Jon Stewart | Rosewater / 2014 [documentary]

who are you? who am i?

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jon Stewart (screenwriter and director, based on the memoir Then They Came for Me by Maziar Bahari and Aimee Molloy), Rosewater / 2014 

 

There is a great deal in Jon Stewart’s first film documentary, Rosewater, to want to like. The very fact that a noted news-casting-entertainer—recognizing his The Daily Show as the unintentional causation of a journalist’s arrest in Iran—would take out time to make a movie about that man’s experiences is news in itself, just as the print and television media have treated it. The film’s depiction of the facts surrounding Maziar Bahari’s (Gael García Bernal) coverage of the 2009 presidential election and the so-called “Green Revolution” in that country, his sudden arrestment and imprisonment (for 118 days) in Tehran's notorious Evin Prison, and his (and the movie’s) determination to give witness to the hundreds of other lesser-known journalists formerly and currently imprisoned, make for a notable subject of humanitarian significance.

     Accordingly, as Stewart’s work begins with Bahari’s having to leave his beloved and pregnant wife in London for a few days of reporting, we settle back for what suggests it will be a revealing work. If Bahari, reporting for Newsweek, seems a little dissociated from his homeland, we soon discover, he is almost clueless about others of his quite informed generation still in Iran, who bravely defy governmental edicts. We might credit this to his focus on becoming a new father and the several years he has spent in the West. But when we soon discover that both Bahari’s father and sister were arrested and tortured by different regimes and for different reasons, we begin to wonder if Bahari isn’t just a little bit dense in the head, at least as presented by the director. In fact, we never quite get to find out who this unfortunate journalist really is.

 

    Stewart attempts to link the son to the past, suggesting his mixed feelings about returning to his home country, by hitting the viewer over the head—plastering billboards, shop windows and others of the city’s surfaces with images from his memory. And unfortunately, this heavy-handed technique hints at further directorial missteps, replacing psychologically-induced imagery for what might have been more effectively communicated through narrative events. In fact, the whole first third of this film, when Bahari quickly picks up a taxi cab driver to become his guide, is filled with all sorts of bits of information that, if fleshed out, might have given the entire film—particularly the work’s central scenes within prison—more dimension. We want to know more about Bahari’s communist-leaning father, his beloved, politically involved sister, and his gently-enduring mother. We are fascinated by the driver (who, Bahari soon discovers, owns no taxi, only a bicycle) and his friends’ open commitment to world-wide information through what they joke is “dish university,” joyfully demonstrating a series of forbidden dish satellites hidden upon a mid-sized building roof. How did they come to be so politically savvy? Or are they merely demonstrating a braggadocio in the face of the menacing political forces in which they enmeshed? Did the younger generation truly imagine that Ahmadinejad's opponent might really be allowed to win the election? Once again, Stewart washes over the real issues with amateur gimmicks, flashing the dissident’s joyful display of their half-hidden communications center with animated maps and arrows representing emails and tweets.

      One might forgive these clumsy visual displays as emanating from Stewart’s lack of experience. But, alas, his decision to take the easy route instead of the more difficult one continues throughout much of the film. We never really do get to know Bahari, his family, or his new-found friends, and the film suffers from that lack of knowledge: why should we care so desperately for this likeable reporter, and how could he not have guessed that his activities in the city, including his comic gesture of commenting on spying activities on The Daily Show, and, most importantly, his actually photographing of an attack and murder at a local military station, would not lead to his arrest? If history has taught us anything, you do not need to have done anything illegal to be perceived as being guilty, not only in dictator-based countries, but often even in so-called democracies such as jolly-old England and the gold ole US. That such a savvy comedian such as Stewart would miss the opportunity to bring that idea home, one feels, is a loss for our times. Are we (not only Americans, but westerners far removed from the internal struggles within Iran) involved in any way with the events in this picture? Why, one wonders, did Stewart so clearly want to bring this story to the screen if he did not intend to explore its larger ramifications?  

