Serge Gainsbourg | Je t’aime moi no plus (I Love You, I Don’t) / 1976

where women are not welcome

by Douglas Messerli

 

Serge Gainsbourg (screenwriter and director) Je t’aime moi no plus (I Love You, I Don’t) / 1976

 

The landscape of French composer, singer, actor, and filmmaker Serge Gainsbourg’s 1976 picture Je t'aime moi non plus (I Love You, I Don't) is filmed in a countryside landscape so desolate and isolate and filled with bumpkins that one might be naturally assume the garbage dumps, gas station, and hamburger joint central to this movie were in some rural midwestern or a western locale in the US, or even the industrial wilds of New Jersey—particularly given the fact that the two actors central to this work, Joe Dallesandro and Jane Birkin, are English-speaking.

      But it doesn’t matter since it is clearly meant to be a kind of symbolic space, far enough from true civilization that its characters are forced to live demeaning and meaningless lives endlessly longing for love—a story told worldwide whether it comes from the pen and camera of Gus Van Sant, Derek Jarman, Werner Rainer Fassbinder, or Gainsbourg. These figures’ words are all dubbed into French so it must be an isolate Gallic landscape where they’ve forgotten the arts of fine cooking, architecture, and romantic sex.

       Into this forgotten landscape drive Krassky (Dallesandro, who describes himself as an American Pollack) and his male lover Padovan (Hugues Quester) who evidently is originally from Italy where he’s recently served time in prison. The neighborhood is also seemingly related to a world imagined by Jean Genet since on the way from the dump in which Krassky and Padovan have just emptied their truck, they encounter four other gay boys whose car has broken down and offer them a ride in their empty dumpster while a peasant (Gérard Depardieu) on horse passes, who these boys declare is gay as well. We can only wonder on just what planet we’re landed.

      Inexplicably, the moment they announce that fact Krassky stops the truck and pulls the lever to lift the backload to rid him of the apparently unwanted hitchhikers. In this film, we quickly realize, the unexpected is all that you can expect, and explanations are neither Krassky’s nor Padovan’s forte.

       The duo arrives at a drive-in, order up a couple of cokes and burgers (horsemeat we later discover), and before Padovan can even finish his slot-machine game, the garbage collector Krassky as fallen in love with the boy named Johnny behind the counter, who it turns out is really a girl who with her short-cropped hair, her androgynous face, flattened bust, and small boyish bottom has been waiting for any man good looking enough to come along to take into his bed. Dallesandro, accordingly, is a feast for her eyes. In fact, Johnny’s really Jane Birkin, the girl who tumbled with another of her sex around David Hemming’s feet on purple paper in Blowup (1966) and who, by this time Gainsbourg had made famous all over world for singing with him the song with the same name of this film which he had originally written for Brigitte Bardot, whose husband got jealous when she and Gainsbourg tried to record it. So this film already had a kind of history before they even turned on the projector.

     For most of the rest of the film, the bubble-butted, muscular porn-star Dallesandro tries to find a way to get an erection long enough to fuck this new-found boy-like beauty over, understandably, his handsome and hairy bottom Pandovan’s protests.

     Reviewers have all described the “love affair” between the two, Johnny and Krassky, as representing a groundbreaking examination of gender fluidity, with many declaring that the two are truly in love, even if their love is doomed. Budd Wilkins (writing in Slant) goes further to argue that Gainbourg “chooses here the almost taboo topic of heterosexual anal sex.” “In Je T’Aime Moi Non Plus, it’s a gesture of physical connection and mutual gratification that flagrantly defies what’s considered natural and civilized.” He goes on to argue that “his instantaneous attraction to her remains undiminished even when she turns around.” The writers for Criterion describe the duo’s connection as “a carnal attraction, even when it runs up against the practical physical barriers of genitalia.”  Sounds nice to me.

