Samuel Theis | Petite nature (Softie) / 2021

different from the others

by Douglas Messerli

 

Samuel Theis (screenwriter and director) Petite nature (Softie) / 2021

 

In the very first scenes of director Samuel Theis’ Petite nature we see an entire family on an overnight move, Sonia (Mélissa Olexa) moving out of her current lover’s house with her young daughter Mélissa (Jade Schwartz), her 10-year-old son Johnny (Aliocha Reinert), and her elder son Dylan (Ilario Gallo). They find someone to move most of their possessions, but with no car these pre-teens. must walk through the streets of the city in which they live, Forbach, in northeastern France, each with treasured objects in hand, Johnny leading with two plastic bags of fish, hurrying forward to get them before they die back into their aquarium.

      The long-haired blond boy Johnny, the “softie” of the title, is a caring and loving child who is sensitive to what most of the family is simply not—in this case even embarrassed to be seen as part of the procession of displaced family on their way to public housing project. The elder pot-smoking teen is interested in his girlfriend (Romande Esch) and his male friends in the project who hang out mostly in a heavily graffiti-covered tunnel, while it is Johnny who must care for his little sister, walking her to and back from school, dressing and even feeding her, and getting the family groceries, while his mother works for a pittance at a cigarette stand and makes out with a series of male lovers we see throughout the movie, coming home many a night drunk.

      She is dependent upon her younger son, and loves him dearly, but laments the fact that he is such a sensitive boy, unable to even stand up to the neighbor boys’ taunting of their pet dog, let alone for himself, a boy with beautiful long hair who openly reads as a “sissy.”

     It is the new school teacher who has moved from a more affluent area of France to the poorer Alsace-Lorraine region who further opens his mind, which leaves him raw in a world which demands being tough and hardy. Here many of the natives even speak another language, a mix of French and German, Franconian, like the people, a mix of heritages that seem always at battle with one another.

      On the very first day of the class, the teacher Mr. Adamski (Antoine Reinartz) asks each of his students to describe where they would like to be in their lives in 30 years, a question unimaginable to most 10-year-olds, but inconceivable to a childlike Johnny. One student would like be in Miami, married with children, another in Dubai making large sums of money, but Johnny is nearly speechless just for nature of the question let alone his natural shyness. Within a few weeks Adamski has begun to open this beautiful child’s mind—the visual and oral evidence of which is one of the many joys of the movie—and Johnny has fallen in love with him, quite literally, obviously realizing far too early that he loves men, particularly when they might serve as the father he hardly ever sees.

       It is notable that at one exasperating moment at home, he suddenly becomes frustrated with his role as a parent in some ways more substantial than his own mother, and suddenly blurts out that he doesn’t want to work in a cigarette stand, he does not at all intend to grow up to become a MacDonald’s manager. 

     At another point, seemingly out of nowhere, Johnny tells his mother that because of their financial situation and his intelligence he might be able to attending boarding school in Metz that Adamski has told him about. But, of course, Johnny’s mother won’t hear of that possibility either, given her need of the boy to raise his sister and keep order in their house.

     Johnny becomes so quickly infatuated with his teacher, that one afternoon he picks up his sister and stakes out Adamski’s house in a fashionable neighborhood, peering into the empty home and, from behind a tree, watching his teacher arrive home with his girlfriend, Nora (French rock singer Izïa Higelin). Arriving home late, Johnny is faced by a distressed mother who, when he refuses to tell her where he was, queries his little sister and finally beats him when he refuses to explain the situation.

     Having been beaten and momentarily forced out of the house, Johnny has no alternative but to actually visit Adamski and Nora. He charms Nora as well, in way that becomes dangerous to the teacher himself, particularly when she invites the boy along with an older girl to an evening open celebration at the Centre Pompidou-Metz, where Nora works. There, among the strong works of contemporary art, he stalks his teacher from room to room, associating Adamski’s interests with his own, at one point even perceiving him, as light pours in from a video installation of an opera house, as being part of the artwork itself. Later, after dinner in a local restaurant, the older girl and Johnny are left alone for a moment to talk, she immediately sensing that he’s “into boys,” and asking him he’s found someone he likes. Johnny admits he has, and agrees that he’s in his school, although he doesn’t believe, he admits, that the friend knows he loves him. Wondering how he can tell, the elder girl suggests he casually touch his body somewhere, his arm and hand, during everyday conversation to see what his reaction might be, and hints at other tricks such as wetting one’s lips to see if the other might be ready for a kiss.

