Ulrike Ottinger | Freak Orlando / 1981

beyond explanation

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ulrike Ottinger (screenplay and director) Freak Orlando / 1981

 

Like most of Ulrike Ottinger’s early works, and particularly her “Berlin Trilogy,” of which Freak Orlando is the second installment, the director centers her work a visual circus of life, completely surrounding the viewer with performative scenes that luxuriate in visual sensuality and, at many times, are a shock to the senses, particularly since Freak City where the Orlando of this voyage—a variation of the figure having previously appeared in the director’s Laocoön & Sons (1975) and Madame X: An Absolute Ruler (1978)—has wound up is a world of religious fundamentalism and cruelty not unlike the Inquisition.

     One might almost describe the work as a kind of camp horror-film that alternates with scenes of gentle love and tenderness—even if, as in Madame X’s world, the later don’t last very long. The work, indeed, is filled with contradictions. Clearly a feminist-influenced piece, as in most of her cinema Ottinger purposely frustrates her feminist admirers by creating a nebulous moral compass that itself points at various moments in different directions. And the lack of a clear declaration of values as opposed to the total wonderment of difference no matter how loathsome it might become sometimes serves as a block to even the most opened-eyed liberal. Despite her work’s obvious political intentions, time and again Ottinger refuses to make declare moral judgement.

     In her essay, “Ulrike Ottinger’s Strange Subversions,” Adina Glickstein nicely summarizes some of these issues while describing important perspectives of the film:

 

“I can never set aside the sense that films like Madame X and Freak Orlando take advantage of the bodies that have been coded as different, can never parse whether they work with or against the oppression that this perceived difference catalyzed, in Ottinger’s time as well as our own. To offer a good-faith reading, these films could easily be summed up as a celebration of difference, calls for solidarity among the exploited. There’s a feminist gesture in Ottinger’s rejection of straightforward narrative and form, refusing to position the women who populate her films in line with the cinematographically-constructed demands of “to-be-looked-at-ness” that, even by the 1970s and ‘80s, dominated mass-cultural representations of women onscreen. Yet that same disavowal, in denying any narrative framing that might elucidate the films’ underlying politics, can make them feel, at times, more like pageants—trotting out the “strange” and “zany” to an indeterminate end.

     The second installment in the Berlin trilogy, Freak Orlando, is one such showboat of spectacle. The titular “freaks”—gay men, bearded women, people with dwarfism and other physical disabilities—cavort through bleak West German landscapes that resist placement in space or time, moving from mystical department stores to coal fields and fairgrounds. BDSM leather daddies are elevated to the level of righteous religious self-flagellants, their procession punctuating the film with ecstatic grunts as they wander between sooty industrial scenes. Freak Orlando is a raucous celebration of extremity, a cavalcade of strangeness unburdened by narrative constraints. Nothing about it wants for a storyline, but perhaps in part because its form is so arcane, its ethical implications are also completely confounding. Is it a jubilant invitation to embrace divergence? Or rather, does it come across an uncritical caricature, its depiction of diversity less satire than ridicule? For all the ways in which Ottinger’s early filmography feels outside of time, it also telegraphs a sense of ethnographic excess that is distinctly of its era.”

 

     In the context of it being a spectacle or a series of inchoate performances, Freak Orlando does not provide a coherent plot. Instead, Ottinger divides her work up, in manner not unlike Andrei Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev, into episodes; in Freak Orlando there are five.

      I’ll briefly summarize these episodes in order to provide a broad sense of a work that must be seen in order to make any sense.

 

     The First Episode consists of a character named Orlando Zyklopa (Magdalena Montezuma) who arrives at the Freak City gates, pauses before a naked buried torso (a kind of Mother Earth-Venus figure all in one), and enters, soon working with her own seven dwarf-shoemakers in a futuristic shopping mall, in what appears to be an instant shoe repair that primarily destroys the footwear while stamping them as her creation with a huge anvil. The customers grow angry and she and her dwarfs are chased away by the crowds and the store manager, Herbert Zeus (Herbert Zeus). The dwarfs, two intertwined dancers who reappear throughout the work (Claudio Pantoja and Hiro Uchiyama) make their way to a forest where they hide themselves in a tree which becomes a kind Trojan Horse. Soon after as they make their way to another location they discover a sacred stylite to whom a group of city flagellants, who look like crazed Tom of Finland leather boys, also make their annual pilgrimage. But just before their arrival, the stylite begins to move, naming Orlando as his successor, before he falls to his death. The citizens of the tourist spot insist that she must immediately replace him since the BDSM boys travel there each year just to see him, spending a great deal of money of their decadent pleasures after. When she refuses, the villagers of the holy shrine murder her.

