Adrien Dezalay, Emmanuel Delabaere, and Simon Philippe | The Red Drum Getaway / 2015

in a spin

by Douglas Messerli

 

Adrien Dezalay, Emmanuel Delabaere, and Simon Philippe (directors) The Red Drum Getaway / 2015

 

For the duration of about 4 minutes, Adrien Dezalay, Emmanuel Delabaere, and Simon Philippe’s The Red Drum Getaway patches together scenes from Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window and Vertigo with scenes from Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, A Clockwork Orange, Eyes Wide Shut, and 2001. The result is somewhat silly, but given the supernatural and violent elements these six movies share, the mashup sort of makes sense.

       As the video explains, “Jimmy was having a rather beautiful day,” checking out the women from his apartment window—until suddenly he catches a glimpse, in the window across the way, of a murderer even more dangerous than Raymond Burr’s Lars Thorwald: Jack Nicholson from The Shining madly gazing back at him.

      Already a bit on the dizzy side after performing his “I look up, I look down” scene in Vertigo, James Stewart encounters horrible visions in every direction he turns, running into the gang member droogs of A Clockwork Orange down one San Francisco street, after catching another glimpse of the insane Jack Torrance. With nowhere to turn, he ducks into a club, The Red Drum, wherein he immediately encounters the circle of naked women of Kubrick’s last and worst film, Eyes Wide Shut.

       The whole experience is just too much for the former cop, Scottie, who immediately spins into his own vertiginous madness, falling into the desert plain where our simian forbearers from 2001 beat him to a pulp. Even the now tortured Malcom McDowell screams in horror at the spin of events, while other Kubrick and Hitchcock figures look on as if witnessing it on their television sets.

       If this is all rather trivial, it’s so well done that we almost wish the two directors, Hitchcock and Kubrick, and actors, Stewart and Nicholson, might have gotten together to make a grand spooky entertainment. In some ways, it almost seems that they might have enjoyed the results.

    And if nothing else, directors Dezaley, Delabaere, and Philippe remind us of just interesting found materials and be when collaged together into narrative.

 

Los Angeles, May 24, 2016

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (May 2016).

François Truffaut | L’Enfant sauvage (The Wild Child) / 1970

radical changes

by Douglas Messerli

 

François Truffaut and Jean Gruault (based on the journals of Dr. Jean Marc Gaspard Itard), François Truffaut (director) L’Enfant sauvage (The Wild Child) / 1970

 

When I first saw François Truffaut’s The Wild Child in 1970, I recall being unimpressed; its quiet documentary-like style, taken mostly from the journals of the 18th century Dr. Itard—who took in the child and attempted to civilize him—appeared charmless and uneventful, almost as if I were watching an educational study.

      Seeing it again yesterday, after a span of 46 years, I was emotionally moved and even shed a few tears. I do recognize that I have grown a bit more sentimental with age, but I believe that  the movie seemed so different this time around because I could fully sympathize with both the doctor and the child, even though Truffaut distances them through his black-and-white, silent-film like cinematography (particularly in its use of the iris to close scenes) and tells the film’s “story” in a quite dispassionate voice that makes clear that it is the expression of a written text. The costumes are those of another century. Yet what we see expressed, particularly through the terrified and confused “wolf-boy’s” eyes, is completely in the moment.

      Beautifully performed by Jean-Pierre Cargol, a gypsy boy the director found in the streets of Montpelier, and quietly “directed in front of the camera” by Truffaut himself, this enfant sauvage somehow represents all of our collective memories of coming into the world in which we are gradually tamed and civilized. Like Truffaut’s character of The 400 Blows and several other films—in fact The Wild Child is dedicated to the actor, Jean-Pierre Léaud—this child must, at times, be punished, even though the error of his ways is truly not his fault; as the doctors speculate, he was meant to have been killed and left in the woods, but miraculously survived.

      But Victor, the name he finally takes on for his own, is far wilder and more scarred than Antoine Doinel ever was, and many authorities of the day speculated that he was permanently deranged.

      At first, when Itard receives permission to take him into his own house, it almost appears as if the boy is beyond help. The child seems not even to be able to hear at first, because, like Helen Keller as a child, language has no meaning to him: he cannot connect the quiet noises adults make with anything of significance since his is a mute language of grunts and groans. He must be taught to dress, to walk, to wear shoes, taught how to eat and drink. Yet by learning those very acts, the child—Itard and the movie’s audience gradually perceive—does have intelligence and the ability to learn. He even learns to say one small work in a high squeaky voice, “lait”—although he refuses to say it before he receives the milk, only after, clearly being unable to see language as a tool of transaction.

