Louis Feuillade | Les Vampires Episode 6 – "Les Yeux Qui Fascinent" ("Hypnotic Eyes") / 1916

buried treasure

by Douglas Messerli

 

Louis Feuillade (screenwriter and director) Les Vampires Episode 6 – "Les Yeux Qui Fascinent" ("Hypnotic Eyes") / 1916

 

Although I have written about all the episodes of Louis Feuillade’s entertaining silent crime serial film lasting roughly 7 hours in full, the only sequence vaguely of interest to LGBTQ audiences is Episode 6 wherein the series’ central villain Irma Vep (Musidora) disguises herself as Viscount Guy, the son of the Grand Vampire who during their stay at the Royal Hunt Hotel in Fontainebleau has chosen the pseudonym of Count Kerlor.

 

     As anyone who has seen the full 417 minutes of Les Vampires knows, Irma Vep is of interest to gay readers simply because she is such a powerful and dominate female in the manner of Italian director Mario Roncoroni’s titular hero in Filibus, a movie released in the same year in which Feuillade’s series began. But whereas Filibus actually courts women while dressed as a male, arguing for a lesbian identity, Irma is not very convincing as Kerlor’s son, and the happenstance that she supposedly is in disguise is immensely undercut by the fact that journalist Philippe Guérande (Édouard Mathé) and his somewhat comic assistant Mazamette (Marcel Lévesque) easily recognize the young count as Irma in a theater newscast—surely one of the first instances of a film-within-the-film serving to develop the plot*—while the rival gang leader Juan-José Moréno (Fernand Herrmann), who also immediately recognizes the young viscount as Irma, eventually falls in love with her in this episode and—due to the fact that Feuillade fired the Grand Vampire (Jean Aymé) because of his consistent lateness to film-shoots— hypnotizes Irma to shoot and kill her Vampire friend.

 

     If nothing else, we know from Irma’s later marriage with the last Grand Vampire Venomous and her relationship with another Grand Vampire Satanas—clearly Les Vampire gang is sexist given that no one seems to consider choosing Irma as their leader—that Irma Vep is consistently heterosexual, as all other of the film’s figures appear to be, Mazamette even presented as a womanizer.

      In this episode the labyrinthian plot involves the fact that in the same hotel where Kerlor and his son are holed up an American couple, Mr. and Mrs. Verner are also staying. They are also using pseudonyms since it becomes apparent early on that they are really Raphael Norton and actress Ethel Florid, who have fled to Europe after Norton has robbed the American millionaire George Baldwin (a figure who appears in later episodes). Baldwin has posted a notice in the newspaper that whoever can capture the criminal(s) will be awarded the unspent amount of the loot.

     Early in “Hypnotic Eyes” Philippe and Mazamette, having bicycled into the Fontainebleau region in order to evade attention, notice before they even reach the city a man riding a full speed on horseback quite early in the morning. Climbing a nearby rock, they observe him turning off the road and carrying a small case to another rock formation before he turns back and rides off. After he has left, Mazamette explores that other rock formation, finding in a hole the small carrying case, inside of which they later discover are the $200,000 in banknotes that Norton (now pretending to be Werner) has stolen.

     By solving the puzzle and reclaiming the cash so very early in the episode, the director has resolved most the intrigue of his story, and the rest of this segment is dedicated almost entirely to the complex intrigues of both gangs, Les Vampires and Moreno’s slightly less brutal villains, as they attempt to track down the missing funds.

 

     Whereas Les Vampires simply engage the hotel guests, including the Werners, with the histories of Count Kerlor’s father—which involves another film-within-a-film whose sole purpose is to divert attention—while Irma, dressed in her dark bat-like attire explores the Werner’s room wherein she discovers a map leading to the hidden treasure.

       Moreno exerts far more energy to obtain the same information. Hypnotizing his new female servant and dressing her up as Irma, he carries her off to Fountainebleau where, after Irma has found the map, he grabs and chloroforms her. Obtaining the map, he hands it over to his secretary pretending to be Irma, who returns to Les Vampires, passing it onto the Grand Vampire while signaling that it is dangerous to speak so as to prevent herself from having to reveal that she is a fraud. She returns to Moreno as he tosses Irma’s body out the window to his cohorts below.

      Meanwhile, given the map, the third Vampire (Miss Édith) follows it in hopes of finding the treasure, only to discover a message there that if the owner of the money should come upon this spot Philippe and Mazamette will return the cash. Moreno and his men, of course, have followed and arrest her, equally disappointed with the fact that others have beaten them to the prize. They provide her with their own message to relay back to the Grand Vampire: they have taken Irma as ransom.