     The boy, however, has his own plan already in mind, a disastrous trip to Adamski’s home during school vacation when he knows that Nora will not be there. He hopes in might be invited in, but when the teacher says he is busy correcting papers and has no time to entertain him, Johnny simply asks to use the bathroom before leaving, and returning to the room in which Adamski is at work, attempts to kiss him before striping off his shirt, seating himself in a chair, and as best as he knows how, tries to seduce his teacher by rubbing his nipple.

      Shocked and rightfully terrified given most of Western contemporary cultures’ hysteria about pedophilia, he demands that he boy immediately dress and hurries him out the door with no niceties or friendliness about it, knowing that if this event ever even got out, he would lose his job. In attempting to help the child, he and his girlfriend have gotten too close.

     It reminds me of the horrible scene in in Norwegian director Gjertrud Bergaust’s 2018 film Jakt (Hunt), where an empathetic farmer has offered a young local bullied gay boy a job, but is suddenly forced to fire him and lock him out of the house when he realizes that he is being set-up for a charge of pederasty.

     Obviously, any 10-year-old is devasted when his idealized teacher must now resist from showing him any special attention, particularly when he has imagined that he was his teacher’s sexual pet. One day during a simple class lesson it as if the trees themselves call out to him as suddenly he attempts to leap from the window of his third-story class room, his fellow students preventing him from the jump.

      The principal attempts to help Johnny’s mother comprehend that such an act requires that he talk to a psychologist, but like many working and rural folks, she is resistant to the idea, fearful that others will think her son is crazy. The principal reminds her that Johnny behaved in this manner in front of his entire class, who themselves will have to be visited by a therapist because of the incident, but she refuses nonetheless. And she demands a further explanation of his behavior afterwards, Johnny dangerously coming close to hinting about his love of the teacher and his belief that he is his teacher’s pet—so close, in fact, that Sonia herself becomes fearful that pedophilia has been involved. But fortunately, Johnny insists that he has never touched him or shown him sexual affection. And being of the working class, she is calmed by his denials.

     The film ends the only way it might, with the man who offered him the world having to remove himself slightly from the boy’s further education. But Johnny nonetheless, like his classmates, takes his first communion, an event attended of necessity by Adamski and Nora, who congratulate him as they do his other classmates. And at the party for him, Nora’s current boyfriend, seeing Johnny apart from the celebrants they’ve invited, pulls him up into his arms and carries him into the room of other males who similarly carry him on above their heads, the perfect kind of love for a boy who so desperately needs but cannot find open expression of male affection.

      As usual, his mother drinks too much, and is carried home drunk by two men, Johnny being forced to undress her and lay her out on the couch, putting a blanket over her passed-out body.

     A moment later he puts his hand around her jaw, as if he would pull her out of her stupor, demanding that she listen: knowing she cannot even hear him, he insists in no uncertain terms that she remember what he says, that he plans to attend the boarding school the next year in Metz.

      Despite everything, this child is determined to get a better education, refusing to become what his family and local society has planned for him. He may be a softie, but he a tough-minded child with the intelligence and desire to be someone, if not more important, at least different from the others—which takes us all the way back to Richard Oswald’s 1919 film wherein a concert violinist makes the mistake of falling in love with his own special student.

     Fortunately, Adamski has not made the same mistake. As Pat Brown of Slant magazine recognizes, while “Theis’s account of class and sexual precarity remains knotty and unresolved in ways that one doesn’t expect from the typical melodrama about impoverished youth, Softie ventures into territory that, with Maïmouna Doucouré’s Cuties, proved to be relatively volatile: the sexuality of marginalized French pre-teens.Rather than teaching a lesson [however] Softie seems much more interested in conveying an experience. Theis proves much more interested in the pain of small mistakes and miscommunications than he is in grand drama. Providing a straightforward glance into the experience of navigating a queer identity when one’s environment provides little to no models for expressing it, Softie is a noteworthy repurposing of the coming-of-age social drama.”