      In the Second Episode the former Orlando Zyklopa, is miraculously reborn as Orlando Orlanda on the steps of a basilicum of the Middle Ages, a child with two heads who enchants the crowds by singing a lovely two-part harmony. The two heads, however, are not always in agreement, basically taking opposite viewpoints, the one more dominate scolding the other. Their acrobatic dancers (again Pantoja and Uchiyama) are taken prisoner by the flagellants, locked away in a cone shaped metal contraption that looks much like the dunce caps which are used to punish those who stray, mostly women. Orlando Orlanda follows the flagellants along with the famous dwarf painter Galli to the convent of Wilgeforte wherein lives the bearded woman saint. Orlando again undergoes a metamorphosis, dressed in new clothes in the department store warehouse, with Galli painting the portrait of the transformation.

      The Third Episode tells of Orlando Capricho, now captivated by a special travel offer made by the Freak City department store, but learns to distrust her mirror image. She falls into the hands the Spanish Inquisition persecutors and the 18th century, and locked in cages with other significant figures of the day, barely escapes, deported with other great men and women, including Galileo and Einstein.

 

     Now Mr. Orlando, he is engaged at the entrance of a psychiatric ward by freak-artistes of a side-show traveling throughout the country, headed by Helena Müller (Delphine Seyrig, who also plays several other roles throughout the work). Orlando falls in love with the left side of Siamese-twin sisters, Lena, the other named Leni. Together they have a baby, but Leni, distraught over Lena’s having found a lover, becomes an alcoholic, the two fighting day and night, Lena not being able to live her life due to her sister’s alcoholism. The baby constantly cries, and Orlando, trying to stop their intense bickering finally shoots Leni dead, obviously killing his beloved Lena as well. The head of the troupe is now forced to sentence Mr. Orlando to death in compliance with the age-old tradition of artistes.

      In the final Fifth Episode, Mrs. Orlando, called Freak Orlando because of her special orientation, has become an entertainer, touring with four Playboy-like “bunnies” (Jackie Raynal, Jill Lucas, Vivian Lucas, and Beate Kopp), a special attraction of shopping centers and family celebrations, etc. Now host to the annual Festival of Ugliness, she performs before a party of handicapped veterans (the former BDSM boys) and others, crowning the winner with a trophy inscribed: “Limping is the way of the crippled.” The award this year goes to a passing traveling salesman who has not even entered as a contestant. The festival ends, and Orlando’s story is over, as she makes her way, limping, out of Freak City, pausing once again before the nude, half buried living statue.

     As I suggested, my commentary explains nothing. Ottinger’s images are in a world of their own, calling up mythological and historical characters (Narcissus, Zeus, Hermes, Janus and the Cyclops for example) as well as figures and scenes from a vast array of cinema history including, of course, Tod Browning’s Freaks, Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Luis Buñuel’s Simon of the Desert, Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, Federico Fellini’s Satyricon, Pier Paolo Passolini’s Salò and Pigsty, and numerous other works. Oddly, the film has a great deal in common with Mel Brooks’ History of the World, Part I, released in the very same year.

 

    But Ottinger clearly draws on her own nearly endless imagination for the largest part of her totally engaging tableaux, with figures you cannot easily forget even if they often seem beyond comprehension. Who might have imagined the scene where. as Orlando Capricho is dressed in a gown featuring Christmas Tree lights, the bearded saint of Wilgeforte nailed to a cross sings an aria of her family troubles while acting out the entire holy trinity: her father, her mother, and herself? She is accompanied by an acolyte who holds on a pole before her at all times a martini, a bit like the water served up a sponge to Christ by a guard.  Or a dinner party where the naked guests, wearing blindfolds must reach in through barbed wire for their drinks to toast their goodbyes to freedom? Or, finally, a dance routine with the Tom of Finland boys (Luc Alexandeer, Jochen Benner, Klaus Dechert, Polo Espinoza, Dan van Husen, Reinhard v. d. Marwitz, Jörg Matthey, Stefan Menche, Konrad Regber, Peter Schmittinger, and Emile Snytscheuvet) on crutches? Only Ottinger could conjure up these scenes.

     This is a world of queer folk, all outsiders who are unable to fit into any other world but their own. Or perhaps all the others simply can’t fit into their various societies. According to Ottinger, it appears, a freak is just someone whom the others in the neighborhood can’t explain.

