Jack Smith | Flaming Creatures / 1963

creatures afire

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jack Smith (director) Flaming Creatures / 1963  

 

For years I'd been hearing about the sensational film Flaming Creatures which seemingly influenced filmmakers and dramatists from Andy Warhol, John Waters, and Federico Fellini to Cindy Sherman and Richard Foreman.

     From the beginning, after its New Bowery Theater showing in 1964, screenings were rare, and in the late 1960s Smith took the film out of circulation. For all these years, accordingly, I had been seeking an opportunity to attend a rare showing, and despite the fact that I was scheduled to teach a literature course on November 9th, I arranged from the first day of class that we would skip the week in question.

   Listening to J. Hoberman's historical recounting of the film, which was deemed pornographic on its release and was denounced in the media and even in the halls of congress—one congressman being outraged that it was not even being good pornography (evidently he couldn't get an erection)—it is difficult not to let out a hoot of laughter.

   In today's world, Smith's orgiastic figures of mostly gays and transvestites seems almost innocent. Yes, from time to time, one or another shakes a flaccid penis in the camera's face, but, for the most part, the figures of this pastiche of scenes and music reminiscing from Maria Montez to Josef Von Sternberg's films and numerous other popular cultural references, seems utterly innocent. Hoberman himself describes the film in those terms:

“Flaming Creatures forty-five washed out, dated minutes depict a place where a cast of tacky transvestites and other terminal types (some costumed as recognizable genre faves—a Spanish dancer, a vampire, an exotic temptress), accompanied by recordings of popular music, shrieks, and snatches of Hollywood soundtracks ("Ali Baba is coming! Ali Baba is coming!") dance, grope, stare, posture, and wave their penises with childlike joy. The marriage of Heaven and Hell presented with playful depravity.”

    The creatures in Smith's film are aflame with buried desires—blindingly bright passions to show off, to love, to dance, to cry out, perhaps even to die—the creatures burning up before our eyes. What makes this film so troubling to some I believe is that it is almost a screed simultaneously to life and to extinction, a kind of mad portrayal of Heaven and Hell: not St. Peter's Heaven paved with good acts nor Lucifer's burning inferno but internal heavens and hells within each of us, often so potent that coherent language and expression cannot be reached. Smith himself described the work as "a comedy set in a haunted movie studio," which at first, given the very ludicrousness of the actor's portrayals, I dismissed.

      Clearly, however, there is something comical about the full throttle simmering of this heap of human flesh at the center of the short film. And yet, it is a haunted, ghostly world left behind by the cheap and gaudy reality that Hollywood directors have awarded us as alternative spaces in which to exist. And in that sense Flaming Creatures is an inevitable product of filmmaking itself. In a strange way this silly, tawdry, outrageous depiction of a hopped-up bacchanalia is no more or less unbelievable than hundreds of scenes from Cecil DeMille epics such as his 1949 Samson and Delilah, Bible-tales turned into fantasylands for a world of displaced souls. 

 

Los Angeles, November 13, 2009

Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (November 2009).

 

Kiyoshi Kurosawa | Tokyo Sonata / 2008, USA 2009

a new beginning

by Douglas Messerli

 

Sachiko Tanaka (screenplay), based on work by Max Mannix, Kiyoshi Kurosawa (director) Tokyo Sonata / 2008, USA, 2009

 

Early in Tokyo Sonata we witness a rainstorm, the breeze blowing the raindrops into the modest Tokyo home of Megumi and Ryuhei Sasaki. Megumi rushes to close the window and wipe up the water that has fallen to her floor, but in the very midst of the act, she pauses, momentarily opening the door once more. We recognize her immediately as a woman pondering the dangers that lay outside her seemingly tranquil life.    

     At his office, Ryuhei works as an executive director of a department that suddenly has hired a new Chinese woman—willing to work for considerably less than most of the other employees—and before the day is done, Ryuhei is fired. Startled by his new situation, and completely unprepared for it, he briefly wanders the streets before returning home.

