Alain Resnais | L’Année derniére à Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad) / 1961

murderer of time

by Douglas Messerli

 

Alain Robbe-Grillet (screenwriter), Alain Resnais (director) L’Année derniére à Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad) / 1961

 

As I have hinted in my discussions of The Erasers and The Voyeur, there is a significant amount of humor in Robbe-Grillet’s work. The ineffectual investigations of the detective Wallas in The Erasers and the highly organized but internally rambling journeys of Mathias in The Voyeur may result in intellectually arresting conundrums, but the tensions that arise from their actions or lack of actions present us with several humorous twists of reality. Our very confusion in both of these works is based, in part, on the multiplicity of detail deflected by minds that can make no sense of the reality the are witnessing. The details overwhelm any sense of coherent narrative.

     One can almost imagine, accordingly, when film director Alain Resnais begin filming Robbe-Grillet’s script L’Année derniére à Marienbad the glee the two took in creating a work that so purposely confuses its audience. Indeed the film has absolutely nothing to do with Marienbad, being filmed almost entirely at the Nymphenburg and Schleissheim Palaces. X suggests to A only the possibility that they may have met at Marienbad. Moreover, except for the vague whisperings and fragments of conversation, the only coherent sentences uttered by X as he repeatedly recounts the background of “Empty salons, Corridors, salons. Door. Doors, Salons. Empty chairs, deep armchairs, thick carpets. Heavy hangings. Stairs, steps. Steps, one after the other. Glass objects, objects still intact, empty glasses. A glass that falls, three, two, one, zero. Glass partition, letters….” A says very little as X attempts to convince her—in a kind of maddened version of the commonly used “come-on”: “Haven’t I met you somewhere?”—that he has been waiting for A ever since their affair last year at…wherever that affair may have been.

    Using 18th and 19th-century dramatic conventions, such as melodramatic music that sounds as if it had been composed for a silent movie, and tableaux vivants in which numerous visitors to the hotel are gathered in small groups and frozen in space as the camera passes, Resnais creates a landscape that is almost hilariously stylized, at one point even painting in shadows for his characters trapped between shadowless, manicured trees—as if to point up the fact that the characters of this film are so insignificant that they cannot even cast their own shadows.

     Early in the film we observe the hotel guests attending a play announced as Rosmer, presumably a production of Ibsen’s Rosmersholm of 1887, a work centered upon a dialectic between the opposing forces of Rosmer and Rebekka West, the first a representative of conservatism and idealism, the second of radical reality. Accordingly, we have evidence early on in this film that X and A are polar opposites, she clearly a passive dreamer, wandering through space, while X attempts to bring her into a real world where they might rediscover their love—or at least transform his apparent rape of her into something in which she equally participated.

     We also recognize in the Rosmersholm connection that Last Year at Marienbad is not so much a story about a man and a woman who may or may not have had a previous affair, as it is about a couple trying to uncover their own reality in a world that seems to have no solid past, present, or future—in a landscape which destroys time. All the guests have come here, we are told, for relaxation: no business is allowed. In such a desultory place, games such as Nim (a game based on mathematical principles, in which the first player inevitably wins) and target shooting are the primary activities, reminding one of Renoir’s Rules of the Game, just as in that film, the only other entertainment available to the bored and wealthy guests is the game of love.

     Finally, one perceives in the reference to Ibsen’s play that this is an extremely literary work, what film critic Thomas Beltzer has described as “an intertextual meditation,” a story not so much about a couple attempting to uncover love, but, just as do authors, to create a world in which they might survive. Beltzer argues that the script is based, in part, on Argentine writer Adolfo Bioy Casares’ The Invention of Morel, a work, published in 1940, that was itself influenced by H. G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau.

     In The Invention of Morel, a fugitive trapped on an island falls in love with a woman, Faustine, controlled, it appears, by a tennis player, Morel. As in Robbe-Grillet’s script, when the fugitive attempts to speak to Faustine, she does not react, and the many other tourists around her seem not to notice him. Ultimately, he discovers that the figures he is seeing are holograms created from the original beings, now destroyed, trapped in an eternal mechanical reality that is repeated again and again.