 

Los Angeles, December 1, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2022).

Ernst Lubitsch | Die Austernprinzessin (The Oyster Princess) / 1919

the spoiled brat’s stomp

by Douglas Messerli

 

Hanns Kräly and Ernst Lubitsch (writers), Ernst Lubitsch (director) Die Austernprinzessin (The Oyster Princess) / 1919

 

 Ernst Lubitsch’s wonderful 1919 silent film comedy, The Oyster Princess, begins with the image of the comically overweight “Oyster King” (Victor Janson) puffing on a gargantuan cigar, attended by numerous costumed patsies who blow his nose, wipe his mouth, and whisk away the ashes of his smoking consumption while the “King” dictates to another army of secretaries and typists. Everything about this wealthy American, his “palace” of a home, his appetites, and most notably, his disdain is preposterously enormous.

     We soon learn that perhaps the most outrageous outsized product of this man’s estate is his daughter, Ossi (the noted German movie star Ossi Oswalda), who, Mister Quaker is quietly told, is throwing a fit in her room, whereupon the camera shifts to a room littered with broken pottery, furniture and other objects she has apparently been tossing into the air in anger. Ossi, clearly a spoiled problem child, has just read of the marriage of the Shoe Polish King’s daughter to a count, and is furious that she has been outdone. Why hasn’t her father found her a husband of the same rank?

     Quaker, who obviously has never denied his daughter anything, calls upon the matchmaker, Seligson (Max Kronert) who, after failing to provide an appropriate companion for a tall and plain woman client, suggests a Prince, Nucki (Harry Liedtke), as Ossi’s husband. Off he goes to the Prince’s abode, where we quickly perceive that Nucki, despite his royal heritage, is suffering hard financial times, as he and his valet, who whom he seems to be living in a kind of roommate/sexual partner life, Josef (Julius Falkenstein) wash and hang up their meager clothing to dry. Seligson’s knock on the door results in a scramble to convert their rundown flat into a place appropriate for a prince. In high comic mockery, the two quickly hoist a chair atop a table to create a ridiculous throne into which Nucki climbs as Seligson enters (after much delay) to suggest the match.

    Nucki, it is quickly revealed—although faced with poverty—is nearly as spoiled as Ossi, and will not deign it worthy of his attention to check out the Oyster King’s proposition, but instead dresses up his valet in his own suit and sends him off to check the girl out in his stead.              

     At the Quaker mansion, Josef is also left waiting, the master having retired for his afternoon nap, and his daughter, attended by a legion of maids, determines to bathe and be given a massage before dressing and attending to the visitor. So begins what one might describe as the first major event of this terpsichorean-dominated picture, as the impatient replacement-suitor, quite insanely begins connecting up the vast mosaic patterns of the floor in a series of movements that can only be described as a kind of formal dance. In fact, one might describe his situation as being the central problem facing nearly all the figures in this satire: faced with such vast emptiness of thought and activity, they seek out ways to engage with one another less with an intent to communicate than with patterned movement.

     Indeed, even before Josef can explain who he is and why he has come, Ossi—although clearly disappointed with his appearance and inability to express himself—has swept him up into her own hurry to get hitched. While her father continues in his self-induced coma, Ossi has trundled the Prince’s representative off to a minister who marries them, much like a Las Vegas marriage drive-in, before he can blink out a response.

    Instantaneously, Quaker arranges for a massive wedding wherein armies of servants prepare a banquet that might have been the envy of Petronius’ Trimalchio. At the dinner, the delighted Josef eats and drinks himself, perhaps for the first time in his life, into a sated drunkenness, while everyone else suddenly is infected with, what the title boards describe as “a fox-trot epidemic.”

     In this beautifully conceived scene all guests, kitchen workers, servants, and even the orchestra conductor (Kurt Bois, who often played shady gay characters such as the pickpocket in Casablanca)—who busy with his hands with his directing baton, dances by jutting out his behind—are all suddenly caught up in a frenzy of the music. This obviously anal-focused scene alone is worth watching Lubitsch’s film, for it realizes yet another series of images that we encounter in the post-war German art of the Weimar period in the works of George Grosz, Max Beckmann, and Otto Dix—along with a dash of Josephine Baker! Nothing like it occurs in Hollywood movies.

     After the party, Ossi sends the drunken Josef to bed in room separate from her own.