    Communication between family members is failing. The oldest son, Takashi, a college student, rarely returns home, and when he does he says little; Ryuhei describes him as "hopeless." Kenji, the youngest, increasingly realizes that communication with all adults is a dangerous business. Caught in the classroom passing on a book of sexually explicit manga drawings, he is punished by the teacher. Feeling the punishment to be unfair, he reports in front of the class that he has seen the teacher viewing anime on his way to school, challenging the man's authority. Accordingly, at home he eats silently, while his father broods. When Kenji surprisingly asks if he might take piano lessons, Ryuhei explodes, adamantly refusing to even consider it. Only Megumi seems to be able to speak civilly to her husband and children.

      Pretending to leave for work the next morning, Ryuhei spends the day on a park bench, lunching on free food set up for the unemployed and poor. After facing long lines to the unemployment office, he has been told that he might be able to obtain a job as a manager of a food store, but rejects it as too menial. Discovering an old college friend in the same food line, Ryuhei learns how to make use of the local library and other places where the two wait out their imaginary work day. 

      Having given up on trying to communicate his desires, Kenji secretly signs on for piano lessons in a nearby home, using the money given to him by his mother for the month's lunches at school. We see an increasingly frustrated Takashi, unable to find any suitable career. Ryuhei, meanwhile, begins a long descent into a world of secrets and lies. This very normal-seeming family has nearly fallen silent, terrifying Megumi and creating a tension between themselves that is ominous to say the least. As the overly-wise daughter of Ryuhei's friend observes of Sasaki, "You've got it bad, haven't you?"

      Takashi's decision to join the American military as an alien worker further plunges the Sasaki family into anger, as the father refuses to sign the permission and Takashi leaves their home permanently. Although Takashi survives Iraq, he determines to stay in the USA as a potential terrorist in response to the acts he has witnessed.

     Kenji, meanwhile, has discovered that he has a natural gift for music and is told that his playing shows signs of genius; when his mother discovers a small broken keyboard in his room and receives a letter inviting their son to apply to music school, she is both troubled by his deceit and delighted by his talent; but Ryuhei, once again, grows angry in his inability to control his family and his own life, pushing the son from the staircase to the floor below; fortunately, Kenji survives the slight concussion.

      The vortex of fear and anger spirals even further out of control as Ryuhei hears that his friend and wife have committed suicide, and, determining to take any job available, secretly begins work as a janitor in a local shopping center. If thus far Toyko Sonata seems best understood as a kind of psychological soap-opera of events which are easily recognizable in the context of today's global economy, Kurosawa pushes his film into another dimension as Megumi encounters her husband working in the red garb of a cleaning man in a shopping center.

      Suddenly, the movie shifts from its realist perspective, skipping back into a time a few hours earlier, where we witness Megumi being taped and bound in her home by a would-be thief. Discovering that she has no money, the thief prepares to leave, removing the covering that has hidden his face. The sound of a police siren, sends him back into the house, and too late, he realizes he will now be recognized by his victim. He forces her into a stolen car, and the two race away to...well that is the problem, both the incompetent thief and victim have nowhere to go.

      From here on the movie pitches into a kind of tragi-comic opera, as Megumi demands they stop by the local shopping mall for the toilet and to pick up a few provisions for her new journey. There she repeats the encounter with her husband we have witnessed earlier. Ryuhei rushes away, declaring "It's not what it seems."

     Meanwhile, Megumi surprisingly returns to the car and the astonished thief. Without a destination the two drive to the ocean, where they camp out in a small shed and share with each other tales of their failed lives. The sexual encounter that follows lies somewhere between an act of passion and rape. Megumi determines she cannot go home, and lies upon the beach preparing to wait out her fate. As Megumi has told the thief in their conversation, she feels that she is trapped with no options for a future, but wishes that there could be a way to simply "start over," to be born again. Yet we know Megumi has too much sense of purpose to completely give up her present life, and when she awakens we discover her back in the shed, the thief having apparently driven the car into his watery grave.     

