Robert Guédiguian | La Ville est tranquille (The Town Is Quiet) / 2000

the people are a fantasy

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jean-Louis Milesi and Robert Guédiguian (screenplay), Robert Guédiguian (director) La Ville est tranquille (The Town Is Quiet) / 2000

 

The Marseille director Robert Guédiguian presents in a 360° pan at the beginning of this film, showing a city awash in a golden splendor of light, which does indeed appear to be quiet and calm. The music we hear, Debussy, Bach, and works by other such composers, is being played, we soon discover, by a young Georgian boy on an electric keyboard set up in a park; a sign asks listeners to contribute to his purchase of a real piano.

  

    Union organizers are attempting to stand firm against dockyard closures and a payout agreement with the company, but the men shouting out their determination seem tired and look uncertain about their demands. One, a character we will later follow, Paul (Jean-Pierre Darroussin), cannot even bring himself to join in their chants.

      On a clear night, a group of city elites celebrate on a rooftop terrace, the host (perhaps a politician) going about his guests to briefly speak with each. One of the most stunning women in the group is Viviane Froment (Christine Brücher) whom we later discover is a music teacher currently working with mentally disabled children. Her husband, Yves (Jacques Pieiller), an architect, spends his time chatting and flirting with beautiful women.

      So far we see nothing in Marseille that we might not encounter in any large city: Los Angeles, New York, London, Paris. The city is tranquil, or, as an African character later puts it, "The world looks happy from up here."

     The irony of Guédiguian's title, accordingly, becomes evident when he takes us down into the streets to follow other denizens of Marseilles' l'Estaque district, the most notable of whom is Michèle (Ariane Ascaride), a woman whose daughter is a drug addict and has a baby born out of wedlock.  Michèle’s husband is, as the movie puts it, on the "dole," a drunk who sits about all day complaining about his daughter's painful whimpers of withdrawal. To survive Michèle works as a fishmonger all night, returning in the mornings to feed and care for her baby granddaughter and daughter. When the daughter, Fiona, is not suffering she is out whoring for money to buy drugs. As Michèle screams out to her daughter, the drugs you bought last night surely cost more than I can make in a month! When her husband threatens her, she retorts, "Death would be nice."

    For all that, Michèle is filled with determination and the will to survive, and she is the most loving and forgiving character of the film, so desperate to help her daughter, for example, that, after Fiona has used the doctor-prescripted antidote to get high, the mother contacts an old friend, a bartender Gérard to help her obtain real drugs. When her savings runs out, she is determined even to pimp herself in order to cover the cost.

     Into this world comes Paul who has used his redundancy money to get a loan to purchase a new car and a cab license. Paul, the son of a former Partisan father and loving mother, also does not live such a tranquil life. A failure in everything, he represents the millions of individuals who work hard, but seem never to get ahead, cannot maintain relationships, and fall time and again throughout their lives. Claude, the man from who he has borrowed money, puts it bluntly: (my summary, imprecise quote) "You will never pay me back and I will have to do something terrible to you. But I won't be able to because of my respect for your father." A man who seeks love from prostitutes, Paul observes Michèle's dismal failure to find clients, and takes her home without demanding sex. When soon after he loses his cab license for violation of taxi regulations, he returns to Michèle, this time paying her for sex. It is clear that he would like their relationship to go further, but she is too preoccupied to notice his obsequiousness.

      

     Meanwhile, across town a young African, Abderramane (Alexandre Ogou), recently released from jail, observes Viviane teaching her students in an auditorium. He has sought her out because of the memorable experiences he had as a member of a choir she taught in prison, and he is determined to do something better with his life. Like Michèle, Viviane is fed up with her husband, and finds a gracefulness in Abderramane's flattery. Before long, he is helping her students to dance, and the two briefly come together for a one night of love. Soon after Abderramane is shot by fascists, who include Michèle's husband, for attempting to swim in the nearby ocean.

     Michèle's life continues to spin downward, as her daughter needs higher and higher doses of crack cocaine. She is so exhausted, that she misses her work shift for the first time. Fiona continues to cry out in pain.

