Michelangelo Antonioni | Le amiche (The Girlfriends) / 1955

the woman from rome

by Douglas Messerli

 

Michelangelo Antonioni, Suso Cecchi D'Amico, and Alba De Cespedes (writers, based on the story “Tra donne sole” by Cesare Pavese), Michelangelo Antonioni (director) Le amiche (The Girlfriends) / 1955

 

Michelangelo Antonioni’s Le amiche, from 1955, does not have the deep intensity or for that matter the complexity of his great trilogy, L’Avventura, La Notte, and L’Eclisse of the 1960s; but as The New York Times critic A. O. Scott noted about a 2010 revival of the film, it is, nonetheless, “enchanting and strange.”

     I’m not sure I’d use those exact terms. L’Avventura, when I reviewed it a few years ago, did not appear as experimental and unconventional when I reviewed it a few years ago, as it clearly was to the critics of the day. And this film, based on a Cesare Pavese story, reads, at times, more like an updating of George Cukor’s 1939 film, The Women than something like Blowup, although the latter is also based on a short story, and features, like this film, fairly well-off and sophisticated arts people.

      Yet here, unlike Cukor’s chestnut, there are men, with whom the five central women friends—Clelia (Eleonora Rossi Drago), Rosetta (Madeleine Fischer), Momina (Yvonne Furneaux), Neme (Valentina Cortese), and Mariella (Anna Maria Pancani)—fall in and out of love.

      Unlike The Women, who are intelligent but spend most of their loves caring for their bodies, attending fashion shows, and most of all gossiping about one another, this small coven of accidental “friends” are closer to closet feminists, particularly Clelia, who has come to Turin (her hometown) from Rome to open up a new salon like the one she has in the capitol city.

       The locals, Rosetta and Neme, are in love with a handsome, but failed artist, Lorenzo (Gabriele Ferzetti). Although currently married to Neme, he has painted a portrait of Rosetta, who has fallen in love with him through the act, and hence, given the impossibility of their love, begins the melodrama by attempting to kill herself; fortunately for the film, she does not succeed, and instead gains a new friend Clelia who happens to be staying in a hotel room next to hers.

       Momina, married, lives in an open relationship, mostly with architect Cesare (Franco Fabrizi)   who is too slowly rebuilding Clelia’s new shop. So too Momina’s protégé Mariella would love to develop a relationship with him.

       The more down-to-earth Clelia, meanwhile, falls for Cesare’s working-class assistant, Carlo (Ettore Manni), but quickly realizes that she has long ago moved out of her own working-class roots and that if they truly became a couple realizes, as she tells him, “We would just fight about furniture.”

        Perhaps the film’s strangest scene is when this entire group takes off a day to travel to the beach, where they play out some of their fears and frustrations, Clelia being worried that Rosetta may attempt suicide once more, and Mariella attempting to seduce Cesare, while all around them couples appear to be having sex in the shadows of the beach shacks and dunes.

       It is a brilliantly paced scene, languid yet brittle with tension. And suddenly what might have seemed to be friendship and love turns out to be a kind of existentialist drama wherein each figure must face her inner self. None of the people, we now perceive, really belongs with the others. And despite some of their career successes, none of them is truly fulfilled.

       Moreover, as the “girlfriends” gradually perceive, the three men in their lives are simply not reliable, as the women come to realize that they are much stronger and able to deal with life than the males around them.

        There are parallels and foreshadowing’s here of Fellini, in whose films it is almost always the women who ground their lovers and explore more adventurous worlds than the males to whom they are linked. One need only think of Giulietta Masina in his Juliet of the Spirits.

        The woman from Rome finally gets what she wants, a fine new salon, after which quickly hikes back for where she’s come. Neme is offered a show of her ceramics in the US. Momina, a strong and dominant woman, will clearly survive. Only Rosetta, the previous survivor, cannot assimilate her mistakes and finally succeeds in committing suicide, and it appears that Clelia alone truly cares about the young woman in the next room who has died. Unfortunately, the ever-flirtatious Mariella must still come to terms with the truth. 

        

Los Angeles, December 2, 2019

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2019).

 

Henri-Georges Clouzot | L'Assassin habite au 21 (The Murderer Lives at Number 21) / 1942

calling cards for murder

by Douglas Messerli

 

Henri-Georges Clouzot and Stanislas-André Steeman (screenplay), Henri-Georges Clouzot (director) L'Assassin habite au 21 (The Murderer Lives at Number 21) / 1942

 

L'Assassin habite au 21 was Henri-Georges Clouzot’s first feature film, and the 4th movie he wrote for the Nazi-run studio Continental Films—a company created, in part, to replace banned American films. Fortunately, there are no obvious Nazi propagandistic elements in this work, and some critics have observed subtle satiric moments poking fun at the Germans.

