Manoel de Oliveira | Belle Toujours / 2006

woman of today

by Douglas Messerli

 

Manoel de Oliveira (screenwriter and director) Belle Toujours / 2006

 

Manoel de Oliveira’s 2006 film Belle Toujours describes itself as an homage to Luis Buñuel’s intriguing Belle de Jour from 1967. But, actually, it first appears to be closer to an academic exercise in de Oliveria’s interpretation of the original, which also seems quite outlandishly outdated. We can perhaps forgive de Oliveria’s apparently misogynistic attitudes and interpretations of the behavior of the previous film’s central character, Séverine, as representing a combination of masochistic and sadist attitudes, given the fact that the Portuguese director was 100 years of age at the time of its release.

     In fact, many of the original viewers in 1967 also felt that it was necessary to explain Séverine’s quite unconventional behavior, in which the loving wife of a handsome young doctor slipped out each afternoon to work as a prostitute. The possibility that a beautiful woman, trapped in a pleasant, even loving, but totally uneventful housebound marriage might be—given her unconventional sexual and familial attitudes—fascinated by other sexual possibilities, particularly in a time when many males, including her husband’s best friend, sought out sexual liaisons apart from their marital relationships, evidently seemed impossible to imagine for most critics of the period. And the idea that Buñuel’s character, played by Catherine Deneuve, might be a proto-feminist figure, as I argue, might not have even been entirely apparent to the authors, Buñuel and Jean-Claude Carrière, themselves.

 

    And to give de Oliveria credit, he does have his elderly Séverine (Bulle Ogier this time around) admit to having no sense of guilt for her behavior precisely because of her unconventional moral values. The character who expresses what might be de Oliveira’s interpretations, moreover—the sexist, now alcoholic, and totally unappealing former blackmailer (in the original he demands sex for withholding the information about her sexual activities from her husband), Henri Husson—played with remarkable precision by the original Husson, Michael Piccoli—would surely be unable to conceive any other scenario; late in the movie he even attempts to cover over his offensive behavior by retreating behind the old saw that women are incomprehensive mysteries. The real mystery, it seems to me, is why even a young prostitute, who with her older friend who have plunked themselves down in a local bar which Husson visits three times during the movie, might even find him attractive. Séverine, for her part, spends the first half of de Oliveira’s homage in trying to escape any contact between the old lecher.

     Even de Oliveria seems disinterested in actually getting these two back together, slowing his 68-minute movie down to such a luxuriously relaxed pace that one begins to wonder whether there might ever be even a glimmer of narrative, using the first 7-8 minutes of the work to present us with a nearly complete performance of Anton Dvorak’s Symphony #8 in G Major—a concert whereat Husson first spots Séverine—and following it by two or three languorous postcard views of the Paris landscape. Most of the film’s dialogue takes place in a local bar which, quite inexplicably, Séverine has momentarily stopped in search of a regular patron.

     There, with the help of several iceless whiskeys, Husson entrances the bartender with his vague and slightly dishonest narration of the events of the Buñuel film. Chalk it up to the director’s age again for the inability of the young, handsome bartender, living in a period that appears to be contemporaneous with the movie’s making, to comprehend the woman’s behavior, who also queries Husson about the existence in the late 1960s of apartment-complex houses of prostitution. That he is supposedly wise to all sorts of sexual information. given his occupation, where, he as describes it, many patrons feel to the need to confess their sexual peccadilloes to a seemingly disinterested stranger, makes it even harder to imagine that the young man might have any time to devote to the salacious analytical observations of a drooling old codger.

    The kid is anything but dumb, even proffering the observation to the obviously unreflective elder man, that men also do precisely what Séverine has. Perhaps he gets a certain sexual gratification from the numerous confessions over which he officiates.  

     Yet for all the seemingly “slight” Dvorak-scored “travelogue aerials of Paris” that demarcate Buñuel’s fantasy from the “factual” “affectations” of de Oliveria’s work—as Slant magazine described the whole affair—there is something so completely aesthetically fascinating about this film, particularly in the perfection of its images, acting, and sound-editing, that I was hardly able to take my eyes away from the screen.