     Ryuhei has attempted to run so far from the reality of his life that he is now seen stumbling and falling upon the rubble of Tokyo overpasses and streets. At this point, he is so delirious that he races out in front of a car and, so it seems, is hit. The driver pulls him away from the car's grille and deposits him by the roadside, apparently leaving him for dead.

     Kenji attempts to sneak a ride in the baggage section of a bus on its way to another city, and after being caught by the driver, is arrested and imprisoned for the night, refusing to answer any of the police's questions.

     With the rising of the sun and the disappearance of her captor, Megumi has little choice but to return home. But this time, unlike all the comings and goings we have seen before, the house lies empty. Without her presence, it is as if none of the others can return either. The increasing silences of the household members has transformed it into a house of death. However, in that reality, and through each of their symbolic deaths, they are now freed. Kenji's cell is opened; the case has been dropped. Miraculously Ryuhei awakens, slightly battered but able to walk. As, one by one, they slowly come through the door, there is a sense that life may "start over" after all.

    The final scene depicts Kenji's piano audition, to which Ryuhei and Megumi arrive just before their son plays. Kurosawa ends his meditation of family life with a complete performance, brilliantly played by Kenji, of "Claire de Lune," Claude Debussy's setting of Paul Verlaine's poem in which dead dancers perform in the moonlight, an appropriate piece since it signals the family's recovery from lunacy and death.

     At times a bit lugubrious and, at other times, lacking in believability, Tokyo Sonata nonetheless is an engaging portrait of the dilemmas and strengths faced by contemporary families.

 

Los Angeles, April 6, 2009 

Reprinted from Nth Position [England] (April 2009)

Reprinted from Reading Films: My International Cinema (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2012).

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Ethan Coen and Joel Coen | A Serious Man / 2009

another job, or the uncertainty principle

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ethan Coen and Joel Coen (screenwriters and directors) A Serious Man / 2009

 

A Yiddish peasant's cart beaks down when, suddenly, out of nowhere a man in a horsecart appears to help him. Miraculously, he is an acquaintance, so the peasant invites him to dinner. Upon telling his wife the story, she becomes horrified, for the good Samaritan, she has heard, died years before.

He must be a dybbuk, a body possessed by a dead spirit. When the "dybbuk" appears at the door, she announces her feelings, which he politely denies: here he stands before them, not dead in the least, but a helpful passerby. Without hesitation she stabs him with a kitchen knife. For a moment he looks utterly surprised, but quickly regains his composure. No, he will not stay for dinner, not remain in a house where he is not wanted. However, as he leaves we can see a blood stain slowly growing over his chest where she has stabbed him. Is he a dybbuk surviving the wound or a man about to die? The couple are cursed forever for their possible mistake.

     The uncertainty of the situation, the curse of the dead, and the ludicrousness of the system of beliefs underlying this tale sets the tone for the Coen brothers' new film, A Serious Man, set in St. Paul, Minnesota in the late 1960s, where the brothers grew up.

     Larry Gopnik (wonderfully performed by Michael Stuhlbarg) is a physics teacher at a local university who is about to be reviewed for tenure, blessed with a wife, two children, and a nice suburban home. True, he is tormented by a brother living with them, who spends most of his time in their bathroom draining a cyst. But his life, if uneventful, is otherwise what he might describe as ordinary and pleasant.

     His children, we soon discover, have little interest in their education or, for that matter, anything of value. The boy, Danny, about to be bar mitzvahed, is forced to go to Hebrew classes, during which he secretly listens to music on his headphones. Outside of the classroom his greatest activity is smoking pot. Sarah, the daughter, consistently steals money from her father's billfold and spends most of her time, as Larry later puts it, "washing her hair."

