Bruce LaBruce | Défense de fumer / 2014

lighting, camera, action!

by Douglas Messerli

 

Bruce LaBruce (screenwriter and director) Défense de fumer / 2014 [4 minutes]

 

This short film, commissioned by the Festival de Nouveau Cinéma in Montreal, might almost be said to be a tableaux vivant of a leather boy’s gay paradise.

     In the garage where he works, handsome mechanic (Ron Dagenais) takes a break, turning on the lights of a back space, taking out a cigar where a sign clearly says “Smoking prohibited,” and lights up. Within minutes a half nude leather boy shows up and the mechanic hands him his lighter, another appears, and yet another, five in all, each time lighting up their cigars. I was reminded almost immediately of what the lesbian figure Sigrid in the comic short film from 1968 says to the woman she’s pursuing in The Dove, handing her a cigar, “Phalliken symbolsk”— although here it’s not so much a symbol but something close to reality.

    The leather daddies (Notre Dame de Cuir, Xavier Hamel, Van Hechter, Jessy Karson, and Leather Daddy G. L.) line up with the mechanic in a row, the room quickly filling up with an impenetrable screen smoke as the Sirius Quartet plays Mikael Karlsson’s “Danache.” (“Hereafter).   

     The blue haze that soon hides them all quickly turns to red, becoming a scene right out of a gay bar like New York’s The Anvil in 1968 or Truxx, a decade later in Montreal.

      As Letterboxed commentator Mike Kennedy notes: “…the classical music changes to the “4 on the Floor, Ass in the Air Mix” of MC Spacebar’s “Cock Thoughts” performed by Hirsuite Pursuit,” the boys circling round.

       But reality quickly returns, the fantasy boys disappear, and the mechanic’s break is over. He tosses away the remainder of his cigar and turns off the lights.

      If there was ever a good reason for smoking, director Bruce LaBruce has revealed it in this humorous pocket mirror flash of the worker’s inner desires.

 

Los Angeles, September 21, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2025).

Luis Buñuel | Un chien Andalou / 1929

music for dead donkeys

by Douglas Messerli

 

Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel (scenario), Luis Buñuel (director) Un chien Andalou / 1929

The well-known 1929 experimental short film, Un chien Andalou, might almost be described as a purposeful shocker. Eschewing most normative narrative devices, and purposefully selecting disconnected scenes based on dreams involving “no idea or image that might lend itself to a rational explanation,” the film’s two creators, Dalí and Buñuel—so legend has it—turned up on opening night with rocks in their pockets, expecting the audience to negatively react. When the audience responded rather calmly, the artists were disappointed. In fact, the film’s run, planned for only a limited period, had to be extended to eight months!

      The growing popularity of Freudian psychology as well as, what I have commented on elsewhere, the innate conservatism of Surrealism probably accounted for the film’s success. And more than anything else, what the film does show us is that there is no such thing which the human brain does not instinctively attempt to link to narrative, even if the work of art does not pretend to tell a story. We think in narrative, even when we encounter something seemingly disjunctive, and particularly when it comes to dream imagery, the brain struggles against the notion of unrelated images to bring them into more coherent patterns.

     Rather that relating the sequence of this 16-minute film’s events—this is a film that demands being seen more than being talked about—I shall recount the kind of events that occur in this film to explain what I mean. One might suggest that the scenes in this picture fall into at least six categories, some images relating to more than one: religion, social or cultural institutions, sex (both heterosexual and homosexual, including variations of gender), nature, violence, and death.

     The film begins, indeed, with what appears as a violent act, a man (Luis Buñuel) cutting a woman’s eye with a razor. Later, another man (Pierre Batchef) attempts to attack the same woman (Simone Marueil)—after he has been sexually aroused by stroking her breasts—in an attempt to rape her. A woman who has found a severed hand in the middle of street is run over by an automobile. Later a third man (Robert Homent) appears to chastise and punish the second man for wearing a nun’s habit over his male clothing. The man he chastises ultimately shoots him with magically-appearing pistols. The man falls dead in the middle of a meadow. The film ends with a couple buried up to their waists in sand.

     Relating to the religious category is the man bicycling down the street with the nun’s habit over his suit. When he is later prevented from attacking the young woman, he picks up a rope to which are tied stone plates of the Ten Commandments and two grand pianos containing the corpses of dead donkeys, all hooked up to two shocked seminarians (Dalí and Jaume Miravitilles). One might even describe the very first scene, with the influence of the full moon, as suggesting an archetypal religious/sacrificial event.