     If Husson is a doddering old fool dishing out antique theories of Freudian behavior which never existed in real life, he is also still a dandy—at least in his own mind—a self-infatuated old cock who wanders the Paris streets in a Proustian-like fantasy as he stalks the woman from the past, peering in windows at bewigged female mannequins and his own image simultaneously. One imagines that he even posits the possibility that he and Séverine still might sexually come together, particularly when she finally (in a dialogue erased by streets sounds) agrees to meet him for dinner. He arranges a private dining room with candles, in which, once the couple have finished eating, he suggests they talk in only candlelight.

      But if we might imagine this carefully organized dinner as a prelude to anything else, de Oliveira presents it as a near-completely unspoken affair, as the couple dine, Husson licking his lips in slightly obscene delight of each bite; all Séverine wants to know is whether or not Husson has really revealed to her husband that she had been a prostitute; it is not that she is ashamed of her activities—as she admits she now, in older age, a changed woman and she continues to feel no guilt—but, it becomes clear, she is still distraught over the fact that her husband might, before being inexplicably shot and paralyzed by one of her jealous clients, have suffered with the knowledge; she needs to know whether the frozen tear that formed at the edge of his eye was in sympathy with her or the result of a tortured vision of his wife.

      Totally unable to comprehend her dilemma, Husson has instead brought her a gift of a sexual toy-box whose contents, consisting of the sound of a buzzing fly, was never completely revealed in the Buñuel film. She is outraged by his present, and returns it to him, demanding he live up to his promise to tell her whether or not he has told her husband.

     In response, Husson merely reiterates the two possibilities, throwing the alternatives, suggesting that he may be lying in either case, back in her lap. Séverine rushes from the room, breaking a bottle of wine and glasses in her abandonment of the personification of selfishness who has sat across from her at the table. De Oliviera suddenly comments on the action by presenting, almost in surreal-like fashion, the image of a cock strolling down the elite hotel hallway, emblematizing the Husson character in a way that we now know has not at all represented in his own personal interpretations.

      In her escape, Séverine has also left behind her purse, from which the vengeful and now thieving monster takes evidently large denominations of money in order to tip the waiters. After he leaves, they, themselves, describe him as a perverted weirdo as they clear the tables and carry away the would-be romantic candelabras. Although Husson, now in possession of Séverine’s identity and some of her money, may have imagined he was won, Séverine clearly has again escaped his clutches. He may have destroyed her husband’s love and faith, but he has no real power over the opposite sex, especially a woman who has so successfully freed herself from his kind.

      Ultimately, de Olivera’s film, we perceive, has been an homage, not to Buñuel, but to his character Séverine, whom de Oliveria truly does portray as a woman of today.

 

Los Angeles, April 25, 2015

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2015).

 

Oz Shtamler | Auto da fé / 2022

forgetting what you want

by Douglas Messerli

 

Oz Shtamler (screenwriter and director) Auto da fé / 2022 [20 minutes]

 

The pun of the ritual penance carried out against condemned heretics, Oz Shtamler’s 2022 short film, Auto da fé deals with another kind of penance played out by an Israelic mechanic, Amnon (Noam Boukobza) who suddenly meets up with porn star Danny Jokcs’ (Rafi Kalmar) car. Amnon is immediately entranced by the porn figure whom he evidently recognizes, and the somewhat fey individual now becomes central in his life, suggests they might meet up in two days.

    His boss, dealing with his own memories of a female affair long again in Portugal, is not at all sympathetic with Amnon’s constant attention to Jokcs’ car, which evidently even appears in his porno films, and to which Amnon makes sex one late evening after watching a performance of the star’s primary porno on-line.

     His boss, obsessed with his own memories, attempts to convince his worker that the car is not worth the wealthy porn star’s attention. As he states, “If you have enough money, you can forget what you want.”

