Robert Bresson | Le Journal d’un curé (Diary of a Country Priest) / 1951, USA 1954

the miracle of our empty hands

by Douglas Messerli

 

Robert Bresson (screenwriter and director, based on a novel by Georges Bernanos Le Journal d’un curé de champagne) Le Journal d’un curé (Diary of a Country Priest) / 1951, USA 1954

 

Robert Bresson’s third film, Le Journal d’un curé de champagne, brought him international attention and awards, including the 1951 Grand Prize at the Venice Film Festival. Like his later film, Mouchette, Diary of a Country Priest was based on a novel by the noted French Catholic writer Georges Bernanos, and like that later film, this work is a bleak portrait of French provincial life.

     A young priest (Claude Laydu), fresh out of seminary, is assigned to the village of Ambricourt in northern France. Innocent and highly idealistic, the priest feels dissociated from and uncomfortable with his often cynical and crude parishioners. These people are, according to the seasoned priest of nearby Torcy, a vengeful and mean folk, going so far—as a local schoolgirl, Séraphita tells him—to lace wine with drugs upon the priest’s visit, just to observe him fall into a stupor upon his return home, which, in their gossip, they can portray as drunkenness. The priest, however, has big changes in mind for his community, which, despite the warnings of the Torcy priest and the local count, he attempts to enact, meeting with resistance and ridicule from nearly all. Even his catechism students involve him in their schoolgirl jokes.

     His one regular churchgoing worshiper, Miss Louise, a nanny at the chateau, unintentionally involves him with the family at the chateau. While the husband eventually dismisses the aspirations of the priest, the young daughter of the house further draws him into the life of her family by reporting that her father and her nanny are having an affair. When the priest finally determines to approach the girl’s mother, he discovers a woman who, long aware of his husband’s infidelities, has determined to forgive them at the expense of her own salvation and happiness.

     In a long and fascinating discussion about human will in relation to God’s grace, the priest attempts to reconcile the woman to her savior.

 

Countess: Love is stronger than death. Your scriptures say so.

Curé d’Ambricourt: We did not invent love. It has its order, its law.

Countess: God is its master.

Curé d’Ambricourt: He is not the master of love. He is love itself. If you

would love, don’t place yourself beyond love’s reach.

 

     Miraculously, he succeeds in her returning to her faith, but when she dies that same evening her family and the entire community is even more outraged by his intrusion into this woman’s and other’s lives.

     Meanwhile, the priest himself is suffering not only from severe doubts about the power of his faith and his ability to lead this village, but is unable to eat most foods, surviving primarily on bread crusts and the wine into which he has dipped them; in short, he eats only the elements of the sacrament, bread and wine. A trip to a doctor in a neighboring town reveals that he is terminally ill with cancer, and, upon visiting a seminary friend living in that town—a man who, having failed to finish his education, leads a desultory and poverty-stricken life as a writer—the young priest dies after apparently coming to terms with his own failures and recognizing that “All is grace,” that God himself is grace.

     Such a plot summary, however, can give one no idea of the power of Bresson’s film, which in scene after scene pits the beautiful, finely-boned, almost monk-like priest—Laydu, a nonprofessional actor, who apparently studied the mannerisms of priests and fasted to achieve the wan, fragile look of the priest—against the everyday commonness and earthiness of these village folk. The film begins with an image of young couple in the midst of a lusty kiss, breaking away from each other as the priest enters their terrain. The nearby priest, a hard-headed pragmatist, has few delusions about the people, and it is clear that he has survived only because he has demanded petty obedience to the church’s laws as opposed to sweeping change. The local doctor, Delbende—one of the few men of intelligence of the community—has apparently never heard of Semmelweis and antiseptic techniques. He literally looks and smells of the earth, and returns to the earth by killing himself.

     The priest is clearly an aesthete, a man not of action but of symbolic acts and a spiritual language that in contrast to the community he is attempting to serve often appears to come out of nowhere, as if he were speaking in tongues. If nothing else, his highly pitched intensity, revealed in long narrational passages as he is seen writing his diary, seems utterly at odds with the everyday events and behavior of his surroundings.

 

    As in many later films, Bresson focuses on bodily parts, particularly the hands, to help engage the reader in the priest’s sense of displacement. Throughout the film, the priest’s hands seem almost to flutter into motion—with many of the sexual connotations that word suggests—while those around him stand stolidly against or stomp into space.

     The priest, on the other hand, represented significantly by pen in hand, repeats the words of his journal as if they were a sacred text. Repeatedly he signs the blessing. When the countess throws her locket containing the picture of her dead son into the fire, the young priest quickly reaches into the flames to retrieve it.