     Bioy Cesares has, in turn, admitted that his character Faustine if based on the actress Louise Brooks, who, as he put it, “vanished too early from movies.” And, in fact, throughout Resnais’ film we see the actress Delphine Seyrig as a kind of Brooks-like beauty, as she positions herself in various divans and beds.

     Beltzer, moreover, goes on to cite other works that relate to Last Year at Marienbad, creating what he describes as a kind of “ontological vertigo.” Yet the critic naively argues that Robbe-Grillet and Resnais refused to make public the relationship between their work and Bioy Cesares’ because they are “Eurocentrics who think art should have nothing to do with the genre of science fiction/horror.” By not revealing the possibility that the characters in Resnais’ film are holograms, Marienbad becomes, in Beltzer’s words, “merely surreal art for art’s sake.”

     Obviously, he has read little of the great Argentine writer’s work, and has no perception that in Europe Bioy Cesares if far better known and respected than in the US. And I would hardly describe his metaphysical tales (or The Invention of Morel) as belonging only to the genre of science fiction or horror tales. I would suggest, rather, that Robbe-Grillet refused to tie his script down to a single work, or even multiple sources, simply because he sought to make Marienbad a kind of Borgesian library (Bioy Cesares wrote many works with Borges), to position it as a work which calls up numerous other fables of desperate love.

     It is odd, given Beltzer’s own adjectival descriptions, that he does not link Last Year at Marienbad, for example, to Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, released just three years before Marienbad. Yet both movies deal with a relationship that previously existed, in which the male rediscovers his lover, but is yet somewhat uncertain that it is actually the same woman. X must almost convince himself in his repetitious descriptions of their previous affair that A is, in fact, the same being. Like Scottie in Vertigo, X has despaired of ever finding her again, but has believed all along that their reunion was inevitable. X’s passionate despair strongly resembles the kind of madness Scottie has had to endure after the apparent suicide of Madeline Elster.

     A’s husband or lover M clearly has control over her that is very similar to Gavin Elster’s relationship to with the pretender Madeline in Vertigo, as he acts out the role of her husband while he is actually her lover.

    Throughout Marienbad, in Seyrig’s long narcissistic-like reveries, suggesting themes of love lost and rediscovered, and the attempt to make the “new” woman over into the one in the past, there are similarities to Vertigo. But then, of course, those elements exist in many stories of love lost and found.

     That is just what makes Robbe-Grillet’s and Resnais’ work so powerful. In the world they present, time has become warped and so shifting that there can be no reality. The characters cast no real shadows because they are ghosts who share their reality with numerous other figures of literature and art.

 

Los Angeles, July 12, 2008

Reprinted from My Year 2008: In the Gap by Douglas Messerli.

    

Frank Capra | Lady for a Day / 1933 || Frank Capra (director) Pocketful of Miracles / 1961

all about us

by Douglas Messerli

 

Robert Riskin (screenplay, based on a story by Damon Runyon), Frank Capra (director) Lady for a Day / 1933

Hal Kanter and Harry Tugend (screenplay, based on a story by Damon Runyon and Robert Riskin’s script), Frank Capra (director) Pocketful of Miracles / 1961

 

For years my companion Howard and I have preferred Frank Capra’s remake of his renowned Damon Runyon adaptation of “Madame La Gimp,” Pocketful of Miracles, over his 1933 film version, Lady for a Day. Sure, the 1961 remake is all Hollywood and about as sweetly syrupy a confection as ever made—that is, after all to be expected in Capra’s cornball vision of American life, where everyone defines himself as a hick compared to the snooty, wealthy snobs. And yes, the opening Jimmy Van Heusen and Sammy Cohn theme song, sung by a children’s chorus, makes any music lover want to turn tail and run from the theater. The pouting coos of the young Ann-Margret’s Louise are nearly unbearable; Glenn Ford’s gee-gosh rendition of the supposedly suave Dave the Dude often produces viewer cringe; and even Peter Falk’s wise-cracking cynicisms seem to be from another movie. I even admit that Hope Lange’s Queenie Martin, the dancing speak-easy owner desperate to get married and move back to Silver Springs (a.k.a. the DC suburb Silver Spring)—a desire never once expressed by the tougher Missouri Martin of the original—seems utterly ludicrous. And the whole film is just too long!

