Clint Eastwood | Mystic River / 2003

that childhood car

by Douglas Messerli

 

Brian Helgeland (screenplay, based on the book by Dennis Lehane), Clint Eastwood (director) Mystic River / 2003

 

Clint Eastwood’s Mystic River which, years after its original release, I saw for the first time the other day, is a complex movie based on a kind of standard trope: three young boys, close friends in a Boston neighborhood, grow up to become social and moral opponents in their lives as adults. It happens all the time, or, at least, that’s what testosterone-driven male directors would like you to believe—not only Eastwood, but Martin Scorsese, even the melo-dramatist Douglas Sirk have all done variations of this theme.

     Yet this film is far more complex than most such films. Afterall, the young boys involved, Jimmy Markum, Sean Devine, and Dave Boyle, seen playing street hockey in an early scene, behaving somewhat badly as they attempt to write their names in freshly poured sidewalk concrete, are suddenly accosted by a man pretending to be a police officer, who demands their names and home locations before pulling away, quite inexplicably, with Dave, demanding him to enter a car wherein sits a priest—the two of them abducting the boy for 4 days while continuously sexually attacking him—abuse is too kind of a word in this case of utter rape and sexual battery! That the equally macho Eastwood would even dare to take on this subject is quite amazing. But then this diehard Republican apologist has always been a rather surprising figure in the celebrity and film world.

    Pulled out of his native social community, Dave almost immediately loses contact with the world he has known, and as an adult, (performed by Tim Robbins), he remains an outsider—a person who as the simple representation of the death of his youth is shown through the closure of a window blind—remains haunted by his abduction. Not that his childhood friend Jimmy (Sean Penn) is much better off; he, now an ex-con, runs a local popular neighborhood grocery and liquor store, where he is still closely in touch with Dave. Not only that, but by marriage, the two are still related, having married cousins.

      Actually, the two former boyhood friends are also related by their manias and sense of violence. Jimmy is obsessed with the fact that his 19-year-old daughter Katie (Emily Rossum) is dating a boy, Brendan Harris (Tom Guiry) whom he despises, for reasons that are not immediately revealed, but later we discover have to do with the boy’s father, who committed the crime which put Jimmy in prison. But the very fact that he is still attempting to control a 19-year-old child speaks a great deal about his macho persona. Certainly, his wife, Annabeth (Laura Linney) is equally unhappy in their relationship, but that doesn’t seem to be of much importance in Jimmy’s mania.

     In fact, women in this drama are nearly deleted, including Celeste (Marcia Gay Harden), Dave’s wife, who suddenly is intimidated to help her husband to “clean-up” after a mysterious event wherein, he claims, he was forced to kill someone who accosted him.

     The same night Jimmy’s daughter Katie is brutally murdered, her body left mutualized after Dave has witnessed her in a local bar with her girlfriends.

      The plot of this mystery/murder film gets even more complicated when the third childhood friend, Sean (Kevin Bacon), now a police detective, becomes involved in the search for Katie’s murderer.

    In a sense, the different directions of these three boyhood friends now reveal their extreme differences, as Dave begins to suspect Jimmy’s involvement in his daughter’s death, while Sean, with careful deliberation, attempts to track down the murder(ers).

       The fact that the hot-headed Jimmy becomes increasingly convinced that Dave has destroyed his daughter, represents not only his mania, but his guilt for not being the one who was enticed into the childhood car.

       It is as if all three boys were so terribly abused that day so long ago that none of them can let it go. At least Sean, with his partner, Detective Sergeant Whitey Powers (Laurence Fishburne) work together to track down the true killers; yet Sean’s own wife, pregnant at the time, has left him, so we must recognize him as another failed lover, another destroyed member of this trio.

      Convinced of Dave’s guilt, Jimmy corners him and demands an admission of his activities. Hoping to free himself of Jimmy’s immediate wrath, Dave admits to the murder—despite the fact that the man he has murdered, in fact, was another child abuser, whom he had discovered in a car with a young kid. Yet Jimmy, convinced of his righteous revenge shoots the former friend in the head, releasing his body in the Mystic River of the film’s title. In a sense, it is a revenge for his own lack of courage all those years earlier, a cleansing of his own guilt for not speaking out for his friend those long years ago, for not being the child the two villains chose.