     Social and cultural forces are represented by the reading material left by the young woman when she rises to look the window: a reproduction of a Vermeer’s The Lacemaker. The grand pianos also fall nicely into the cultural forces at work in this film. The police who keep the crowds away from the young woman poking the severed arm are obvious social forces. And even the scolding man who forces his “friend” to remove the nun’s clothing appears to be representing social and cultural norms, his punishment being evidently, like some schoolboy, to stand in the corner.

      Natural imagery appears in the very first scene in the image of the moon, and reappears several times when the young male lover’s hand becomes infested with ants. A death-head’s moth prevails over some of the final scenes, as does the idyllic meadow in which a man dies and the final stroll of a seemingly happy couple by the sea. Even their embedment in sand suggests the forces of nature.

     Sexuality, with which a great many of the film’s images are concerned, seems to link up many of these seemingly random occurrences. Certainly the violent cutting of the eye in the very first scene also seems connected to sex, a stealing of the woman's proper vision. And throughout film sex is implied in a series of gender confusions: the man dressed in a nun’s habit, the woman on the street looking very much like a transvestite. The man who comes back to life attempts to feel the young women’s breasts and struggles to get nearer to her as he is transformed almost into a werewolf, blood dripping from his mouth. The young man who comes to chastise the man dressed as a nun appears to not only be correcting his ways, but in his intense stares and emotional involvement with the other man appears to have some very deep relationship with him; perhaps the two have been lovers. When another man arrives, he wipes his mouth away with his hand as the young woman applies lipstick, sticking out her tongue at the would-be suitor. The last stroll by the sea suggests they the young couple have finally found true love, even if that love ends up in Spring (the season for lovers) with their being half-buried.

     Death of course is the end of many of these events. The ants plaguing the hand of the man who has fallen from his bicycle certainly suggests the result of any burial. The woman who is struck by the automobile apparently dies. So too does the man whom the cross-dressed man shoots, his death being more thoroughly revealed in his second collapse in a meadow. The death-head’s moth clearly calls up the skull of a dead man. And the half-buried couple suggests a kind of perfect Beckettian-like end’s game.

     That these various categories are interrelated are often self-evident. The attempt to rape the woman is held back by the culture and the church, representing so many stubborn taboos which must be destroyed before the man can act. Love leads, again and again, to violence. Violence, symbolized by the severed hand, leads ultimately to death. Bit by bit, accordingly, each viewer ends up a series of inter-casual relationships between these seemingly disjunctive images that create a kind of poetic narrative, the kind of narrative without plot that American poet David Antin argues for his “talk-poems.”

     We might even go so far as to describe Un chien Andalou as being a kind of imaginary movie, a film less interested as defining the genre of cinema than it is interested in creating a large mulligan stew of the subterranean relationships between sex, culture, religion, society, nature, and death. It is no accident that Buñuel called for Wagner’s finale to Tristan and Isolde and a variation of a tango as the music to accompany this love-and-death dominated work of art.

 

Los Angeles, August 1, 2012

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2012).

 

 

Nikolaj Arcel | En kongelig affære (A Royal Affair) / 2012

something rotten in denmark

by Douglas Messerli

 

Nikolaj Arcel and Rasmus Heisterberg (screenplay, based on a book by Bodil Steensen-Leth), Nikolaj Arcel (director) En kongelig affære (A Royal Affair) / 2012

 

In 2009, in a conversation with Polish writer-director Zbigniew Kaminski, I was asked if I knew of any good new books which he might adapt for film production in Poland. Having just read Per Olav Enquist’s historical fiction, The Royal Physician’s Visit (see My Year 2001), I suggested that title and, if I remember correctly, even loaned him my copy of the book.

      He felt, evidently, since that the film would have to be shot in Denmark, it would be too expensive for his company. However, some film company did ultimately buy those rights, planning to make an English-language movie, but evidently had difficulty in getting funding.

      Meanwhile Zentropa Entertainments, Danmarks Radio, and a consortium of other producers told the same story, this based on a work by Bodil Steensen-Leth, Prinsesse af blodet. Knowing of the other project, the scriptwriters, Nikolaj Arcel (also its director) and Rasmus Heisterberg, worked hard with Enquist to discover what was documented and what were the fictional scenes that he had added in order to avoid any question of rights.