      The saddest thing, however, is that open-minded men such as Adamski are forced to keep their hearts in terrible check when it comes to helping the youth of their classrooms. In our society, love is such a confusing force that it must be denied the very individuals who sometimes need it most.

Yet I can imagine that Adamski might have dealt with the child’s torturous farce of love in an entirely different manner, laughing it off while demanding he dress and leave, attempting to make it clear to the boy that there is a vast different between caring for another and a physical expression of love. As it was, Adamski and Nora behaved almost as hysterically as do our general societies in such situations. And had the boy attempted to act out such a rejection in another manner, he might not have been so easily saved.

      But I loved this film, nonetheless, for the child who in the end not only was saved but redeemed himself recognizing perhaps for the first time that despite his gentle assimilation of responsibilities and recognition of the failures of those around him, that he might be someone of greater worth.

 

Los Angeles, March 17, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2023).

Quinn de Matta | Into Temptation / 2021

nothing about love

by Douglas Messerli

 

Quinn de Matta (screenwriter and director) Into Temptation / 2021 [20 minutes]

 

Into Temptation begins with what seems to be an older man, Michael (Juan Manuel Salcito), perhaps a father, playing hide and seek with whom he might assume is his son, calling out the numbers from 10 down to 1 before he goes on the search presumably for the running and hiding child.

      But almost immediately we recognize something here is terribly amiss, as the older man looks into a couple of places before entering the bedroom where, in fact, an even older man lays tied up, gasping through a mouth gag for help.

      Michael asks if he’s ready to talk, pulling out his cell phone presumably to record whatever the older man says. The gag, we realize is a jock strap. Pulling it out of the man’s mouth, the elder asks him to “stop.” He asks “Who else is here,” presumably having heard Michael speaking to another, but we almost immediately recognize that the other is his own childhood version of himself, a young Michael (Jaxon Ballenger) which we presumed was the child on the run.

      Michael straddles the man, erotically touching his body, explaining that he has thought about this so many times, what each of them would say, how they would behave. All the other can say is that people will soon be looking for him. “I don’t want you to get trouble,” he lies, attempting to project the protectiveness of an elder man to a younger.

      Michael smiles, fondly stroking the man’s face: “No one’s coming.”

      He bends to kiss the man, who screams and pleads for help.

      “Isn’t this what you want? You and me?”

      The child goes racing through the room again, Michael in chase of him, following the image of his own younger self, imaginatively capturing the boy as he, himself, has become the elder. “Now the last one back has to hold the vestments.”

      This film, we suddenly perceive, is a revenge tragedy, a work in which a now very disturbed adult is playing out the sexual tortures of his own childhood by the man, a priest, Father Graham (Tom McLaren) whom he now has captured and controls, just as the other had been in control of the young boy.

      This psychodrama plays out in alternating scenes of the young priest and the boy and the interchanges, such as that which we just observed, of Michael and the now much older priest.

    In the re-imagined past, we see the priest presenting the boy with a special present he has bought him, a cross he puts carefully around the boy’s neck. Conflating God with his own personal attentions, he tells the boy that “He and I will always be with you all the time. And you’ll always know how special you will be to us both,” his devilish clever linking of himself to God making it almost impossible for the child Michael to separate the physically loving attentions of the priest with his spiritual values supported by his parents and the community.

      The priest tells the child that he has one more for him, a special gift, demanding that he not move.

     The adult Michael brings his captured priest a bottle of wine, declaring “Only special boys get to have some,” as he pours wine down his victim’s throat, obviously just as the priest did to the boy to get him drunk or put him into semi-consciousness to facilitate his sexual actions. He strokes the older man’s face, reporting “I didn’t like it either, but you get used to it.”