    Still, Capra does project a kind of glorious Technicolor magic in his tale of the street hag, Apple Annie, magically transformed from a “cockroach what turned into a butterfly!” And who could more brilliantly portray that improbable resurrection than the radiant Bette Davis, late in her glorious career? The supporting actors—Edward Everett Edward Horton as the witty butler Hudgins, Mickey Shaughnessy as the dim-witted comedic Junior, Sheldon Leonard as the mobster Steve Darcey, and the linguistically gifted con-man, Thomas Mitchell as Judge Henry G. Blake, among others—are about as perfect as one can imagine. One need only compare a single scene—the moment Annie is first viewed in her completely made-over body—with the original to realize that Capra did sometimes have a genius for dramatic scenarios. In Lady for a Day, May Robson is announced by Glenda Farrell without much ado, simply appearing suddenly at the open doorway. While she certainly looks quite grand and proper, Robson’s Mrs. E. Worthington Manville transformation falls quite dead, as if the cosmetic and clothing magicians had simply draped her in a new dress and topped her head with a nice-fitting wig. There is little of magic in the scene. In Pocketful of Miracles, however, the transformation seems to take hours as Junior, snoring away in boredom successfully tosses cards into a hat (something he cannot achieve, apparently, while he is awake). Suddenly the door of the bedroom opens, as the utterly exhausted makeup and clothing experts stagger out, Queenie following them with an imitation of a trumpet blare. Chords from Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite swell up, and out struts the beautifully coifed and elegantly dressed Davis. One can hardly resist clapping in delight for the pure theater magic of the moment.

    By comparison, Lady for a Day is coarse and crude. And once Capra convinces us through that Pocketful of Miracles scene that such magic is his subject, we believe that Dave the Dude can truly save the day by bringing with him, at the very last moment (with Hudgins reassuring the Count, “Nobody arrives first, sir. They all arrive last”), the real New York Chief of Police, the city's Mayor and the state Governor ready to claim Mrs. Manville as their friend, replacing the Dude’s clumsy henchman and Queenie’s tough molls.

     It hardly even matters that everyone involved, including the hood-winked, aristocratic Count Romero and his son, are engaged in a monstrous deceit. As the Governor tells his wife, it felt good, made him feel young again. And isn’t that, after all, the role of Hollywood comedies?

     The other day, however, in preparation for my several pieces on Damon Runyon stories adapted into films, I again watched, after some years of neglect, the 1933 black-and-white version, and, for the first time, had to agree with most critics that Lady for a Day was superior. First of all, this film, with all its rough edges, does seem somehow fresher, freed from the glossy Hollywood imitations of actors like Hope Lange, Ann-Margret, and Glenn Ford. Without the various plot complications of the remake—the Dude’s negotiations with the Chicago Mob, Martin’s desires to go straight—the story straight-forwardly focuses, moreover, on Apple Annie, instead of flying off in the many directions of the 1961 cut.

     The tough-girl image of Glenda Farrell’s Missouri Martin seems utterly believable compared with Lange’s saintly sinner. And while Ford’s Dave the Dude often appears like a befuddled office worker, Warren William’s subtle elegance makes one comprehend how he’s been awarded his moniker, putting him in a league with Runyonesque fast-talking conmen like Judge Blake, who Guy Kibbee played with almost as much panache as Thomas Mitchell.