     Moreover, he speaks of the role hands have in his beliefs, recalling the hands of “the virgin rocking the world’s cradle,” and, as he lifts the countesses’ veil as she lies upon her deathbed, rhapsodizing: “Oh, the miracle of our empty hands!” in his apparent startlement of discovering the effect—having blessed the countess at the end of their conversation—one can achieve, despite his feelings of inadequacy, with a simple touch.

 

    Part of the dilemma of this man’s life is that no one dares to show him love or even encourage his acts. Only once or twice is he blessed by the touch of other’s hands, the most important of these moments being when Séraphita discovers him face down in the mud, and he awakens to the touch of her washing away the blood and mud from his face before pulling him into the safety of a temporary hiding place where we can comfortably sleep off the drug-laced wine he has drunk, gently stroking blueberry juice on his cheeks so that can explain his “drunkenness.”

    The second such event is when a relative of the count invites him to ride on the back of his motorbike, and with hands intently placed upon the handlebars, takes this man of God on a wild ride, so delighting the priest that we suddenly recall he is after all a young boy who might, had he chosen another path, be thrilled by life.

     In that exhilarating ride, moreover, Bresson presents us with one of the most homoerotic scenes possible, forcing us to see just how desperate this lonely man is for the touch of another human male body. Not only do we suddenly see him as a young boy, but as a kind of angel who has been trimmed down, wings included, to represent what the older priests have long ago become. As if we might miss the rapport between the two young men, the motorcyclist, when he reaches his destination, turns to the priest to say “To bad you’re leaving. We could have done this again,” as if the two actually have experienced a kind of sexual release in the ride. And perhaps they actually have.

    In the isolated village of Ambricourt there is no one to embrace—not only sexually, of course, since he has taken the vow of chastity—but symbolically or spiritually, the only methods left to him. The emptiness with which he faced is indeed the disease which kills him, a cancer which leaves him equally with an empty stomach. Despite his own dying perception, we can only ponder why he was offered so little earthly grace.

 

Los Angeles, March 19, 2000

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2000).

Gary Halvorson and Richard Eyre | Carmen / 2019

three hateful figures

by Douglas Messerli

 

Georges Bizet (composer), Ludovic Halévy and Henri Meilhac (libretto, based on the novella by Prosper Mérimée), Richard Eyre (director), Gary Halvorson (film director) Carmen / 2019 [Metropolitan Opera live-HD film]

 

Over numerous years I have come to know almost every aria in and the plot of Carmen, but oddly enough I had never seen a performance of the popular opera. So, the announcement by the Metropolitan Opera that this year they were including their tragic tale of the gypsy Carmen and the soldier Don José in their live HD broadcast, led Howard and me to buy tickets. And this production was such an excellent one, that feel that perhaps I need not see another.

     I say that, knowing that I might truly enjoy hearing Georges Bizet’s most memorable score, and would truly enjoy singers performing it of the quality of this production, but must also proclaim that the central characters are all rather repulsive. 

      Yes, Carmen (Clémentine Margaine in this production) is a truly independent spirit, who will have love only on her terms, as she expresses it in her Act 1 "Habanera.” If in a society where men generally made the decision about whom they loved, the cigarette girl, given her beauty, is able to make her own choices of lovers and to declare that her shifting interests may result in heart-break or even death for her former lovers. In short, she recognizes herself as a dangerous siren who spends a great deal of energy in playing a kind of dominating whore, spinning webs around men only to leave them entrapped when she moves on to her next lover. And all those around her, apparently, know her pattern and steer clear of her sexual enticements. Only outsiders such as Don José (Roberto Alagna) and the toreador, Escamillo (Alexander Vinogradov) might allow themselves to fall for her charms.

      It is precisely her independence and willfulness that attracts men to her. In a society of feminine passivity, Carmen stands out in her alluring masculine-like stance. One might even observe that she symbolically stands for soldiers and toreadors alike—both groups of which, because of their historical association with their own sex and their colorful costumes, have long been the focus of gay intrigue—as a kind of acceptable drag incarnation of their male colleagues. *

     But Carmen also is a betrayer, a violent fighter, a smuggler, and thief, who entices the flustered Don José not only to leave the saintly—and again quite passive female, who visits her would-be lover only upon instructions and the pleas of Don José’s mother, Micaéla (Aleksandra Kurzak, in real life the wife of Alagna) free her from arrestment, for which he is imprisoned for months, to leave his employment as a soldier, and to join the gypsy smugglers. True, he is intoxicated by his love for Carmen, but we also see through these acts just how weak he is as a man. In a sense, Don José is as passive as Carmen is independent. And he too has now betrayed all those to whom he was formerly committed. Is it any wonder that Carmen can no longer admire or love him? By giving in to all of her demands he has simply shown himself as a male weakling (and we must remember that Mérimée’s tale is very much about gender stereotypes, even if they are often overturned).