        Itard also perceives that the boy has an innate desire for order and uses that to connect images and the real objects, and finally words and the objects themselves. At one point, he even tests the child’s ability to comprehend justice by insisting that the child’s correct answers are mistaken and threatening to punish him in another lock-up. The boy screams and strongly resists the threat, proving that, indeed, he recognizes what is unjust.

     But he is still somewhat like a trick-dog; he knows the correct movements without comprehending what accomplishing them means. To push those boundaries, Itard, sometimes ruthlessly overworks him in his attempt to have the child make connections—so much so, at times, that even his gentle housekeeper, Madame Guérin (Françoise Seigner) must remind him that the boy should have more time in his beloved outdoors.

      One must remember that this film was made at a day when many of us had newly romanticized wild and near-naked living styles, and Truffaut was highly criticized for what some saw as his own notions of education and child-care. Mireille Amile, for example, wrote: Itard’s “civilizing mission” was unacceptable. “How can the rebel of The Four Hundred Blows place himself alongside the oppressor, even as sympathetic as Itard?”

       Their presumption that Truffaut shared all of Itard’s viewpoints, I believe, is rather absurd. Ways of raising children before the later Victorian and modern idealization of childhood, were simply different than ours, and Truffaut is portraying Itard not cataloguing his own attitudes.  Children were often represented as little adults, not growing human beings. Moreover, Itard himself, clearly recognizing that he was working with a sentient being, was under the gun so to speak; if he could not post demonstrable results, he was fearful that the government would take the boy away and, very likely, as Itard’s colleague, Professor Philippe Pinel had argued for, place him in an insane asylum.

     After all, Itard did take his housekeeper’s advice, even letting the child play alone outside, with both of them fearing that he might return to a savage state in the forest where he could be killed by a wild beast (he’d clearly had to fend them off previously, as his scars demonstrated) or even be killed by a human hunter mistaking him for prey.

      But even before this, we must remember, Itard had taken the child to a nearby farm, where Victor learned to drink milk, and took joy in being pushed about in a wheelbarrow.

      In short Itard was no villain for trying to civilize his new charge as quickly as he might, if for no other reason that he wanted to protect him.

      It is Truffaut, moreover, which directed the acting child how to demonstrate the confusions and frustrations that so touch us about the character. And when, finally the child does stay away for an entire night, it is natural that we fear for his existence, just as do Itard and his housekeeper.

       But the boy’s return says it all; even if he is not wholly domesticated, he can no longer live in nature, but must learn to survive in the civilized world, so that by film’s end we do quite know whether or not to celebrate or cry. Yet every day, we do, in fact, celebrate the little indications that a wild baby is gradually learning to imitate us: its first steps, its first words, the first sign that she or he comprehends the lessons being taught at school. To learn all of these things in a few months is quite impossible, and yet Victor made some radical changes. Perhaps we should just applaud all three of the central figures of this not always gentle film.

 

Los Angeles, December 3, 2017

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2017). 

 

 

James Whale | Frankenstein / 1931

rooting for the monster

by Douglas Messerli

 

Francis Edward Faragoh, Garrett Fort, Robert Florey (uncredited), and John Russell (uncredited) (screenplay, based on a play by Peggy Webling, based, in turn, on the novel by Mary Shelley, gathered by John L. Balderston), James Whale (director) Frankenstein / 1931

 

The other day I determined to watch Frankenstein and The Bride of Frankenstein again, films I had not seen since my childhood. I was far more impressed with James Whale’s filmmaking this time than I was as a rather snobbish child, when the horror genre little interested me.

      Of course, there is still a great deal of nonsense in Whale’s version of Frankenstein; the very idea that Baron Frankenstein (Frederick Kerr), who speaks like a blustery country Englishman, should live in a Tyrolean village where the “peasants” celebrate his son’s wedding with Schuhplatter dances makes for some quite ridiculous moments.

     What I was also struck by this time was what a real scientific nerd Henry Frankenstein (Colin Clive) truly was—even his professors had thought he had gone too far. Yet how quickly he turned against his own monster—the strangely handsome, at moments, Boris Karloff—even threatening his creation with his torch, while permitting his assistant Fritz (Dwight Frye) to actually torture him, leading the monster to kill his assailant.

     Despite the fact that Henry declares he must complete his work in privacy and see no one, he fairly readily allows Elizabeth (Mae Clarke), Victor (John Boles), and Dr. Waldman (Edward Van Sloan) into his old mill laboratory, inviting them to watch him perform the miraculous (and in this version, rather brief) resurrection of his stitched-together body parts.