     Gérard, we discover, is an assassin, who we watch kill a city notable celebrating on a rooftop party just as we have witnessed early on.

     Michèle fires up another dose of drugs for her daughter, this time adding a second packet and yet a third. Smiling in the bliss of relief, Fiona awaits the needle which will result in her death.

     Gérard arrives, responding to Michèle's news a few minutes before Paul arrives for another sexual encounter. Despite the fact that he knows he is intruding on some dreadful happening, this time Paul insists he will not go, but stay. What happens, we are never told. But it is clear that they can no longer help one another, that they are both doomed to face the circumstances of their acts.

       We witness one such encounter with truth. Gérard, angry with some pedestrians who react to his near-refusal to stop his car to let them pass, picks up a gun as if he intends to shoot them. As he exits the car, however, he turns the gun instead into his own mouth before releasing the trigger.

      In a small street of the immigrant ghetto, a piano is being delivered. Left for a few seconds in the middle of the street, the young Georgian boy with which the film began, sits down to play.

     Guédiguian's harrowing film is often described as a painfully realist presentation of Marseille, but in its intricacies of plot and its density of coincidence, it is, to my way of thinking, more like a kind of fantasy. Even the most well-rounded character in the work, Michèle, is almost too selfless to be believed; the others are all rather vague, their actions often muddled.

    Yet for all that, the film works as a piece of art, for we realize that any attempt to describe the motivations and behavior of real people is a kind of fantasy as well. Just as Viviane, earlier in the film, suggests her husband's self-proclaimed love of the people belies his complete ignorance of them— "For you the people are a fantasy"—we all can only imagine what is inside each other. The impetus of Guédiguian's film is not realist characterization but a political statement, a presentation, of sorts, of the various social and political positions one might take within any large community. Far from being quiet, life in a city is always noisy, a mess of various voices and demands, which is also why city life is so terrifyingly exciting, creating a place where one never knows what to expect. The town is quiet only when one refuses to listen to its people calling out.

 

Los Angeles, March 16, 2011

Reprinted from International Cinema Review (March 2011).

Alain Resnais | Mon oncle d'Amérique (My American Uncle) / 1980

battle of the species

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jean Gruault (screenplay, featuring the writings of Henri Laborit), Alain Resnais (director) Mon oncle d'Amérique (My American Uncle) / 1980

 

Resnais' My American Uncle is often described as a "didactic" film since it features the theories of French physician, writer, and philosopher Henri Laborit, who is interviewed from time to time throughout the film by the director himself. Yet, I would prefer to call it a film "structured" around psychological and philosophical ideas in the sense that Resnais' characters are not so much examples of Laborit's ideas, but are closer to living experiments of his theories in the manner that Resnais himself, at one point in the film, comically suggests become human rats.

     These "human rat" figures include René Ragueneau (Gérard Depardieu), Janine Garnier (Nicole Garcia), and Jean Le Gall (Roger Pierre), who each share a strong sense of individual identity, thwarted by family, friends, and the work place.

      René, born on a farm, is determined to leave home and become a financial success, and ultimately is hired as a textile executive; Janine, raised by a political active Communist family, wishes to become an actress; and Jean, born of a wealthy and well-placed family, seeks political power, becoming for a time the influential director of a state television station like RTF (Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française).

     Given our current economic situation, Resnais' film seems very contemporary as all three of these individuals lose their jobs, coincidently becoming intertwined in their personal lives and situations. At one point in the film, Jean meets the actress Janine, falls in love with her, and leaves his wife. But their relationship, although filled with passion, flounders when he develops kidney stones. Meanwhile, his wife secretly approaches Janine asking her to allow her husband to return home, since she is near death. Janine, also feeling somewhat entrapped in the relationship, accordingly abandons Jean, but later discovers that the wife has been lying, and that she has now lost her former lover forever.

    The painful encounter between them on Jean's family island, and his insistence that he is truly better off with his wife, suggests—as Laborit predicts—that she may react suicidally. Certainly, Janine seems to have no one or any belief system to turn to in her loneliness and sorrow. Yet Janine, who works now as a designer associated with René's textile company, remains strong, and, agrees with René's boss, that they must fire him as director of the textile firm. When René, who has worked loyally if somewhat unimaginatively all his life, discerns the situation, it is he—the solid Catholic family man, who attempts self-murder. He is saved by a telephone call from Janine shortly after he has tried to hang himself.