      Finally, Sean reveals they have uncovered the real killers, two kids, one of whom was the son of the notorious “Just Ray” Harris,” the man who sent Jimmy to jail and the father of his daughter’s boyfriend, brother to Brendan, resulting in Jimmy carrying even more guilt and sorrow for the rest of his life. He confesses to his wife, and Sean also seems to know that the disappearance of Dave has something to do with Jimmy. At the end of the film, it is unclear just how much longer Jimmy can survive.

      I might argue that Eastwood and his screenplay writer, Brian Helgeland, might have simplified their story, based on the novel by Dennis Lehane. But, obviously, that was just the point: the interconnected stories of these young men are just part of the inextricably complex and tortured tales of young men and women growing up in what Eastwood shows as an almost sour sewer, the Mystic River flowing through Boston, which we later rediscover in works such as in Tim McCarthy’s Spotlight. That great Brahmin world of high ideals was never what it pretended to be.

     The children in Eastwood’s movie were just those kinds of abused kids that the news reporters shed their “spotlight” on in McCarthy’s 2015 film, boys who never could fully recover from their sudden abuses on the streets in which they were simply playing hockey and memorializing their names into the local pavement. They were innocents suddenly put into another world apart from their imaginations. Can you blame them for being failures as adults?

 

Los Angeles, September 28, 2019

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2019).

Eric Mueller | This Car Up / 2003

kismet

by Douglas Messerli

 

Eric Mueller (screenwriter and director) This Car Up / 2003 [16 minutes]

 

Minneapolis businessman Pete (Michael Booth) and bike messenger Adrian (Brent Doyle) could not be more different, so it appears. Pete, up in his 45-story office, calls up for a delivery of information, imagining for a moment being anywhere but in his office, perhaps on a tropical island. The heavily tattooed-and-pieced Adrian, going about his rounds, imagines himself in a white shirt behind a desk, suggesting that perhaps they are simply at the opposite ends of the worlds in which they would each like to be living.

     Both, however, firmly believe in chance or fate, Pete pulling out his old magic eight-ball to get the answer to his unstated question: “Will I soon meet someone with whom I will fall in love?”; and Adrian, upon a finding a quarter just outside of Peter’s office towers, tossing it again and again to find out the answer to a question that we suspect is similar to the businessman’s self-query.

     Unfortunately, Pete’s magic ball keeps responding “No,” and Adrian’s quarter keeps coming up heads when he obviously has hoped for tails and vice versa.

     This mostly silent film by Eric Mueller programmatically splits up the screen into four frames: one the lower left showing us the in-time office-bound experiences of Peter and the lower right showing us Adrian mostly making his way through traffic on his bike. On the upper left we catch glimpses of Pete’s thinking and imagination, while on the upper right we observe Adrian’s thoughts, the top two images also being represented at moments as a kind of casino slot-machine, indicating that each man is hoping to win love with—which becomes increasingly obvious—the other.

     But in their first go-round, the keep missing their encounter, Pete leaving the office to take the elevator down at the very moment that Adrian arrives with is package he delivers up to the office secretary.

     As Los Angeles Times reviewer Kevin Thomas observes: “The filmstrips further express the lives and longings of the two men. On a smoke break by his building’s bicycle stands, the well-tailored Pete takes note of Adrian and soon realizes that he is attracted to him beyond his look, so very different from his own. Will the wheels of fortune spin in Pete’s favor, permitting another encounter with Adrian?”

     The quartet of images reveal them on the next day both taking outings in the park and, without realizing it, resting near trees nearby one another. They are so close that we observe, at one point, a man with a dog speeding through both their frames. This time we observe that they indeed do share a great deal in common, particularly in their interest in one another, in one glorious moment their panels aligning up like the planets, when both spot a nearby male couple greeting one another, as their minds return to the moment of the day earlier when they shook hands. A moment later we observe them both conjuring up the image of the other.