      Carmen has now fallen in love with an equally odious being, the self-enchanted, braggadocios bull-fighter from Seville, Escamillo. The children (which are absolutely wonderful in this production, which provided them even with a backstage interview in the intermission) and the locals may all celebrate his achievements, but there is something amiss with this “hero.” Escamillo may appear brave to attempt to visit the smuggler’s mountain hangout to seek out Carmen, but he is quickly bested in a fight with Carmen’s cohorts and backs off. 

     Even if Carmen is currently smitten by him, we recognize that she will eventually perceive his true cowardice and will leave him as well. Fortunately, we never discover what might have occurred in their relationship, but it might be interesting as a separate work to imagine what their relationship would have been and how it might have ended—surely, once more, in violence.

    The true hero of this opera is Micaéla, who truly enters the lion’s den of the smuggler’s hideout, trembling with fear, not only for her encounter with the suspicious males, but for having to encounter her nemesis Carmen. Yet only she is able, temporarily at least, of weaning Don José away from this world so that he might attend to his mother’s impending death.

      Her victory, however, is a short one. He returns to Carmen, this time taking on the most horrific role he might ever embody of a murderer, waiting to be arrested and hung.

     No matter how you might view conventional behavior, you have to be shocked by the trio of horrific beings at the center of this story. Opera is filled with hateful figures, criminals, rapists, and many, many murderers. But these three rather shady figures starring in a single work may be a kind of record.

    They all may be proclaiming love, but the results of that love make you shudder. Even Don Giovanni, the lecherous count also roaming the Seville streets, seems almost saintly in comparison.

As the gentle and mostly unjudgmental Howard said, upon leaving the theater, “these are not such nice people.”

     I was enchanted by the performances and music, even if it didn’t make me want to abandon my life and run into the mountains.

 

*It’s fascinating, simply as a coincidental piece of gay gossip, that Marcel Proust, after Bizet’s death, befriended the composer’s wife and son, upon whom he based two of the central figures in his masterpiece, Remembrance of Things Past. The author of the original Carmen, Prosper Mérimée, although having occasional affairs and long correspondence with women, never married and lived most of his life with his mother. He did have a one-night stand, apparently, with George Sand (not impressed with his sexual prowess), who might almost be portrayed as a kind of Carmen, a strong-willed, talented seductress of many powerful men.

 

Los Angeles, February 6, 2019

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (February 2019).

 

Tim Wardle | Three Identical Strangers / 2018

into the mirror

by Douglas Messerli

 

Tim Wardle (screenplay, with the help of Lawrence Wright; and director) Three Identical Strangers / 2018

 

The director of the 2018 documentary Three Identical Strangers, Tim Wardle has encouraged critics not to reveal the ending (or even the second-half) of his film about the triplets who suddenly discovered, at age 19, the identities of one another. Yet, I’d argue that it might be better to know the second half of the film without knowing the early, rom-com, part. In a sense, it is like asking one to read Heart of Darkness without knowing that things go bad for Kurz and other Belgian occupiers in the Congo, which misses, perhaps, the very reason one might wish to read that book, or, in this case, take a visit to your local movie theater to see this remarkable piece of filmmaking.

        If you don’t want to know anything about this movie before seeing it, please feel free to skip this review. It has never bothered me to know as much as I can about a film before seeing it so that I might better comprehend and enjoy its images.

     As the many critics writing on this film have revealed is the wonderful accidental encounter by Robert Shafran, a 19-year-old freshman at Sullivan County Community College in upstate New York, of a series of people who greeted him with great enthusiasm, pats on the back, and even kisses on his very first day on campus. That alone might have made anyone suspicious something was amiss, but the fact that many also called him Eddy might have made any of us feel we were in a slightly surreal experience. When he finally met his dorm room mate—who, recognizing that Eddy (Galland) had previously determined to not return to campus and was slightly different from his new roommate—asked Robert whether he was a twin, the news might have set off shocks of incredulity to the new freshman. We never discover in this film why the evidently popular Eddy had decided not to return to the community college or how Robert had determined to attend the very same institution, a semester later, but it clearly did trip off clues that something was very strange; and before he knew it, Robert was in a small phone booth with his new roommate dialing up Eddy Galland and, soon after, speeding in his elderly car about two hours away to meet, at the doorway of the house, his mirror image.

