages around the city, destroying the pretensions of several of his guests—in one devastating scene he calmly berates one of his women guests, a writer proud of her 11 novels, the simultaneous care of her children and the connubial love of her husband. Jep points out that her books are insignificant and that she has now turned to television scripts, that she has nurses and nannies to care for her otherwise unattended children, and that her husband has been long involved in an affair. She, like everyone, he proclaims, lives a life of near-desperation. Not that he, the long-ago author of a great novel, who has never again written another work, is any better. And throughout the rest of film, the well-dressed, gracious and smiling plutocrat seeks—on the longest voyage of his life—to discover why he has accomplished so little since.

       In part, it seems, his failure to again write is simply a matter of lassitude, of continued exhaustion from his Berlusconi-inspired lifestyle. Indeed, nearly all his pampered friends might be described as having abandoned themselves up to the seven-deadly sins, as each of them, one by one, suffers from the wasted motions of their wild dance of the moment. One loses her son to madness and suicide; another, Carlo, comes to perceive that he is a literary fraud and returns home to his birthplace; a third, Ramona, a posh-bar stripper, dies from an undisclosed disease (perhaps AIDS); Jep’s editor, a brilliantly cynical dwarf, has lived her life, she admits, in the position of a child. A performance artist brutally throws herself against a wall, a drop of blood trickling down her cheek. A meticulously dressed neighbor, whom Jep admires throughout the work, is arrested as the country’s most famous wanted man. 

    As in Fellini’s version of the fall of modern-day Rome, moreover, the church also is not exempted from this self-serving world. A priest, heir to the Papacy, can only babble on about his favorite recipes. Even the Saint of this tale, a kind of Mother Teresa-like figure, admits that, having taken the vow of poverty, she cannot speak of it but only enact: at 104 she sleeps only on floors and, in the last scenes of the film, crawls on her hand and knees in a pointlessly painful journey to the top of a long stairs. Are her acts of attrition any more meaningful, one has to wonder, than the burning and dancing sinners at Jep’s hell-bound parties. As the host declares near the end of this work, “You know what I like about the ‘train’ (the long, snaking line-dance performed by his guests). It goes nowhere!”

 

    In the end, Jep has no major insights except, as his magic-making friend reminds him, that all actions—even that of making a giraffe suddenly disappear—are nothing but “tricks,” aspects of the imaginary world that Céline has described. Art itself, we suddenly discover, is the only way we can capture the beauty—in all of its facets—which is what, ultimately, Jep has been able to do in his “second” work, a retelling and confession of his own life, the film we have just witnessed, La grande bellezza.

 

Los Angeles, December 1, 2013

Reprinted from Nth Position [England] (January 2013).

Julien Duvivier | The Great Waltz / 1938

swept up!

by Douglas Messerli

 

Gottfried Reinhardt (story), Samuel Hoffenstein and Walter Reisch, screenplay, based on a story by Vicky Baum), Julien Duvivier (director, with uncredited direction by Victor Fleming and Josef von Sternberg) The Great Waltz / 1938

 

I must begin this review of Julien Duvivier’s The Great Waltz—a vaguely biographical film based on the life of Johann Strauss II—by confessing that I do not generally enjoy the music of Strauss. The kitschy, sweeping waltzes, with their seemingly endless choruses of arpeggios, represents the kind of Austria—a country who writers, composers, and artists I do very much admire in the 20th century—I can hardly abide, and this movie not only features those arpeggios but reifies the corny stereotypes of pasty-punching, meerschaum-smoking, hitchy-kitschy dances such as the Tritsch-Tratsch-Polka. The reams of golden curls of the opera singer Carla Donner’s (Miliza Korjus) hairdo, makes me cringe, along with her never-ending trills, which send me into paroxysms that can only make me wonder how the handsome Fernand Gravet as Strauss could have ever fallen in love with her, let alone allowed himself to travel with her all night in the Vienna Woods, where together they created, through a literalness of musical composition—replete with shepherd’s horns, the clomping of the horse, and echoes of the wind—that only reiterates just how unoriginal his musical vision was.

 

      The movie, nonetheless, does have its marvelous moments, including those featuring Strauss’ modest wife, Poldi Vogelhuber (beautifully played by Louise Rainer)—even the evil Donner admits, “You probably deserve him more than I do, but he’s going with me.”—her spirited father and mother, and the whole orchestra of eccentric music lovers willing to play for free who Strauss brings together in order to promote his new, as yet unaccepted compositions. His first venue in a large drinking establishment utterly fails, before the sudden appearance of Donner and friends, along with the establishment’s owners, who simply by opening the windows for all of Vienna to hear, sweep them up into the restaurant in a polka and waltz-dancing frenzy that is what myths are made of. Even I might have been drawn into such a large cast call of Hollywood dancers. And I could only lay down my defenses in the utterly silly joy of the masses of Vienna coming to the rally of local music—not so very different, after all, than Jean Renoir’s embracement of the can-can in his far more witty and cinematically interesting French CanCan.

 

      Strauss, we are made to believe, was a kind of revolutionary (in Austria, it appears, anyone who did anything out of the norm was a revolutionary) in his advocacy of this popular form, as, invited to a grant aristocratic ball the composer, along with his willing ally Donner, dares to play a waltz! The scenes are hysterically funny, as the wealthy audience, first appalled, is gradually seduced by the orchestral cascades, and ultimately—in an elegant scene, allegedly directed by Josef von Sternberg—are, as were the ordinary Vienna folk, swept up into its rhythms. It’s absolutely lovely to think that such music might have had that—or any such effect.

        When the revolution actually comes to be, Strauss, we are told, has composed the rebel’s march, accidentally involving the aloof Donner into the riff-raff of his friends, and trying to protect her, including from Kaiser Franz Josef—who will ultimately be seen as the solution to the rebellion. Finally forced to recognize the stupidity of his dalliance with Donner, “Schani” Strauss returns to his loyal wife, and, after an opera or two (presumably including the operetta, Die Fledermaus) is invited to play before Franz Josef himself. So has the rebel become the representative of the bourgeoisie. Don’t all artists want that?

 

     In short, The Great Waltz is even a greater fantasy about art and those who must (particularly in this case) briefly suffer the slings and arrows of the conservative world out of which they have risen. 

       In the end, I guess, what makes Duvivier’s film so much fun is that it so completely embraces the kitsch world out of which Strauss’ music has come, that, as Americans who have taken a shine to nearly every popular-cultural stich that has come our way, we cannot but be caught up in its refrains: Da-de-da, da-de-da-da-de-da-da-de-da.. Da-de-da dot-dot-dot-dot…well you know the rest!

      As bad as this movie may be, and even might have been, it is inexplicably charming nonetheless. Cinematographer Joseph Ruttenberg even won the Academy Award of 1938!

 

Los Angeles, September 5, 2013

Reprinted from International Cinema Review (September 2013).