    Jeff Myers, in the Orlando Weekly, asked questions very similar in his review of November 19, 2014:

 

                        Not only does the growing threat to independent journalist go

                        unexamined, Stewart fails to connect Iran’s behavior with our

                        own. It isn’t hard to recognize that Bahari’s incarceration and

                        enhanced interrogation echo the situation in Guantanamo Boy,

                        and that Ahmadinejad’s criminalization of reporters and pro-

                        testors has its equivalencies here. One has only to recall the

                        actions by police in Ferguson, Missouri, to see the connections.

                        

     Once we are locked away, with Bahari, in the prison, the movie tightens up some and explores ideas more complexly. Stewart is smart, I would argue, to present the grand inquisitor of his hero “Rosewater” (Kim Bodnia)—dubbed so because he smells of the perfume he dabs upon his nearly-always sweating carcass—as an ordinary man, trying to accomplish a mean and demeaning task within the confines of a brutal bureaucracy. Even a torturer, Stewart makes clear, has to come to his job each day ready to endure the pushes and pulls of both his emotional and physical abuses. The fact that “Rosewater” is isolated in a country that doesn’t always allow access to Western thinking (and the same might be said of so many countries in which these torturers exist) works to his disadvantage. There is something almost painfully touching about his absurd misconceptions revealed through questions such as “Who is that Anton Chekov mentioned in your Facebook profile?” “Why did you travel so many times to New Jersey?” and, most obviously, “Why did you claim to be in league with a spy on the television show?” Bahari’s reply only points out the unanswerable absurdity of the questions themselves: “Why would a spy have a television show?”

     There is almost a joyful righteousness when Bahari, finally coming to perceive that instead of battling absurdity he should go with the flow, begins to spin mad tales of his addiction to massages that forces him to travel to New Jersey. Such a pitch for sexual pleasure  might possibly end in death, particularly when linking that addiction to the “pornography” his inquisitor suspects exists in the many movies they have found on Bahari’s computer, including Pasolini’s Teorema. In short, Stewart is satirically competent when it comes to demonstrating the banality of evil.

    But even here, at times, Stewart muddles his clever narrative with the overly clichéd visions of Bahari’s father and sister in conversation with the son and brother. In literalizing fantasy in a world of fantastical accusations the director almost aligns himself with the purported enemy. And, while the look Stewart has created of the prison—through a series of white-washed, fairly clean warrens for isolation—may be accurate, it makes it difficult for us to believe in the horrors the prisoner is undergoing. Surely, isolation (blindfolded for long periods of time) for nearly four months in any quarters might drive anyone mad, and the terror of feeling forgotten and abandoned—effectively indoctrinated by the prison officials—helps to break down even the most intellectually fortified being. When he does admit his guilt, Bahari’s bland recitation of force-fed statements is almost meaningless to his captors. And when he accidentally is described as “Mr. Hilary Clinton” by a guard, the prisoner suddenly perceives his case is not only unforgotten but has been internationally discussed. 

  These moments represent highs in an otherwise rather ineffective recounting of events, however. As overwrought and melodramatic as movies such as Midnight Express are, we come to better understand the psychological effects of prison life than in Stewart’s wryer and drier presentation.

   I’m willing to give Stewart the benefit of his inexperience; perhaps, if he desires to become one, he may someday become an intelligent and effective director. But I was disappointed that he botched so much of this potentially revelatory, even important, document.

    

Los Angeles, November 30, 2104

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2014).

Kenji Mizoguchi | 夜の女ち Yoru no onnatachi (Women of the Night) / 1948, USA 1979

bad girls

by Douglas Messerli

 

Yoshikata Yoda (story, based on the novel by Eijirō Misaita), Kenji Mizoguchi (director) 夜の女ち Yoru no onnatachi (Women of the Night) / 1948, USA 1979

 

Kenji Mizoguchi’s powerful post-war film is also somewhat problematic. A woman, Fusako Owada (Kinuyo Tanaka) whose husband has not yet returned from the war, is living, rather uncomfortably, with her tubercular son with her husband’s brother. The brother has little income, and Fusako and her ailing child must often fend for themselves. Attempting to sell one of her summer dresses, Fusako is told by the seemingly friendly clothes-merchant that she should try prostitution, which shocks the struggling woman.

 

     Back at home, her teenage sister-in-law, Kumiko (Tomie Tsunoda) arrives to report that there is news of Fusako’s husband. Together they rush to his former place of employment, only to discover that, after surviving throughout the war, he has died of malnutrition, leaving behind only a few personal belongings; even his worn uniform has been destroyed. The head of the company, Mr. Kuriyama (Sanae Takasugi) offers his condolences and his help if needed.