       The subject here is murder described in a comic way that almost reminds one of The Thin Man series, particularly since its central characters, the police detective Wens (Pierre Fresnay) unintentionally teams up with his wife, the hilarious would-be opera singer, Mila Malou (Suzy Delair) to solve a series of city murders committed by a man or woman who leaves behind, with each killing, a card declaring it is the work of “Durand.”

       The Mayor, the Chief of Police, and others are naturally frustrated that there seem to be utterly no clues as the identity of Durand, and demand the Wens solves the case within a few days or he will be without a job.

       At a would-be opera tryout, the over-the-top Mila Malou—a woman who not only sings her songs a bit higher than they are written and who is more than a little neurotic—is told by the opera impresario that even if she were to sing well, he could not hire her because she has no “name.”

       Determined to quickly become famous, Mila determines to outdo her husband by being the first to discover Durand’s whereabouts, but her actions, driving without lights, immediately land her in jail until Wens can show up to claim her as his wife.

       Meanwhile, Wens gets a break when an ex-con, now gone straight and working as a second-hand furniture dealer, purposely gets arrested—through a hilariously put-down of a local policeman as he sits perched on a streetlight—so that he can tell Wens privately that he found newly printed cards in the drawer of a desk recently sold to him by someone living at a boarding house at 21 Avenue Junot.

      Going in search to the murderer, Wens tells his wife he is traveling, leaving a sealed letter behind in case he doesn’t return.

       He arrives at the boarding house dressed as a priest and there meets a cast of lunatics that might be at home in Arsenic and Old Lace: a bird-tweeting doorman and servant, a slightly dotty landlady, a man who makes dolls with no faces, an ex-soldier who spouts his detestation of mankind and who sees Durand as a kind of hero, a magician who sleeps in a coffin and keeps making things disappear, a would be lady-writer whose manuscripts are perpetually rejected, and blind ex-boxer and his nurse who appear to be having an affair. Each of them is strange and it seems that any one of them might be Durand.

       The fun of this film, a bit like Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians, lies in trying to outguess Wens and—when his wife unexpectedly shows up as a new guest in the house—Mila in determining which one is the murderer. Even Wens seems, once he has settled on the mean ex-soldier, mistaken. For although the arrested man finally admits to being Durand, police are faced with another murder with Durand’s calling card hanging from the corpse’s neck.

      They arrest the dollmaker only to be served up with another body, and Wens goes on a chase to find the magician performing a new act, which still does not reveal his guilt. Indeed, his life is now threatened as the 13th and perhaps final murder.

      As anyone who has read my hundreds of reviews knows, I always reveal the entire plot, so if you’ve not seen the movie and want the joy of attempting to figure the murderer out for yourself, you should stop here.

       The revelation that Durand is not one person but all three of the men in the boarding house working in tandem might suggest that it takes an army, such as the German Nazis, to kill and rob so many people. In fact, these three have been covering for one another all their lives, saving each other from school expulsion and other scrapes they encountered as children. In short, they grew in a culture of deceit that might even suggest the German nation. And in the end, after having captured Wens, they each claim the right to murder him.

     Yet, this is after all a comedy, and at the last moment, the police, with Mila in the lead, rush into the warehouse where the three Durands have trapped the detective, in order to save his life. How they discovered his whereabouts is never quite explained. But it hardly matters, for Mila has saved her husband. Perhaps now she can have the baby she desires and, after performing so significantly to the boarding house audience, give up her musical aspirations.

     This charming who-done-it is a strange offering from a Nazi film company given that it so imitates British and American cinema.

 

Los Angeles, June 8, 2019

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2019).

Stephen Cone | The Wise Kids / 2011

different ways of loving and believing

by Douglas Messerli

 

Stephen Cone (screenwriter and director) The Wise Kids / 2011

Director Stephen Cone’s gentle tales, which tell of teenagers growing into maturity before the eyes of their elders, are, at heart, films of ideas; yet they don’t seem at all to preach, even though they are often located within tightly-knit religious, particularly Baptist, communities. Usually, when encountering any literary or cinematic work about true believers, the writers and directors take stands either for or against. But Cone has the grace and lightness of touch to let his characters speak for their own views, presenting a broad range of different viewpoints without demonizing and judging any of them. It is this director’s fairness (although he often does have a few very narrow-minded figures) that makes his films seem so magical. And even non-believers, such as I am, are attracted to his work.

