Roman Polanski | La Vénus à la fourrure (Venus in Fur) / 2013, USA 2014

just for show

by Douglas Messerli

 

David Ives and Roman Polanski (screenplay, based on the play by David Ives), Roman Polanski (director) La Vénus à la fourrure (Venus in Fur) / 2013, USA 2014

 

No sooner does Thomas Novacheck (Mathieu Amalric) badmouth all the women whom he has been auditioning for a production of his adaptation of the Leopold von Sacher-Masoch fiction Venus in Furs than do the “gods”—or perhaps we should say “goddesses”—call up the presence of what seems to be a rain-drenched, gum-chewing, apparently mediocre actress, Vanda (coincidentally the first name also of his dramatic heroine) Jourdain (the remarkable actress Emmanuelle Seigner). Vanda has missed her audition, so she claims, by several hours, through slow subways and simply having to maneuver through the Paris streets.

       At first sight she is precisely the kind of woman that Thomas has been inveighing against to his wife. He is tired, and it is late; he simply wants to return home, and this woman, who has no idea of whom the real writer (a great figure Thomas maintains) Sacher-Masoch is simply another example of the failure of the opposite sex. Vanda, who suggests she has briefly read a few pages of the subway, describes the work simply as “porn.” Thomas attempts to dismiss her, and she, using one of the oldest wiles of women, cries. He attempts to console her, and so begins what he might never have imagined: a realization of the very issues of control and power about which he has attempted (an apparently failed) to write.

      The comedy—and David Ives’ play is most definitely a comic rendition of The Bacchae and the S&M creator’s novel—begins with Vanda pulling from her bag, very much like a true believer in S&M regalia might have to carry with her or him, a dress of the period of the play. Within moments she has properly adjusted the lighting of the empty theater, accomplished her vocal exercises, readjusted her mop of hair into an attractive bob, and launches into a quite convincing performance of the dramatic Vanda of the 1870s. Several things suddenly begin to suggest to Thomas that she is not quite the figure she has pretended to be.

      First of all, he can find no such name on his list of audition appointments; moreover, she has a complete script, which he has provided to no agents. She also seems to know the entire text by heart, even though she claims to have merely “leafed through it.”

       Playing to Thomas’ male ego, Vanda suggests that he would be the perfect actor for central figure of the play, and helps direct even more than the advice he provides her in their roles. Moving in and out of the theater of the piece, she accuses him of sexist values, while purring out the lines that gradually seduce him in the same ways that the character encourages the wealthy suitor in the play. Vanda, the actress, moreover, has even purchased an authentic dressing gown for Thomas, which she digs out of the deep confines of her seemingly bottomless bag.

      Slowly, Vanda the actress and the character begin to become intertwined, just as she begins to call the character he plays by his Thomas’ real name. At some point she even begins to suggest that she knows a great deal about Thomas’ fiancée, and ultimately suggests they might actually be working together to force the writer-director to perceive how he is abusing women.

      By the end of their hours of dramatic encounters, she has even convinced him into playing Vanda, while she takes over as the dominating male, eventually tying him up to a stage “cactus,” a remnant of a former play. Suddenly turning toward him as the Bacchante that she has now become, Vanda mocks the humiliated and psychologically abused Thomas, leaving him alone, dressed as a woman in lipstick, to face the degradation of his own making.

       The fact that actress Seigner is actually married to the film’s director, Polanski, and that for the most part, Almaric, who looks a great deal like Polanski, is doing a good imitation of the Polish director, adds further dimensions to this comic tale. Given Polanski’s own history with women, it almost transforms the comedy into a dark and wicked tale, in which his own lover has turned against him in revenge.

       The only problem with this brilliantly acted conceit, is that it is precisely that—a dramatically artificial confection that has little to do with the real world. The theme here is everything, while the author (Ives) and director (Polanski) have completely abandoned any pretension of realist narrative. As I have made clear, I’m all for the theatrical—and this is surely one of the most theatrical of all works! That is, furthermore, the very premise, it seems to me, of S&M behavior. Presumably, you don’t really torture people beyond endurance; you merely make it appear as if you might. If you proceed beyond the brink, you become a true brute or even a murderer. The game is everything.