      The police, summoned by Philippe and Mazamette, meanwhile search the hotel patrons, finding Norton and his girlfriend hiding in their suite and arrest them, the award money going to Mazamette who buys himself a fancy suite where he entertains his lady friends and takes interviews from news reporters.

      As I mention above, Moreno falls in love with Irma, determining not to give her up to the Grand Vampire, forcing Irma to kill him. In this episode, at least, Les Vampires are utterly foiled and lose two of their most crucial followers.

 

*One thinks immediately a far later films such as John Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate (1962) and Ulrike Ottinger’s Dorian Gray im Spiegel der Boulevardpresse (1984) in which various other media comment on the events in the film itself.

 

Los Angeles, January 21, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 2023).

George Cukor | The Women / 1939

fool’s paradise

by Douglas Messerli

 

Anita Loos and Jane Murfin (screenplay, based on the play by Clare Boothe Luce), George Cukor (director) The Women / 1939

 

It had been many years since I last George Cukor’s The Women, and I can’t say that it has entirely aged well. At many points, Clare Boothe Luce’s witty language (spruced up to fit into the Film Production Code by Anita Loos and Jane Murfin) helps the film to be still fun in a truly “bitchy” manner, particularly through the gossipy chatter of Sylvia Fowler (Rosalind Russell) and Edith Potter (Phyllis Povah) and others of Mary Haines’ (Norma Shearer) supposed friends. Sylvia has gotten news from a manicurist that Mary’s husband Stephen has been having an affair with a perfume counter clerk, Crystal Allen (Joan Crawford)—and within hours she and her friends have passed it on to one another, even gathering a kind of small scouting party to check the counter-clerk out.

 

     At moments their comments, especially those of the lesbian-like writer, Nancy Blake (Florence Nash), are brilliant, presenting a far different view of New York house-wives from any film later reaching into the 1960s. These women are not only quite independent, but—at least two of them, Mary and Peggy Day (Joan Fontaine)—are pleased with their companions. If you might have ignored Cukor’s credits, wherein he equates each of these figures with animals, you might even think that these smart women are proto-feminists. They’re certainly not stupid or passive. Nancy is even hinting that she believes her husband to be gay.

 

Sylvia Fowler: Well, heaven be praised, I'm on to my husband, I wouldn't trust him on Alcatraz, the mouse.

Peggy Day: Sylvia, you oughtn't talk about him like that! Why, I think it's disloyal!

Sylvia Fowler: Oh now, listen Peggy, do we know how the men talk about us when we're not around?

Nancy Blake: I've heard rumours.

Sylvia Fowler: Exactly... And uh... While we're on the subject, have either of you wondered whether the master of this maison might not be straying?

Nancy Blake: I haven't.

Sylvia Fowler: Well, for all you know Mary Haines may be living in a fool's paradise.

Nancy Blake: You're so resourceful darling. I ought to go to you for plots.

Sylvia Fowler: You ought to go to “someone.”

 

      Yet, we soon perceive that, like the women of whom Elaine Stritch sings in the musical Company, these are “the ladies who lunch.” When they’re not busily gossiping or, metaphorically speaking, stabbing one another in the back, they shop, attend fashion shows, and, yes, lunch. Indeed, I had never before seen the long center of this movie, a scene in the middle of this black-and-white film that, like The Wizard of Oz (a film that appeared in the same year, directed in part by Cukor), was shot by the director in color: a long fashion parade that might almost have been stolen right out of a Ziegfeld Follies routine. Many of outrageous costumes by Adrian, in fact, appear to have been inspired by the Emerald City. 

     Certainly, there are witches here by the dozens. Not only, as Mary’s intelligent mother tries to tell her, are these “friends” eager to dish the dirt, but want to force Mary to confront her bedroom competitor and seek a divorce from the husband she still loves. And if their mean behavior was not enough, Cukor drags in a true “witch” in the form of Hedda Hopper (playing Dolly Dupuyster) who takes the affair to new levels by plastering the news all over the daily papers.

     Like the character Mrs. Lord (Mary Nash) of the The Philadelphia Story—a film that was released the following year—Mrs. Morehead (Lucile Watson) advises her daughter to simply wait out her husband’s current obsession, just as she did in her own long marriage. (Two of the actors in The Women also appeared in The Philadelphia Story, Ruth Hussey, and Virginia Weidler, the latter playing Mary’s daughter, just as she later did Mrs. Lord’s precocious child.)