     But Amnon, by this time is so thoroughly involved with the mythos of his porn star figure and his car that there is no turning back, as he finally brings the auto back to life. Moreover, in a late-night fantasy or reality—we have no ability to determine which it is—Jokcs, (or is it someone else who Amnon has met?) joins him in the auto for an incredible fuck. Whether it’s the porn figure, another friend, or an imaginative fantasy, it doesn’t truly matter. Amnon has experienced complete satisfaction and he has totally accepted his gay existence which he has needed to hide in the redneck garage world in which he lives.

     Alas, and more than slightly terrifying, the wealthy porn star never returns for the car, and despite its beauty and, despite Amnon’s detailed attention to its refurbishment, it is sent away to be crushed as a piece of rejected rubbish—of course, in that act, representing as well the society’s constriction and total destruction of Amnon’s experiences or even his sexual possibilities.

     Without any intention of ill-well or an obvious homophobic reaction, Amnon’s boss and friends have more than tortured the young mechanic; they have crushed the very life out of him—or at least the car which symbolized his sexual fantasies.

      I have long recommended Israeli films as being some of the most powerful and innovative of current LGBTQ+ movies. This is another example of the powerful approach they take to the issues which are difficult without their religious-centered society.

 

Los Angeles, January 27, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2024).

Tim Burton | Big Eyes / 2014

identity theft

by Douglas Messerli

 

Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski (screenplay), Tim Burton (director) Big Eyes / 2014

 

If there was ever a serious case of identity theft—yet involving no stolen credit cards, social security documents, or captured bank accounts—it is the case of Margaret Ulbrich (Amy Adams) who we first see as a woman with a child on route from the collapse of an unhappy marriage, which a voiceover, rather smugly reminds us, “Women just didn’t leave their husbands in those days.” She hardly gets settled into a new life in San Francisco working as painter in a furniture manufacturing plant before she meets and falls in love with the obviously caddish Walter Keane (a sleazily charming Christopher Waltz) and, threatened by her former husband with the probability of being an unfit mother, decides to marry him, one of the early clues that Margaret is an extraordinarily naive woman, desperately seeking for something or someone to believe in.

     Before she can even adjust to the new marriage, he has stolen the two things she loves most in her life: her daughter and her art. He steals away the child not through paying any unusual attention to her, but by challenging the young girl’s memory of her mother and severing their relationship as he puts Margaret to work at creating the saucer-eyed nymphets that dominate her art, which he quickly grabs away by taking the credit for creating, insisting that the Keane signature with which the married Margaret now signs her work, is his, while hissing out to her calm her demurrals that “lady art doesn’t sell.”

    Walter, who has long pretended to be a painter, it turns out, cannot even paint by the numbers; although we are told he has survived by being a real estate agent, we are also given no evidence of his skills in that profession. The only thing he appears to be brilliant at is conjuring up schemes which require larger and larger lies. True, his expertise in drawing attention to Margaret’s hackneyed work is something close to genius: even before Warhol and the numerous others who would soon depict ordinary everyday objects such as a soup can in their art and sell that work through some of the same advertising methods of that soup company, Walter was able to sell his wife’s kitschy paintings by giving them away to famous celebrities (such as Joan Crawford), reproducing their images in posters and postcards, and plying those images of images in the very stores which sold those cans full of soup.

     With the help of a local newspaper writer working on celebrity columns, the shyster Keane was able to somehow get front cover newspaper, television, and radio attention for a product that the noted art critic John Canady (played here by the always watchable Terence Stamp) proclaimed as being “atrocious.” Despite the cynicism of other local art gallerists to the contrary, is it any wonder that Walter desired to take some of the credit for creating the art itself?

      But Walter wanted all the credit, turning his wife into a virtual slave, who, hidden away for hours each day, created closets and closets of the stuff. Perhaps even more importantly, the work she was pouring her heart into was not precisely what one might imagine as the best definition of “art.” Burton’s film, presumably, would like to argue otherwise, hinting that its creators would like its audience to engage in such questions as “who decides what’s good or bad?” and, as with issues such as Warhol argues, “how can anything so beloved by so many be anything but good?” The filmmakers even proffer the possibility, in their often inane declarations, that Margaret was a sort of pre-feminist, willing in the end, to fight to get her own name and identity back.