 

    Larry's wife Judith suddenly announces that she wants a divorce; she has fallen in love with another man, Sy Ableman, an oily pragmatist with whom one finds it hard to imagine any could fall in love. Not only does she suggest her husband move to a living room cot (Larry's brother inhabits the couch), but she insists upon a Get, a Jewish decree that will allow her to remarry.

     At school, an Asian graduate student whom Larry has failed, tries to bribe him by leaving behind an envelope filled with hundred-dollar bills, and when the professor attempts to return the incriminating evidence, threatens to sue him for defamation. A fellow professor reports, moreover, that the tenure committee has been receiving anonymous letters attacking Larry's moral character.

    What more could go wrong? In the Coens world this is only a warm up for a series of painful events as Larry is forced to move with his brother into the Jolly Roger Motel, discovers through the police that his brother has been gambling, is sexually tortured by the nude sunbathing of the woman next door, is involved in a car accident, and—when his wife's lover Sy is killed in a coincidental accident—is forced to pay for his enemy's funeral! Wait! More is coming. The Coen's great joke in this well-crafted and alternately sad and silly tale is that the sufferings of a schlep like Larry can be worse even than those of the Old Testament's Job.

 

     The subject, the utter unpredictability of life, is a rich one, especially when the hero, like Job, is a true believer, a good man. In his search for answers, Larry seeks out three rabbis who, predictably, can offer him nothing accept simple prescriptions ("you have to see things from a different perspective") or meaningless stories (the second rabbi's tale of a dentist who discovers a secret message in the teeth of one of his patients is a gem). The third rabbi (played by an acquaintance of mine, Alan Mandell) can't be bothered to see him. The attorney only complicates Larry's life further by charging him large sums of money.

      What happens to faith, to one's sense of being, to an understanding of the universe—a subject at the heart of Larry's love of physics—when faced with such a series of dilemmas and betrayals? Would that the Coens might really care about these issues and at least seek out some possible suggestions to the problem, even if we know there can be no real explanation.

      Too often in their films, the Coen brothers present characters that are more like cartoons than actual living folk, and in this film we quickly discover ourselves unable to sympathize with anyone, including the confused Larry; he's so passive and unassertive that, at times, we almost feel he deserves what he got. And the Coens, in their adolescent abuse of their character types, purposely manipulate us to laugh and cry at situations that often are so bizarre that we feel the directors are simply thumbing their nose at us.

      For a few moments in this film, a fog seems to lift: stoned out of his mind, Danny nonetheless gets through his reading of the Torah splendidly: the family is proud, Larry's wife almost seeming to suggest that there might be a way to return to normalcy. Larry even gets tenure.

 

   But the Coens are determined to turn even that possible resurrection of life into a joke. The doctor calls, reporting that there was something in Larry's recent X-rays that they need to discuss. A tornado is pounding down upon Danny's school and the principal cannot seem to open the basement door. The End. Thumbing their nose in complete disrespect of any genuine audience emotion, the Coens throw their work to the dogs. All right, so there is no predictable order in the world! But even Job finally got a break, was ultimately restored to God, awarded a new family and wealth and allowed to live on for 140 years.

     As my companion Howard observed: the Coens are perpetual whiners angry with the universe for its failure to provide answers, pouting smart alecks afraid to admit that compassion might possibly exist.

 

Los Angeles, October 9, 2009

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2009)

Reprinted from Reading Films: My International Cinema (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2012).

Ted Shawn | Finale from "The New World" / 1936 [dance film]

gesture as dance

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ted Shawn (director) Finale from The New World / 1936 [dance film]

 

Performed evidently only 2 times, this all-male dance, using the Philadelphia Orchestra’s performance of the “Finale from The New World” by Antonín Dvořák as its accompaniment, is far less effective than Shawn’s 1935 ballet, Kinetic Molpai, filmed like this work, at Jacob’s Pillow in 1937.