    The other day I watched one of his early films, The Wise Kids, in two entire viewings over two days, and I realized just how subtly his “ideas” were presented. In this film three students, one a church organist and drama leader, and the other, a slightly older, perhaps lesbian girl, ostracized from her grandmother’s love while still living in her house, stand in for a wide range of viewpoints, while still all deeply embraced by the religious community in which they were raised.

     The most daring of them is the preacher’s daughter, Brea (Molly Kunz), who, as a senior in school, is suddenly beginning to question her religious teachings. As she puts it to her best friend Tim (Tyler Ross), “We might have believed whatever our parents taught us.” In short, she is arguing that, in part, children are, in following their parent’s teachings, in some sense brainwashed. And if they don’t later begin questioning those beliefs they will be again imposed on their own children as well. Clearly that is the case with their classmate, Laura (Allison Torem), an overeager believer who prays to God with words such as “fabulous” and “awesome.”

     Although Tim is less disenchanted with his beliefs than Brea, arguing that he pretty much came to his beliefs by himself, he is having his own difficulties with his religious convictions because he has discovered that he is gay.

     It’s clear that all the girls in his school, represented here only by Brea and Laura, find him cute. But a casual question from a visitor to the community, “Is he gay?” signals these young people that Tim is, indeed, homosexual, bringing Laura to the ask the question directly and to promise to email him a list of Bible passages that prove it is a grave sin. Tim blandly suggests she do that, making it clear, despite his own insistence that it is simply something he is trying to work it out with prayer and thought, that he is comfortable within his own skin. And it is that self-assuredness that makes this character so truly likeable. Soon after, he tells his working-class father that he is gay, a widower who accepts the fact quite affably. But when Tim’s younger brother hears of it, he is anything but accepting, and Tim, who has begun to bond with Brea, calls her, suggesting he needs to get away.

      Meanwhile, Brea, much loved by the elderly busy-body in the church, Ms. Powell, has become friendly with her granddaughter, Cheryl (Sadie Rogers)—a self-admitted non-believer, and the two take her along to a clearly mixed gay, lesbian, and freewheeling local bar in their small community. There, Brea lets her hair down by wildly dancing, Tim finds a handsome young man with whom he passionately dances, and Cheryl is approached by another woman. The trio has found their true spiritual home.

      But the other major figure in this tender film, the drama coach Austin (played by the director himself) is double-locked into that closed society by his marriage and his sincere love of his wife Elizabeth, and the growing recognition that he, too, is gay. We recognize his emotional state by a hand left perhaps just a second too long on a student’s shoulder, a clumsily attempted kiss of Tim at a party, and his inability to have sex with the wife whom he, nonetheless, loves.

      Brea, who was preparing, like Laura, to attend a local religious college, has quietly applied to NYU and suddenly is accepted, while Tim had planned all along to attend the New School. Understandably, Laura feels rejected, but we also know she will find a local boy to settle down with who shares her religious fervor. Tim and Laura will surely face rockier but far more varied futures.

      A return home after their first semesters, brings together the young trio, who perform again in Austin’s dramatization of the Christ’s birth. And during that visit, as Austin meets with Tim, the older man admits that he is gay. In a reversal of the usual roles, the younger consoles the elder with a deep hug, knowing surely that the elder is doomed to either remain in the closet or to destroy the entire life he has made for himself. It’s clear that he will chose the former, mouthing during the performance, “I love you,” to his wife, she responding “I love you too.”

      What this director shows us, time and again, is that love can take many, many shapes, even within closed societies. There are no monsters here, just human beings attempting to live out their lives the best they can, some within greater confines than others. The kids are wiser simply because they have attempted to work out the definitions of their world while they were young. For poor Austin, we realize, it is too late, and we can only deeply sympathize with the pain and suffering he will have to embrace for the rest of his life. But then, we also know that the man performing Austin was a “wise kid,” who made his way in a different direction than his preacher father might have wished.

 

Los Angeles, February 16, 2018

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2018).

 

Cris Derek Van | Your Face in December / 2023

ghosts

by Douglas Messerli

 

Cris Derek Van (screenwriter and director) Your Face in December / 2023 [11 minutes]

 

Again appropriating images from many sources, this time including photos by Robert Mapplethorpe and others, Chicago based Asian artist Cris Derek Van tells a story in Your Face in December about gay a love between Fabio and Sebastian.

    In this work, except for lovely homoerotic gay photos of men, the director does away almost entirely with images, using many of his cinematic frames for words only, this time spoken in Spanish and translated on screen into English.

    The language is again highly romantic and poetic, with phrases such as: “Your voice, your eyes, your hands, your lips. Our silences, our words.”