     Meanwhile, friends of Prince Nucki’s have arrived at his flat, and insist he join them in a night a revelry. And while Ossi sleeps, Nucki celebrates, arriving in a park in the early morning where, in another dance-like cinematic structure, each of his friends fall, one by one, into exhausted friezes on empty park benches. Only Nucki moves on in a drunken shuffle, arriving, by accident, near the Quaker mansion at the very moment when Ossi is engaged with her friends in a meeting of the Multi-Millionaires’ Daughters Association Against Dipsomania. 

    At that very moment Nucki is picked up and thrown into their midst as a would-be candidate for their organization’s activities, which quickly appears to have little to do with curing the sufferers but involves the discovery of attractive young drunks.

     The charming Nucki immediately attracts all these desperate women, who rush forward to claim him. But Ossi will have none of that, insisting, despite the fact that she has another husband stored away in a nearby room to settle their differences in another kind of formal ritual, very close to dance, a boxing match, something that again challenges the standard notions of gender.

     One by one, Ossi knocks out her opponents and wins Nucki as her lover, at the very same moment when Josef has awakened and, peeking through her keyhole, discovers her in bed with another man. Rushing off to find his father-in-law, he soon returns and enters the room to confront the stranger; but when he discovers her would-be lover is Nucki, proclaims the two already married, since Josef has married Ossi in the Prince’s name! 

    The wedding party that follows is, for the first time in this film, a sensibly-sized affair, with only Ossi, Nucki, and Quaker pontificating at a small dinner table. In the middle of a conversation the lovers sneak off, and when Quaker discovers their disappearance, he follows, also peering into the keyhole while declaring, for the first time in this comic romp, that he is finally “impressed.”

     Love has found a way to bring an end, finally, to the infectiously queer romps of these clearly mad light-trippers.

     A satire about wealth and power mixed with a large dash of what would later be described as a screwball comedy, Lubitsch’s work very much looks forward to films such as It Happened One Night and My Man Godfrey, but at a much more openly multi-sexual level.

 

Los Angeles, May 3, 2015

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (May 2105).

Spencer Williams | The Blood of Jesus / 1941

testing the waters

by Douglas Messerli

 

Spencer Williams (screenwriter and director) The Blood of Jesus / 1941

 

Although it is a nationally recognized treasure, and selected for inclusion in The National Film Registry, Spencer Williams’ 1941 religious pic, The Blood of Jesus remains a pretty amateur affair, with some cast members missing their lines, others being slow on the pick-up, and even the singers, both Reverend R. L. Robinson’s Heavenly Choir and the supposedly professional jazz singer hitting some definitely sour notes with, in some cases, faces to match. In fact, it’s not much fun at all in this small rural religious community in which the definite “saved” Sister Jenkins (Juanita Riley) and sister Ellerby (Reather Hardeman) gossip with greedy delight and most of the community is not very imaginatively prayed over. The church in which this film’s action begins is a far cry from the theatrically-inspired Alleluia choruses of Black Gospel singing or the rhythms of antiphonal declarations and responses as presented in Faulkner’s works or even in a more recent film of rural Southern church-going depicted in The Apostle.

      Made of a budget of just $5,000, its writer-director Spencer Williams—later known for playing Andrew Hogg Brown on the Amos‘n’Andy radio show—didn’t have enough even to shoot new scenes for his vision of the heavenly gates—borrowing instead from images of an Italian filming of L’Inferno—let alone the skill or possibility of properly setting and lighting his picture. In short, the film is often crude and rudimentary.

     Nonetheless, the simple tale about the damned and the saved, displays a simple charm that often appears in outsider art. Moreover, in its gentle mix of the deadly serious and the joyfully comic, it documents a way of life that was perhaps already over by the time the film was made. And particularly in its numerous renditions of standard religious songs such as “All God’s Children Got Shoes,” “Amazing Grace,” “Go Down, Moses,” “Good News!” “I’ve Heard of a City Called Heaven,” and “Run, Child, Run,” Williams’ work can almost be seen as testament to Southern black music and culture.

      Williams, playing Razz, the no-good, Sunday-poacher husband of the beautiful and spiritually blessed Martha (Cathryn Caviness) are convincing as a loving couple moving in opposite directions, she, quite obviously to heaven, and he…well we know his destination by his absence from the film’s church-going and baptising events. The good-natured Razz almost sends his wife to heaven when his gun accidentally goes off. And the rest of the film centers on Martha—or least her attractive spirit—as she his beckoned off by an angel (Rogenia Golthwaite) and targeted by Satan (James B. Jones) through the handsome, salesman-like tempter Judas Green (Frank H. McClennan).