      The result, A Royal Affair (2012), is a resplendent tale of the beautiful Caroline Matilda of Great Britain (Alicia Vikander), her mad young husband, Christian VII of Denmark (Mikkel Følsgaard), and Johann Friedrich Struensee (Mads Mikkelsen), the royal physician with whom Matilda has an affair.

      With the royal court as its setting, the film is absolutely breathtakingly lovely to look at, and the plot is filled with court intrigue, particularly with the plotting of Ove Høegh-Guldberg (David Dencik) and the queen dowager, Juliana Maria of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel (Trinen Dyrholm). Yet Struensee is himself involved in an attempted takeover of the government, working with two former courtiers, Enevold Brandt (Cyron Bjørn Melville) and Schack Carl Rantzau (Thomas W. Gabrielsson).

     But the real center of this film is revealed early on as a momentary transition between the medievally-run country of 18th Denmark and its brief transformation into an enlightened nation, the fact of which led Voltaire himself to pen a letter to the King. And, in this sense, Struensee, a reader of enlightenment writers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Voltaire, who manipulates his young royal charge to oppose of privy council—who actually rule the country with Christian offering merely his signature—and to pass radical changes for the good of the Danish people, including universal inoculation against smallpox, a clean-up of Copenhagen’s filthy streets, and other important changes, some 1,069 decrees in all.

      In Enquist’s version of the tale, Christian—whose major passions appear to be theater and whores—is perceived as quite literally mad; but here we are more uncertain about his mental instability, having to wonder whether, as the wise physician seems to suggest, if it isn’t simply a pose to free himself from the responsibilities of state. As he says early on in his battles with the privy council:

 

             Who is more disturbed, the King or someone who believes the Earth

             was created in six days?

 

Struensee, who quickly befriends Christian, does just that, freeing the young king from his passive role by rehearsing Christian’s daily new proposals and, ultimately, after doing away with the privy council, taking over the bill-signing himself.

       Although Matilda does have a son, Frederick, with Christian, mostly she is deserted, keep apart in an unfriendly world where even several of the books she has brought with her from England, are taken away, having been banned in Denmark.

    Is it any wonder that, as the physician and she come together to discuss ideas, that she falls passionately in love with Struensee, becoming pregnant with his daughter, who later would be related to many of Europe’s royal families. Her daughter, Caroline Amalie, for example, would become Queen of Denmark.

     In a sense Mathilda, of whom Christian continually refers to as “mother,” and Struensee, who clearly plays the role of a loving and doting father, are almost destined to their own spousal-like relationship, the later joining her in bed every night. And at moments, particularly when the troubled Christian falls into the arms of genial and clearly loving physician, it appears that the relationship between this trio has become a kind of perverse ménage-a-trois, particularly when, discovering that she is pregnant with Struensee’s daughter, Mathilda is forced to encourage Christian to return to her bed as a ruse to hide the fact that her child is a bastard.

       When the queen dowager actually does perceive that Mathilda and Struensee are love, however, there is little hope Struensee can stay alive, even though Christian is quite ready to forgive him and stay his execution. But the privy council has returned to power, and the evil Høegh-Guldberg ignores Christian’s reprieve, beheading one of the few men of the country who had a truly good mind and caring constitution.

       Mathilda is sent away, and her son Frederick eventually comes to power, an afternote letting us know that he later restored many of the reformations previously ordered by his father, as imagined by his physician.

       Although, many of the incidents presented in the movie are fictions, most of them by far occurred in history itself. And the only truly unbelievable aspect of this film is that the scenes we are witnessing supposedly consist of a long epistle Mathilda is writing to explain her actions to her children. As several critics noted, had she actually written such a letter, it would surely have gotten into the hands of enemies, and would probably have resulted in the death of her daughter. In history, it is apparent, that this unhappy young queen kept her silence in painful isolation, returning to England to become involved with charities.

       In the end, we might almost see this film as a presaging of the liberal, open-minded and economically successful country that Denmark is today. Perhaps the royalty, after years of inter-breeding, needs a good dose, now and then, of a county doctor of German peasant stock. If nothing else, Mathilda, brought an aura of what Christian describes as “the dramatic” into the oppressive Danish court. It’s too bad that film did not incorporate the fact that Mathilda, far from being the fragile beauty as she is here represented, was often attired in men’s clothing and appeared in formal occasions in riding breeches.