     Here, the small male group, led once more by Jack Cole (only a guess), the male group, evidently struggling to great the new world, feature three of the dancers who gesture and point out that brave new world to what appear to be a far more reluctant gathering of six recalcitrant figures, perhaps sailors, not at delighted in what is before them.

     But quickly their leader excites them in a series of spinning vortexes of the dancers in what lies before them, until finally at the crescendo each in their own way works out their expressions of fortitude and joy for what lies ahead.

     The dancers here, however, unlike in the iconic Kinetic Molpai, look more like amateurs, despite their impressive spins. And the dance itself seems composed of more gesture rather than inner emotional expression.

 

     Yet, one cannot help but recognize that despite its attempted pageantry, the real focus here is on the male body, presenting it up as a homoerotic focal point that is not terribly far from the later wrestling matches of Bob Mizer and other physique magazines of the 1950s and 1960s.

     This work was reconstructed and synchronized by Daniel Callahan in 2011.

 

Los Angeles, August 26, 2024; reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2024).

Marcel Carné | Le Quai des brumes / 1938

no escape

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jacques Prévert (screenplay, based on a novel by Pierre Mac Orlan), Marcel Carné (director) Le Quai des brumes (Port of Shadows) / 1938

 

I almost think you have to be French to truly understand Marcel Carné’s masterful film, Port of Shadows. It’s not that the Jacques Prévert story is difficult to comprehend, a love story in which fate rules: this sense of destiny has been there at least since the Greeks. Any American admirer of film noir would understand the dark undertones of this simple tale—although one might argue that American film noirs are always more complex and murkier in their plots. The muddled morality of this film embedded in its seemingly permanent surrounding of dense fog is not so dissimilar to the elements of early German cinema and most of British film-making.

     No, there’s something more elusive than all that. Carné’s characters enter the film with a sort of intense halo of fatalism about their heads: nothing good will happen because it never does; while, there are pleasant moments, of course, life is not good to people like them. It’s as if Victor Hugo’s Fantine had never truly had a dream, but simply accepted her tragic life.  It is so difficult, accordingly, to explain the quality of this film to a society that believes—so it imagines—that everything will eventually turn out all right, that life is a series of constant betterments and achievements; how even to speak to a society that believes in a dream of financial and social rewards about such French ennui?

     Jean Gabin as Jean, an army deserter, has no illusions left as he enters the environs of the port city, Le Havre. He has only his personal honor and nobility, and they mean nothing. He saves a dog by forcing a driver who has picked him up to steer out of range, yet later attempts to drive the poor beast away, nonetheless, feeding the animal even though he, himself, is nearly starving So too does the girl (Nelly, played my Michèle Morgan) he accidentally meets, through the goodwill of a passing alcoholic (people in this world are more defined by their behavioral type that by any individual eccentricities) who takes him to the Panama’s bar, carry with her the world’s sorrows. She, too, is hurt, a destroyed person, yet tough: she has, after all, although she can’t yet quite admit it, overhead the murder of her former boyfriend, Maurice, by her ugly godfather, Zabel (Michel Simon).

      This couple’s encounter, the immediate attraction between the two, their later short-lived affair (one night is all that Carné allows his figures) is part and parcel of the world of destiny these figures inhabit. So too are they quickly caught up in the sacrificial death of the local painter (Robert Le Vigan), who, after swimming out beyond his capabilities, leaves his clothing, his brushes, and his passport for Jean to “inherit.” The gesture is noble, but it too can have no ultimate effect in this world of dark shadows. Although Jean books passage on a ship bound for Venezuela, where he might escape the long hand of fate, once he has met Nelly, he has no choice but to return to the city, saving the girl from the fiendish hands of the jealous godfather only to have to face his own comeuppance for having belittled the local thug, Lucien (Pierre Brasseur). As Sartre would later express it—although far more metaphorically—there is “no exit.” Jean knew his fate the moment he left the military, and Nelly knew she would be left alone the moment she met Jean. The characters reveal this in their every movement. Jean, even as he, near starvation, cuts the bread and sausage Panama has awarded him, Nelly, in her deep, deep entrenchment within her plastic slicker, hands nearly always hidden, head pointed forward as if she were about to endure a deep rainstorm. Even Zabel seems to welcome his deserved punishment of murder by Jean.