      But  I’m sorry, I think either these folks missed something or I saw a different movie. In fact, despite the wonderfully framed scenes of these two beauties throughout by cinematographer Willy Kurant, and the brilliant gamin-like expressions of vulnerability and fragility that Birkin displays whenever the camera lets loose of Dallesandro’s butt, the game of “He loves me, he loves me not,” which she willingly plays—hoping that he might even break through to provide her with something that might feel like love—resolves itself in only the second part of this anaphoric paradox.

        Surely Krassky comes to recognize in her willingness to give herself over as a kind of slave, something to which he’s attracted. After all, this is a homosexual who cannot tolerate the idea of being called a “poof.” And in his macho sensibility he realizes in her gender difference a kind of challenge. If there were any female with whom he might ever prove himself a real man, it is with Johnny.

      

    But love, as Tina Turner has made clear, has nothing to do with it. He already has a lover in Padovan, despite his frustration with what might almost be described as the boy’s male hysteria. Looking at her face, even her chest, if Krassky blurs his eyes just a little, he can imagine a boy, but when he looks lower he loses his erection.        

     He can only attempt to fuck her anally, and she is a small-boned woman who suffers significant pain with each thrust of his penis.

     In fact, there is a great deal of humor in this film as he attempts to transform her, somewhat as in Hitchcock’s Vertigo, into the boy he first glimpsed. They try it out in several hotel rooms to be kicked out each time on account of her horrific screams; and they end up trying it even in the back of his garbage truck. But even there, when she tells him that despite the pain, she loves him, his answer is that true love is simply  a matter of coming simultaneously, as if a mutual climax was the goal of any relationship. This a world in which guys take their dates to a violent all-girl roller skating derby, where a barn dance generally includes a competition among the local heterosexual hags for full-monty stripping.  Krassky cannot even bear seeing Johnny in a dress. Johnny is purposely deluding herself since the world in which she exists offers no other alternatives. Women are not welcome here. Sadomasochism is better than no sex at all.

      This is not a film about heterosexual anal sex, in other words, but about a gay man engaging in anal sex with a woman whom he attempts to imagine, unsuccessfully, is a virginal boy. You might as well describe Je T’Aime Moi Non Plus as being a study in pedophilic desire. 

     Almost all the critics see poor Padovan, moreover, as the crazed, uncontrollable villain, but after all this fool has nothing else but his relationship with Krassky to define his existence. He’s beaten up by the hitchhiking gay gang he mocked; and even the pretty peasant he seeks out denies him the pleasure of his cock evidently because of its immense size which has so punished other willing boy butts that he’s been locked up by the cops. Padovan is understandably jealous, and I might argue that that fact encourages Krassky in his endeavors to prove himself “flexible” as well. But Padovan knows that a relationship with Krassky and Johnny, even if it developed to that extent, must come to an end.

       A bit like a Hitchcockian psychopath, he simply wants to hurry it along, not in the shower but in the bathtub, not with a knife but the plastic bag he carries with him as if it were some kind of special charm, a bit like Johnny’s dog or the stuffed doll Krassky has given her. Again something totally inexplicable, the bag at least we observe offers him a warning sign of his arrival, a hat to wear in the rain, and, just to scare off his rival, something to wrap around her face to strangle her to death.

       Krassky appears on the horizon to save the day, tossing away the eatery’s tables and chairs as if he were entering a bar to disperse all the other gunslingers on his way to his final destination in a Sergio Leone movie. Only this time, when he reaches the endangered girl, he merely bends down to make sure she’s still breathing. He does not even move in the direction of her molester. In fact, he takes Padovan’s hand and leads him away, the girl shocked by the absolute turn of cinematically “normalized” events.

     The boys go off into the sunset together as the girl, still naked, falls to the concrete like an urbanized version of Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World, having lost her way from what she once knew as her homestead. He’s finally broken her.

      Enough of experimenting with all this gender fluidity, Krassky seems to say, as he crawls back into the cab of his truck with Padovan, happy to have someone into whom he can comfortably fit his cock when they find their way home at night.