        But even though this “game” is downright entertaining, it is ultimately empty, ending, when it is over, with perhaps a chastened individual, but also with a being who, when the bags filled with all of the necessary “accruements”—as Bette Midler mocked in one of her routines—have been dragged away, is simply left alone. The torture was been all for naught, after all just a show. And so we feel after Polanski’s film, as we quietly walk out of the dark of the theater once again into the light. Furs and whips don’t do it for me as much as good old-fashioned lust.

 

Los Angeles, March 24, 2014

Reprinted in World Cinema Review (March 2016)

Raúl Ruiz | Les trois couronnes du matelet (Three Crowns of the Sailor) / 1983, USA 1984

the other

by Douglas Messerli

 

Emilio Del Solar, François Ede, and Raúl Ruiz (screenplay), Raúl Ruiz (director) Les trois couronnes du matelet (Three Crowns of the Sailor) / 1983, USA 1984

 

Raúl Ruiz’s stunning Borgesian-like tale, Three Crowns of the Sailor, begins with a murder—

 

               On the night of July 25, 1958 I killed Ladislaw Zukarevitch, antique

               dealer, my mentor, my master in the art of polishing diamonds,

               my tutor at Warsaw Theological School. I got nothing out of this

               crime except the ring he offered me many times; several hundred

               marks; a collection of old coins, of no value; and a long letter where

               he advised me to leave the country.

 

—and ends in a second murder, the same student killing a sailor whom he has just met that evening. What led the Polish student (Philippe Deplanche) to murder his tutor is never explained, unless we are to interpret the “long letter” left behind to have been a warning from his tutor. We better comprehend why this violent student murders the central story-teller of Ruiz’s film, the sailor (Jean-Bernard Guillard), whose interconnected stories constitute the major action of the film.                               

 

    Running from his dastardly acts, the young student meets up with the desperate sailor in a highly dangerous part of town, and, after being shot at, seeks out the older man—despite his pretended cynicism (he is an atheist, he declares, who does not believe in the “afterlife”)—primarily to buy himself some more time and possibly find a way to ship off.

      The sailor, in turn, wants something from him, three Danish crowns, which, we later learn, are demanded from him by the captain of his boat in order to spare his life. In fact, the idea of “paying back” whatever has been given to one is crucial throughout this story, as the “hero,” continually borrowing from his friends, racks up a substantial debt which comes to symbolize, of course, what he owes through the process of living. All the young boy has to do is listen to the sailor’s long story, but the young are always dismissing what they might learn—clearly he has also dismissed the lessons of his tutor— and the student of this cautionary tale seems at times to be more interested in drinking and sleeping than in attending to the sailor’s amazing stories.

     Through intense close ups and a dizzying overabundance of objects and dazzlingly rich scenes, the viewer is very much put in the situation of the often stuporous student, forcing us to cling to the sailor’s narratives just to escape the panoply of often confusing images thrown out like a magic carpet before our eyes. As the reviewer from Time Out commented: Ruiz’s film is “a dream of a picture in every sense.”

        It also represents a dream narrative, wherein everyone is someone other than themselves. The shiftless “hero” cannot even find himself in his home town of Valparaiso, Chile. Like numerous other young men in the city, he has no job nor meaning in his life, and spends of his days just wandering the streets or dinking in a local bar—until he meets up one day with a man appropriately called “the blindman” who tells him of arrival of a ship on which he might get passage. But even the blindman, not truly blind, warns him not believe him, giving the younger man the money to pay for the drinks so that others will believe he has paid for them. The two drink together throughout the afternoon. But soon after, the blindman is discovered near death on a pier, refusing, as he dies, to even recognize his own blood: “someone has painted me red!” Soon after our “hero” meets up with an older sailor who begins to tell him his tale, but just as suddenly disappears from sight, the younger man suddenly realizing his has been wandering the streets talking to himself. Yet moments later he comes across the very boat which the blindman has named, goes aboard, and, even without experience, is welcomed to join the crew.