    As he strokes and kisses him, the elder Michael plays the role of the young priest, “The feeling inside, it feels good, doesn’t it. Some say it feels like butterflies, but I think it feels like angels—hundreds of them.”

     Michael again straddles him: “They never understood what we had.”

     But now the priest responds: “They call me a monster. But what was I supposed to do? They put me in the garden. And then they punished me for taking a bite. That’s all it was. A little bite.”

     “No, no, no,” shouts Michael, now caught up in his own version of their past sexual interludes, again revealing just how manipulated the boy was, momentarily reliving another past moment: “Do you feel that? That’s you! And that’s me. He wants us to be together. But you have to promise. If they find out, they’ll send me away.” One can easily visualize what is happening, and how the priest turns even the special adolescent feeling of an erection into emotional quagmire of guilt if he dare to share the experience in language.

     Observing the childhood memory, the priest now begs that he will never tell anyone if only Michael will let him go.

     But the boy become the man cannot let him go. And we’re not quite sure of the full reasons. Is it just revenge, the full expression of what it meant to live under the total control of an older man, or is it his own now perverse deep feelings for the priest who has been forced to abandon him for his sinful behavior?

     Playing the priest again, he demands the old man stop crying. He didn’t hurt him. But clearly the boy Mickey did feel hurt, had reason to cry out, just as now the older priest does.

     The adult Michael admits, “I’m not letting you go again.”

     But the now cynical old priest clearly cannot comprehend anything, has not learned anything, asking “How much to you want?”

   Michael, shocked by the suggestion, makes it clear the kidnapping has nothing at all to do with money. When the priest asks him to call people to and tell them want it wants, the formerly abused adult says something that is hard to comprehend: “You are what I want. We made a promise.”

    The priest mocks him, did he keep his promises to Santa, to the Easter Bunny. “Go ahead, tell them about the mean old priest who touched you.”

     “No, no I won’t” shouts the adult Michael, still committed to the love he believed he and the priest had long ago committed to. The horrible truth is almost unbearable. He won’t tell anyone, he insists, “Because I love you.”

     How does a man who manipulated a young boy into touching his penis and allowing him to touch the boy’s erect young cock explain to himself the horrifying results of his endless series of lies, of the deep intertwinement of his relationship with the boy and the boy’s own very belief system. If love is godly, if Christ preaches love, and the priest argues for the child to engage to that love, how can a boy, even later as an adult, ever be able to separate the spiritual from the profane? How can the man whose job it was to truly educate young men in spiritual matters, now undo his twisted and perverted teachings?

     Even the priest finally admits it, makes it clear what this film argues, sexual abuse of an elder man with a boy has nothing at to do with gay love: “Nothing about then, and nothing about now is love.” As we have witnessed, pedophilia is about control, not about love.

     But Michael is now forever deluded, answering in tears, “When they came for you, no one believed me, no one listened. And I waited. And I prayed. I prayed. He brought us back together.”

     Misunderstanding everything, the old priest responds, “Then, why am I being punished?”

   Michael doesn’t comprehend his control of the priest as punishment, however, any more than the priest would have accepted the fact that he was controlling the boy Mickey.

   There is a strange element of such relationships that is very much akin to sadomasochism, of capturing and controlling the other in order to make certain the lover will remain, keep silent, and return their love. If there is any love involved in such situations, it is accompanied by a deep fear that the love is not truly available, that it will not be returned, that it will be utterly resisted and ignored. And given that fact, any love that may have been involved is converted to control, fear, self-doubt, the fear of discovery of its existence by others. The forbidden remains forbidden even after the rules, the sin of breaking those rules, and the disdain of the law—whether social, cultural, or personal—has been fully expressed. It is the very forbiddenness of the act which helps to render to even more irresistible.

     “You’re not being punished,” Michael cries out again and again: “I love you.”

     Michael again strokes the priest’s face and finally kisses him fully on the lips.

     As he begins to attempt to masturbate the older man, the priest argues “None of the others behaved this way.”

     Michael points out it was the others who sent him away. He kept their secret. “I am, I am special,” he insists.