       Soon after, Fusako’s child falls into a seizure and dies. Cutting into the future, we see Fusako, now better dressed, on the street, where she accidently encounters her long-missing sister, Natsuko, and the two take tea to celebrate their reunion.

     Natsuko, we discover, is working as “dance hall hostess,” and Fusako is now working as an executive secretary to Mr. Kuriyama. Natusuko asks if she might move in with her sister, and Fusako agrees. After an utterly depressing beginning, accordingly, it now appears that the world has improved for the two sisters. However, as we soon discover, Fusako’s price for her position is the sexual attentions of her boss, who we also discover is smuggling cocaine. While Kuriyama is away on a business appointment, his assistant rushes into his office report to Fusako that the police are on their way, entrusting a large cache of the drug to the secretary, who is told to hide it in her home.

      When she arrives home, she discovers her door is locked from inside. When Natsuko finally opens it up, we discover Mr. Kuriyama within; the two have obviously been also having an affair. Furious with the betrayal, Fusako leaves home, disappearing from her sister’s and Kuriyama’s life. Secretly, she has taken the clothes-merchant’s advice and tutelage (the elderly woman also apparently serves as pimp for several women), joining the numerous street-walkers of Osaka.

       If some critics have complained of Mizoguchi’s cuts across space and time in the story I have recounted so far, I would argue that instead of creating confusion, it allows the inevitable surprises of life itself, and we quickly assimilate these alterations in the condition of his character’s lives. Yet the sudden transformation of Fusako, while perhaps inevitable given the difficulties of her life, seems almost inexplicable. How could a woman horrified of the concept when she was in greater need, suddenly turn to such a way of life? We must wait until later in the film, perhaps, to comprehend a rationale: her utter hate of men, and her desire, after being lied to by Kuriyama, to seek revenge.

       When Natsuko discovers that her sister has been spotted on the streets, she goes in search of her, but is mistakenly arrested with numerous other prostitutes in a police round-up. Once the women are booked, they are taken to a prison hospital and tested for syphilis. At the hospital, the two sisters again meet up, Natsuko explaining her mistaken arrest. Although Fusako is now angry with her sister, she remains protective, assuring her that she will be freed and everything will be fine once she proves she has contacted no disease. Shockingly, however, Natsuko discovers that not only is she infected, but that she is pregnant. Yet she quickly becomes determined to have the child and take the cure to rid her of syphilis. When she later explains the situation to Kuriyama, with whom she has been living, he demands she have an abortion and is unsympathetic to her situation. Now also jilted, Natsuko begins to bring home men from her job and to drink heavily.

      In one of the most exciting moments of the film, Fusako, still locked away in the hospital, escapes over the wall, returning to the streets before, finally, returning home to find Natsuko drunk, about to give birth. Fusako demands she join her, lifting up the near-lifeless body, as she takes her to a woman’s refuge. At the refuge, Natsuko goes into labor; the child is stillborn, but she survives. Authorities try to convince both women to change their lives, but Fusako still resists, angrier than ever and now a hard-boiled street creature.

      A similar situation has previously occurred with her young sister-in-law, Kumiko, who, having run away from home and been refused refuge in the Owada apartment, has met a young street boy, who rapes and robs her, abandoning the innocent girl in an inn where the local prostitutes beat her and steal her clothing. Kumiko is forced to join them to survive.

       In the final and most moving scene of this film, Fusako accidently meets up with Kumiko when she is called to observe a beating of the young intruder into the older prostitute’s territory. Recognizing her, Fusako demands that the women cease beating her, but the girl, now as hard-boiled as her sister-in-law is unrepentant and determined to remain on the street, in response to which Fusako herself beats the young girl, taunting her for her degeneracy and the condition of her life before breaking down into tears, the young girl seeking solace at her knee. Determined to take the girl to safety and, finally, to abandon the profession herself, Fusako lashes out against the other violent women, who, in turn, fall upon her, beating her relentlessly. Finally, a group of on- looking prostitutes intercede, realizing the truth of Fusako’s insistence that “there should be no women like us.”