      If the film is sometimes fun in its satire of female gossip, it turns very sad, however, on the train to Reno, particularly since two of the Reno ranch tenants, Mary and Peggy, really don’t want their divorces. The script and Cukor try to keep up the spirits of the clever play by introducing the hilarious, serial divorcee, The Countess De Lave (Mary Boland) and the ranch owner, Lucy (Marjorie Main). Peggy, who finds herself pregnant, returns to her husband; but when Mary attempts to call him with hopes of a reconciliation, he calls her, instead, to let her know, since the divorce has now gone through, about his own marriage to Crystal.

 

     Even if, a bit like All About Eve, everything does work out in the end—particularly since the nasty Crystal has now taken up with The Countess’ most recent husband, a Reno cowboy turned, through her money, radio broadcaster—there’s something more than sad about the horrible behaviors of all, male and female, involved. And we know by film’s end, that the lovely mother that Mary portrays at the beginning of The Women will never quite be restored. She may be the “owl,” which her mother represents, but she will never again be the joyous, loving wife and mother of work’s first scenes.

      In a sense, The Women is a kind of playing out of the Garden of Eden myth, but from the perspective only of Eve, as if Adam didn’t truly matter. In such a world, as one character suggests early on, there is no forward movement, no possibility for a new world: “everything is going in circles.”  

 

Los Angeles, June 15, 2018

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2018).

Pier Paolo Pasolini | Medea / 1969

medea’s mad dance

by Douglas Messerli

 

Pier Paolo Pasolini (screenwriter and director) Medea / 1969

 

I watched Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film Medea several days ago but couldn’t quite bring myself to write about it until now. Part of the problem is that the story itself is so confusing and shifting that it is difficult to truly understand the role of Medea in her relationship with Jason (Giuseppe Gentile), his search of the “golden fleece,” and her pain concerning her many children who have been destroyed by Kresus (Massimo Girotti).

  

  Medea, in the myths, is impenetrable, and even the great Maria Callas, the remarkable opera star Pasolini chose for his Medea figure, hardly speaks in this film—and when she does only in translation. Mostly she glowers over the scenes this ritualistic tribe, who killing men use their innards to return them to the landscape in attempt to reinfuse it with their powers. It is a terrifying ritual that smells of a Euripdean world that Pasolini never quite explains. But then Pasolini is obviously seeking a world even darker than that of Euripdes.

      People in this world are chopped up, for hardly any logical reason, and their parts distributed back into the earth, with the community participating in a cannibal-like feast. Mostly, the participants look on, including Callas, with severe observation, as if the entire community were transfixed by the central scene in Tennessee Williams’ Suddenly Last Summer.

      Whatever the source of Pasolini’s film, we are simply terrified by the brutality. And there seems to be no way out of this horrendous drama of hate and revenge, except in the earliest of scenes with the centaur (Laurent Terzieff) and the young Jason (Luigi Masironi), encouraged before he can comprehend the message by the centaur to reclaim his kingdom taken from him. 

     Although quite beautifully filmed, Pasolini’s movie is a confusing mix-and-match version of the Medea myth. And, since it is mostly presented in images, with very little dialogue, it is almost impossible to comprehend why Jason, upon his return to Corinth, turns his attentions away from Medea to Glauce, and why in sudden revenge Medea repeats the brutal ceremony we witnessed earlier in the film, this time destroying her brother Absyrtus before she turns on her lover and Glauce. As The New York Times reviewer Vincent Canby expressed it:

 

"Medea is a primeval soul who erupts almost spontaneously when transplanted into a civilization ruled by order. And this, I think, is where the film goes awry. There is no real conflict between Pasolini's conception and Euripides's Pasolini's supplements the other's, but because nothing in Pasolini's imagery in the scenes in Corinth is equal to the passion of the original text, or to Pasolini's own scenes early in the film, the movie seems to go thin and absurdly melodramatic."

 

 

Indeed, her vengeance, coming seemingly out of nowhere—particularly since she has not even been allowed to explain her love for Jason—is so difficult to endure that, as in the final scenes of the director’s Salò, we almost feel that we must close our eyes to what we are observing, particularly since Pasolini has previously made love to his beautiful star with his camera.

     Perhaps, as in that Salò, Pasolini’s point here is that within every human heart there is always perversion and, finally, a monster, and trying to hold on and control the beloved is always a sort of fascist act.

      Certainly, Pasolini’s own life and death gave credence to that fact, as his “acquisition” of a young handsome man led to the boy turning on him and murdering the director. One might almost read Medea today as a prescient vision of what love spurned can lead to.

 

Los Angeles, February 14, 2019

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2019).