     At the crossroads between Hell and Zion Martha fortunately strays from her destined path by visiting the nearby city, filled with nightclubs and bordellos, where we get to see, much to our delight, an acrobatic dancer, a jazz singer, along with the close-dancing couples of the bordello. Mostly the misled Martha simply sits back and smiles; the city is clearly more entertaining than the preachifying country life. But when she’s hired as a bordello dancer (whose jobs appear to be more in the line of robbing the customer’s wallets than in providing them with sex), she hangs back, inexplicably staring for a long while out of the upstairs window. Ordered to enter into action, she quickly dons a new dress and attempts to escape, followed by the road house denizens who believe her to be a fleeing robber.

       At the crossroads, Satan has set up a jazz band upon a pickup truck, but has no power over Martha since she has fallen along the wayside of the road to Zion. There the blood of Christ drips across her face and she is truly saved, brought back to life within her own bedroom where Razz, now completely regretful of his sinful ways, sits in despair. The angel returns to bless their new reunion and their clearly religiously committed future lives.

       The fact that this was one of the few all-Black films in a time Hollywood used Black actors primarily as maids, butlers, and drivers, of course, gives this work a great deal of significance, despite its often clumsy story-telling. But what is truly amazing is just how similar this straight-forward fable is to the far more sophisticated all-black film directed by a young Vincente Minnelli just three two years later, Cabin in the Sky. Indeed, one might almost suggest that Williams’ film tested the waters, so to speak, for the lure of black and white audiences to both the religious subject and the racial makeup of its actors, which ultimately broke down the color barriers for artists such as Lena Horne, Ethel Waters, Eddie Anderson, and soon after, Eartha Kit and Sidney Poitier.

 

Los Angeles, June 8, 2015

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2015).

 

 

Catherine Breillat | Barbe bleue (Bluebeard) / 2009

a lonely salome

by Douglas Messerli

 

Catherine Breillat (screenwriter and director) Barbe bleue (Bluebeard) / 2009

 

In the 1950s, two young sisters sneak into an abandoned attic to check out the space, play games, and read their favorite storytales, including the gruesome Charles Perreault fable, Bluebeard. Marie-Anne (Lola Giiovanetti), the eldest, is a highly sensitive and frightened child, who, although having been charged to care for her sister, Catherine (Marilou Lopes-Benite), is very much controlled by the precocious younger girl, who reads the tale to the elder.

    The girls’ storytelling alternates with the tale of two other sisters, Marie-Catherine (Lola Créton) and Anne (Daphné Baiwir), living in 1697. The fairy-tale sisters are attending a private school fun by nuns when they are called to the office of the Mother Superior, who tells them their father has just been killed and, since the family will no longer be able to pay for their educations, sends them immediately home. On the voyage home, we gradually discover that the younger of these two is, like the sister of the 1950s, is strongly independent of mind and acutely aware of the economic and social future with which the children will now be faced. It is an unjust world, where monsters like the infamous Bluebeard, rumored to have murdered his previous wives, live in enormous castles, while these poor girls, with dowries and now deeply in debt, must either submit to becoming nuns or join a court as ladies-in-waiting, neither of which perceive as viable futures. Here too, the elder is obedient and religious much like her mother, a pious girl, who, despite her great beauty, is conventional in her thoughts and emotions; the younger sister, Marie-Catherine, on the other hand, is determined to live in a castle just like Bluebeard’s, and chides her mother for forcing them into black clothing and penitent behavior—particularly as many of the family’s possessions are being taken away as payment.   

   It is only a matter of time before an emissary of Bluebeard shows up to the house to invite the financially strapped daughters to a party at the castle. From the invitees, the overweight and ugly Bluebeard (Dominique Thomas) will choose a new wife and give financial support to her family. With no dowries and a life of poverty ahead, the mother and her children have little choice but to attend the affair, while secretly hoping, perhaps, that they may be spared from being the subject of his attentions.

  The forceful outsider, Marie-Catherine, however sees it as an opportunity to obtain all the things she has missed in life. Moving away the other celebrants, she attracts Bluebeard’s attention, and in conversations with him, in which she expresses no abhorrence for the man who recognizes that almost everyone sees him as an ogre. He determines to marry her. The young girl is simply delighted to have a new dress—her first—made for her alone and, after a quick ceremony in the cathedral, she enters the castle of her dreams.