      Gainsbourg’s work is perhaps one of the most beautifully filmed comedies ever made.

 

Los Angeles, December 15, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2021).

 

Michael Apted | The Collection / 1976 [TV movie]

the smell of olives

by Douglas Messerli

Harold Pinter (screenplay, based on his stage drama), Michael Apted (director) The Collection / 1976 [TV movie]

Harold Pinter's brilliant short play of 1961, The Collection, is a work about two couples, Stella (Helen Mirren) and James (Alan Bates), married for two years, and Harry (Laurence Olivier) and Bill (Malcolm McDowell), living together for a number of years. Both pairs are clearly dissatisfied with their relationships or, at least, interested in sexually exploring alternatives—but fearful, also, of destroying the commitments they have made. Although James runs his wife's dress business, it is clear that she is the designer. Bill, as Harry tells both James and the audience, has been picked up in the slums, and is obviously completely dependent upon his older lover.

     The play begins with a late night/early morning telephone ring to the Belgravia house of Harry and Bill by a caller who refuses to divulge his name, a man seeking Bill. This call, in turn, sets off a series of calls and, soon after, visits by James to the house in search of Bill, who, he has been told by his wife, sexually molested her in her hotel room during a meeting of clothes manufacturers in Leeds.

     We never discover whether or not such an encounter actually occurred; both Bill and Stella change their stories several times in the course of the play. But it hardly matters, for the true energy of this play occurs not in the discovery of any "truth," but in the opportunity for new encounters—for James it might almost be described as stalking—with other beings, and the danger that their interchanges represent.

     If indeed Bill and Stella met in Leeds, even to simply talk about sexual possibilities, as Bill insists late in the play, there is a parallel pattern in James' visits to Bill. Both of these rendezvouses are highly sexually charged and physically threatening. Yet both also began and end in a war of words. Despite his position as intruder, Bill invites himself to drinks, demanding olives—in a typically brilliant Pinteresque non sequitur—and a place to sit, while gradually insinuating himself into James' life, going even so far as to query him about Harry and his supposed allergic reaction to rabbits (those animals which so prolifically fuck).

     It all ends, quite absurdly, with Bill lying prone on the floor, James standing over him in an overtly sexual position while the "conquered" man alternately denies and confirms James' imaginative recounting of the "rape" of his wife. Although Bill denies nearly everything, in the very last moments of their encounter when James reports that he called his wife while Bill was still sitting on the bed, Bill corrects him, "Not sitting, lying," hinting that there was truth in most everything the seemingly jealous husband has reported.

     Although nothing is spoken about James' visit to Bill, Harry certainly suspects something, and tension arises as he attacks his lover the next morning while endlessly reading and re-reading the newspaper, demanding he given it up only to insist that he has no desire for it, the kind of Pinter-like maneuver performed by those wanting to vent a problem when they cannot openly do so. Possession of the newspaper becomes a substitute for the possession of the truth and, ultimately, of their sexual rights and physical control of the other.

     Meanwhile tensions are also mounting between James and Stella, played out in a meaningless discussion of biscuits--which James argues will make his wife fat—and his desire for olives, which she also doesn't have in the house, hinting to James that she has never cared about his likes or dislikes. James carries the game somewhat further by admitting that he has already visited her Leeds "lover," admitting that he enjoyed his company and found him quite attractive, although lying about his being quite forthcoming. James focuses on his respect for Bill and the fact the he too is an opera man, just as James himself is, although he always kept it a secret—hinting perhaps that he has hidden his homosexual interests. (Aren't all male opera connoisseurs gay? Certainly they might been presumed to be in the 1960s.) James concludes, "It looks as though, by accident, you have opened up a whole new world for me."