Nontawat Numbenchapol | ดอยบอย (Doi Boy) / 2023

dangers of love

by Douglas Messserli

 

Homsap Chanchana, Prasongsom Koonsombat, Prakit Laemluang, Nakorn Phopairoj, and Nontawat Numbenchapol (screenplay), Nontawat Numbenchapol (director) ดอยบอย (Doi Boy) / 2023

 

Documentary filmmaker Nontawat Numberchapol worked for 5 years on his 2023 film Doi Boy, now distributed by Netflix. Surely one of the reasons it took so long to make were the varying layers of significance that his film reveals.

  On one level it is yet another glimpse into the sex worker network in Thailand. The central figure in this film, Sorn (Awat Ratanapintha), is a citizen originally of Myanmar, who has gone AWOL from his enforced military service. Originally a monk, the Myanmar government entered their shrine, conscripting all to join in the government’s long-standing war with the ethnic Shan tribe in eastern Myanmar. Without a steady job or passport to obtain one, Sorn finds it easiest to make money and keep below the police radar by working as a dancer and masseur in the Doi Boy Club in Chiang Mai.

     One of his major customers, strangely enough is Ji (Arak Amornsupasiri), who works as a police officer. Although both men are in sexual relationships with women, Ji’s wife being pregnant, their massage sessions are also highly sexual with, at each session, them determining who wants to be the top and who the bottom. Indeed, Sorn seems quite popular at the club but still does not make enough to survive, relying on his girlfriend, also a sex worker, to pay the electricity, etc. He and his friend, however, spend some of the rent money on attempting to get passports which they are certain will allow them better paying jobs.

 

     Despite the sexual focus of the first part of this film, however, Doi Boy quickly morphs into a dark political adventure tale as the clubs are closed down during the Covid pandemic and Ji enlists his unwilling sexual partner to help him enter Myanmar in order to fulfill an assignment of tracking down a young man, Wuth, a political activist who with his gay lover Bhoom has long been speaking out about both their own government and the Thai police force who work together to silence activists such as themselves.

      Ji promises Sorn a passport and money if he will help get him across the border and help him find and silence Wuth.

     Bhoom, Wuth’s lover, has already been killed by Ji by the time Sorn becomes unwillingly involved. But Ji, tired of being forced into such dirty deeds this time wants to help the young Wuth, by forcing him to disappear into a Buddhist shrine instead of killing him as well.

      But when are all arrested by a former monk now working for the military, their voyage becomes, as one my imagine, a kind of journey into hell where no one can be trusted, friend or enemy, and each of them are forced to align themselves in variously different configurations of friendship just in order to survive. At one point Ji must disavow any connection with Sorn and Wuth, at another moment Sorn and Wuth attempt escape Ji’s control over them, and at year other moments Sorn must join up with Ji in order to help the always suspicious and wary Wuth.

     As Hugo Hamon writes in Asian Movie Pulse:

 

“The movie encompasses a fluidity in everything. Ultimately, identities, nationalities, states, boundaries, relationships, values, friendships appear as arbitrary constructions, and in the midst of this jungle without any absolutes, anyone can be anything and everyone could represent a danger. The transition between scenes is executed with delicate grace, seamlessly navigating even the harshest realities.

    Doi Boy features numerous plot twists, with many scenes allowing the complexities of each character to unfold and reshape our emotional investment in them. Our empathy varies greatly throughout the viewing. Initially, we adopt the perspective of the cop and develop empathy for him. However, as he proves to be violent and as the film takes on a thriller tone, we become much closer to Sorn and activist Wuth, creating an especially intense contrast.”

     By film’s end each of the three central characters have gone their own direction. Wuth ends up safe, in nothing else, as a monk with nowhere else to go. Ji returns home to his pregnant wife only to disappear again, probably a victim of his own police force for not having properly disposed of Wuth.

     Sorn’s girlfriend, not knowing where he has disappeared to and even if he is still alive, takes of the offer of a wealthy customer and escapes with him to a promised life of well-being.

      The last we see of Sorn, now with passport in hand, is as he seems to be trudging through the jungle in hope of escaping once more into Thailand. We realize, however, that he will perhaps be no better off this time. And he has already lost the two beings who most lived him. Whether or not he may return to sex work, his future is bleak. And he now surely realizes in this world in which everything is constantly changing that he can no longer trust anyone. As director Nontawat Numbenchapol makes clear, and as Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul also hinted in his Blissfully Yours (2002), life for Myanmar immigrants in Thailand is dire.

 

Los Angeles, February 28, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (February 2024).