 

Los Angeles, December 23, 2012

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2012).

Georges Franju | Eyes without a Face / 1960, USA 1962

the beauty of her own beast

by Douglas Messerli

 

Pierre Boileau, Thomas Narcejac, Jean Redon, and Claude Sautet (screen adaptation, based on a fiction by Jean Redon), Pierre Gascar (dialogue), Georges Franju (director) Les yeux sans visage (Eyes without a Face) / 1960, USA 1962

 

I saw this classic "horror/science fiction" film at the AFI Fest in November 2011, selected by the Guest Artistic Director of that year, Pedro Almodóvar, who also introduced the four films he had chosen. The Franju film had obviously been one source for his The Skin I Live In, playing in the theaters at the time.

     Almodóvar even complimented the audience (a bit sparse for the large Egyptian Ringler Theater) for its taste, speaking of film's formal qualities. "There's only one scene that is a bit gory," he declared. "But generally the film is elegant and understated."

     Basically, I agree with Almodóvar, and would rather release the film from its horror and science fiction genres—my least favorite of film genres in any event—and speak of it more as did its director, as a film of "anguish," much quieter in its mood and more penetrating than any horror film. The fact that Les yeux sans visage was issued in the US dubbed into English and retitled The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus, shown in a double feature with The Manster, certainly did not help its audiences move beyond the attacks made by some UK audiences. In Scotland, so it is said, seven audience members swooned during the famed heterografting scene (Franju's witty answer: "Now I know why Scotsmen wear skirts.") British critic Isabel Quigly, labeled it "the sickest film since I started film criticism." Americans were not far behind in their howls.

     Today with gore and violence so graphically presented in all films it is hard to understand the outrage! Or, let us say, given Franju's dramatically poetic presentation of horrific events, events of "anguish," perhaps we can easily comprehend the outrage. This is not some silly conception of a Hollywood B film studio, but a tightly-structured and quite beautifully filmed work, which suggests far more than it actually portrays.

     Indeed, its "hero"—if the Frankenstein-like doctor can be described as such—is very much a creature of anguish. He has, after all, been responsible for an accident in which his daughter's face has evidently been so burned and scarred that little skin has remained; only her eyes have been saved. Living in a large villa near to the mental clinic which he runs, Doctor Génessier, (Pierre Brasseur) has somewhat secretly been experimenting with skin grafts (something, as Almodóvar points out, we take for granted today), attempting to find a way to graft them upon his patients without having the tissue rejected. Mostly he experiments on large dogs stored away in the basement near his laboratory, but he must also find human subjects so that he can restore his daughter's face. He has already succeeded on his assistant, Louise (the stunning Aida Valli), upon whom he more dependent than we might imagine and who, we discover, is strangely willing to meet all his demands, including sharing his lie that his daughter, Christine (Edith Scob), is missing.

     The film begins with intense music by composer Maurice Jarre, as Louise drives down a country lane, lined by trees, whose silhouettes puncture the nighttime sky. She seems terrified by something: perhaps the rain or just the occasional truck whose bright lights nearly fracture the car's back window. For a few moments we might even fear that she herself will go hurling off the road. Gradually, however, we discover that there is another passenger in the back seat, a man, it appears, who seems to be sleeping. As the journey progresses, however, we begin to perceive that something far worse is occurring, and, as she approaches a river with a small falls, we watch her drag the man from the car and toss him into the water.

     A public lecture by the Doctor about the very subject of his experiments titillates and intrigues his audience, but the Doctor has no time after to chat. As one elderly admirer speaks to him of the future, he interrupts "The future, Madame, is something we should have started on a long time ago," disappearing into the night. He has been called by the police, reporting that they believe they have found his missing daughter or perhaps another missing girl, Mlle. Tessot, whose father they have called in as well. The Doctor expediently identifies the body as being that of daughter, increasing the anguish of the waiting Mr. Tessot, whose daughter is still missing.   

     We soon discover the truth. Christine remains locked away in the villa, forced to wear a mask over what is left of her face, while the girl buried in the Génessier fault is the missing Tessot girl, whose face was clearly removed in another failed experiment by the Doctor.