     As he momentarily backs off, we see the scars on Michael arms that clearly represent a suicide attempt, he arguing that “He brought me back to so that I could keep my promise. We made a promise to God. And I’m going to keep that promise.”       

    Who is now is the monster, the Frankenstein who created the other or his creation? The issue is unanswerable. And it no longer matters. Both have destroyed any possibility of real love for a strange and perverse notion of love that wasn’t/isn’t what it pretended/pretends to be.

      As Michael undoes his belt to strip himself of his clothing, we suddenly move into the past again as the priest reads pontifically from “The Song of Solomon”:

 

                            Close your heart to every love but mine.

                            Hold no one in your arms but me.

                            Love is a powerful as death.

                            Passion is as strong as death itself.

                            It burst into flame and burns like a raging fire.

                            Water cannot put it out. No flood can drown it.

                            That is the word of the Lord.

 

    Amen, says Mickey, the child, as Michael lays down with his elderly priest lover, having just turned on the gas burners of his kitchen stove.

     I have encountered only a couple of other films as powerful as this 20-minute exegesis of cultural and scriptural texts, complemented with Paul Spaeth’s almost queasy-feeling musical score (featuring the unlikely combination of timpani and flutes). If there was ever a film I might point to in order to explain the horrors of male child abuse, I’d name this movie.

     But it is dangerous matter, as I have pointed out time and again, in our current society terrified of discussing just such complex issues. Just this week, Google brought down years of blog writing for my sites about poetry, theater, opera, art, fiction, and film because of a meaningless accusation—without mention of any specific text—concerning my comments on this very subject. While we in the US like to complain about the censorship in other countries, it’s also become quite apparent that we do not have free expression in this country on the internet, that although the internet sites allow numerous examples of false political statements, it monitors and cuts away free speech on numerous subjects which frighten the general populace just by their existence.

 

Los Angeles, November 24, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2023).

 

 

Victor Sjöstrom | The Scarlet Letter / 1926

undoing the past

by Douglas Messerli

 

Frances Marion (screenwriter and titles, based on the novel by Nathaniel Hawthorne), Victor Sjöstrom (director) The Scarlet Letter / 1926

Swedish director Victor Sjöstrom’s film adaptation of Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, during the director’s short “Hollywood” period, is surely one of his best films, and perhaps the most powerful performance ever of its central actor, Lillian Gish. By comparison to this silent work, Gish’s work in the 1930 talkie I watched immediately after viewing this film on TCM, One Romantic Night, seemed somewhat bland and unexpressive.

     Not so in The Scarlet Letter in which Gish, quite literally, lets her beautiful hair down several times, particularly early in the film when she goes rushing into the woods after her escaped bird. This series of events, beautiful filmed by Sjöstrom and his cinematographer Hendrik Sartov, as his camera fluidly tracks the beautiful young woman dressed all in white—as opposed to the church-going Puritans, clad mostly in black—says almost everything that needs to be said about this oppressive culture, where even allowing a bird to sing on the Sabbath, let alone running and chasing after it, is deeply forbidden, as if joy and beauty were an anathema to God.

      In the closed and claustrophobic world of Sjöstrom’s Boston, nothing can be hidden from the sight of nosy and viciously gossiping neighbors such as Mistress Hibbins (Marcelle Corday); and punishment for the young steamstress’ transgressions immediately follows, ordered by the elders. It is not enough that she be brought before the kinder church minister, The Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale (played by the striking Swedish actor Lars Hanson) to be scolded before the entire community, but the now seemingly innocent act puts Hester Prynne in the pillories for her “crime.” As Dimmesdale tenderly releases her from her bodily imprisonment, he is struck by her beauty, which follows, soon after, with a quite steamy embracement, again in the woods.

    Unlike Hawthorne’s tale, accordingly, where we only gradually discover the intense sexual relationship between the minister and Hester, here everything is established from the beginning. And the director makes clear from the very first scenes that the hugs and touches between these two beautiful beings is against not only community norms but law, as soon after, we observe the comical wooing of the work’s dunce-like Master Giles and a young woman, wherein they are forced to speak to one another over a table through a long tube-like device that keeps them worlds apart. A quick, stolen goodbye kiss, ends in his being ousted not only from the house but from his would-be lover’s life.