     That evening as both prepare Italian meals for themselves we recognize just how much these two actually do have in common given our ability to see what TV stations they are both watching and how they lay out in the couch, hit the bed at the same moment.

      The next day at the office, Pete can’t get Adrian out of his mind as the delivery boy suddenly shows up to his office—without a package. Pete suddenly realizes that Adrian has been attracted to him as much as he to Adrian, and with a wink he speeds his visitor off to the elevator, where Pete sheepishly admits that he was about to call for a package. Adrian, asks “Why didn’t you?” Peter answering that there are certain things you simply have to leave to fate or chance. Adrian prefers the word fate, as the two fall into a deep embrace. Suddenly, we lose the upper two panels of the film. The two continue their dual interaction until the door opens, the image turning into one full image of the two in the elevator still kissing in the clinch.

     If it is clearly not a very profound film, This Car Up is a nice excuse for believing in kismet when it comes to gay love.

 

Los Angeles, March 16, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2023).

Rahman Milani | Stille landskap / 2003

portrait of an outsider

by Douglas Messerli

 

Rahman Milani (screenwriter and director) Stille landskap / 2003 [8.40 minutes]

 

I must admit that the Norwegian film, Stille landskap was my very first LGBTQ film entirely in Farsi—moreover without English language subtitles. Directed by Rahman Milani, this starkly photographed tale presents, through a straightforward presentation of images, the story of an Iranian teenage boy (Homayon Hamzeloee), living in a rural Norwegian community with a family who have obviously emigrated to Norway, the boy having obviously fallen in love with a Norwegian school mate (Georg Lyngved).

      The two meet up in the Norwegian boy’s home to hang out together, share their love of art, and enjoy one another’s bodies, never imagining that without a closed curtain a neighbor, another Iranian immigrant, might be observing their lovely kisses.

     When the boy’s family finds out, he is severely beaten by his father, despite the pleas of the mother to stop. And the last several frames of this 8-minute short—produced by Frank Mosvold, several of whose LGBTQ films I have previously reviewed—concern the boy readying himself in the middle of the night to escape, ending in a long train ride across the snow-covered landscape until he arrives in the city, presumably Oslo. What he might do there and how he might possibly survive is not explored. One can only conjure up images of another outsider youth stalking the streets of the Norwegian capitol, Knut Hamsun’s starving young would-be journalist in his 1890 fiction Hunger.

      Through the strains of the film’s music we also even get a hint of another world-traveling Norwegian wanderer, Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gynt. We can only wonder whether his story might also end on taking an even longer voyage in order to find safe haven.

      If this film’s narrative seems almost too pared-down to represent any complexity about Milani’s story, in its images of the frozen landscape and homelife violence, it fully brings to life the painful isolation of its central figure.

     Yet I would like to know where this young man’s suffering leads, to discover what possible solutions a queer life he has in a world in which he is a kind of double-outsider, both politically/religiously and sexually. Is there any haven available to him within Norway’s relatively small, like-minded population? Is there even any respite elsewhere in the world?  If there was ever a universal symbol of loneliness it lies in the face of this young kid.

    I lived in Norway in the 1960s, and absolutely felt at home in its gloriously open culture. But several years later, as an older man, I returned to Oslo, finding only a single store where I might have even imagined there might be gay literature available. The man behind the counter reacted to my question with a kind of distressed laugh: “No, in the small town of Oslo there is little interest in gay material.” I felt the cold of his sad laughter go straight through my bones; the lovely landscape of by beloved Oslo turned still and frozen as it must have been for this Iranian queer boy.

 

Los Angeles, June 24, 2021

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

Séamus Rea | Two Minutes After Midnight / 2003

every man’s fantasy lover

by Douglas Messerli

 

Séamus Rea (screenwriter and director) Two Minutes After Midnight / 2003 [11 minutes]

 

Two Minutes After Midnight is a comic gay fantasy that explores the various dream partners that a wide range of dancers at a gay club in Britain can conjure up in one evening. It’s a frightful thing, particularly for a nice-looking average gay boy just wanting to find someone to whom he’s attracted to go home with.