     The second visit by James to Bill actually seems like an arranged "date" between the two, since James has prepared a cheese board and put out a bowl of olives. As the two verbally spar, the conversation turns to a discussion of each other's bodies which ends in a shared stare in the mirror, and a witty repartee in which the offered olives are denied by James, despite his insistence that he be served them on his previous visit:

james: I don't like them.
Pause.
bill: Don't like olives?
Pause.
What on earth have you got against olives?
james: I detest them.
bill: Really?
james: It's the smell I hate.*

     It doesn't take a Freudian psychologist to make one realize that they are not talking about the fruit of the Olea europaea, and that James, although clearly attracted to the other man, has some reservations when it comes to acting out what he feels.

     Harry, meantime, pays a visit to Stella, asking her if she knows Bill Lloyd. She doesn't and has never heard the name, she insists. But as the two continue in conversation, she claiming that her husband has made up a fantastic story, she does admit knowing that Bill was in Leeds even though she never met him. James has been overworked and seems quite mentally ill she insists. Harry suggests that she might take James on a trip to the South of France to cure him. He leaves, presumably satisfied that the relationship between Stella and Bill has been all made up.
     Back at the meeting with Bill and James, since James has expressed his abhorrence of olives, Bill suggests he have cheese, having a "splendid cheese knife."

 

james: Is it sharp?

bill: Try it. Hold the blade, it won't cut you. Not if you handle it properly

(moving closer). Not if you grasp it firmly up to the hilt.

     It is obviously a coded message of seduction. Only a few minutes later, however, James has picked up another cheese knife, challenging Bill to a duel, Bill playing "the sissy" by refusing to act out the phallic challenge that James has offered up, putting down his cheese knife. But James picks it up, not only now, as Bill points out, having two knives, but claiming to have another in his hip pocket.

     Bill wonders, what does he do? "Swallow them?"

     James' comeback is hilariously campy: "Do you?"

    This time, however, James impetuously propels his words, for the first time in the play, into action: tossing the cheese knife into the air and cutting Bill's hand, producing, perhaps, something tangible in the way of a small scar, which Bill has proven not to have in the first visit, despite talk of James' wife's attempt to keep off her assailant by mildly scratching him.

    In a world only of talk, finally something has happened, someone has at least been palpably touched. Harry, observing this scene behind the doorway—having returned from his conversation with Stella—knows quite clearly what the sword play means. Pinter seems to be hinting at the older and younger attractive interloper playing with knives in Roman Polanski's 1962 film, Knife in the Water. Pouring his guest another drink he tells him that James that he has met with his wife and she has admitted that she has made the whole story up. "Women are most strange...if I were you I'd go home and hit over the head a saucepan or something." and lashes out in an emotional outburst of hate against the "slum-boy slug" he has brought into his proper home:

“There's nothing wrong with slugs, in their place, but he's a slum slug, there's nothing wrong with slum slugs in their place, but this one won't keep his place, he crawls all over the walls of nice houses, leaving slime, don't you boy?”

  The older Harry is clearly fighting to keep his young lover the only way he knows how. Like James he dominates the passive Bill, but unlike James his is only a world of words, and he can only wonder when action may again break out. Ultimately, of course, James must also retreat, as the civilized British society insists. They all return to talk, meaningless politeness. The talk utterly defeats any acts of love. Love, after all, in this world has less to do with action, than accretion, is something held together through time and repetition. As Harry says to Stella about James: "I found him in a slum, you know, by accident"—as if he were an object he discovered in a shop to be brought home to add to his collection.

   Yet behind their language looms terror. James returns home to reassure himself that his wife did indeed do nothing but talk to Bill that night in Leads. "You didn't do anything, did you?" he almost pleads. "That's the truth, isn't it?" Her silent look, "neither confirming nor denying," "her face friendly and sympathetic," with, in the television version I saw, an ever so slight smile upon her lips, tells us nothing. As Pinter knows, silence is so dangerous.