     The most horrifying of events follows, as Louise, wearing always a pearl chocker around her neck to hide the scars of her surgery (Almodóvar suggested that the necklace itself had become almost grafted to her neck), stalks a young girl she has seen on the street, who has a face not unlike Christine's former milk-white skin. Little by little, Louise insinuates herself into this stranger's life, inviting Edna to a performance (she has an extra ticket), and finally meeting her over lunch, declaring that she has found an apartment, for which Edna has been searching.

     The "apartment," of course, is in the villa. Edna, disliking the long trip from the city and sensing that something is amiss, attempts to leave, but is quickly anesthetized by the Doctor. He is eager to attempt the grafting once again.

     That scene is the gory cutting and pasting of the entire face of which the critics so railed. But even here, more is implied that shown, as pencil and forceps (called for again and again) become the focus of the scene, more than the skin-raising result. This time, however, the Doctor and Louise are convinced of their success. They even will allow the victim, Edna, sustenance, and, possibly, some more time to live, but she, recognizing the horror of their acts upon her, escapes, jumping to her suicide from a high window. Together, both Doctor and his assistant, take her body into the family vault, dropping it with a heavy thump upon the others buried within.

     Christine's scars seem to heal. The transplant appears to have been a success, and the haunted Doctor and Louise, aware of their horrible deeds, wonder even if they might now be cleansed of the past. While examining his daughter's face soon after, however, the Doctor detects signs of a slight rosiness in the checks, suggesting that the new face has been rejected by the patient. Within weeks, Christine's beautiful face begins to darken and wither away. She must return to her ghostly mask. Obviously, another woman will have to be found.

     This time, the plot is a bit more complicated, entailing the Doctor's clinic, Christine's former lover, Jacques Vernon, who works in the clinic, the police, and a young shoplifter, whose blue-eyes and blonde hair fit the bill of the next victim.

     I will spare the reader all the details, except to say the new girl, Paulette, is released from the clinic unharmed, suggesting to Jacques and the police, that the Doctor has not been involved. Louise, however, picks up the young girl on her way back to Paris, delivering her, like the others, to the laboratory.

     Yet the interruption of the police visit to the clinic, as they wonder why Paulette has not yet returned home, gives time for the anesthesia to wear off, and Paulette awakens tied to the operating table. Her struggles arouse pity in Louise, waiting upon another table, for a new face. Louise, who is torn between her desires for new possibilities for life or accepting death, has long been horrified by the events surrounding her, and determines to free Paulette, just as Louise returns to the operating room. With the same knife Louise used to break Paulette's bonds, she stabs Louise in her pearl-encircled neck, and in a mad trance, enters the kennel, one by one freeing the wild dogs on which the Doctor has experimented.

     At that very moment, the Doctor returning home and wondering at the excited barking of his dogs, opens the door to the kennel, the beasts leaping out upon him. When they have finished, we get a glimpse of the Doctor lying dead, his own face having been torn to bits, his eyes staring out in disbelief and wonderment.

     Christine frees the birds the Doctor has also caged, some of them gathering around her, sitting upon her shoulders, flying near to create a vision that reminds us very much of a painting of the young girl hanging in the villa hallway. If nothing else, the girl without a face has finally turned into the image of her imagined being, becoming the beauty of her own beast.

 

Los Angeles, November 6, 2011

Reprinted from International Cinema Review (November 2011).

 

 

Henning Carlsen | Sult (Hunger) / 1966

the man who talks to his shoes

by Douglas Messerli

 

Henning Carlsen and Peter Seeberg (screenplay, based on the novel by Knut Hamsun), Henning Carlsen (director) Sult (Hunger) / 1966

 

It must have seemed to an act of great moxie that director Henning Carlsen took on a film adaptation of Knut Hamsun's great novel of 1890, Sult (Hunger). For one thing, Carlsen is Danish, while the events occur in Kristiania (Oslo, Norway). The languages of these two friendly Scandinavian countries are quite similar, but there is just enough differences, I am sure, to distract for the Norwegian viewers of the film, from the film's Danish title, Svält, as well as reminding them that Denmark once was the more dominant of the Denmark-Norway Union.