      Also surprising to me was how few monster encounters appeared in the original film, as opposed to the several sightings by characters in The Bride of Frankenstein. Yet the one major scene depicted is worth everything just for its black humor: when he meets the little girl who gives the monster half of her flowers and shows him how, if you throw them into the lake, they will float. They each throw them, one by one, watching them gaily drift away. When they run out of flowers to toss into the lake, the joyful monster picks up the girl and tosses her into the water; evidently, she can’t swim. You might almost think that Mel Brooks wrote the scene.

      How the girl’s father immediately knows that the monster has killed her (or for that matter, that anyone has killed her) is somewhat inexplicable, as is the mass hysteria that overcomes the villagers. But by that time, after sensing that something is wrong, Henry’s bride-to-be is attacked by the monster, and Henry leads one of hunting parties in search of the beast, shouting to his men “Stay together men!” while ordering them, in the very next second, to break up into two groups.

      Even though the craggy hills look very much like a sound-stage, Whale creates stirring portraits in nearly all of his night scenes, and the chase, with the creature capturing his maker, Henry’s fall from the tower, and the mill’s being set afire certainly doesn’t disappoint in its excitement.

      Fire and light, indeed, are the subthemes throughout this work. The monster is kept the dark for days before he finally, and only briefly, is allowed to witness light, a very touching scene as Karloff slowly raises his hands in his pleasure of the beneficent sun. As I already mentioned, both his creator and assistant control and torture the monster through his terror of fire. And it is fitting that, apparently at least, the monster is consumed by fire as well.

     Frankenstein’s monster seems to not have been given even the slightest of chances by human beings to be spiritually “brought into the light.” Endowed with a “bad” brain, he is doomed, as evidently many are in this German-like territory where hanging is a common occurrence, to die before he has even come to life. The purported murder of the monster, accordingly, is almost a kind of abortion, turning him into the most poignant figure of the film—despite his murder of two and attempted killing of others. Whale was a kind genius to make us root for the monster instead of those who attempt to free themselves of him.

    And, finally, of course, there is the whole quite Freudian notion underlying this powerful film, of a father who turns on and sacrifices his son, as if this time Abraham does willingly and without question give up Isaac to the societal gods. The monster is an outsider from birth, and his lack of knowledge, or what we might describe as his innocence, is what puts him at odds to the closed-minded society. Since he is “born” as a full adult, he does not have the time to learn the behavior of the patriarchal world around him, and fails to obey its rules without even knowing that there are such restrictions. His “father” himself has also disobeyed the restrictions of a male in his bringing to life (“birthing”) of his own son, a gender role he has undertaken that the world around him perceives as totally perverse. The product of that ungodly act, accordingly, must be destroyed by both the society and the perpetrator if he is to live on. The “queer” offspring who is unable to mimic societal niceties is doomed. This film is a “queer” film even if it has little directly to do—unlike its follow up Bride—with sexuality.    

 

Los Angeles, October 19, 2017

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2017). 

Yasujirō Ozu | 秋刀魚の味 (Sanma no aji) (The Taste of Pike, aka An Autumn Afternoon) / 1962, USA 1964

coming to terms with life

by Douglas Messerli

 

Kogo Noda and Yasujirō Ozu (screenplay),Yasujirō Ozu (director) 秋刀魚の味 (Sanma no aji) (The Taste of Pike, aka An Autumn Afternoon) / 1962, USA 1964

 

The plot of Yasujirō Ozu’s last film, An Autumn Afternoon, although essential, is not what really matters, and can be summed up in a few simple paragraphs. The elderly factory manager, widower, Shūhei Hirayama (the regular Ozu actor, Chishū Ryū), has relied on his obedient and caring daughter, Michiko (Shima Iwashita) to keep the house for him and his younger son, Kazuo (Shin'ichirō Mikami) far too long, and at 24 she is beginning to move away from marrying age. His close business friends attempt to explain to him the situation, and even seek out appropriate young men for her. But neither he, nor his other daughters, seems interested her leaving the house—after all, how will he and his slightly irresponsible son survive without her?

      A reunion with his former schoolmates with their elderly professor, nicknamed “The Gourd” (Eijirō Tōno) begins to make him realize the error of his ways, for the now alcoholic professor relies on his long-unmarried daughter, now a quite bitter old maid, to run his small noodle shop. And meeting her, he begins to realize that this may ultimately be his and his daughter’s own future if he does not quickly change his ways.