     We cannot know "truth" in this world of linguistic games. Did Stella make up the story simply to make her inattentive husband jealous? Was James truly attracted to the homosexual he discovered who had supposedly had sex with his wife, or was simply out to make sure the "fag" got what was coming to him? He could as well be repelled and attracted both, unable to act on his own desires, which explains his wife's dissatisfaction. Perhaps only Harry's motivations are apparent, his attack on his lover merely meant to keep him in his place, beside him in his bed. He is forced to clean up the mess Bill makes behind him, smoothing over the labyrinth of lies and ineffective actions that he collects around him in his relationships with others.

     Although this version of Pinter's remarkable play seems a little busy in its fruitless attempts to leave the drawing room of the playwright’s purposely claustrophobic setting—the sets themselves are perhaps a bit overwrought in their attempt to create a sense of stylish realism—one couldn't ask for a better cast.

 

*Olives are a slang term for a man’s balls.

 
Los Angeles, December 27, 2008

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (December 2008).

 

 

Rainer Werner Fassbinder | Angst vor der Angst (Fear of Fear) / 1975, USA 1976

out of focus

by Douglas Messerli

 

Rainer Werner Fassbinder (screenplay, based on an idea by Asta Scheib), Rainer Werner Fassbinder (director) Angst vor der Angst (Fear of Fear) / 1975, USA 1976

 

What is the problem with Margot Studte (Margit Carstensen)? She’s beautiful, the wife of a clumsily loving husband who daily works and is studying at the university at night, and is the mother of a beautiful young daughter and a soon-to-be-born son. Their house has been, apparently mostly paid for by her husband Kurt’s (Ulrich Faulhaber) family, whose mother, daughter, and husband live upstairs and are willing to babysit at any second, besides daily bringing in piles of cabbage, Brussel’s sprouts, and other food stuffs? If they’re a little intrusive, they might be simply calmed by appreciative nods, and a more careful closing of the front door, which the moody Margot generally slams.

      Obviously, everything’s wrong. Margot is not only beginning to experience a wavy, watery view of the world around her and, more importantly, of herself in the numerous mirrors that Fassbinder offers up as decorative trinkets in her apartment, but she is suffering from a kind of undiagnosed sense of imprisonment, which even her wallpaper seems to confirm in its endless row of decorative 1970s paisley, arabesques, and calicos. Even their furniture, we later discover, is not their own choice. Certainly, the potato pancakes, “stinky” cabbage, and numerous other typical German dishes, regularly delivered up by her Mother-in-law and her daughter are not appealing to her or her family.

      More importantly, she finds it impossible to describe any of her increasingly disturbing feelings to her busy husband. Although Margot almost manically attempts to distract herself through her intense love of her daughter, she is everyday beginning to fall apart, fearing for her own sanity.

    Her kindly doctor (who also lives across the street) insists nothing is wrong with her, and nonchalantly proscribes Valium and other drugs, to which Margot, in her increasing “angst of fear” begins to consume with greater and greater frequency.

      To add to her fears, her own husband, at moments, seems to doubt her sanity, and her brother-in-law, Karli (Armin Meier) describes her swimming regiment (through which she daily attempts to control her fears) as maniacal, reporting that back, of course, to her immediate family. In fact, nothing that Margot does goes unobserved by her nosy relatives, who like Nazi-era neighborhood snoops, note her increasing trips to a local pharmacist, Dr. Merck (Adrian Hoven)—with whom she happily exchanges sex for increasing dosages of drugs—and observes her bizarre behavior, including regular street encounters with a truly local madman, Herr Bauer (Kurt Raab), who recognizes her as developing psychological problems similar to his own, and who accosts her, perhaps, out of sympathy, but in his constant following, seems to be further threatening her stability.