     The problem, however, is not that she painted doe-eyed, saddened gamin because—hint hint—she too felt so terribly sad—but that she painted figures that looked somewhat human beings without identity themselves: their only claim for existence being their big, empty eyes.

     If Margaret had her identity stolen through her art, so too had she created an art that, although imminently recognizable, had no identity itself. Every gamin, be it boy or girl, dressed as a harlequin or in Hawaiian garb, playing with a dog or simply moping around a darkened corner, is precisely like every other one of its kind: a thing (unrecognizable ultimately as a depiction of a human being) of horrifically large peepers.

     Why unsophisticated US consumers were so attracted to these monstrous figures—monstrous, when we recall that that word is derived from meanings that express a “warning” or “demonstration”—that point to one thing only, their unnaturally enlarged eyes, is inexplicable. One might almost be tempted to argue that it expresses either immense sentimentality of post-war US culture (“aren’t these unidentifiable interplanetary figures absolutely adorable?”) or, possibly, the postwar adult generation’s purposeful goal of terrifying their children the way the war had terrorized them. Fortunately, my parents preferred rustic rural scenes and faux Monets to cover our suburban house halls!

      It should come as no surprise that the only art historical reference Margaret makes mention of is her admiration for Modigliani, who painted exceptionally elongated necks? For her art clearly represents, much as it did for her gold-digging husband, merely a gimmick rather than an engagement to comprehend something within the world or one self. 

     It is also absolutely predictable that even when Margaret does succeed in regaining her name, she gives over her life once more to a force bigger than her, the religion of the Jehovah’s Witnesses—who firmly believe in a patriarchal-based society in which abortion, marriage outside the religion, homosexuality, and even political involvement with the world around them is a sin. They can drink (as everyone in this film does—heavily), and they can sue.

     And it’s hardly surprising that a film devoted to the abolishment of what makes someone different from someone else, should ultimately lose its own identity, hammering down its subjects with simple-minded prescriptions of humankind. Amy Adams does her best to reveal a real being beneath the meek and nearly speechless Margaret by expressing through facial and other body gestures a whole range of internalized tensions. Waltz is nearly perfect at playing the Jekyll and Hyde alterations of charmer and abuser. But these roles, like the nasty hiss of Canady’s proclamations, are so one-dimensional that even these talented actors have a difficult time in showing us anything to care about.

    Burton, for his part, has become so trapped in his simplified notion of the 1950s suburban world—a period which hardly he can be said to have himself experienced since he was born in 1958—that his movies are all beginning to look alike: certainly, we’ve seen that tract-house settings with which this movie begins in works such as Ed Wood and Edward Scissorshand, And I am, admittedly, wearying a bit with the director’s vision of artists as alienated and suffering weirdos. Yet it’s hard to deny the visual beauty of his San Francisco and its environs, brushing them with a smear of gold that I haven’t seen since Hitchcock’s Vertigo.

     But the only vertiginous sensation one might feel in Burton’s film is expressed in the artist’s own distress in observing her large eyes being pasted across the faces of everyone she meets in a local supermarket.

    

Los Angeles, April 21, 2015

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2015).

James W. Horne | Yoo-Hoo / 1932

escapes from the perverted culture

by Douglas Messerli

 

George Stevens and J. A. Howe (screenplay), James W. Horne (director) Yoo-Hoo / 1932

 

With the obvious exceptions of animated cartoons, travelogues, and news reels, the 1930s did not particularly mine the form so popular in the first two decades of the 20th century, the short film. There were, however, a few short films such as the very likeable work, directed by James W. Horne, from 1932, Yoo-Hoo, just 20-minutes in length, starring the memorable character actor James Gleason.

     But even this short film, influenced by its time, begins with a wonderful pansy event. The film begins with Jimmy Gleason working on a telephone line, one of the cables blocking the desert highway.  A truck pulls up to the cable and honks its horn, forcing the grouchy Gleason to shout out his complaints, “All right, keep your shirt on, you’ll get by.”