       So Mizoguchi’s film ends, strangely, with a moral indictment, damning these “women of the night.” But given the harsh conditions of these postwar women and the continual unfeeling righteousness of several of the religious and social figures he has revealed throughout, it seems, in the end, that the director is somehow ignoring the implications of his own tale. Despite the frankness of Mizoguchi’s film, offering up open discussions of prostitution, rape, syphilis and women committing violence, the denouement would seem to return these women once again into home-bound roles that often means complete self-sacrifice.  

     Although Woman of the Night quite clearly shows us that it is the men in these women’s lives who have helped to destroy them, the film ultimately seems to suggest that the women alone must redeem themselves, must reject the demeaning and destructive roles they have embraced. In a strange way, however, it is only as prostitutes that these women seem to have any power in the post-war Japanese society. Mizoguchi does not show one woman, other than the child-like acolytes of the women’s refuge—given daily quite meaningless “pep” talks by the center’s director—who is permitted any dignity. It is clear that the sometimes “rightist” film director was of two minds about the predicament of his “women of the night,” quite brilliantly revealing their plights while blaming them for their decision to choose this method of survival. The paradox he has created is nonetheless a fascinating one, worth pondering through viewing this mesmerizing film.

 

Los Angeles, June 5, 2013

Reprinted from International Cinema Review (June 2013).      

Jean Cocteau | Orphée (Orpheus) 1950

the other side of the self

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jean Cocteau (screenwriter and director) Orphée (Orpheus) 1950

 

“Every schoolchild knows the story of Orpheus and Eurydice,” begins Jean Cocteau’s film, repeating the ancient myth before rolling off into its own hardly recognizable version. For Cocteau, it appears, is far less interested in the love between the original couple than he is in Orpheus himself. Indeed, the director is portrayed as Orpheus (as Cocteau wrote during the film’s making, “It is much less a film than it is myself.”), a highly successful poet who, we discover in the first scene, is scorned by his own poetry community. All the general criticisms of Cocteau—that his writing was basically unoriginal, that he stole from numerous other writers, and that his works were lacking real experimentalism—are called up in Orpheus’ discussion with an older poet, before the young rival, Cégeste, appears on the scene, calling up Cocteau’s own affair with the young poet Raymond Radiguet, whose death decades before, as Mark Polizzotti writes in the notes to the Criterion edition, “still haunted him.” The fact that Orpheus was performed by Cocteau’s former long-time lover, the handsome matinee idol Jean Marais, and Cégeste was acted by Cocteau’s current bedmate, Edouard Dermithe, further creates tensions between the artist in the film and the creator of the work of art.

     If I were to recount the plot of the rest of this film, for those who have never seen it, I might be perceived as ridiculous and possibly not to be believed, so I’ll forego the storytelling. It hardly matters, in any event, for as those who have watched this “incredible” piece of cinema, the landscape is a mix of a dream world and the personal that hardly ever comes up for breath into solid ground. In Cocteau’s telling the somewhat plain but pleasant Marie Déa is less a lover than she is a slightly pampered, mostly ignored wife. For Orpheus’ true love is on the other side of the mirror, where death waits, performed brilliantly in Cocteau’s fable by great dramatic actress, María Casares. As the dead chauffeur, Heutebise (François Périer), tells Orpheus:

 

                                 I am letting you into the secret of all secrets, mirrors

                                 are gates through which death comes and goes. Moreover

                                 if you see your whole life in a mirror you will see death

                                 at work as you see bees behind the glass in a hive.

     From the very moment he encounters the Princess of Death, observing her and the now dead Cégeste passing through a mirror, the poet cannot help but attempt the same action, frustrated by the hard surface of the glass, but equally fascinated by whom he encounters there. For Cocteau, it is quite clear, the Orpheus myth also involves the story of Narcissus, as Marais in a grand theatrical manner, plays to himself, enjoying the image of his own pompadour-topped beauty.  If he thinks he has fallen in love with Death, it is also clear that it is not the black-clad ice-cold beauty whom he attempts to follow throughout the film, but the other side of himself.