      A quick trip home to pack his duffel results in sad farewells from his family and an impromptu party given in his honor, in which his sister’s fiancé—now the family’s only possible breadwinner—begs the soon-to-be sailor to remember him. A beautiful woman called “the princess” arrives to dance the last dance with him, suggesting that it is good he is leaving because if he had stayed he might have fallen in love with her and committed suicide. She is, she proclaims, determined to never marry, and is responsible for of her lover’s deaths.

     So begins a series of more stories, some interlinking, some oddly placed in this storybook narrative, but all colorful—the present of the film is shot in black-and-white, but the adventures are in lurid color—and narratively quirky. It would be pointless to describe all of these tales, some of which are nearly indescribable in any event. The wonder of this film is seeing them played out on the screen. But we do, ultimately, perceive links.      

      One of these important linkings is a search for family. Throughout his adventures the sailor visits ports where he uncovers the family relationships he has left behind. In one city, visiting a brothel, he meets up with an innocent young girl who lives in a room filled with dolls and a small coffin in which she keeps all her worldly possessions. He comes to perceive her as a kind of sister, borrowing money from sailor friends in order to allow her to leave the brothel.

     In Singapore, he happens upon a young boy, whom he is told is actually a wise elderly man, 90 or older, who every time he eats grows younger. Consequently, the now child hardly dares to consume any food. Overcome by a paternal feeling, the sailor again borrows money to put the child into a safe home.       In Tangiers he and a woman friend are attacked and threatened by two-would be robbers, with knives held to their throats. In his attempt to escape the assailants, the sailor is arrested along with the thieves and imprisoned. In jail the two thieves and he gradually develop a deep friendship, becoming like brothers to him. They eventually escape by killing a priest who gives them daily theology lessons, insisting that the guards open the jails to the door as he speaks. The murder, quite obviously, resembles the one with which the film has begun.

     Finally returning home to Valparaiso, the sailor discovers his previous family members have all died after hearing of his return and death through an automobile accident the day before. Everything, including the entrance to the house has been turned upside-down.

     While in Valparaiso, he also again comes across the former “princess,” now a nearly nude performer, Mathilde (played by American body-builder Lisa Lyon), performing in a local nightclub. Making an appointment to meet her the next day, he hopes for a sexual encounter. Greeting him, the beautiful Mathilde gradually strips, pulling away her clothing, her nipples, her hair, and all else to reveal herself as a transgender being having, as she proclaims, only one orifice. Evidently, the sex he enjoys with her is so intense that he becomes obsessed with the figure he now perceives as his “wife.”

     In the end, the sailor again “borrows” money to establish a restaurant in Lisbon, inviting his new family to join him, but Ruiz’s camera scan of them shows, apparently, that there will be no cohesiveness between them. The only connections lie in the sailor’s mind.

     A second major thread of these narratives is the idea of “otherness,” as the sailors all refer to our “hero” as the “other,” from the beginning warning him not to become to befriend them too closely in danger of trading places. Although these men eat and drink like normal beings, there is a great deal strange about them, as he perceives them intimately showing off their tattoos to one another—tattoos that are all “letters.” He, himself, is assigned a letter by the ship’s captain: N, representing perhaps a kind of “Nth position,” or “anything,” a “neuter,” a “nothing.” The captain of the ship, who constantly sings Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy,” will allow no salt on board, although we all know it to be necessary for animal life. Nor do his shipmates, despite their constant consumption of food, ever defecate. Worms crawl out of their feet, arms, and chests. They are, quite obviously, dead, and the ship in which travels is a “ship of the dead.” As the other, we can presume, he is the only living being on board.

      When we connect the sailors’ “letters” with the letter left by the tutor for the young Polish student—a statement, in short, of the boy’s destination, the course of his life—we cannot but perceive that the young, inattentive student is now, himself, an “other,” a person separated from the talkative sailor and his new-found family. The handsome boy is also a kind of neuter, a nothing who will have to be punished for his ignorance through a life of hard living.

     As the sailor finishes his tale and the two drunkenly move out of the lit-up dance hall in which the story has been told, the young man pays his three Danish crowns, found by him in the hands to the dead tutor, the antique dealer. He now seeks his reward in being signed on to the sailor’s ship, but the sailor suggests that he hasn’t yet earned the right.