     As great as Bette Davis was in Pocketful of Miracles, May Robson, older and more irascible than her reincarnation, is also more sure-footed in her role. When Robson gins it up, one truly believes she loves the stuff. When she sends her cat flying, one becomes convinced that she has truly kicked the cat. As marvelous as Davis is, there is something too elegant about her Annie and too tenuous about her Mrs. E. Worthington Manville. One need only compare the moment when the Manville figure realizes that she must reveal her true existence to the Count. Entering the room, Robson restates her understanding of why he has traveled to America to meet and evaluate Louise’s family with a speech something to the effect: “You wanted to know all about us—Oh, I don’t blame you. It would terrible if after the marriage you found out….” Robson reads those lines quite assertively, hinting at both her comprehension and her disdain for the Count’s petty snobbery; and for a second, one truly does believe she is willing to spill the beans, that she will finally speak the truth. Davis says the same words, but pauses a second or so, her voice somewhat shaking just before her denial of any blame, and in that pause she reveals a sense of a deep inadequacy, almost a sorrowful expression of her own inferiority which might force to admit what will destroy her daughter’s life. But in that pause, as poignant as it is, the viewer also realizes she will never complete her sentence, she cannot reveal her true self. While Robson’s Annie is a proud being who despises the very class distinctions she is forced to act out, Davis’ Manville is ashamed of her true self. Capra’s Lady for a Day represents precisely what its title suggests, a woman who becomes a lady just for a day; for, at heart, she is a beggar who is proud of her profession. The same director’s Pocketful of Miracles utterly reveals the later version for what it is as well: a magic bag of tricks. Can one truly imagine, at the end of the second film, when, as the boat pulls away Davis commands her beggar friends to get to work, that she can ever truly return to her life in the streets, that she will again fall from the heights of the imperious beauty to again become a hag, or, as Runyon characterizes her, “a gimp?”

      Finally, Lady for a Day has a treasure that even outshines the genius of Edward Everett Horton’s bemused butler: Ned Sparks as Happy McGuire, the kind of sour cynic about whom one can quip, as does Missouri Martin, “Happy, if you break anything, be sure it’s your neck,” while at the very same moment breaking out in a guffaw. If there was ever anyone born to utter Runyon’s Dadaist-like Americanisms, Sparks was the man! The interchange between that film’s butler, Halliwell Hobbes and Happy says everything you need to know about why Capra succeeded the first time round:

 

                             Happy McGuire: That should be a cinch.

                             Butler: I beg your pardon, Sir.

                             Happy McGuire: I said that should be a leadpipe cinch!

                             Butler: If I had choice of weapons with you, Sir, I’d choose

                                         grammar.

 

    Compare that with Horton’s admission in his role as butler: “I love a good fairy tale,” and you can understand why a director devoted to self-deluded American dreamers of the middle class preferred the remake.

     Speaking of “fairy tales,” moreover, Capra’s original participates in the early 1930s snub of the new Motion Picture Code by pointing out a queer in the midst of this colorful crowd, as the male leader of the squadron of Annie’s physical transformers of her hair, clothes, make-up, etc, Pierre (Leo White) who leading in his women workers is told, “Wait a moment, you can’t go in there!” to which Missouri Martin (Glenda Farrell) responds, “Oh that’s all right! Believe me, fellas that’s all right,” assuring the others and Capra’s audience that Pierre’s homosexuality makes him an exception to the rules. The scene also made it into the 1961 version, dragging along the on-screen appearance of an obvious gay figure (Fritz Feld) into the early 60s at a time, as I have written elsewhere, the cultural censors reiterated their attacks of gays and lesbians, who the major studios—despite the increased attention to LGBTQ figures in European and US underground filmmaking—increasingly feared to portray.

Los Angeles, May 20, 2012

Reprinted from International Cinema Review (May 2012).

F. W. Murnau | Tabu: A Story of the South Seas / 1931

love is death

by Douglas Messerli

 

F. W. Murnau and Robert J. Flaherty (screenplay), F. W. Murnau (director) Tabu: A Story of the South Seas / 1931

 

Watching the great German-American director F. W. Murnau’s last film yesterday, I suddenly perceived that—despite its exotic locale of Bora Bora and the fact that numerous film critics note time and again just how different this film, with its use of natural scenery and real-life constructions, is from his highly stylized and theatricalized pairings of costumes and sets of films such as Nosferatu, Faust, and Sunrise—it shares his basic German sensibility so evident in someone like Wagner: love is death.

       For Murnau—an outsider homosexual, forced to leave Germany because of the strict laws against his sexuality—his predilections for handsome young men, in fact, were dangerous. Shortly after filming Tabu and before its theatrical release, the director died in a fiery car crash driven by a young Filipino, chosen, so the story goes, because of his beauty more than his driving skills. Some legends have it that Murnau died while committing fellatio on his young charge. Love was certainly death for Murnau himself.