    The two obviously cannot keep their minds off of one another, talking, we soon realize, after at least one of the deaths. The love is retained in the mind, the body—both of which strangely in this cold storage romance, not longer exist. They are ghosts.

     And despite their romantic declarations, with many statements of silence and eternity such as— “Like an eternity of coming to understand myself and my budding desires, when I look at your face in December, I come to understand. Alone, but not sad, smiling, but not happy, walking but not moving somewhere.”—we quickly realize that these figures in space no longer exist together.

     Nothing is explained about their coming together or what happened between them except love. But by the final frame 11 minutes into the film we hear a gunshot, forcing us to realize that either one or both of them have been killed, either by suicide or mutual sacrifice.

     Loss is again the center of Derek Van’s film. Yet, strangely this time we feel only the loss, no significant nostalgia or sorrow since these were ghosts—their now empty language dominating the screen and their existence—before the film even began.

 

Los Angeles, July 20, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2024). 

William Branden Blinn | Thirteen Minutes or So / 2008

the shape and size of it

by Douglas Messerli

 

William Branden Blinn (screenwriter and director) Thirteen Minutes or So / 2008 [14 minutes]

William Branden Blinn’s 14-minute film, Thirteen Minutes or So—without the credits, Blinn’s film is probably 13 or so minutes—begins where many LGBTQ movies end, with the couple having consummated a hot night of sex. But then, superficially, since this is a Q movie, not LGBT-centric, maybe it needs to look at what has happened between these two handsome men, Lawrence (Nick Soper) and Hugh (Carlos Salas), through the lens of the past tense. Both have presented themselves as straight men, and even after their sex maintain they that they are heterosexuals.

      We discover, in fact, that their conversation the night before had begun by talking, as heterosexual men are evidently prone to do, about “pussy” and how, as true he-men, how they like “to eat pussy.” Their conversation moved on to a brief discussion of their hometowns, Fort Wayne, Indiana in Lawrence’s case and Salinas, California for Hugh. I might imagine how such a conversation disintegrated into a chat about their towns of their favorite football or baseball teams...and whatever else straight men find so fascinating to create a friendship. But in this case, Lawrence invited his new friend up to his room to show him a website on...(he gets vague even  discussing it) “the size and shape of different....how our anatomy perfectly fits....” Presumably we’re speaking of vaginas, but Lawrence cannot finish his sentences, so disturbed he is about “what just happened.”

      As Lawrence admits, he doesn’t even jerk off, living as he claims in an alternative space better than.... He evidently hasn’t had sex with a woman for a long while either. But he has...has had girlfriends. Hugh also had a girlfriend...has had many girlfriends in the past. And has never done it with a.... He’s never even imagined it. He’s never had the opportunity, never been attracted to....

      In this short film, the two males speak in ellipses, being unable to explain what has just occurred between them. They can’t finish their sentences just as they can’t apparently continue with their relationship, their new-found friendship...whatever they might wish or not wish to call it. Lawrence in particular is startled by the facts, even though Hugh reminds him that he actually began it, and both of them “sealed the deal,” French-kissing and intensely caressing one another before what may or may not have been simply mutual masturbation...or maybe something more complex. Certainly, the moans and groans of pleasure we hear emanating from the dark as the opening titles scroll sound like they’re engaged in something deeply passionate.

     More importantly, Hugh admits not only that he “liked it,” but would do it all over again, going even further by admitting that it was a something incredibly real that he has never before experienced with another man. Lawrence, grasping at straws, wonders whether their drinks weren’t spiked, to which Hugh sarcastically responds, “you think somebody slipped something into our water?” “I was drinking coffee,” Lawrence struggles to explain things to himself. “You liked it?” he asks once again, incredulous of the fact.

      “I truly liked it,” Hugh again admits.

      Trying to seek a way out of the consequences, Lawrence says “We’re just not wired that way.”

      “Before, I might have agreed with you,” responds Hugh, “but now....”

      “I haven’t had it in a while. You’re so very good looking. You seem so normal.”

      “I am normal. And so are you,” Hugh explains, however, that there’s something that overrides the rules, as he puts his hand upon Lawrence’s heart.

      “My heart?”

      “My heart.” Evidently their long conversations together went to a lot of places to which they are not willing to return to after their sexual act. “I think I know you pretty well now.”

      Hugh describes how in his room Lawrence described how his cat would come to sit on his chest and as it began to purr his heart would swell, and as the cat continued his heart would swell bigger. He felt, so Hugh claims, as if he could feel is own heart swelling, and then...”you were all over me.”