     Just as the sailor and his friends have killed their “tutor,” the priest, so too does the student turn on the sailor, grabbing a club and brutally beating him again and again, then helping him up and even apologizing, before felling him with a final and deathly blow.

     The student, having suddenly perceived the lesson of the sailor’s tale, ends this memorable movie with a statement that suggests he now knows everything: joining the crew of the ship, including the man he has just killed, he speaks: “You always need a living sailor on a ship full of dead. That man was me.”

 

Los Angeles, December 28, 2011

Reprinted from Nth Position (February 2014).

Pedro Almodóvar | Madres paralelas (Parallel Mothers) / 2021

the fathers who were never there

by Douglas Messerli

 

Pedro Almodóvar (screenwriter and director) Madres paralelas (Parallel Mothers) / 2021

 

You might describe Pedro Almodóvar’s excellent new film Madres paralelas (Parallel Mothers) as a work that keeps changing direction, or to use a more appropriate metaphor, a film that keeps reblooming but in completely different configurations. The body of the plant is the same, in this case two intertwined stems, but the flowers they produce shift and alternate at important junctures in their interrelationship, allowing the plants to keep growing—and the narrative to keep moving— in ways that you might otherwise have not expected.

     

 

     The two “mothers” at the center of this work are Janis Martinez (Penélope Cruz), in her late 30s who has had an affair with a married man, Arturo (Israel Elejalde), and discovers herself pregnant as a result; and a young college student, Ana Manso (Milena Smit) who we later discover has been gang rapped. Janis is positive and even excited about the situation, having carefully thought it out and determined to have the baby with no support and involvement of the father, although she has told him of the situation. As a successful photographer she can afford to hire an au pair and already has a maid to help her. Ana, on the other hand, has been sent by her father back to her mother, Teresa (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón) who as an actress who has just won a plum role in a new production of a Federico García Lorca play who has little time for her daughter, let alone the desire to play grandmother for the new baby. Accordingly, Ana is as unsure and frightened about her future as Janis is certain.

      In the Madrid hospital where they meet up, maternity patients are evidently paired by their estimated times of delivery, and the two women are, therefore, asked to share a room, where Teresa visits Ana and Janis’ wealthy magazine editor, Elena (Rossy de Palma) vists her friend, each also meeting the other woman. In the brief time that the two mothers share they bond, exchanging telephone numbers for when they leave the hospital, hoping to keep in touch and, if nothing else, to share stories about their new babies, Janis’ Cecilia and Ana’s Lucia.

      So, we might presume we have entered a kind the kind Almodóvar world like that of Volver, which also starred Cruz, wherein the story revolves around the female members of a family and the growing relationship between two women. And we wouldn’t necessarily be mistaken if we made this presumption.

      However, the director immediately throws several kinks into what might be a feminist-like tale. Janis’ au pair, Brígida, is not quite working out. As a young college student, she is far too busy attending classes and studying to help out during the day, and by night when the baby is  sleeping in her room, she habitually puts on her ear phones, thus making her unable to hear if the child were crying or in danger. The maid’s husband is ill, and she increasingly asks if she might leave early in order to visit him in the hospital, leaving Janis alone to make dinner for herself and Brígida. Moreover, the father of Cecilia, Arturo, unexpectedly returns just to see his progeny. If Janis is upset by his sudden appearance it is because she still has feelings for him, despite the fact that he is even more attentive to his wife now that she has cancer. But the visit, although polite, seems curt. He seems pleased to see the child, but comments little and leaves soon after. 

      The next day when Janis goes to his hotel to confront him, he explains that he simply doesn’t see any aspect of himself or his family in the child’s appearance, and doubts his paternity, which obviously angers Janis who insists she had no other lovers at the time that they met.

      Ana has also found herself too busy to meet up with Janis. Although Teresa had planned for her play to open in Madrid, the director announces that the theater is unavailable and that the company will have to tour the provinces before returning to Madrid for the opening. The young girl, according, is left in her mother’s home alone with a maid and nanny, but has little experience in even knowing how to make use of their services. She feels as alone and afraid as when her father sent her, unwanted, to her mother upon discovering her pregnancy.