      But so too, at least spiritually speaking, is it in almost all his films. In Nosferatu, for example, Orlok, clearly attracted by the handsome Hutter, spares him to stalk, instead, Hutter’s wife Ellen, who gives up her life to keep the monster near her until a beam of sunlight turns him to dust; Gretchen, similarly, must give up her life for the sexual debauchery of Faust; although the protagonists of Sunrise both survive, they both first symbolically die, as the husband plots his wife’s death and, ironically, when he abandons his plans, seemingly drowns.

      Yes, Tabu in its use of natural space and amateur Tahitian actors (Matahi and Anne Chevalier) as the young lovers, The Boy and The Girl, is superficially different from these earlier works, but underlying these cinematic shifts is a similar story. The film, much like Nosferatu descends upon the neck of Hutter, spends much of its early frames in homoerotic voyeurism of the young native boys at play, the directors’ camera almost languishing over the shirtless and semi-pantless Matahi as he spears fish, before wetting all the male characters down in the surges of the surrounding sea and slides in the flow of a nearby waterfall, the focus particularly attending to their wet buttocks. It may be some of the most sensuously sexual filmmaking outside of the porn industry. It is no surprise that Robert J. Flaherty, more interested in anthropologic specificity, would come to abandon this project.

     Yet Murnau knows his audiences, and soon steers his story into an intense romance between Matahi and a naive girl, Reri, who is as beautifully feminine as Matahi is masculine. The arrival of outsiders, carrying the aged warrior Hitu, destroys their joyful innocence, however, as the old man accepts the young virgin to replace the now-dead ceremonial figure as a bride in Tabu, a kind of goddess that demands she is free of all touching, longing, and lustful gazes—precisely what she and her young man have just enjoyed.

      The ceremonial dances performed for her leaving them represent, perhaps, some of the steamiest dancing ever brought to the wide screen, as the young bare-chested maidens surround Reri while oggling the young men in grass skirts provocatively swaying their hips. Even in his complete despair, Matahi cannot resist joining the other boys, drawing the new goddess into an intense dance that might be seen to break the Tabu even before she departs.

      The young lovers determine to leave their island paradise that very night, moving on in their small boats for several days until they reach a distant, seemingly more civilized island, where Matahi becomes a pearl-diver, the couple living in a simple hut upon the beach. With his natural athletic skills, the boy is a natural, and soon returns with a pearl, celebrated in wild abandonment at a local bar—without the couple even perceiving that they have footed the bill.

      Time passes as the two fall ever deeper in love, but we perceive the consequences of their illegal rapture. Reri receives a message from Hitu, demanding that she leave the island and return to him within three days. When the couple attempt to book passage on another ship that might save their lives, they discover themselves to be so deeply in debt that they cannot afford to travel. If this is a safer place, it is far less “civilized” than their original paradise.

       Throughout the torturous night, they hold one another in terror, Matahi secretly determining to dive in that next morning in another arena of Tabu, a deep cove where the pearls are protected, so the natives believe, by a giant shark. Many men have been killed in their attempts to dive there.

      That morning Matahi sneaks out to dive into the Tabu region, and in a stunningly filmed sequence in which we glimpse, only momentarily, his body against the shimmering reflections of water, he returns with what is apparently a black pearl; he has survived. In his absence the shadow of Hitu, like Nosferatu’s shadow hovering over the innocent Ellen, has come to claim Reri. She has been taken to his boat. When Matahi discovers the fact he bravely attempts to swim after, but almost reaching the rope that might help him recapture his bride, we observe a knife in the hand of Hitu cutting the connecting line. The boy swims for a short while longer before finally disappearing into the surrounding waters. Death has taken love one more time.

     In short, even if this film seemed ti be recognized as a transformative shift that might have occurred in Murnau’s great filmmaking, it remains, at least structurally, apiece with his previous works—all films that, as Alexandre Astruc has described as a “fatality hidden behind the most harmless elements of the frame.” Even the paradisiacal sunlit world of Bora Bora contains dark shadows that sever the lover from the object of his or her love. It is almost as if Murnau, at a time when he might have most enjoyed the fruits of his brilliant career, foresaw that love—or at least sex—would inevitably lead to self-destruction.

 

Los Angeles, December 19, 2012

Reprinted from International Cinema Review (December 2012).