      Lawrence, who has been busy dressing through much of this conversation as if to make a hasty retreat, now pauses to repeat “You’re so handsome.”

      “You’re beautiful and amazing. But dude, that’s my shirt.”

      As Lawrence looks down and slowly begins to unbutton it, Hugh pulls Lawrence’s face to his neck. “This is nice....” his friend sighs.

      If Blinn’s charming recreation of the natural attraction of two straight men to one another seems, at moments, a little too much like a gay fantasy textbook to be totally believable, I do think as these two good-looking hunks stand once again at the threshold of a leap into bed and Nicola Quilter’s song “Sleep Wake Dream” accompanies the ending credits that—as Rick Blaine utters to Captain Louis Renault in Casablanca—“this is the beginning of a beautiful relationship.”

 

Los Angeles, December 20, 2020

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (December 2020).

Jean Choux | Un chien qui rapporte (The Dog that Pays Off) / 1932 [in French only]

please return with love

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jean Choux (screenwriter, based on the work of Marcel Gerbidon and Paul Armont, and director) Un chien qui rapporte (The Dog that Pays Off) / 1932 [in French only]

 

Another film I was able to see only in the original language in which I am not entirely fluent, in this case French, The Dog that Pays Off features the wonderful French actor Arletty as a rather indolent chanteuse, Josyane Plaisir who is having difficulty paying her bills for her lovely apartment. When she’s not singing, she spends most of her hours with her women friends, dancers and performers who are far less successful than Josyane.

       Her concierge Mme. Gras (Madeleine Guitty) and her husband visit a dog handler to help arrange a scheme that might solve their tenant’s problem and help make them rich as well. The dog handler insists the singer, convincing her that in order to find men she should borrow his trained dog, who jumps into rich men’s cars, the pet's name and address tied around his neck. When the rich men go to return the dog, recognizing the singer’s name they court her as well, bringing her jewels and other trinkets. So she might also find a rich man to marry, sharing her new wealth with her concierge.

      Of course, there are troubles from the beginning. One of the first courtiers the dog brings home is René Brodart (René Lefèvre), who, although very handsome is even poorer than Josyane. She falls immediately in love with him, but obviously can’t afford to marry such a poor man, accordingly continuing her scheme to get rich.

      The next “man” her cute pup brings home is indeed rich and very handsome, la comtesse de Noyant (Laure Diana), dressed in a man’s riding jacket, books, and a monocle, all symbols of the day of her being a lesbian. She and Josyane, however, do strike up a friendship, and during their tête-à-tête, René comes charging in, furious that his new-found love is hosting another man in her living room. The comtesse, laughing in delight, takes of her hat and lets down her hair to reveal her gender, calming down the young lover.

     But it is also la comtesse who reveals what Josyane is up to by encouraging René to follow the dog and watch its actions. Very soon after the dog has crawled upon the lap of a wealthy businessman, all too ready to return the dog to the lovely owner; the outraged René demands that he hand over the dog immediately to him. And, apparently, he temporarily breaks off his relationship as Josyane begins to rake in pearls and diamonds through visits of wealthy suitors of all sorts, including an Indian raj.

     One of Josyane’s friends, jealous of the singer’s new life, however, steals her dog, and Josyane is heartbroken, now without a possible way to bring in new treasures, although clearly she has now accumulated enough jewels to survive very nicely.

     After dreaming of all the money she will share from Josyane and the dog’s escapades, the concierge, however, recognizes there is only one way to resolve the problem: she contacts René, who returns to Josyane, this time bearing another dog to replace the one she lost.

     Meanwhile, in remorse, the singer’s friend returns the stolen dog and the original owner, the dog handler, pays a visit to claim his animal back, demanding to be paid for its use. Josyane pays him off with a diamond bracelet and turns to kiss her poor lover René, the only man with whom she is truly happy.

     I may have missed some details of the plot or confused elements of the story due to my faulty French, but basically that is the gist of the quite entertaining movie, which also contains some fascinating cinematic elements such as a speed-up of the sound reel, comically making a character speak as if she had ingested helium. In another scene the director reverses the image, at one point even turning it upside down in order to rearrange events as the concierge might wish to imagine them. During the concierge’s dream scenes, the film nicely overlays images, laying them upon one another as in collage. And throughout, the camera is fluid as it follows the comings and goings of the singer’s visitors.

       The fairly long scenes with la comtesse de Noyant are some of the most honest portrayals of a lesbian in early cinema, and unlike Hollywood films the movie does not at all mock her sexuality but fully recognizes and records it. It’s clear that the cigarette-smoking independent mannish woman clearly enjoys her position in life.

 

Los Angeles, July 28, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2024).