     In short, if Laborit's predictions sometimes turn out to be correct, they are also miraculously thwarted by coincidence and chance, elements central to many of Resnais' films; and the human “rats,” accordingly, prove more adaptable than imagined, suddenly forging fresh inter-relationships.

       Life, so Resnais suggests, may not always be a completely fulfilling and joyful experience, but, as these figures demonstrate, neither is it  anything truly predictable.

     The fact is that all three of these individuals also live dream-lives, lives of new possibility represented in Resnais' film by clips from older movies starring Danielle Darrieux, Jean Marais, and Jean Gabin. Although human rats may behave selfishly, imposing their will upon others, although they can force each other to suffer pain or even death, as individuals they can also imagine themselves as someone else, as other beings filled with strength and grace.

     Each of these figures also grew up in families that spoke of an "American uncle," a man who had left the world in which the rest of the family remained, a being who, for better or worse, richer or poorer, stood as a kind of talisman for difference and change. These kinds of dreams, these kinds of imaginative possibilities, Resnais makes clear, do not exist for rats. And so the tragedy is over even before it has begun.

 

Los Angeles, March 21, 2010

Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (March 2010).

 

Luis Buñuel | Los olvidados (The Forgotten Ones, aka The Young and the Damned) / 1950, USA 1952

betrayals

by Douglas Messerli

 

Luis Alcoriz and Luis Buñuel (screenplay, with dialogue by Max Aub, Juan Larrea and Pedro de Urdimalas), Luis Buñuel (director) Los olvidados (The Forgotten Ones, aka The Young and the Damned) / 1950, USA 1952

 

Luis Buñuel’s powerful 1950 Mexican film, Los olviadados, is a study of betrayals—betrayals by family members, street friends, neighbors and, most importantly, by society itself. The young boys at the center of Buñuel’s work have hardly any chance to survive, being prisoners of their economic and sociological conditions. The marvel of this film, however, is not simply its political and sociological statements, but the way in which it helps us to comprehend each of these often unsympathetic characters’ behavior. Each act seemingly out of selfish necessity, but we come to recognize those behavioral needs, and comprehend how their obsessions arise from their simple attempts to survive in a society that seemingly does not want them to.

       For me, the central figure is a basically “good” boy, Pedro (Alfonso Mejía), who is not only hanging out, as his mother vehemently states, with the wrong crowd, but has no other figures in his life, including his child-like mother, who cannot provide him with a sense of worth. Pedro’s mother (Stella Inda), a hard-working maid, earning little money to support her four children, is herself furious with the world which has cast her out at the early age of 14, when she became pregnant with Pedro. She is ill and has few alternatives. But in that fury she has also neglected the son who she is determined is incorrigible.

        In fact, Pedro is a loving boy, who, in turn, loves animals—although he destroys several in retribution for his own treatment throughout the film. He literally has nowhere else to go but to fend for himself on the streets, at least finding a certain degree of respect with his street companions, particularly from the true villain of the tale, Jaibo (Roberto Cobo), who at the beginning of the story has just escaped from a reform institution.

  

    Even the violent ruffian and thief Jaibo, however, in Buñuel’s telling, must be contextualized within the facts that he has never known his mother or father, issues which he uses to gain sympathy from Pedro’s mother as he develops a sexual relationship with her. Nonetheless, we feel little sympathy for him, despite his somewhat charismatic demeanor and appearance, when, immediately after his escape, he galvanizes his former street friends—children who seem far younger than he—to rob and later beat an elderly blind street musician and soon after, to kill a former colleague whom he believes has betrayed him, Julian (Javier Amézcua)—a man/boy who has left the streets to work in support of his drunken father and suffering mother. Pedro lures away from his job, while Jaibo beats him from behind with a stone and club.