David Lean | Great Expectations / 1946

questions and conclusions

by Douglas Messerli

David Lean, Anthony Havelock-Allan, Cecil McGivern, Ronald Neame, and Kay Walsh (screenplay, based on the fiction by Charles Dickens). David Lean (director) Great Expectations / 1946

 

If, as some critics assert, Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations is one of his tautest, most compressed works, Lean’s film version of 1946, based on a stage version that had already been severely trimmed from the novel—in Dickensian terms, is nearly emaciated. Lean, had not read Dickens’ novel, so legend has it, before he began directing the movie. Yet, as commentators have observed, he often matches the spirit and tone of Dickens’ brilliant work.

      The few scenes, in fact, present events that happen at a near break-neck speed, as the fiction’s young hero, Pip (Anthony Wager), wandering home through the local churchyard encounters the terrifying prison escapee, Abel Magwitch (Finlay Currie), who not only threatens the young boy with death, turns him upside down to release any food that might be contained in the boy’s pockets, and demands Pip return to him at dawn, bearing food and a file.

      Despite the eagle-eye and terrorizing “rampages” of Pip’s sister (Freda Jackson), with whom he lives, along with her gentle husband, Joe Gargery (Bernard Miles), Pip manages to escape the house with a bottle of brandy and a savory meat pie, along with the wished-for file, delivering them up with a fair share of kindness to brutal criminal. His good acts, however, seemingly have little effect, as the police appear, recapturing Magwitch and his arch-enemy criminal friend, who has turned Magwitch in.

      We hardly have time to recover from this breathtaking series of events before Pip is summoned, quite unexpectedly, to the home of the wealthy and elderly local eccentric, Miss Haversham (Martita Hunt), an apparently well-meaning, if curt woman, whom we gradually discover to be a monster, determined through the beauty of her adopted child, Estella (Jean Simmons as a child and Valerie Hobson as an adult) to entrap boys like Pip by encouraging them in fall in love only to be jilted—just as the elderly lady was on the very day of her wedding!

      With these two fast-moving series of events, we really have the heart of the story, the rest being an unspooling of sorts of the questions and conclusions asked and made by both the film’s major character and its audience.

      Early on in the film, Pip is criticized by his older sister for asking too many questions, which she insists results in all the evils of the world. When Pip is suddenly told by a local lawyer, Mr. Jaggers (Francis L. Sullivan) that he has inherited money, becoming a man of “great expectations,” and will be sent to London to become a gentleman, the boy is again told that he may ask no questions about his benefactor. Jaggers advises: “Take nothing on its looks, take everything on evidence. There is no better rule.”

      Yet the child, like his society, cannot resist coming to his own conclusions based on appearances, presuming that his benefactor is Miss Haversham. And like the prejudiced and bigoted society around him—a society that would kill innocent children along with their guilty parents, and, as does Estella, automatically demeans anyone of “common” lineage—bases everything on superficial concerns. It is that problem which is at the heart of Pip’s many dilemmas throughout Dickens’ exciting narrative.

        Despite his growing awareness of Miss Haversham’s evil intentions, Pip still supposes her to be the source of his improved situation in life, and she, on her part, allows him to believe his own fabrication, further drawing him into her world, a universe bound together with spider-webs that knit together the emptiness of her dead life. Strangely enough, it is only Haversham’s minion Estella that tells him the truth, that she does not truly love him and that he should rid himself of any delusions about her. But here again, Pip refuses to perceive the evidence, seeing only a beautiful woman that, by societal conclusions, could not possibly be a woman of evil intentions.

      Similarly, when Magwitch suddenly appears in his (Pip now played as a adult by John Mills) and Henry Pocket’s (Alec Guinness) flat claiming that he is Pip’s benefactor, the young man is appalled, unable to believe what is now quite evident.

      Much of the latter portion of this work centers upon Pip’s punishments and willing corrections for his misconceptions and boorish social behavior, in particular his snobbish dismissal of his dear friend Joe. His attempts to help Magwitch escape back to Australia—he willing even to join him—and his struggle to repay Joe for his kindnesses when Pip, faced with debt, grows sick (events mostly excised from Lean’s cinematic version)—only emphasize that the man of “great expectations” has failed to live up to them through his embracement, instead, of societal conventions.