    Our hero John (Andrew Hinton-Brown) thinks he’s spotted the perfect person and approaches him on the dance floor, but the guy quickly walks away to the bar. Not to be easily sloughed off, John follows him, but is told to go away. John suggests he may not know what he’s missing: “I may be the answer to all your dreams,” predicative of what is about to happen.

     Disappointed by the abusive rejection, our average boy retreats to the bar toilet where he meets up with an angel (Mark Wakeling). When John snaps back that he thought “Angels didn’t have any vices,” the angel replies, in Oscar Wilde fashion, that vice is just what some call different kinds of pleasure.

     Strangely testy with his new angel friend, he finally is convinced that he can get back at the guy who rejected him and perhaps become the perfect companion of anyone else he desires by the obeying the instructions given to him by the heavenly messenger: “Just turn around the ring three times on your finger, and you will turn into any man’s sexual fantasy.

     The first time he attempts it, he indeed becomes a beautifully muscled hunk (Adrian Bouchet), with whom, when he returns to the dance floor, everyone is awed. The nasty boy who refused him cannot resist, telling him suddenly that he is the “sexiest guy I’ve ever seen.” John plays with him for a moment before he refuses his offer to go home with him, responding, “You’re so far up your ass, I don’t think there’d be room for anyone else.”

     So begins a series of transformations where, observing someone not so bad looking, he turns the ring to become their sexual idol. The results, however, are ridiculously unfulfilling as he transmogrifies throughout the evening into a woman, a grandmotherly drag queen, a man dressed all in rubber, a man-baby, a leather number, Brunhilde, Hitler, and finally a dog, making him wonder whether anybody is normal anymore.

     Finally, he spots a good-looking boy and returns to the toilet for one last try. Three turns of the ring and he comes out looking—just like himself. Convinced that he’s gone just beyond the midnight deadline, he dejectedly heads home alone. Meanwhile the last truly handsome boy, encouraged by his friend to “go after him,” argues what is the point? “Obviously he isn’t interested. He was perfect.”

     This is not at all a deft or truly clever film, although it does provide a few giggles. Unfortunately, the film is available on YouTube only in a miniaturized version with Russian subtitles, not the best way to watch British director Séamus Rea’s short work.

 

Los Angeles, January 16, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 2023).

Maren Ade | Der Wald vor lauter Bäumen (The Forest for the Trees) / 2003

in search of a friend

by Douglas Messerli

 

Maren Ade (screenwriter and director) Der Wald vor lauter Bäumen (The Forest for the Trees) / 2003

 

The Forest for the Trees, German director Maren Ade’s directorial debut, is a tale about of provincial school teacher, Melanie Pröschle (Eva Löbau) who has moved to Karlsruhe to work in their prestigious Bose school. It is her first teaching position, which begins, inexplicably, in the middle of the school term. And, equally inexplicable, she is asked to teach math to both third-graders and ninth-graders. She is full of apparently new concepts of teaching, but in this far more conservative institution, she is thwarted not only by her fellow teachers, who apparently give far higher grades to their students but severely control classroom behaviors, but particularly by the unruly older students themselves, who protest almost any new project she suggests, including a field-trip outing, for which they argue instead for a trip to a local amusement park. At one point a particularly unruly student throws a chocolate milk carton at her; and when she calls in his mother to speak of the incident, the woman sides with her son.

     In short, the positive-thinking Melanie is thwarted in almost all her optimistic ideals. One teacher daily displays lovely plants her students have awarded her, but, as Melanie’s only seeming ally Thorsten (Jan Neumann) suggests, she purchases the “presents” for herself.

     While Thorsten attempts to help and perhaps woo her, Melanie, who apparently has experienced a breakup of her own previous sexual romance, pushes him and his advice aside, attempting to soldier on without the help of others, particularly when she overhears other teachers gossiping about her inabilities to control her classrooms.