      The murder sweeps up the young Pedro into a world from which he can never escape, a fate the boy perceives subconsciously from the beginning, presented in a surrealist-like dream he has that evening, where the dead Julien appears beneath his bed while his normally hostile mother arises to embrace him. The fact is his mother not only doesn’t embrace or even love him, but denies him the paltry food which she might offer. Pedro is cornered in a world where he is made guilty simply for his existence.

     The complexities of this are the subject of the film, Pedro’s empathy for others being displayed by his “adoption” of another young boy, “Little Eyes (Mário Ramírez), whose father has abandoned him on the street. “Little Eyes,” in turn, is taken in and physically and sexually abused by the blind man (Miguel Inclán), while others of this street saga are interwoven into the tragic events, which include betrayals of love, sex, and friendship, including the well-meaning social institution where Pedro is finally sent to get an education and working skills.

   In the end, the faithful Pedro is even forced to squeal on his “friend” Jaibo in order to survive, but it does no good. In his world, each betrayal only leads to another, until finally everyone involved is, and in some respects, destroyed. The beautiful young girl Meche—sexually attacked both by Jaibo and the blind man, who we discover is a pedophile—must, in the end, even betray her affection for Pedro by helping her father dispose of his body when they discover that Jaibo has killed him. Jaibo, in turn, reported to the police by the blind man, is shot to death.

     “Little Eyes,” abused as a laborer for the blind man, is now forced to the street as well, where we know his future will probably parallel Pedro’s. The last image of this painful documentary-like, neo-realist work shows Pedro’s body being tossed by Meche and her father down a cliff into a garbage dump, a scenario that reminded me of the end of another Mexican-centered masterwork, Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano.

 

     This early work about a kind of gang warfare makes the American musical West Side Story seem like a church-sponsored musical morality play. For the American musical, at base, proffers a dream of hope, of desire and possibility, despite its tragic ending.  Buñuel, as he made clear in his voice-over prologue, offers up no answers: only the future society can determine what to do about the street-side criminal world he portrays. These urban waifs are destroyed without love, without hope, without a voice. Is it any wonder that the Mexican society it portrayed, was outraged, demanding even the director’s ouster as a citizen of that country. The tragedy is that these same destroyed and forgotten children live still today in many of our major cities: I’ve seen them in São Paulo, Los Angeles, New York, Moscow, Naples, even Paris. That Buñuel’s film seems fresh 64 years after its making is a frightening thing to report.

 

Los Angeles, February 27, 2014

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2014).

Stanley Kramer | Inherit the Wind / 1960

how long is a day?

by Douglas Messerli

 

Nedrick Young and Harold Jacob Smith (screenplay, based on the stage play by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee), Stanley Kramer (director) Inherit the Wind / 1960

 

Director Stanley Kramer, it is safe to say, was never known for his subtlety. Throughout his career he made pictures, most of them with underlying liberal themes, that out-rightly depicted battles between good and evil concerning racism, holocausts (both the Nazi murder of Jews and nuclear holocaust), intellectual freedom, and moral antipathy. He may not have always explored the complexities of good and evil, but watching his films you certainly knew on which side he stood.     

     One of Kramer’s most respected films, Inherit the Wind was based on the highly acclaimed play by my friend Jerome Lawrence and his long-time collaborator Robert E. Lee that presented a fictionalized version of the true-life trial in which a small-town Tennessee teacher, John T. Scopes, was arrested for teaching Darwin’s Theory of Evolution in a state that had voted that it was illegal to teach anything but Creationism.

       The great lawyer, Clarence Darrow, procured by the Baltimore Sun journalist H. L. Mencken, argued for Scopes, while the famed three-time presidential candidate, William Jennings Bryan, argued for the state. Using different names for each of these now-renowned figures (Scopes was renamed Bertram Kates, played by Dick York; Mencken was called E. K. Hornbeck, played against type by Gene Kelly, Darrow became Henry Drummond memorably acted by Spencer Tracy, and Bryan was renamed Matthew Harrison Brady, performed by Fredric March) as a fable of sorts to attack the “kind of mind control,” argued Lawrence in a later interview, of McCarthyism: “It’s not about science versus religion. It’s about the right to think.”