      The driver does not seem pleased with the lineman’s pronouncements, honking again, and turning Gleason into an even grumpier worker. “Oh, you’re gonna be that way, are you?”

      The drive exits the truck and begins to pull on the line, Gleason shimmying down the pole. As Gleason readies to duke it out, the burly driver (Billy Gilbert) opens his mouth to speak in a high, effeminate voice, “Pleaaase! I merely wanted to get by. I’m in a hurry.” Gleason, realizing that he’s merely dealing with a pansy, mugs in imitation, as the driver, staring back with a smile of appreciation and flirtation, drives away, his name I. M. Sweet being revealed on the back of his truck.

      In any other movie, the film would move on to its far more important heterosexual concerns. But this film continues in a strange trajectory that involves issues of child abuse and, from some perspectives I am sure, even a kind of pedophilia.

      In the very next frame, we see a mean couple shouting out their anger about an escaped boy, and a moment later we see the boy, Rooster (Bobby ‘Wheezer’ Hutchins), running and hiding under a drop cloth left beside Gleason’s truck. The angry man (Frank Austin), at first seeming to be the boy’s father, demands to know if Gleason has seen “a little rat around here, a boy.” Gleason hasn’t a clue what the man is talking about.

      But in the next moment he discovers the boy hiding under his canvas, the nasty adult offering him now $10 if he finds him, and quickly changing it to $15. What we quickly discover is that this despicable man is not the boy’s father but the head of an farm that is paid to keep orphan boys, most of whom, as Rooster later tells us, have already escaped the regular beatings and other forms of abuse they are forced to suffer.*

      Observing the boy’s wounds on his body—Rooster even willing to show him those on his ass, but Gleason backing away from such sexually explicit evidence—Gleason absconds with the boy, taking him to his own apartment. He introduces the boy to his female neighbor, Anita (Antia Garvin), demands the kid take a shower, and gives up his bed to the boy, only to discover in the morning that Rooster has crawled into the couch in which he spent the night to cuddle up to the older man.

     This little film turns out to be one of Gleason’s best films, as he quickly reveals his love for the child, despite his characteristic grouchiness. And in the end Antia and Gleason even determine to marry to keep the child safely in their hands as opposed to the inquisitive detectives.

     Yoo-Hoo is actually a lovely greeting to a world that freely and with good cause broke the rules of the early Depression morality, allowing us to say hello to other moral perspectives until it all came crumbling down in the restrictions on film established in 1934. Yet strangely, despite this film’s interesting revelations, its moral heart offers up an escape from the perversions of the general culture as if defines them.

 

*The state offered up abandoned children and young juvenile offenders to farmers even through the 1950s, basically enslaving the children into labor on Midwestern and farms in other regions. My playwright friend John O’Keefe describes just such a life in his play Reapers describes his own experiences as just such a child, including some homosexual engagement. He once told me that he had been sexually abused as a young child on several occasions.

 

Los Angeles, January 27, 2024

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 2024).

Mabel Normand | Mabel's Blunder / 1914

the schemer

by Douglas Messerli

 

Mabel Normand (screenwriter and director) Mabel’s Blunder / 1914

 

After a hard and long year of filmmaking, actress Mabel Normand asked her director Mack Sennett for some vacation time in order to travel back East. Instead, he awarded her the responsibility to write and direct her own movie, a chance which she simply couldn’t pass up.  That 1914 film titled Mabel’s Blunder is a long forgotten but delightful comedy of office love, jealousy, and cross-dressing mix-ups which ends with two sets of brothers and sisters along with one of the set’s father—all of them involved in mistaken romances.

 

    It begins rather simply with a young secretary (Normand) having fallen in love with her office companion, Harry (Harry McCoy). They have recently been engaged and they’re still admiring the ring he recently put on her finger. However, she first has to contend with her boss (Charles Bennett), who also is attracted to her, and who just happens to be Harry’s father.

     The boss calls her in for dictation, flirting with her in the process and demands she stay late to type up the letter. Meanwhile Harry has been asked to read and answer a pile of his father’s correspondence.