      Many of Fassbinder’s films demonstrate the breakdown of individuals (particularly The Bitter Tears of Petra van Kant, Why Does Herr R. Run Amok? and In a Year with 13 Moons), but Margot’s situation is the closest of his work to a Hitchcock and reminded me of Mia Farrow in Polanski’s 1968 Hitchcock-inspired Rosemary’s Baby. In fact, we wonder, supported through one of Margot’s insults against the intrusive mother and daughter-in-law, whether her new son, Jan, might not grow up to be another “cabbage-eater.” Certainly, given the film’s self-absorbing fixation on the growingly mad mother, we rarely get even glimpse of the new child after his birth, we can only wonder, will he, too, be as monstrous as “Mutter” (Brigitte Mira) and daughter Lore (Irm Hermann)?

      Finally, even her ignoring husband cannot dismiss the fact that his lovely wife, after she has seemingly attempted to commit suicide, is now addicted to drugs and alcohol, and soon after the local hack doctor insists she is a schizophrenic commits her to an institution. There, through the help a friendly woman doctor and a healing patient, Edda (Ingrid Caven) (who on-line critic Jim Clark has connected with the Eddas, the ancient source of German myths), Margot is healed—at least temporarily. Although when she hears of the suicide of the local madman, Bauer, she again seems the watery, wavy pattern that has first led her to believe she was losing her sanity, I’d argue she has now become a survivor, a woman who understands that she must fend for herself in a world that has long been attempting to turn her into an infantile, a woman with no purpose outside of motherhood and cooking—the movie began with her making a cake.

      She and her daughter Bibi can now come out of their shadows (throughout the film, Margot’s daughter stands behind doors and screens, overhearing her mother’s intense interchanges with her husband) and claim their rights in the relationship she has with Kurt. We cannot know where that will end, particularly given Kurt’s reliance on his monstrous family; but even Lore’s husband, Karli, has encouraged her to turn away from the family through his simple gift of flowers. This beautiful woman, who at film’s end has obviously turned to a career of typing, will clearly survive—after all, the local madman, Bauer, has now died, and she, who has so feared his presence, has been renewed by her brief interchange with fellow females. If her view temporarily goes out of focus, her spirit, I would argue, has been renewed after her outspoken battles with her mother-in-law and her daughter. And, no matter what happens in her relationship with Kurt, she will surely move on as a stronger individual.

      That all of this was first presented on German television—at least from a US perspective—is startling. Yes, Bergman, who highly influenced Fassbinder, had presented even more involuted psychological dramas on Swedish television, but to present such startling visions such as this and later, Berlin Alexanderplatz, to an audience which it was obviously critiquing, is fairly amazing, particularly at a time when, just across the wall, in East Berlin just such family and neighborhood surveillance was a daily occurrence and was still highly instilled in the German mindset. In 1975, once again, Fassbinder was far ahead of his times, in filming about the past—and a future of drug dependency—that was amazingly prescient.

 

Los Angeles, August 6, 2017

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2017). 

Pierre Bismuth | Where Is Rocky II? / 2016, USA 2017

art without reason

by Douglas Messerli

 

Pierre Bismuth, D.V. DeVincentis, and Anthony Peckham (screenplay), Pierre Bismuth (director) Where Is Rocky II? / 2016, USA 2017

 

Sometime in the 1970s, well-known Los Angeles artist Ed Ruscha, with the help of his artist-surfer friend Jim Ganzer, constructed a rock made out of wheat paste, transporting it somewhere in the Mojave Desert within other rock formations. Given the extremes of weather and heavy winds, the “fake” rock, dubbed “Rocky” after the Sylvester Stallone film, did not survive. Another such rock, this time made out of fiberglass and resin, was constructed; dubbed “Rocky II,” it was also transported, in 1976, to a mysterious location in the desert and placed near or upon natural rocks which, at least superficially, it matched. This time, moreover, a British film crew from BBC happened to document the fake rock’s creation and transport it, although not knowing precisely where the rock was placed.