 

     In Hamsun's narrative very little actually happens. His work is a piece of internal language, a conversation with the self that the unnamed character carries on as, starving, out of work, and homeless, he wanders the streets of Kristiania. Only a few things in real time actually transpire: he writes an article and attempts to place it with a publisher; he observes a lovely and slightly flirtatious woman whom he dubs Ylajali (Gunnel Lindblom); although we cannot be certain, since many of the events are those of his imagination, he may actually visit Ylajali and contemplate having sex; he stares in the windows of the various stores and encounters some of his friends from the past; he is kicked out of his rooming house and briefly finds another (for one night) only to be ousted the next day by a boarder whom he observes having sex with the landlady; and he sits on park benches, sometimes talking to his worn-out shoes as if they could understand and converse with him.

     In short, there is no traditional story attached to this work; it is merely a series of psychological incidents played out upon a realist setting, the Oslo of 1890. That is, in part, why Hamsun's fiction was so innovative and ground-breaking. Without any of the gewgaws of plot, Hamsun had created a character so amazing that he stands alongside of the memorable figures of Dostoevsky, Kafka, Camus, and others.

      Miraculously, the film has come through remarkably well, and, although different in many ways from the literary work, is true to its essence. Of course, most of the praise must go to Hunger's brilliant director, Henning Carlsen, who filmed in black and white (and sometimes sepia), more closely linking it to the silent pictures with which the original book is aligned. There are occasional conversations in the film, and the noises of the street itself—the clip-clop of horses, the drum of the feet of workers and ladies out for a stroll—but for all that it may as well be described as a silent film. And Carlsen and cinematographer, Henning Kristiansen, have used their camera to catch the smallest of bodily nuances, the grimaces of disgust on the faces of  the bourgeois citizens of Kristiania as they pass the beggar-like hero, a dog's violent gnaw of a bone (which our hero would love to share), the scuttle of a rat, the blinks of Ylajali's large eyes. All of these help to make the film come alive and replace what might have ordinarily been told in dialogue.

     But a large of the film's success must be accorded to the actor Per Oscarsson who plays the hero (Pontus as he is called in the film) with all the aplomb of Chaplin and Keaton combined. Oscarsson won the Best Actor award at the 1966 Cannes Film Festival, well deserved surely. From the very first scene, as Pontus stands with his back to us on a bridge, the actor completely enthralls us with his every bodily move. In this scene he seems to be doing something that we cannot quite interpret, yet appears to be something slightly obscene, a regular movement of the hands. Is he masturbating in open public? When the camera finally moves in, revealing his actions, we humorously recognize that he is, metaphorically speaking, masturbating. He is attempting to write with a pencil upon a slip of paper. Yet he seems to be getting nowhere, repeating again and again a date, circling empty words, etc. Writing is not an easy task in the open air.

     Pontus, as I have mentioned above, has not eaten for several days, and when he finishes his attempts to write, he rips off a small bit a paper and stuffs it into his mouth, simply to chew on something. Oscarsson's lean, unshaven face is perfect for the role. We can see that he is handsome even in his haunting decay. If only....might someone in this society come his rescue? Yet by the film's end we know that would be impossible. This is a proud and self-destructive man, a kind of hunger-artist, determined to get by on almost nothing. He awards even his bedding to another unfortunate. Time and again, at the editor's offices and when he encounters friends, etc., asked if he needs a small advance or for them to provide a meal, Pontus lies to hide his penniless situation. When he is accidently overpaid at a grocer’s whom has visited to purchase a candle, he throws the coins into the hands a woman beggar and returns to the grocer to upbraid his inattention. When he finally is able to buy a little soup, he discovers he can longer stomach it. As played by Oscarsson, Pontus is a nineteenth-century dandy in the dress of a fool, a man—one is tempted to say, much like the author—who, despite the turmoil and terrors of the upcoming century would remain a romantic.

     And, in that sense, he, and only he, is responsible for his fate. Despite Hamsun's dour and unforgiving portrayal of the Kristiana bourgeoisie (Carlsen portraying them at moments a bit like the figures in some of the paintings of Edvard Munch), it is Pontus' inability to recognize his own suicidal tendencies that is his undoing. He has talent, it is clear, but he has no idea how to reveal it. The only solution to his condition—as he has been previously told by his landlady—is to leave, to return to the country or go elsewhere. At the very last moment as a ship is about to leave port, the hero signs on. Where he is headed no one knows, not even, apparently, the character. But it does not matter to someone who talks to his shoes. It will be a better place by far, and finally he can learn again to how to eat.

 

Los Angeles, January 21, 2012

Reprinted from International Cinema Review (January 2012).