     In Hawthorne the gradual discovery of the relationship between Dimmesdale and Hester only reiterates his and the community’s hypocrisy. But here (Hanson speaking in Swedish, Gish in English) we are presented with the background events of Dimmesdale’s later “treason,” which create a far deeper sense of sympathy for both the minister and Hester. Here we see both her own flirtations and demurrals as well as the powerful forces of love emanating from the Reverend. As Hester states the obvious, they live in a world that is “afraid of love,” a community terrorized by even the vision of women’s undergarments.

     If that leads us to more fully sympathize equally with Dimmesdale, the director further allows us feel the extreme tensions that the two feel even before Hester’s adultery is revealed through the birth of young daughter, Pearl. Dimmesdale desperately desires to marry this woman—which would have saved their lives—but it is Hester who is most responsible for the situation, not through her sexual responses, but through her lies, through the fact that she has not revealed her marriage to Roger Chillingworth until Dimmesdale is about to leave the country on a mission to the English King. Hester’s crime and punishment, accordingly, is not correctly perceived by the vengeful and cruel community: hers is not a crime passion or wonton sexuality, as much as it is that she is, just like most in this community, unable to face the truth, fearful of losing what she has attained—in her case, the love of Dimmesdale. In short, although she is publicly humiliated for her aberrant behavior, she is, in fact, one of them, and like them, desperate to hide the truth.

     This is particularly obvious in this film when Dimmesdale, returning from his voyage, discovers her plight. While he is determined to tell the truth, she insists that he continue to keep it secret, to serve the community rather than reveal to that society they he and they are all equally sinners. It is this internalization of reality that ultimately dooms both lovers, Dimmesdale and Hester, but also the community at large. Even Master Giles’ determined revenge on Mistress Hibbins for her insufferable gossip, is based on a lie, as he, pretending to be her, play-acts in a scene of imaginary gossip against town leaders who accidently (purposely to him) overhear her words. The result is dreadful series of dunkings into a nearby pond.

     The lies indeed insinuate themselves into the lives of all, but particularly into the heart of this more appealing Dimmesdale, who, after saving Pearl from being taken from Hester by baptizing his daughter (itself, in this society, surely a sacrilegious act) spends much of the rest of the film with hand over heart, as he wastes away, daily retreating from living.

     Sjöstrom doubles the couple’s torture by bringing back Hester’s missing husband, Chillingworth, who, as a doctor saves Pearl’s life, but as a husband determines to revenge his wife (and, more indirectly than in Hawthorne’s work, Dimmesdale) by simply reappearing at auspicious moments. If the letter A she is forced to wear to the end of her life might remind her of her supposed sin, the more frightening punishment is Chillingworth’s constant reminder of his knowledge about the truth of the events.

     For a brief moment, these two tortured beings attempt to imagine some way out of their assigned fate through an escape to Spain where they may begin again and escape their tortured past—brilliantly symbolized in the film by Hester’s removal of her A from her dress. But we have already perceived that the A signifying their past actions will be forever emblazoned upon their memories as we watch the young Pearl draw the same figure, as if beginning her studies of the alphabet, in the sand. Chillingworth’s presence simply reasserts that fact.

    And it is Chillingworth’s presence once again that finally forces Dimmesdale to make a public confession about his involvement, revealing, in his personal anguish, that the same letter attached to Hester’s dress has been branded by iron upon his chest. Whereas Hawthorne may wonder if this was miraculous event wrought by the hand of God, in Sjöstrom’s far more corporeal rendering of the tale we have no question that the A upon the minister’s chest is a self-inflicted punishment for his own lack of moral daring. Yet again the Swedish director fully redeems Dimmesdale through the man’s confession, which itself, temporarily at least, saves his community by revealing the truth, that all men are sinners, that the mud they sling upon Hester and Pearl is that in which they themselves also walk.