      For years, the short BBC documentary was forgotten, until, soon after filming his script of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and looking for another film project, Bismuth was shown a copy of the documentary.  Perplexed that an artist would create a work of art which no one knew of and very few would see or even recognize it if they were to stumble upon it, Bismuth set out on a voyage to discover the where and why of “Rocky II.”

      Confronting the artist at a gallery in England, Bismuth, pretending to be a journalist, asked a simple question of Ruscha, “Where Is Rocky II?” Admitting that there had been such a work, the artist, however, would not reveal its whereabouts, merely wishing Bismuth good luck in finding it.

      Determined to find the rock or, at least, document an attempt to find it, Bismuth hired a private detective, Michael Scott, to help track down the rock’s whereabouts. Like the flat-footed and clueless detective he truly is, Scott proceeded to question many art authorities throughout the city, including art dealer and curator Jeffrey Deitch, MOCA’s Philippe Vergne, LACMA’s Michael Govan, billionaire collector and philanthropist Eli Broad, bookstore specialist Dagny Corcoran, and others, somewhat hilariously asking them: 1. Did they know artist and 2. Did  they know anything of “Rocky II?” Of course all knew Ruscha quite well, but none had heard of the piece nor knew anything about its whereabouts. Govan suggests that Scott should contact Ruscha directly. Corcoran suggested Scott check out Rusha’s catalogue raissone; there was no mention of either of the “Rockys.”

        Had Scott known a bit more about art he might have asked Govan, who after all had helped artist Michael Heizer take a huge rock from nature and place it on the grounds of the museum, why anyone might do precisely the opposite. But the irony was surely not lost on the LACMA audience that filled the Bing Theater, where I saw this film last evening.

       While continuing to film Scott doggedly tracking down leads—from the outset, he determined to ask Ruscha, himself, last, since the artist was known to have been uncooperative—Bismuth hired two noted screenwriters D.V. DeVincentis (High Fidelity, Grosse Pointe Blank) and Anthony Peckham (Sherlock Holmes, Invictus) to write a fictional movie about the same subject, to be called Monument One. In short, the film he finally shows, a kind of “fake fiction,” moves in two directions simultaneously, as the film writers create a fictional reality—suggesting dark secrets might be hidden in the fake rock and hinting through their cast members, Robert Knepper as Cal Joshua (a fictional Ruscha), Milo Ventimiglia as the detective, Richard Edson, Roger Guenveur Smith, Barry O’Rouke, Tania Raymonde, and others that the rock may even be detonated to explode—that they also document, later bringing in director-actor Mike White to help with the “trailer,” with which this inverted documentary ends. White’s suggestions for the teaser are particularly funny, and, in the end, he seems more interested in getting high than in filmmaking.

     Meanwhile, Scott tracks down Ganzer (suggesting in the after-film conversation that he might have been personally misled of his whereabouts by Bismuth and his crew), the two establishing an immediate rapport, and with the help of a map that Bismuth has from the British Ganzer (who remembers the trip as a traveling to the left, left, and left), they make a pilgrimage to the Joshua Monument area in search of the possible location of “Rocky.” The perilous road seems to end up in Ruscha’s private desert home, with no one home. And, apparently, at least in terms of the film, the rock is never found. Ganzer later does admit that he saw it, but that it had been, once again, partially destroyed by the desert conditions. The camera seems often to be showing us the rock without it being confirmed.

        We can never know the location, nor even quite imagine Ruscha’s real reasons for the rock’s creation. But that isn’t the point. Bismuth’s brilliant film is not so much about truly comprehending what art is and why it is created as he is in showing how truth and fiction in art are intensely interconnected. Of course, no documentary speaks precisely the truth; it is rather a “version” of it, in which real things are posed and redefined. No good fiction, on the other hand, is without its truths. Finally, in his mash-up of genres, Bismuth has, for once and all, showed us that the existence and meaning of art can never be completely comprehended. And we realize that there is no logic in wanting to see or possess the Maltese Falcon-like object.