      In short, both women have been betrayed by men in their lives. Janis, moreover, has grown up in a fatherless household and her mother, in turn, had grown up without a father. Now the new male in her life even refuses to acknowledge the child, even though he has been asked for nothing regarding its care and upbringing. Ana, having attended a party with her boyfriend, having gotten drunk, has been raped and photographed, the two boys who observed and photographed the event, later threatening her with exposure if she does not also have sex with them as well. Despite the fact that she has legally been raped, her father, who has long ago been divorced from her mother and raised his own family since, insists that she should not report it to police before sending her off to the career-driven Teresa.

 

      And both are soon about to face even further difficulties they might never have imagined. Disturbed by Arturo’s absolute disavowal of the child and by Cecila’s dark complexion create enough doubts in her mind that she proceeds with a DNA test, only to discover, to her shock, that she is most definitely not the birth mother.

      At the very same time, Ana discovers her beloved Lucia dead of a rare form of crib death that the doctors describe as resulting from her undeveloped brain’s forgetting to ask the body it controls simply to breath.

      By accident the two meet up again in despair, this time at a café where Ana, having left her mother’s house, has taken a job. Feeling forlorn and friendless, and perhaps just a little curious about the obvious situation with Cecilia, Janis invites her back to the house. Upon seeing pictures of Lucia, and recognizing that she could indeed be of her own blood, and then suddenly being told of that child’s death, a wave of emotional responses rushes over Janis, who almost spontaneously  yet perhaps subconsciously with a deep sense of self-protection and even manipulation, invites the now more mature and suddenly quite beautiful Ana to take on the job of her au pair, to live in her own house, and perhaps gradually replace her maid, whose husband has grown even more ill than when she first returned home with the baby. The New Yorker critic Anthony Lane summarizes Cruz’ character and her acting very nicely in this and the following devastating scenes: 

      

"For those of us who deify Penélope Cruz, the new film is a case of déjà vu. In Almodóvar’s Live Flesh (1997), she played a young Madrileña who gave birth on a bus. (A friend had to cut the umbilical cord with her teeth.) But there was a clinging helplessness to that character, whereas Janis, in “Parallel Mothers,” is—or, for a while, appears to be—in mature command of her fate. Deeming Arturo to be surplus to requirements, she raises Cecilia on her own. Circumstances, though, conspire against her, and she winds up employing Ana as a nanny. “I’ll teach you how to run a house and cook,” Janis says, kicking things off with a lesson in peeling potatoes. Here is Cruz at her least showy and yet her most adventurous, allowing a storm of confusion to sweep across her face as she sits at a café table, and guiding us through the stages of one woman’s self-possession: having it, losing it almost completely, and then reclaiming it."

     The two women not only get on well together but develop a close friendship that suddenly transitions into a sexual lesbian relationship. Although there is clearly love between them, it is dominated by Ana feelings for Janis, and if Janis seems slightly reticent it is not simply because of the age difference but because in the interim she has swabbed both Ana’s and Ceclia’s mouths only to discover, after sending it off to the laboratories, that indeed Ana is Ceclia’s birth mother, quite obviously making the situation almost impossible. And even she realizes what Ana will later accuse her of being, that she is entirely selfish in her inability to reveal the truth. Janis has come to love Cecilia has her own child. 

      In the perfect Almodóvar world the two women, even upon such a devastating revelation, would continue to in their love of each another to raise Ceclia as their mutual child, living happily ever after as a lesbian couple.

      But this director’s worlds are always fallen, haunted by history in ways that none of his characters want to admit. Aunts move in unexpectedly with their nieces, lovers from the past come back to haunt those who have moved on in other directions, buried truths come crashing back to the surface.

       Arturo returns once more, Janis accepting his invitation for a drink and staying out with him all evening. Upon her return, Ana is jealous, worried that her companion has once again had sex with him. She denies it, but Ana is still observant that something is different and challenges Janis, believing it has to do with their love. Again she is mistaken; the discomfort emanates, we realize, Janis’s deep sense of guilt for her betrayal of Ana. And finally, given the situation she reveals the truth about Ceclia.