    If the film version differs, quite radically at times, from the beloved fiction, it works as an adaptation that raises most of Hawthorne’s themes while presenting the work’s heroes in more humane terms. And upon Dimmesdale’s death, in our empathy, we are quite ready to forgive his long silence. This silent film, after all, has audibly asserted what was in his heart.

 

Los Angeles, October 15, 2013

Reprinted from International Cinema Review (October 2013).

Henry Hathaway | Peter Ibbetson / 1935

i’ll see you in your dreams

by Douglas Messerli

 

John Meehan, Edwin Justus Mayer, Waldemar Young, Constance Collier, and Vincent Lawrence (screenplay, based on a story by George du Maurier), Henry Hathaway (director) Peter Ibbetson / 1935

 

The French Surrealists, helped along by the work’s rediscovery by Paul Eluard, adored Henry Hathaway’s 1935 film, Peter Ibbetson, based on the tale of 1891 by George Du Maurier. For them it not only encapsulated the concept of a love that survives all obstacles expressed in the term l’amour fou, but, through its shadowy, slightly blurred sequences created by cinematographer Charles Lang, was perceived as a sensual justification for the primacy of dreams. If this fact might help to elevate the film’s status for English and American viewers, it also simply reconfirms the retrograde Romantic tendencies of that movement and its questionable idealization of childhood, as well as their often patriarchal genuflection before what they saw as the “feminine principle.” And even if one finds plenty to enjoy in this fairy-tale like fantasia, one has to wade through the film’s excessive sentimentality and rigid religiosity to get there.

     Child actors Dickie Moore (as the Peter, nicknamed Gogo) and Virginia Weidler (as the six year-old Mary) are, for a few minutes at least, quite charming and sweet. Just to look into young Gogo’s picture-perfect face is enough to melt hearts. But these child actors, forced to engage their adult audience in a struggle between the sexes for the first third of the film, quickly shift from the sweet and sickly sentiments expressed through their acting out of friendly boy-girl squabbles to the requirement that they, simultaneously, tear up on queue, before crying their little eyes out. Audience manipulation has seldom been so obvious.

     Their early arguments concern not only who is in control (the young Mimsey has all the building blocks—the planks of wood they both desire—in her back yard), but whose creative vision is superior. Little Mary simply wants to build a simulacrum of life, a doll house, while Gogo desires to create something functional, a “real” wagon which can move them forward into time and space. The male’s vision is obviously superior—at least if one values the real world in motion. But, of course, as we know reality is a terribly flawed thing, likely to change at a moment’s notice, stealing away everything we know and love. As a being of that world, poor Gogo, in a blink of an eye, not only loses his mother to the disease with which she has been suffering from the film’s very first frame, but is forced, by the sudden appearance of an unknown uncle, to leave his beloved’s “secret garden” hidden away in a Paris suburb to join the horse-and-hound set of a English county estate. No wonder the terrified boy, girlfriend in hand, attempts to run off; and the moment we next encounter him as a young architectural assistant working for a kind—and, significantly, blind—British employer (Donald Meek) he is in a blue funk. Forced to give up everything that truly matters—a potentially functioning machine in an enchanted garden of a long ago past—who wouldn’t be depressed. Little Gogo, all grown up, has become the ill-at-ease dandy, Peter Ibbetson, a strikingly handsome, mustached gentleman (a slightly effeminate Gary Cooper) without anyone to dandle and fondle.

     His superior may be blind, but he sees right through his favorite worker, suggesting he take a break in gay Paris. There, our diffident hero encounters, at a local museum, a worker who might be more at home in a dance hall, with whom, without hesitation, he immediately takes up. Indeed, we realize it’s a perfect combination because it will never lead him into evil; she is so every day and course that she cannot possibly lead such a distracted young man astray. Peter is so dreamy that he hardly knows she is there, particularly when they wander out to the old estate he inhabited as a boy. Like an adult child, his new-found paramour runs straight to the swing, expecting him to push her up into sexual ecstasy, while Peter stumbles around the now decaying grounds, rummaging like a sleepwalker, through the memories of his distant past.