     Moreover, she has been unable to find new friends in the city, although she even awards some of her fellow apartment-dwellers with house-warming gifts that they might have been more logically gifting her. The work she spends on planning for new teaching projects mostly turns her under-decorated apartment into a mess. And as she grows in the depression of what she projected as a new life, her calls home to her mother end in near-disaster as her mother attempts to probe the cause of these calls.

     In short, Melanie is left entirely alone in a new world, vulnerable to depression at work and at home. If there ever was a film to demonstrate the difficulties teachers daily face—and there have been numerous others (think of Up the Down Staircase or the earlier Blackboard Jungle)—this somewhat quieter version of the dilemmas of attempting to help a younger generation learn is a model. I left the university, with basically good experiences nearly four decades ago, but I have heard from peers about just how difficult it now is to try to help young closed and seemingly privileged minds to question their values, a necessary event if we want to truly educate our children.* 

     Shopping for a new outfit that might slightly intimidate her misbehaved students, Melanie meets a shopkeeper Tina (Daniela Holtz), whom she soon after discovers lives in the apartment across from hers—almost completely visible from Melanie’s vantage point.

    The two, at first, strike up a kind of friendship, Tina inviting her neighbor into her far nicer apartment, and even befriending her, at one point even hiding out in Melanie’s apartment, as the two slug down glasses of homemade schnapps as Tina watches her angry boyfriend return to her space. The event seems to create a bond between the two that only Melanie truly recognizes.

    Let me clarify: this is not a lesbian movie; there is no sexual interrelationship between these two women. But it might as well be, as Melanie becomes more and more attached to her new “friend,” spying on her, often through binoculars (which have been donated for her classes’ failed field trip) and, ultimately, even slightly stalking her new-found friend, showing up at a rather elegant celebration in her haute clothing shop in a frowsy coat to talk to Tina’s clients about the difficulty of teaching.

      In other words, this might as well be a lesbian film, since Melanie is now almost infatuated with Tina to the degree that when her friend finally attempts to include her in her birthday party, the schoolteacher suggests to Tina’s arriving ex-boyfriend, Tobias, that he leave, while she delivers the roses he had brought to her to the new friend.

      The politics of this “friendship” are now quite clear; Melanie is attempting to replace Tobias in Tina’s life. If this relationship is outwardly simply a close connection between suffering women, it has now unfurled into something else, and Tina’s response of now isolating herself from the voyeur of her life is totally comprehensible, while it is also quite devastating.

       Melanie, always the outsider in the new world into which she bravely has entered, later observes the couple mocking her, as she looks down from her apartment upon them.

       With the school vacation over, Melanie takes her own day off, driving her car down a freeway on cruise control, and suddenly, releasing her hands from the wheel, jumping over into the back seat to calmly observe the results, an imitation, if you will, of Thelma and Louise in the 1991 film bearing their names.

     2003, the date of the film, was long before cars might possibly be driven electronically by themselves. We know what the result will be. Melanie may be outwardly mourned, but she will never have discovered much love in her life. She has been a clumsy and desperate would-be lover for her students and both her heterosexual and woman friends.

      Ade’s first film was a kind of tragedy about idealism meeting up with truly cynical aspects of real life. Her later figures become kinds of clowns who persevere in worlds of near-disaster, living and surviving despite themselves.

 

*There were only two instances of student rebellion in my many years of teaching experiences: the first was when a freshman class in literature were appalled when I taught Jonathan Swift; having lost the concept of irony, they hated the writer for suggesting that the English might boil and eat the Irish children. But the worst was with a bitter group of graduate students to whom I attempted to teach Williams and Pound. They hated Williams because of his dismissal of the academic and hated me because, even though I had them purchase the Index to Pound’s references in the Cantos, I suggested that the author often explained those references later in the text, and that the index was not truly necessary. However, the wonderful Tenney Nathanson came out of that angry class as a friend and made a significant career for himself.

 

Los Angeles, December 21, 2019 | Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2019).