     

     Ana is righteously horrified to hear the truth, that Janis has long known that the babies must have gotten mixed up in the hospital but has not thought it necessary to report that earthshattering truth, revealing that it is her child who lives and Janis’ who has died. Ana packs her bags, grabs the child, and exits without further discussion, leaving Janis alone to suffer the consequences of her selfishness.

       By morning Ana calls to apologize for her own insensitivity, and it appears that in fact there is a possibility of two coming together again, if only Janis can assure her of a permanent place in her life.

       But the story and history itself again intervenes. The reason that Arturo has returned and Janis has spent the long night celebrating with him takes us back to the very earliest scenes when Janis photographs Arturo for a magazine spread on Arturo, a well-known forensic anthropologist who works with government founding to examine the remains of Franco’s victims in unmarked mass graves. Finished with the shoot, she tells him of just such an unmarked spot in her own town which contains the remains of her own great-grandfather and several friends, querying him whether he might be able to get a grant to dig there as well. Together they write up a grant, which he warns her sometimes takes several years to be answered, particularly since government funds have been severely curtailed.

       We now must return to Spanish history to comprehend the territory we are about to enter. Upon Franco’s rise to power, thousands upon thousands of anti-Franco soldiers and others simply suspected or innocently caught up with the events of the time were brutally killed through methods that might remind us of the two other great tyrants of the period, Hitler and Stalin. Some estimates of such post-Civil War activity suggest more than 100,000 individuals simply went missing. Among those probably killed by Franco soldiers was Federico García Lorca, the outspoken playwright and poet whose work Ana mother’s is performing. Spanish writer Juan Goytisolo (like Lorca and the director film, a gay man) wrote an entire work of fiction, The Garden of Secrets (1997) focused on 28 individuals each presenting their own theory of the death and location of Lorca, whose body has still to be found.

       Estimates of deaths from the Civil War and the atrocities of its aftermath are difficult to determine, and have been estimated from 2 million to 250,000, those numbers reflecting the inclusion or exclusion of those were killed from other wartime conditions and hygiene, those who represented other nations in the war, and those like children and women whose ancillary deaths often when unreported; and of course, the thousands who were later killed by Franco’s soldiers is still unknown. When Franco died in 1975, the government created the “Amnesty Law of 1977,” as part of the pacto del olvido (the pact of oblivion) in order to wipe away all former crimes in an attempt for the country to make a healthy transition into democracy. But obviously that did not satisfy the hundreds of families who still kept their memories of the Franco regime of husbands, uncles, and brothers being taken away from breakfast and dinner tables who in legend were forced to dig their own graves and were never to be see again—precisely what the older women describe in this film of their own and Janis’ relatives.

        Finally, the outcry became so intense that a new law was enacted, the “Law of Historical Memory,” which along with issuing a forceful condemnation of the Franco regime funded a group, the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory, to seek out the remains of those secretly killed by Franco. It is for that organization which Arturo works; and the reason he has returned to Madrid and celebrated with Janis is because their grant has finally been approved.

        For the rest of Almodóvar’s film, the action shifts away from the personal relationship of Ana and Janis, as through Arturo and his worker’s action of digging and recovering of the dead bodies, Janis teaches Ana and her daughter Cecilia a lesson far more important than how to cook a potato omelet.

        The two remain close friends, but their story also opens up, as Cecilia grows into an inquisitive toddler under the gentle ministrations of Ana, and Janis and Arturo—the latter who has told his now healthy wife about Janis, the two agreeing upon divorce—have produced another unborn child still in her womb.

       Together this little family (Janis, Ana, and Cecilia, Elena, and Arturo), finally march en masse with the others remaining who recall the past the Foundation returned to them through the unearthed graves that permits them to witness the bones of their long ago dead and the artifacts they took with them: a child’s rattle, a glass eye, a gold tooth. By film’s end the personal has become universal, as the individuals have finally taken history back into their own hands, and are ready to face a future with a less haunted past.

 

Los Angeles, January 24, 2020

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 2020).