    To reiterate their concerns, the original playwrights added a romantic interest in the form of Scopes’ girlfriend Rachel Brown (Donna Anderson), and her firebrand, bigot father, Rev. Jeremiah Brown (Claude Akins). In order to further humanize the great liberal Darrow, Lawrence and Lee hinted at a deep friendship between the Darrow and Brady figures, particularly between Brady’s forbearing wife Sara (Florence Eldridge) and Darrow. And to counteract some of the gentility of Darrow, the writers allowed their Mencken figure to spout a series of witty and cynical one-liners that might almost remind one, at moments, of an Americanized Oscar Wilde. Hillsboro is described by Hornbeck as “The buckle on the Bible belt, and his role is, as he puts it, is “To afflict the comfortable, and comfort the afflicted”

     In short, the Lawrence and Lee work was an old-fashioned, slightly creaky, well-made play that lasted for a long-running 806 performances following its 1955 Broadway opening.

      Kramer, true to his directorial limits, makes little attempt to open up the play to the cinematic world of time and space. Although he certainly does bring to the screen a more realistic depiction of the circus atmosphere that the trial created for its small Hillsboro, Tennessee town, most of the festivities that surround the event might have been successfully staged—except perhaps for the long and emphatically enacted religious parade, where choruses of Christian women stridently march through streets singing what seems like ninety choruses of “Give Me That Old Time Religion,” many of them bearing banners denouncing Drummond. In truth, the small southern town, according to many reports—although obviously supporting the religious values of Brady—were equally welcoming to Darrow and Mencken.

      Although he may have been a top-rate film cutter, Kramer’s major cinematic technique is to set up the camera facing the action head-on or at a slightly skewed angle that allows more actors into his frame. And generally, the director seems to have nailed together scenes rather than sequencing them in the processor. Fortunately, once the characters enter the courtroom, overseen by the seemingly kindly but truly blind justice of Judge Mel Coffey (Harry Morgan), things vastly improve, primarily because of the great acting abilities—supported by the gentle manipulations of the plot—of Spencer Tracy and Fredric March. 

     If, in between, we must endure the pious hosannas and damnations of Claude Atkins and the gee-shucks, head down humilities of Dick York, the electric sparks fly the moment Tracy and March begin to sweat out their intellectual match. While Brady may be the better orator, speaking always in a kind of biblical oratory that sounds right even if it doesn’t make sense, Drummond, by far, is the better tactician, summing up his opponent to his own wife: “He would not have made a great president, but he would have been a wonderful king.” Refused the right to bring in outside scholars who might support Darwin, refused to be able to quote from Darwin’s book, Drummond makes it clear that there is only one thinking man in town, the man under arrest.

      In real-life, Scopes was never even arrested, but the film, in fact, is about arrestment, less the arrestment of the body than of the mind. When Brady, in a friendly moment, ponders “Funny how two people can start at the same place and move apart,” Drummond counters “Maybe it’s you who have moved away by standing still.” Although the judge insists that “the right to think is not what is on trial here,” Kramer makes it very clear that that is precisely at the very center of the issue, that a “grid of morality” has been placed upon behavior, something made even more evident in our recent times with the continued demand in schools throughout the country that if evolution is taught, so too must be Creationism, as if these two complete contradictory views of the universe were to be given equal credence.

       In a brilliant maneuver, which Darrow actually used in the real trial, Drummond calls Brady to testify about the creation of the universe, wryly forcing him to insist that the earth was created, as Bishop Usher declared, “precisely at 9 a.m. on October 23, 4004 B.C.,” thus disavowing the existence of nearly all of our fossil history and scientific fact, which Drummond has already posited as “irrefutable as geometry.” 