     Returning to London, he is immediately bundled off to York, where he has been asked to design an addition to a stable on the wealthy Duke of Powers’ (John Halliday) estate. The man’s beautiful wife, the Duchess (Ann Harding) wants the new stables to match precisely the ancient, straw-thatched creation of decades before. Sound familiar? If this lovely lady does not precisely seek a simulacrum, she is certainly expressing her preference for an imitation of life, while our hero is determined to “make it new,” to tear down the old stables in order to construct a useful, more modern structure to house her husband’s beloved horses. Briefly, the two wittily duke it out, the young architect winning over the equally stubborn Duchess, particularly since she immediately perceives there are greater things at stake.

     If the movie up to this time has appeared almost as wooden in its structures as the buildings Peter designs, for a few moments—as the couple gradually comes to discover that each is inexplicably attracted to the other—seemingly everyday events momentarily dissociate from reality, and the movie reminds one a bit of Cocteau. A rain storm quickly descends upon Peter and his workers with the swiftness and ferocity of a cyclone, as he and his associates are forced to take refuge beneath a tent-like canopy wherein he quickly drags his small architectural model—reminding us of the would-be doll-house to which the young boy chaffed in the first scene of the film.

     At another moment, the Duchess begins to relate her dream to the architect, while he finishes her sentences, relating the same events from his own point of view. Both are abashed at what seems like a remarkable coincidence, before the Duchess (whom we now realize is the adult Mary) denies any mystical implications in the strange occurrence. But by dinner, after the Duke astutely recognizes the silences behind his table-mates, they recognize that, between them, they have just experienced an astounding empathy. In Peter’s denial of their love, claiming he loves only one woman fixed in his mind as a six year old all dressed in white, they both are struck by the truth: they are the lovers trapped in the past of their own minds.

     While they recognize they now have no choice but to break off any further intercourse—if for no reason than to keep that pure and innocent relationship from becoming tainted by the carnality they now both desire—we recognize that they have no longer have any choice in the matter. They are doomed by the very fact that they have been expelled from that childhood Eden. Embracement and kisses symbolically replace what is a virtual rape, as they enter a world where the Duke’s attempt to end their retreat from time through murder can result only in the end of his own present life. Peter kills the Duke in self-defense, but destroys himself and his lover in the same act.

     The rest of the story unfurls—or we might better say, rewinds—itself as if the two were simultaneously staring into a mirror. Once more, Peter is pulled away from his loved one, this time to endure an even more horrific imprisonment, because it is real, than the one which he suffered as a young lad. There, like Christ, he is mocked, beaten, and, finally, crucified on the frame of his own bed. Both, through intense suffering and near-death, find themselves now able to transcend life, particularly since they have, in fact, long ago given up the present. Mary visits her lover in his sleep, returning to him through the emblem of a ring, the next morning. And once they realize the powers they now have to escape the world in which they are only slightly still contained, they meet nightly in each other’s dreams.

    If this “transcendent” experience might have been presented, by a more imaginative group of writers and a more brilliant director, as a true world apart from the one we know, by, let us imagine, an eerie surrealist landscape or, better yet, a slightly askew Expressionist world that could transport us visually into another time and place, Hathaway and his five scribes instead present us with what later might be described as a Hallmark Card vision of paradise. There’s a wonderful moment, when Peter (like Christ’s Peter, a rock), after temporarily losing his faith, encounters a monstrous landslide that nearly does him and his dream-love in; but they quickly rediscover those heavenly pastures where they lay down in bucolic pleasure throughout the long night, the music swelling up into Wagnerian proportions in case we missed the point. Even a rock eventually crumbles.

    More banally, when our worn-out heroine finally dies, she meets her lover one last time to invite him into a Christian-like paradise, all spirit and no fun. “I’m waiting for you,” she breathes out the last words she is permitted to speak. God is such a kill-joy! But then, I guess he is willing to allow this couple through the pearly gates, despite the red letters (or perhaps purple passages) this clichéd piece of cinema has blazoned across their chests.

       The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, without so much prudery and propriety, and ending in a far-less ethereal after-life—these ghosts do fortunately materialize—did this all so much better.

 

Los Angeles, December 14, 2014

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2014).