       Shot, Jean orders Nelly to kiss him quick before he expires. This is only a world of only quick-fixes, love found on the run, of one-night stands, momentary pleasures than can have no meaning beyond the seconds in which they bring pleasure.

      Although Carné’s films have been described as “poetic realism,” they most emphatically have little to do with “reality,”—however one defines that—and even less to do with “poetic” expression, unless you define poetry as complete sentimentalism. Rather, Carné’s and Prévert’s theater is much more archetypal, having more to do with Kabuki and the French puppetry figures such as Punch and Judy, actors that formally play out the same stories again and again, than with what Americans might describe as naturalistic theater. Jean and Nelly are not realistic lovers but expressions of the desire of the French to discover love and the ability to give oneself completely over to it, while knowing that that can only lead to one’s destruction.

      It is no wonder that in the France of 1938, when this film first appeared—faced as it was with complete social betrayal and cultural annihilation—there was an outcry, politically speaking, against Carné’s seemingly uncontroversial movie, for it represents a kind of vision of love as surely locked into the French character as the German Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde represented the inconsumable passions of German culture. The cigarette munching, face-slapping, but tender-hearted Jean (Gabin at his best) represented a lover that might find fulfillment, but only in a single night—love could never to be sustained. It shares with Wagner’s neverland vision of consummation and sense of ever-lasting frustration, the idea of love and death being interminably intertwined.

     Although the American filmmakers of 1938 might never have been able to reveal the complete satisfaction of a sexual event as Gabin and Morgan express the morning after their night together, US directors would be sure, in the morning, nonetheless, that life would go on.  Love was love, death, death. Only an American could say that!

 

Los Angeles, February 7, 2003

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

Jean Grémillon | Remorques (Stormy Waters) / 1941

made to disappear

by Douglas Messerli

 

André Cayette (adaptation from a novel by Roger Vercel), Jacques Prévert (scenario and dialogue), Jean Grémillon (director) Remorques (Stormy Waters) / 1941

 

Although Grémillon’s emotive soap-opera, Remorques, was begun in 1939 in pre-war France, by the time it was released the south, under Vichy control, was divided from the north and west of France—the site of this movie’s action, Brest—which was controlled by the German army. When audiences began attending this film in November 1941, the Atlantic sea, as critic Dave Kehr points out, was a military zone, with no operating civilian vessels, while in the movie, the focus is on the crew and operations of a tugboat, The Cyclone, which comes to the rescue of endangered vessels. The entire movie, moreover, was done in the style of French poetic realism common of the 1930s films such as Quai des Brumes (also starring Jean Gabin and Michèle Morgan) and Le Jour se lève, which suddenly had little meaning for a war-torn culture. As the critic for my Time Out film guide, Bob Baker, notes: “Sometimes, as when Morgan contemplates the dead starfish which Gabin has given her, it [Remorques] feels precisely like the last European movie of the 1930s.”

     Perhaps its fantasy-like quality was the very thing that allowed this film to be released without censorship and why it found its audience of the day. A moody film about storms and inexpressible, illicit love, Remorques might almost be said to symbolize the emotions of the period. The film begins with a wedding, where locals briefly speechify before the large hall is given over to dancing. One of Captain André Laurent’s (Gabin) sailors is being wed, and the whole town, so it seems, is in attendance. As the banquet is abandoned for the dancing floor surrounding it, Grémillon’s camera creates a deep perspective featuring a kind of inside-outside dichotomy, as servants begin clearing tables, while outside and surrounding the open-pillared wall the dancers spin, the camera following them. This stunning swirl of motion suddenly ends, after a long pan back through the hall, following a messenger as he enters to report an SOS: the freighter, the Mirva, is floundering offshore. Suddenly the whole festival world—a world surely of another time—is shattered, as the dancers cease, the bride is separated from the new groom, and Laurent’s wife, Yvonne (Madeleine Renaud)—who has already revealed that she stops “living” when her husband goes to sea—is terrified of again having to wait out the night alone.