      Although Michiko is almost offended at his suggestion that she should be married, she has, quite secretly, been attracted to one of her elder brother’s co-workers, Yutako Miura (Teruo Yoshida), and the older, slightly unhappily married Kōichi (Keiji Sada) is enlisted to discover whether or not Miura is interested. He might have been, in turns out, but since Kōichi himself has suggested his sister he is no longer interested; he has found another woman to whom he is engaged.

      Now that Michiko has finally given into her father’s demands, she is even more hurt by the news, and is forced to meet with the stranger who Hirayama’s friends have suggested.

       We never do meet, within the film’s confines, the young groom, but it is clear that he has met her demands; for soon after, suddenly coming into full beauty as a bride, she marries him (off screen), after which Hirayama, in a night of drunkenness, is forced to realize that he will now have to get on with young son without her, clearly a recognition that leads him to recognize that he is now in his “autumn afternoon,” and life from here on will be always quite lonely.

        As I earlier mentioned, however, that it is only Ozu’s basic plot; it is not truly what the movie is about. As in all of this director’s films, family life is at the center of this film, but the way he reveals it is never as a merely tranquil world of family protection.

     Given Ozu’s analysis of the post-War Japanese society, very much at the center of this film as each character must learn to give up their former war-time fascist pretensions and come to live within more meager and even sometimes desperate conditions.

       And, as in nearly all of Ozu’s great films, An Autumn Afternoon, shot with the camera at nearly floor level, suggests the Japanese subservience to each other and to the past, so that when, as the characters eventually must, stand at full height, they appear—particularly in a movie in which the males drink almost constantly—to be tottering into a space in which they cannot quite properly maneuver. Indeed, for the elderly, the world they encounter is now one of Western mores, a society in which the women—daughters, wives, lovers, and even strangers—are no longer afraid of challenging and even dominating the earlier generation. The elderly men and women of so many Ozu films, even if they can claim moral superiority, seem exhausted and incapable of fully retaining their balance.

      Those men (and women) who have not quite been able to adapt to the new Japan, despair in their conditions, quietly crying to themselves—all of which makes this film a somewhat painful work.

       I say “somewhat” because Ozu never overstates his concerns. One of the commonest expressions in this film is an impassive sign of recognition: “Uhhmmmm,” expressed most often by Hirayama, but also by others. Indeed, the figures Ozu presents us with our seldom demonstrative, and hardly even vent their grievances. Like the larger society, they attempt, over and over again, to adapt to their often unhappy situations, portraying their inner conditions, often during their drunken stupors as, “very happy,” “enjoyable evenings” and “wonderful encounters” with the world at large.

     They drink out of long friendship and nostalgia, as a small society of what is left of a past world. The sudden meeting of a former sailor who served under Hirayama in World War II seems to become a reunion almost as important as Hirayama and his friends’ discovery of their former professor on a subway.

       Yet, in his quiet unstated presentations, Ozu makes it clear that, except for the westernized young, these older folks will not and cannot be part of the current fabric of their own society. They are the lost generation—lost and forgotten even more than the men and women of Hemingway’s post- World War I. Although some have jobs and are financially surviving, their own daughters and sons are still suffering the problems of a growing new economy, which hasn’t, in the 1962 period of this movie, quite caught up to Japan’s later economic miracles.

       So many of Ozu’s families, throughout his filmmaking career, have been broken in half, with wives and husbands missing, the survivors having to go on without them. Some, like Hirayama’s good friend, Shin Horie (Ryūji Kita) have found love in the younger generation and feel, in the process, rejuvenated—even though Hirayama and others of his friends mock that resuscitation of life. But for most of the elderly Ozu men and women, their only hopes lie in the future for their children, as they, themselves, realize their must abandon their own dependence upon family ties—and cultural attachments—to the past.

       Yet Ozu makes us realize this is not just a Japanese conundrum. As he stresses throughout this film, this is a human condition: we almost all live alone by the end of our lives. We all seek whatever happiness we might find. We all get on each day the best as we can. If his characters endlessly drink, it is for good reason. They are lonely. They miss something or someone else in their lives. They know they must abandon the love of their own children. Even the great French pataphysician, the ever playful Georges Perc, admits to have cried during his viewing of Ozu’s late masterpiece, particularly when the former shy and seemingly unmarriageable Michiko suddenly appears near the end of this movie as a stunningly beautiful bride. She, at last, has agreed to move into the new world she has inherited. And her father has finally come to terms with his age and death itself.

      If her father, Hirayama, has a hard night of it after the wedding, he will wake up, return to work, and with his now more helpful younger son, Kazuo, survive, one hopes, into old age. Isn’t that what all of us can ever imagine for ourselves?