     If he does not win the case—Scopes losses and is fined $100—he has won the cause by showing everyone just what a fool Brady is. Simple questions such as “how long is a day?” as described in the Bible, become deep traps of intellectual uncertainty, of which the close-minded Brady reveals, even to the seemingly uneducated citizens of Hillsboro, he is ignorant. Outraged by the small fine and lack of punishment for Scopes—in truth, Scopes received no fine, and Bryan had agreed to pay any fine accessed from the beginning—Brady attempts another blustery speech; but this time there is no one left to hear him, and outraged he falls into babble, simply listing the books in the Bible in their order, a school-boy exercise of a religious upbringing.*

      Bryan died a few days later in his sleep; but on stage and in Kramer’s stage-bound film, he dies in the courtroom of a ruptured stomach; and in a simple wrap-up of a more complex life, Drummond reaching for both the Bible and Darwin’s book, carries them out of the courtroom as if he can live equally comfortable with opposing philosophies.

     But it is Hornbeck’s cynicism that, finally seems to win out, as he asks: “How do write an obituary for a man who has been dead for 30 years?” By using the usually loveable dance man Kelly in this role, Kramer has shown, perhaps, his real genius, forcing the audience into a kind of love-hate relationship with this enigmatic journalist. Yet Drummond, in his ability to see things through an historical lens, truly wins out: “A giant once lived in that body,” he proclaims, redeeming, perhaps the fanatical monster we have just witnessed, and, finally, adding a slightly more complex layering to this historical work.

 

 *In my childhood we attended a Lutheran church in rural Iowa, and I recall the older Sunday School-going students reciting the books of the Bible in just such a manner, the one who could name them all most quickly winning the ridiculous contests. Even as a child, I simply could not comprehend what madly naming the books of the Bible might mean about comprehending them or even having read them. My childish mind simply could not assimilate the value of this empty exercise.

 

Los Angeles, March 25, 2014

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2014).

Young-Sun Jang | Private Lessons / 2019

a love poem

by Douglas Messerli

 

Young-Sun Jang (screenwriter and director) 보충수업 (Private Lessons) / 2019 [23 minutes]

 

Physical education student Jae-hyun (Kim Minsung) is enrolled in a poetry course taught by Yeong-il (Kim Sunghwan), which results in several difficulties for both of them. Jae-hyun is not at all interested in poetry and even though he’s kept late after class, shows no interest in completing his assignment, even falling to sleep under his teacher’s watchful eye.

     Yet he refuses to leave the class, and insists on attending all class meetings, Yeong-il finally agreeing to give him private lessons off campus. It quickly becomes apparent that in these “off-campus” meetings, although the student continues to show his disinterest in poetry, that their mentor-student relationship is quickly turning into something that is emotionally necessary.

      When, finally, the teacher begins to perceive that he is even incorporating his experiences with the boy into his poetry, he attempts to cut off their meetings, realizing he will have to fail his good-looking boy for his refusal to do any of the writing required for the class, particularly after he overhears the boy bragging to a fellow student that he is certain to get an A for his grade, even though it’s apparent that he has not done any of the work.

      But as we gradually have come to perceive, the student now controls the teacher and refuses to give up even his “private lessons,” actually writing a remarkable love poem to his teacher. Yeong-il gives the poem a grade of A, but still refuses to meet up with him again for “private lessons.”

      Yet Jae-hyun still seeks him out, determining that he now must become the teacher to the obviously closeted older man. Explaining what love truly is through a kiss, the student reveals that he is in love with his teacher, and without much hesitation, the poetry teacher realizes that he is obsessed with the handsome student, even though a relationship with the boy may cost him his job.

      In the end he cannot refuse the boy’s request to spend the night together.

     Although both of the figures are so likeable that almost any gay person would love to know that they have come to admit their love for one another, the teacher in his actions, finally, coming out, so to speak. But we also know how impossible such a relationship will be for the both of them, and given their social roles as student and teacher, just how wrong it is.

      As Letterboxd commentator Dan P summarizes the film:

 

“how to seduce a college professor:
1) audit his class, despite having zero interest in the subject
2) don't do any of the assigned work and constantly fall asleep in class
3) give him gifts and stare at him constantly
oh I should mention you must first [must] be incredibly hot.”

 

     Having been a college poetry professor, I can only suggest that it’s most certainly tempting. South Korean director Young-Sun Jang hints at what happens in such situations, the teacher being highly motivated to fall in love with a perfectly willing pupil; I know, having been just such a student—although I gladly did everything that was assigned as well.

 

Los Angeles, February 13, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (February 2024).