      Like soldiers off to war, the sailors gather, moving to their boat under the leadership of their highly decorated captain. From the deep alterations of black and white of the first scene, Grémillion’s film turns into a gritty study in dark black and fading lights as The Cyclone goes speeding off in search of the sinking vessel (scenes clearly shot with miniatures). On board that vessel are frightened sailors who refuse even to help toss a tow-line and a greedy captain, Marc (Jean Marchat), who hopes the boat will sink so that he claim the cost of the goods aboard. Only a few independent-minded sailors and Marc’s thoroughly disgusted wife, Catherine (Morgan) have the courage to embark on a small rescue boat in order the reach the saving tug.

      They are rescued and a toe is attached to the Mirva, which mysteriously is cut; another toe is attached and it too, this time under the orders of the captain, is cut. Since the vessel is no longer in danger, the sailors and Marc’s wife (who has found temporary refuge in Laurent’s cabin), are returned to their vessel, Laurent and his crew unable to claim the payment due them for their salvage attempts.

     Despite his numerous commendations, accordingly, Laurent is demeaned by his company’s representatives and he threatens, to his wife’s approval, to resign. Unbeknownst to him, Madame Laurent has been having heart flutters, which her doctor seems to ignore, and she is terrified, as she admits to the new bride, of “dying alone.”

      Meanwhile, Catherine has left her husband, moving into a town hotel. A chance meeting with Laurent develops into a near obsession, and before long, while he checks out a possible new home by the sea, they wander together, he offering her the starfish mentioned above, and she proffering him her deep kisses. In contrast to the sea scenes, their seaside romance is played out in almost blindingly bright white, which can only remind us of the previous wedding and the comments of Laurent’s own ten-year bride at home, who at the wedding quipped: “What’s like a bride? Another bride.”

      The sensuous and brooding Catherine, however, is anything but a bride. She, as she herself recognizes, is unlike Laurent’s wife—“Faithful women must exist”—another kind being. As she expresses it: “Girls like me were made to disappear.” Against the bright white of the set, she is dressed primarily in black. Of course, that very fact makes her beauty all the more blinding, as Laurent’s vision becomes blurred, his head literally whirling in the turn away from his fidelity.

      Throughout most of the film, Laurent has been proud to have his friends and fellow-sailors know his whereabouts at all times, but in the last scenes, as he secretively embraces Catherine, it takes some time for his cohorts to discover his whereabouts, and their boat misses the opportunity to answer an SOS, their competitors on The Dutch having already set out for the rescue.

      Soon after, he is sought out again; his wife has had a serious attack, and he hurries off to her, while Catherine, realizing it is time for her disappearance once again, begins to pack.

      Laurent rushes back into the arms of his wife, she ecstatically embracing him before she dies. But even death is not strong enough to hold him when he is told that The Dutch itself is now floundering. He speeds away as Grémillon, who began his life as a composer, builds up a chorus of rising chords and prayers to every biblical figure from Daniel to Mary, both in a prayer for Laurent and his crew and a lamentation for Yvonne’s death.

     By film’s end we sense the death not only his Laurent’s wife and all she has come to symbolize, but we observe the destined disappearance of Catherine and the romantic world she potentialized. Laurent is left only his battles and the bravery with which he encounters them. If there was ever a requiem to a lost world, Remorques is it. The past and everything that it represents has been, so it seems, “made to disappear.”

 

Los Angeles, October 28, 2012

Reprinted from Nth Position [England] (November 2012).