Adam Arkin and Felix Stacia | Pristine Books / 2003

love with an older man

by Douglas Messerli

 

Felix Stacia (screenplay), Adam Arkin and Felix Stacia (directors) Pristine Books / 2003 [7 minutes]

 

The good university student Travis (Samuel Evans) rooms with his friend / lover Luke (David G. Vigo) who evidently falls in a drunken stupor most afternoons. Travis has evidently been chatting on line for some time now with an older man from Sydney, Mark, who happens to be visiting the city where Travis and Luke are attending school.

      Travis meets up with Mark and they go for dinner, returning to Mark’s hotel room where the handsome visitor fucks the boy, as Travis expresses it, “like no one ever before.”

      In the very next scene of Australian filmmakers Adam Arkin and Felix Stacia’s film, the roommates are deep into a fight, Travis accusing Luke of doing nothing but drinking, smoking, and sleeping through his university days. Mark, he argues, cares for him and has ambitions. Taking up a knife, Luke threatens to hurt Mark or to tell Travis’ father about the situation. Or perhaps worse, destroy his “precious books,” presumably meaning the thing that most differentiates these two boys, the one actually reading and studying, the other simply partying away his hours.

      In his next meeting with Mark, the visitor argues that he needs to get away from Luke before he actually does hurt him. The businessman suggests he move into his apartment in Sydney, and as for his education, he might do that in the city as well, he’d even help to arrange it.

      But Travis questions his motives, and furthermore is simply not certain that it’s what he really wants. When Mark gets angry, Travis walks, meeting up with his roommate in the elevator, obviously having decided to return to the friend with serious problems, but at least of his own age. Together clearly they will have to work out a future between them.

      This short work has quite dreadful sound and the actors reveal their amateur status. But the worst problem is the simplistic narrative that simply doesn’t explain or even probe Travis’ feelings or his viewpoints. Why not join the far more handsome man in Sydney? Age seems to be a barrier here, but to me there doesn’t seem to be that many years at issue.

      Perhaps he loves Luke for reasons we’ve not discovered, but it the responsibility of the film to establish those reasons so that we can make sense of the decision which is at the crux of this short drama. As it is, nothing truly seems to matter. Travis, the good student with the “pristine” books will certainly graduate, while his friend will likely drop out. What interest is this to us? What does it all signify? Unfortunately, the writer and directors do not bother to explain.

 

Los Angeles, November 23, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2022).

Gary Halvorson and Richard Eyre | Werther / 2014 [Metropolitan Opera HD-live broadcast]

between duty and the devil

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jules Massenet (music), Edouard Blau, Paul Millet, and Georges Hartmann (libretto, based on Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werthers), Richard Eyre (stage director), Gary Halvorson (director)  Werther / 2014 [Metropolitan Opera HD-live broadcast]

 

The Metropolitan Opera’s new production of Werther makes it clearer than ever that Werther (the remarkable Jonas Kaufman) and his beloved Charlotte (Sophie Koch) belong together, while standing apart from the others of the work. As my spouse Howard commented, both are costumed in clothes—mostly gray with a white bodice in Werther’s case, and pearl-white or white with a dark overcoat in Charlotte’s—that stand in opposition to the others of the work. Although the melancholic Werther is willing to risk everything for love, he is, nonetheless, like her, a man who adores children and believes in duty. Indeed, his absolute love for Charlotte is based on her conventional values, her determination to care for her brothers and sisters after their mother’s death and to remain true to her promise to her mother that she will marry Albert, a kindly militarist, who by opera’s end all but accuses his wife of unfaithfulness, forcing her to herself send the pistols for which Werther has asked in order to kill himself since Charlotte has refused to give into his sexual assaults.