   The moment Orpheus encounters both Cégeste, the eighteen-year-old adorned by all, and his companion, the dark beauty of death, he seemingly no longer cares for his wife. And if he is fixated upon death, so too he is utterly transformed by the strange messages being sent over death’s car radio, which later, we discover, are being created and transmitted by the dead Cégeste; and through Orpheus’ intense attention to these messages—one of them, “The bird sings with its fingers,” stolen from the poet Apollinaire (an iconically purposeful act of  plagiarism for which Orpheus himself is later accused by the poetry community, Cocteau’s “furies”), we also perceive that the older poet is now also in love with, at least through his words, with the younger man.

       If that weren’t enough, Cocteau creates a strange bond between the dead chauffeur, Heurtebise, and Orpheus, who brings both the car and the driver into his house. Heurtebise, in turn, falls in love with the now neglected Eurydice, and it is his love for her, not Orpheus’, that sends the poet into the land of the dead to retrieve her.

     Even here, moreover, Cocteau creates another kind of homoerotic bond, as Heurtebise takes Orpheus’ hand and shoulder, leading him through the Zone into death’s realm. In short, Orpheus is in love with himself, first, with Death, and, indirectly with Cégeste and even Heurtebise, as opposed to Eurydice. Is it any wonder that, in order for her to return to life, the husband is commanded not to set eyes upon her again—a problem which further frustrates and infuriates him. Both Orpheus and Eurydice are trapped through the command to live with one another without the ability to express love or hate: you can neither love nor argue with someone you cannot see. Both husband and wife, at moments, become determined to break the rules, destroying each other in the process. Orpheus’ look into the car mirror to glimpse his wife seems almost like a determined attempt to rid himself of her—allowing him, since it will also mean his own death, to be enveloped in the arms of the Princess.

      Indeed, as in the original myth, the angered mob of young poets and determined “Bacchantes,” feminist writers in Cocteau’s witty telling, kill him, and, once more, with Heurtebise (the Charon of this tale) he is transported into death’s realm, Death, in her impatience waiting for him to arrive, momentarily experiencing human time.

 

      The strange twist at the end of this tale is more explicable if we comprehend that all three of his lovers—The Princess, Heurtebise, and Cégeste—perhaps perceiving that each is secondary to Orpheus’ central love, himself, erase him from their thinking, allowing him to go back in time, and to return to his loving Eurydice, as if she has just awakened from a nightmare nap.

       If we find Orpheus’ sudden caring for and embracing his previously neglected wife a bit unbelievable, we must nonetheless recognize that through death—and by extension through immersion in the self—the artist is redeemed so that he might, through his creation, continue to survive in the everyday world of “baby clothes and bills,” at which Orpheus had earlier chaffed. So has the self-pitying poet surprisingly (he has been told by the older poet to “surprise them”) discovered another concept of “the other side of the self,” a self that lives in the mundane world of everyday being.

 

Los Angeles, August 4, 2013

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

Rainer Werner Fassbinder | Götter der Pest (Gods of the Plague) / 1970, USA 1977

cobbler, stick to your last

by Douglas Messerli

 

Rainer Werner Fassbinder Götter der Pest (Gods of the Plague) / 1970, USA 1977

 

Often grouped in a loosely based trilogy with Love Is Colder Than Death (of 1969), and The American Soldier, of the same year, Gods of the Plague begins soon after the earlier film ended, with the small-time crook, Franz Walsch (this time played by the handsome Harry Baer rather than Fassbinder) being released from a Munich prison.

     His first call is to his former mistress, Joanna (Hanna Schygulla), now a singer in a local nightclub, Lola Montes (named in deference to Max Ophüls’ 1955 masterpiece, one of numerous film references sprinkled throughout this movie*). And for a short period the film focuses on his continued infatuation with her former lover before Franz moves on, partly in search of his old friend, Gorilla (Günther Kaufmann, Fassbinder’s reluctant lover for several years), now in hiding and whom, he soon perceives has killed his brother.  A second woman, Magdalena (Ingrid Craven) briefly takes Franz into her bed, and a third woman, Margarethe (Margarethe von Trotta) soon appears as another would-be suitor to Franz. Indeed, throughout this highly theatrical and somewhat slow-moving early part of the film, women quite literally hang on Franz’s shoulders and arms, undressing him like he were a play toy. Yet throughout Franz seems almost to be dead, saying little, responding sexually even less, often simply laying still as he were a traumatized survivor. He is the kind of figure, as one critic has noted, to which all the other film’s figures assign whatever desires or possible relationships they imagine.