     In Dickens’ work, Pip’s punishment seems also to include his loss of the beautiful Estella—a woman who, after all, has nearly trapped him into a loveless relationship equal to the one in which she has become entrapped by Bentley Drummle (Thorin Thatcher). In Dickens’ first version of his novel, Pip merely spots Estella, who has been forced to suffer abuse from Drummle, at a dinner party. But in the 1863 edition, Dickens revised the work to have his narrator report, after seeing Estella, “I saw no shadow of another parting from her”—an alteration about which critics have been split for more than a century. Given the issue of “questioning and concluding or assuming” that plays such an important role in this work, I would tend to side with those who find the change to be unfortunate, myself questioning how Pip could even come to love a woman who had so obviously and rather willingly betrayed him and other men, and who, we later discover, is actually Magwitch’s legal daughter, making her—in psychological terms, at least—a spiritual sister. 

     Lean, who generally in his films plays to popular sentiment, goes even further than usual in Great Expectations, creating a dramatic version of the ending that is the weakest moment of his endeavor. Meeting again in Miss Haversham’s mansion, the two face-off, Estella—hurt by her relationship with Drummle—determined to become another Miss Haversham, to join her mentor in her obsession with the past. In anger and frustration, Pip tears open the windows, throwing the moth eaten curtains and other of the room’s leftovers to floor in order to reveal that everything of Miss Haversham’s world is dust and decay. Arguing that he has never stopped loving her, he takes Estella by the hand as the two leave the house together, she hoping that she can meet his commitment to life.

     If Dickens’ revision was somewhat sentimental, so too are many elements of his works, and his choice of a more ambiguous and even possibly positive ending, is still all of a piece with the fiction at large. Lean’s fantastical conclusion works completely against the whole logic of the original concept of Great Expectations, pandering to just those societal expectations that are created not by “evidence” but by “appearances.” One can almost hear Lean and his cowriters querying one another, “how can two such beautiful figures not come together and live happily ever after?” The result is a bit like suddenly marrying off Heathcliff to Catherine in a filmed Wuthering Heights, bannering it with a beribboned message: “And So They Lived….”

     If there is much to be applauded in Lean’s film, particularly in Guy Green’s darkly etched cinematography, there is also, as in many of Lean’s works which he seemed determined to turn into literary epics, a great deal of unnecessarily restrained passion and outright schmaltz. If Lean was a perfectionist in setting up his camera’s every shoot, it’s too bad he wasn’t a better literary thinker able to fully perceive the consequences of his tinkering with the original narratives and their plots.

 

Los Angeles, May 26, 2014

Reprinted from International Cinema Review (May 2014).

 

Paul Mazursky | Enemies, A Love Story / 1989

 ghosts

by Douglas Messerli

 

Roger L. Simon and Paul Mazursky (screenwriters, based on a novel by Isaac B. Singer), Paul Mazursky (director) Enemies, A Love Story / 1989

 

Herman Broder (Ron Silver), now living near Coney Island, survived the Holocaust by hiding out in a barn, embedded in a haystack and bought food and other provisions by the family’s Polish servant, Yadwiga (Margaret Sophie Stein), who, in part, in reward for of her love and loyalty, he has married in the US. Broder, as the first scene of the Mazursky’s movie demonstrates, also was forced to watch the Nazis beat her in retaliation for her suspected protection of him. As the neighbor gossips make clear, Yadwiga is a saint, still living with servant-like dedication with Broder, who lies to her about his profession (he claims he is a traveling book salesman) engaging in an extra-marital relationship with a beautiful Russian refugee, also a survivor of the Holocaust, Masha (Lena Olin), who lives in the Bronx with her mother.

     Masha is everything that Yadwiga is not: a sassy, completely assimilated woman; Masha offers Herman a kind of passionate, almost bestial like sexuality that lies at the complete opposite extreme of Yadwiga’s tender embraces, and each day, in his “rambling travels,” Broder visits her, staying on during the afternoon, while Masha goes to work as a ghostwriter for a successful rabbi’s sermons and speeches (Rabbi Lembeck, played by Alan King). An experienced lover, who is still married to businessman Leon Torshiner (Paul Mazursky), Masha, although perpetually jealous, attempts to overlook Broder’s marriage, seemingly satisfied with their morning sexual activities.