     When the boss leaves, Mabel decides she’s going to leave early as well, but in the process sees a woman (Eva Nelson) about to enter a private door to the boss’s office where Harry is now working. Amazed by what she witnesses, she startles the stranger who decides to enter through the front office door, the secretary unsure of what to make of the late afternoon visit.

 

    Mabel pauses, debating whether or not to return to the office before deciding against it, but finally being unable resist, returns to peek in to see what has happened to the unexpected intruder. What she see’s outrages her, Harry holding the woman in his arms in what appears to be the middle of a kiss.

     Throughout this film, Normand keeps looking back on her finger to remind her of her love while at the same time generally moving forward with compulsive actions of jealousy that might make the later Lucille Ball seem to be an amateur schemer by comparison.

      At that very moment on the street below Billy Bronx (Charley Chase), Harry’s longtime friend, pulls up, calling over to another young man sitting in a car just outside the office building (perceiving him evidently as someone’s chauffeur) to ask him to deliver a message to Harry, which we later discover reads “I am giving a party at La Ramada. Be sure you come.”

      The “delivery boy” just happens to be Mabel’s brother (Al St. John), probably having arrived to pick up his sister. Observing her peeking into the keyhole, he teases her and explains that he’s been asked to pass on a message to Harry.

       Delivering it up, he observes that Harry is delighted with the invite, elated to be able to take his new lady friend to the event.

        Hearing the news, Mabel quickly cooks up a scheme. She and her brother change costumes as she, pretending to be a driver, chauffeurs Harry and the woman to La Ramada, all the while attempting to comprehend the outrageous relationship between her lover and the unknown woman. Dressed as a male driver she dare not enter the La Ramada grounds, but stands outside, her anger growing with every passing moment.

        Inside the outdoor restaurant grove, Harry has introduced his woman companion to all the men, who immediately turn their attentions toward her, including Billy. Billy’s companion, in turn, grows also jealous about the intruder that she leaves the event to commiserate her fears with the waiting Mabel dressed in male garb.

       Meanwhile, Harry’s father returns to the office, discovering his secretary, actually Mabel’s brother in her clothing, still there and invites her to accompany him for dinner at, where else, La Ramada. To protect his sister, the brother puts on a veil and joins the elderly man.

       Back at the party, Billy misses his companion, discovering her with the commiserating arm of a driver (Mabel) on her shoulder. Outraged, Billy begins to slug it out with the chauffeur. Harry and others soon hear the fracas and rushing forward watch the fight; but when Billy pulls off his opponent’s hat, Mabel’s long hair pours out from underneath, Harry recognizing his lover, shocked by her presence as he suddenly realizes that it was she who drove him to the event. Stumbling back into the restaurant grove the entire party now encounter Harry’s father sitting with an unknown woman. Upon seeing his secretary standing before him, the boss unmasks her brother, as Mabel points to the villain of the piece who is now apparently delighted to encounter the elder man in their presence as she runs to hug and kiss him as well. Beyond words, Mabel attempts to make some meaning of the confusing situations as Harry solves the riddles with three words: “She’s my sister.”

     Normand’s work is a rather visually and narratively complex tale for the early talkies, revealing her evident talent not only for acting but writing and directing, later applying those talents to scripts in which she acted with Charles Chaplin and Fatty Arbuckle.

      Normand’s career suffered, however, after she became involved in two murders. In 1922 actor and director William Desmond Taylor was found dead in his bungalow, shot in the back while wearing a locket with a picture of Normand inside. He had long been in love with her, having attempted to help her kick her cocaine habit. Moreover, she was the last person to have seen him the night of the murder. Eventually, however, she was found innocent of that crime, although the real murderer was never uncovered.

       In 1924 Charles S. Dines was shot by Normand’s chauffeur using her pistol. Because of these events and a recurrence of tuberculosis, Normand retired from the screen in 1926 and died four years later at the age of 37.

 

Los Angeles, April 18, 2021

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (April 2021).