     The film finally quickens its pace when Franz suddenly encounters Gorilla on the street and seemingly snaps out of his trance, the two deeply hugging one another and quickly determining to take a trip into the country to visit a friend Joe (Micha Cochina). At this point the dark, dreary scenes of city life quickly disappear as they go “on the road,” so to speak, inviting Margarethe, at the last moment, to join them. Here, for the first time, a series of real conversations begin, where Gorilla admits he has killed Franz’s brother (“It was just business.”). After a series of pauses, Franz asks Gorilla, “Did you sleep with Joanna while I was gone?” Another long pause occurs, as if the question has been asked of Margarethe rather than Gorilla. When Gorilla replies “yes,” Franz responds, “I love you.” Obviously, he could be saying that to Margarethe, but it is clear that it is Gorilla to whom he is addressing his remark.      At Joe’s country house, the three men once more spring into life, rough-housing with each other in a manner that is more about grabbing and holding on to one another than it is about a mock battle it pretends. Using the tropes of dozens of film noir and crime movies, such as White Heat, Kiss Me Deadly, and The Killing, Fassbinder reveals the misogynistic and homoerotic elements of the genre. When the three travelers return home, we find them all bed together, Franz dreaming aloud about a Greek paradise where the three might live, like the Jules and Jim trio, hunting, fishing, and drinking out their days.

      Throughout Gods of the Plague women also form quick lesbian-like alliances, with Joanna embracing her rival Magdalena, and Margarethe briefly establishing a close bond with Joe’s wife. But these relationships, compared with the long term and far deeper homosexual bonds between Gorilla, Franz, and Joe, pale and are short-termed. And, in the end, it is the women who feel betrayed by Franz’s inability to fulfill them, and it is both Margarethe and Joanna, ultimately, with the help of the pornographer Carla Aulaulu (Carla Egerer)—a woman with whom Gorilla has been involved—who, in turn, betray their men.

      Johanna and Margarethe both have different reasons for the betrayal: the first, feeling shut out from Franz’s life takes on the unattractive policeman (Jan George), and clearly wants revenge, pleading with the policeman to shoot Franz; the second wants to prevent Franz and Gorilla from robbing a supermarket, fearing that her lover will be caught.

     Even the supermarket manager seems to be a former friend of Franz’s, suggesting by his open acceptance of the two men into the nearly empty store, that he may also be under the thrall of the handsome Franz. When Franz and Gorilla turn on the supermarket friend, the policeman, who has followed them into the store, takes Johanna’s plea to heart, shooting Franz dead and wounding the escaping “Gorilla.”

     Franz’s last words, “Cobbler, stick to your last,” is strangely enigmatic. The phrase suggests that one should do one what knows best instead of taking on a new role. But here, the idiom somewhat loses its significance since Franz has always been a small-time crook, and is, even now, a film’s end. Does he mean that he should have remained in the penny-ante world which has already resulted in his imprisonment? Surely not. Perhaps he speaks that line not regarding his vocation, but his sexuality. But even here it is unclear precisely what he means. Should he have stuck to Joanna instead of turning to other women or, realizing that the women have betrayed him (just as Joanna had in the previous film). Or does he mean he should have remained with his male friends such as Gorilla or Bruno from the first of this trilogy? Perhaps he is simply referring back to the cobbler of the earlier film, Love Is Colder Than Death, who sells Franz and Bruno the weapons which end in Bruno’s death and Franz’s imprisonment.    

     As if in answer to that question, the seriously wounded Gorilla seeks out Carla Aulaulu, forces her to confess and shoots her dead, hinting that now both sexes have wrought their revenge, transforming the dirty little criminal figures of Munich night-life into near Shakespearian figures.

 

*Joanna, herself sings a song much in the manner of Marlene Dietrich. When seeking out the Gorilla, Franz discovers his dead brother in an apartment belonging to "Schlondorff.” Another figure of the New German Cinema, who directed The Tin Drum.

 

Los Angeles, April, 3, 2013

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2013).