      All three of these figures, at times, define themselves as dead, beings whose existence, given the deaths of all those around them, appears as a kind of miracle; and each of them grab what they can from one another, greedy for the memories of life it provides them. Yet, all of them are severely marked by their pasts. Broder’s and Yadwiga’s marriage is literally based on events that occurred during the war; similarly, Masha’s behavior reflects a woman who has clearly done almost anything during the Holocaust to survive. And, as such, each of these three figures might easily be described as ghosts, haunted by the brutal past.

      Before we can almost assimilate the complex “wonder wheel”-like—the name that lights up throughout the film across the Coney Island Farris Wheel—circularity of Broder’s life, everything is complicated further by the sudden appearance of his thought-to-be dead wife, Tamara (Angelica Huston), who pretended death after a mass murder, crawling out from under the dead bodies to survive. She too, obviously, is a ghost, who later, when she appears at Broder’s Coney Island hovel, terrifies Yadwiga, who is convinced that Tamara actually is a ghost!

      Upon discovering her existence, Broder is suddenly faced with such a series of dilemmas so contradictory that he literally does not know which way to turn. Through Huston’s skillful acting and Mazursky’s artful director, we quickly perceive that, despite their outward hostility, Tamara and Broder are still very much in love. Clearly in over his head, Broder vaguely attempts to tell Masha the truth, but the reality is so incredible that she refuses to believe him, soon after, when she discovers herself pregnant, demanding that Broder marry her in a “symbolic” marriage for the sake of her mother.

      Suddenly, what began as a mildly comic tale of infidelity—at the heart of many a Mazursky movie—has suddenly exploded in a moral struggle for Broder, in which he attempts to please all three women; he even makes a joke, at one point, about his polygamous activities. But living for him, as he spins through space from the Bronx, to Manhattan’s Lower East Side, and back into Coney Island is a heart-spinning and heart-breaking ride, is made even more complex when, on vacation with Masha in the Catskills, he runs into the uncle and aunt with whom Tamara is living.

      At one point, when Masha’s now ex-husband, demands a meeting with Broder, things temporarily seem to open up, particularly when Torshiner reveals that Masha had an affair with a Russian criminal throughout the war, that she has had numerous sexual affairs, and that she is a dangerous temptress.

      Events finally explode, moreover, when Masha and Broder attend at event at Rabbi Lembeck’s house, where they run into a strange figure, Pesheles, who has accidently visited Broder in Coney Island and met Tamara in the hospital where she has gone to have the wartime bullet removed from her hip. With what might be described almost as glee, Pesheles recounts the existence of Broder’s two other wives to Masha, who furiously storms out on her and Broder’s relationship.

     Fortunately, Broder has been completely honest with Tamara, who offers to serve as his personal manager. Her advice is that he abandon Masha and return to Yadwiga, who is soon to have a baby. Broder obeys, for a while rediscovering his second marriage and his faith. But he still longs for Masha, and when she contacts him, now apparently working as a kind of prostitute, Broder becomes determined to run off with her and work as her provider.

     Meeting her again at the Bronx apartment, however, he discovers that the place has just been burglarized, and that her mother is missing. The much beloved and hated mother (Judith Malina) returns, but soon after dies. Demanding Masha be honest about her past, he discovers that she has had sex with Torshiner in order to obtain her divorce, but little else. She is as incapable of the truth as he is in making a decision in his commitment to the women in his life.

      Broder leaves Masha, who takes enough pills to kill herself, realizing the death by which she has long defined her life. Similarly, Broder himself disappears, occasionally sending money to Yadwiga.

      The baby has arrived who has a regular care-giver not only in the form of his saintly mother but through the nurturing support of the very earthy Tamara, the two “ghosts” together—in a strange feminist bonding (even stranger given that the sometimes misogynistic Isaac B. Singer penned this fiction)—sustaining this child of the new world and of the future, in the hopes that it might live a life different from their horrifyingly destructive past. Perhaps, finally, the enemies of the past, not only the German soldiers but cancerous motivations carried about within each of the ghosts’ selves, may be put to rest.

 

Los Angeles, July 16, 2014

Reprinted from International Cinema Review (July 2014).