     What became more apparent than ever in this production is that, as opposed to the conventionality of both Werther and Charlotte, most of the rest of the opera’s figures—despite their outward celebration of the local parson and clichés of cultural obedience—are far more willing to bend to the joy of daily pleasures. Several times in Werther, characters sing out in praise of Bacchus, particularly early in the opera when we first meet The Bailiff’s (Jonathan Sommers) friends, Johannn (Philip Cokorinnos) and Schmidt (Tony Stevenson), who while mocking Werther’s seriousness, themselves sing of the wine and crayfish they are looking forward to at the local pub. Despite the Bailiff’s more serious demeanor and his insistent demand that his children perform adequately a Christmas carol he currently teaching them, he too speaks of Bacchus and, through his daughter’s Sophie’s encouragement, is easily convinced to join his friends at the pub.

     Although both Werther and Charlotte may see the children as “angels,” the children themselves act up and mock several of their superiors behind their backs. Only in Charlotte’s gentle care to they truly act angelically.

     Although Charlotte’s 15-year-old sister, Sophie, is a pleasant and gentle girl who, when Charlotte is away at the ball, lovingly cares for her siblings, she has her own way of not taking things seriously, at the pastor’s wedding anniversary party singing of the joyfulness of the day and weather, while flirtatiously inviting Werther to dance with her at the celebration. In Act III she, similarly, attempts to cheer up her distraught older sister, who has now realized through Werther’s anguished epistles how much she is in love with him rather than with her often fatuous and inattentive husband, Albert (David Bižić).

      In such a bacchanalian world of wine, women, dance and, in Sophie’s case, just the joy of living, the two heroes of the piece become tragic representatives of conventional faith and duty, a fact that, by opera’s end Charlotte has come to realize—that she was forged her with chains to Werther from the first time she set eyes upon him. Two of Werther’s most touching songs—his Act II disquisition on God’s response if he were to commit suicide (Werther’s version of Hamlet’s “To Be or Not to Be,” “Lorsque l’enfant revient d’un voyage”) and his stunningly sad recitation of one of his translations of Ossian—center on death, as does Charlotte’s Act II aria (“Va, laisse couler mes larmes”), a prayer for moral fortitude. While the others dance around them with the zest of living beings, these two suffer, mostly in silence—except to the opera’s audience—unable to survive in the devil’s bacchanal of daily life. Although seen as everyone else as models of moral certitude, they are, in the real world in which they are forced to live, the most tenuous of beings. Is it any wonder, then, that they end their lives in a passionate embrace and kiss that resembles the high Romantic sacrificial pattern of “love, death, and transfiguration.” Although Massenet’s work is far more intimate and modest that Wagner’s great Tristan and Isolde, it is, at its heart, a similar tale, a tale of two lovers doomed by social and cultural conventions they feel are beyond their control, while the others, those on the side of the devil—according to Werther and Charlotte’s way of seeing things—are free to enjoy their lives and survive.

      As Jonas Kaufman suggested during an intermission discussion of this HD presentation of the Met production, in this pre-Freudian drama, there is no way that Werther or Charlotte might see the error of their ways, to psychologically comprehend their entrapment in the dichotomy of “Totem and Taboo.” The problem for modern audiences, accordingly is to try to maintain Werther (and also Charlotte) as credible figures, despite their manias, with whom we can identify. Both Kaufman (in one of the best operatic performances of the year) and Koch accomplished that!

      Unfortunately, in the last moments of Werther’s death, when the two sing of their passion and Werther is transfigured by the sound of the children singing, once again, “Noel Noel Noel,” the sound of the broadcast disappeared. Several members of the contemporary audience with whom we shared the theater suddenly became like children, shouting out for others to sing, or—in the most disgusting of experiences—two elderly women stupidly commenting in loud voices on the slow death of Werther: “Is she dead too? Oh, he’s still living! She’s covered with blood. Oh he’s still singing. Is she going to shoot herself?” etc. etc. Most of the audience members tried simply to imagine the emotional impact by following the subtitles, but for these adult-children the grand opera had simply fallen apart, the credibility that Kaufman had so brilliantly worked towards completely disappearing from the art. At times like these, one can only wonder why some people had been attracted to such a memorable opera broadcast in the first place, leaving the theater as they cried out, “I want my money back!”

 

Los Angeles, March 16, 2014

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera and Performance (March 2014).