 

Los Angeles, November 12, 2016

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2016).

 

Aki Kaurismäki | Ariel / 1988

bad luck sometimes means happiness

by Douglas Messerli

 

Aki Kaurismäki (screenwriter and director) Ariel / 1988

 

Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki’s 1988 film, Ariel, as some critics have commented, is a true mix of different Hollywood genres—all presented with a kind of droll melancholy that is could come

only from the eyes of a Laplander, like the major character of this tale, Taisto Kasurinen (Turo Pajala).

     When the local mine for which Taisto and his friends’ work closes down, his father advises him to move south and hands him the keys to his white convertible before committing suicide. Unable to even bring up the top of the car, Taisto puts his scarf around his head and, after withdrawing his final pay, takes to the road. Along the way, he stops for a hamburger, where two local thugs knock the rube Taisto out and relieve him of every last cent.

       Stumbling back into the car, he travels to the first city he can find, where he is forced to do temporary day work at a shipping dock. His pay is hardly enough to put him up in a local homeless shelter and to permit him to purchase a pack of cigarettes and a couple of beers.

      Frustrated in his attempt to find any other kind of work, he encounters meter maid, Irmeli Pihlaja (Susanna Haavisto) who hands him a parking ticket before tossing her hat into the street, tearing up the ticket, and joining him in the cold front seat and an inexpensive dinner. After dinner she invites him up to her small apartment where she lives with her young son.

     And so begins a new chapter in this tale, a story of poor working stiffs that shares much with Chaplin’s Modern Times.

       Although Irmeli holds down two jobs just to make her furniture payments—by day she works in a meat-packing plant while by night she works as a building guard—Taisto cannot find a single man who might hire him, and ultimately is thrown even out of the homeless center. After being forced to sell his sporty convertible at an outrageously low price, he suddenly encounters one of the men who robbed him and speeds after him, only to be picked up by the police and tried for attempted robbery, attack with a knife, and several other charges. We don’t know whether this taciturn loser has even attempted to explain his side of the story, but in Kaurismäki’s work it seemingly doesn’t even matter; the man is doomed by a society that obviously could care less.

       And, accordingly, the movie shifts again, now becoming a prison tale, somewhat in the manner of Bresson’s A Man Escaped. Now in a cell with a morose sedative-addicted murderer, Mikkonen (Kaurismäki regular Matti Pellonpää), Taisto is visited by the loyal Irmeli and her son, asks her to marry him, and to make plans when he returns home. When she slips a file in the spine of book she brings Taisto for his supposed birthday, the two cellmates begin plans for an escape, and amazingly succeed. Clearly Irmeli’s love means something of a change in Taisto’s luck, for the two succeed in marrying and spending a few hours in bed before the police show up.

      The boy, however, on the look-out, warns Taisto in time for a window escape, and he is off with Mikkonen to find someone to provide them with false passports. In order to “raise” money for the necessary payments and cargo-hold voyage to Mexico or Brazil, the men clumsily rob a bank, dropping much of the money on the run, but bagging enough that they can pay off the passports and get smuggled out of the country.

      But now it is Mikkonen’s luck that has run out, as, when he returns for the passports, the crooks demand all the money. Challenging them to a fight with broken bottle, Mikkonen is shot. And, for the first time, Taisto, checking up on his friend, is forced into violence himself, killing the two underworld men, scooping up the passports, money, and his badly hurt friend and speeding off to pick up his hardworking wife and comic-book reading son.

       Mikkonen dies on route, but not before he discovers the magic button that lifts up the convertible’s roof, as if he were, in fact, entombing himself and other passengers.

       After a quick burial of Mikkonen, the family finds its way to the pier, where, after another payment, they are to be taken to the ship. Given the near-impossibility that Irmeli and Taisto have had in living in this uncaring Finnish landscape, we only fear that they might, once again, be taken for a ride.

      Surprisingly, and truly ironically, the tale ends happily, with the three starting out, once more, on a different kind of road trip—across the sea to the new world of Mexico.

      Like most of this wonderful director’s loser-heroes, Taisto and his tiny family bravely survive the only way they know how, with a kind clumsy comicalness that reveals their ineptitude while simultaneously showing their true humanity; and in that respect, Kaurismäki’s works are generally dark comedies in the manner of Chaplin’s various renditions of his little tramp. No matter what they do—to dream, loaf, rob, or even murder—we side with them and pray for their escape from the unjust worlds that surround them, for they are not Hollywood heroes, but people just like us.

 

Los Angeles, June 8, 2017

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2017).