    Although willful, the girl seems, as Bluebeard himself describes her, as innocent as a dove, but with the self-assuredness of a hawk. Having agreed not to sleep with her until she becomes of age, Bluebeard has prepared a small bed for her in front of his own. But she refuses to serve as his connubial lap-dog, and demands her room—a very small one, however—again something she has never had before. She forces the monster to never enter her room without her permission (a condition, incidentally, made also by Claudette Colbert character in Bluebeards Eighth Wife, as described elsewhere in these essays); yet in the middle of the night she sneaks into his room to observe the rotund man in his sleep.

    It first appears that she has taken the upper hand in the relationship. And the girl actually appears to be happy in the company of this elderly and educated being, who shares some of his immense knowledge with her just as he appears ready to do with everything he owns. When he travels away on a long business voyage, he happily hands over the keys to every room in the house and encourages her to invite her family and friends to the castle in his absence. Marie-Catherine does so, but is seemingly caught in the arms of a young knight when Bluebeard unexpectedly returns. In fact, the girl has been telling the young man just how comfortable she is alone with Bluebeard in the castle; and soon after, she convinces the ogre that she is overjoyed at his return and pleased that they can retire once more into their own private world.

   Bluebeard, however, soon after again sets out for another business trip, once more handing over all the keys, yet this time adding another golden key to an attic room that he forbids her to enter. She promises to obey his orders, but obviously cannot resist attempting to discover what lies behind that one door. No sooner has he left, than she enters the room to discover the bodies of Bluebeard’s ex-wives hung, like carcasses of meat, upon the wall, with pools of their blood welling upon the room’s floors. Shocked and terrified by what she has discovered, she drops the key into the blood; upon leaving the room she attempts to wash the blood away, but cannot rub out its stain. While she is still attempting the clean the key, Bluebeard unexpectedly returns to find her face in pallor. As they sit down for dinner, he demands back the keys. She quickly gives up the large keys, but claims to have lost the small golden one. Forcing her to produce it, Bluebeard discovers blood upon it and condemns her to immediate death.

     Marie-Catherine pleads, unsuccessfully, for mercy, but gets only permission to spend a short time in the highest tower in order to pray. There she attempts to call up troops and family members to come to her side; but Bluebeard soon appears, ready to cut off her head with a large saber. Once again, the girl coaxes from him one more concession, that he kill her instead by stabbing her with a jeweled dagger through the heart. As Bluebeard returns to the able to retrieve the knife, arriving musketeers take over the castle, evidently killing the monster before he can kill his latest wife.

   This beautifully filmed tale alternates with the storytelling by the two young 1950s siblings. Increasingly, as the younger girl tells the story—seeming to modulate it with her own embellishments—the elder grows more and more terrified, ultimately attempting to escape from hearing Catherine’s words, and, in so doing, falls through the attic trap-door to her death. At the same moment that Marie-Anne rises to see her sister lying below, their mother comes to call them home, apparently unable to see the cause of her daughter’s tears: the other dead daughter, dressed in blue-gingham, lays below on the concrete floor.

     The film ends with Bluebeard’s wife, Marie-Catherine, stroking the head of her former husband, laid out on a platter like the pate of John the Baptist over which Salome rejoices. Suddenly these two stories seem to shift, almost as if we have discovered a new pattern in a kaleidoscope: Bluebeard’s death, which will now allow his wife to live out her life in the manner of which she has dreamed, has required the death of her timider and more pious other, the sister who has admittedly used her time and again as a scapegoat. The stronger, feminist woman of the future has won out over the meek and mild maiden of domesticity and despair. But at what cost, director Breillat seems to asks, has she achieved her victory? Might it even lead to the madness of Salome? The viewer alone must determine whether to celebrate or despair over the young girl’s lack of moral vision—or wonder whether she ever had a choice.

      If nothing else, we realize that this film is not really about the Bluebeard myth as it is about how women themselves push other women, including sisters and close friends, out of the way to get their feminist rewards. The monster, in this case, is not simply Bluebeard, but the forcible younger sister the patriarchal system has demanded she become, killing off the timid and fearful of her own gender. The focus here, accordingly, is on the women rather than the already heteronormative male-assumed world in which they are forced to live. And the monsters of this film are of their own kind, women of power but outsiders of the formerly loving society in which they were raised. Despite their power, one senses the total loneliness of both Marie-Catherine and the young Catherine of the 1950s and their angst for having had to abandon the sheltered and closed off worlds in which they were formerly entombed.

 

Los Angeles, December 22, 2009

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2009).