       Discovering that they not only shared the same birthday, the same adoption center, and many of the very same habits, newspapers, particularly Newsday, quickly glommed onto the news item, much to the delight of the sudden discovered twins. Meanwhile, as their stories and pictures begin to appear in local papers, another young freshman at Queen’s college in 1980 saw himself in the pictures that he witnessed and, particularly, after confirmation from his mother and his proud father, nicknamed “Bubbalah,” he too called the media, suddenly the long-lost twins becoming triplets.

      The euphoria of the discovery of two other versions of yourself swept up the three boys into a new world of self-love, propelling them almost immediately into, as an aunt describes it, a world in which the 3 former wrestlers joined one another of the floor in a kind a roll-around that she describes as a somewhat like “puppies.” The three, Eddy, Bob, and Dave hit all the talk shows, dressing alike, talking alike, and interrupting each other’s comments while commenting on their shared interests in the same kind of women, Marlboro cigarettes, and taste in color. There had been numerous other pieces on how rediscovered twins or even those knowledgeable of their kinship, shared conversational habits, patterns of thought, and tastes, and these triplets simply fueled that concept, as newspeople promoted their similarities as opposed to questioning their differences. As they later assert, we wanted and were encouraged to show how much we were like one another without anyone asking anything else.

       They had, however, big differences in their upbringing. Eddy, raised by a strict and authoritarian school teacher, did not have a close relationship with his father. Even in interviews, Eddy’s father still seems to have no clue why he did not have a deep connection with his son. Robert’s father, a physician, although deeply supportive of his son, was often missing; Bob’s mother was herself a successful professional. It was David’s more lower-class father and mother with whom the trio most bonded. If you sense a series of class differences here, it is no accident, and might have been one of the first things that the triplets questioned about themselves; the Jewish adoption agency purposely put them into families of different financial and parenting skills, having already also helped their adoptions of older sisters for the three.

      If the adopted families grew angry for not having been assessed of the fraternal relationship of their beloved sons, the triplets themselves moved in together in a bachelor apartment, showed up at nights in many 1980’s bars and dancing clubs, and even appeared in a Madonna movie. You might say they became enamored to their own triplicate identities. How might anyone not have been: you who were alone most of your life, and who, in this case of all three, sensed something missing in those years, acting out hostility in their early teen years. The trio even opened up their own SoHo restaurant, Triplets, serving up steaks and dancing with their customers each night. In the first year they made more than a million dollars.

      If it’s delight to see these smilingly toothy, pudgy fingered, curly-haired boys in their early encounters, things soon begin to fray. Each of them found women whom they married, not, as they had previously argued, all similar in type. Eddy, who fought hard to keep the families they created together, was devastated when his brother Robert left the business, unable to work successfully with the other two. And, although David remained close to Eddy, living across the street, he could not stop his brother’s eventual suicide. Darker elements had existed in all our lives which involved a sense of abandonment, and later, of having been forced to live a life over which they had had no control.

      When the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Lawrence Wright (The Looming Tower, Going Clear) began to write about “twins” in the late 1990s, he discovered a great deal of information that suggested that the triplets and several twins had been intentionally separated from their birth mothers by late child psychiatrist Peter Neubauer, an Austrian Jew who had fled the Holocaust, using the Jewish Louise Wise Agency. The experiment, which might have been interesting had all parties been alerted to its existence, was an attempt to determine the difference between nature vs. nurture.

      If Wardle’s film begins rather solidly on the side of nature—these guys, after all, seemed at first to be so very alike that only nature could have explained it—we gradually come to perceive that perhaps their upbringing did make an enormous difference. Robert admits that too had had suicidal thoughts, but that he couldn’t bring himself to carry them out. David, although stunned by events, seems rather blessed by having the beloved “Bubbalah,” as his father. Perhaps wealth and permission are not the things that most sustain an individual this film suggests. Just a daily hug might make all the difference.

      Yet, the even darker story of a purpose experiment on human beings, the findings of which will never be published and whose files cannot even be opened in 2066, are the most sinister elements of this tale. Why can’t the overseeing Jewish Federation open those Yale files, or why won’t Yale themselves admit that they might be opened? One of Neubauer’s unwitting confederates perhaps says it best. Those twins who don’t know about each other may be better off, without being torn apart by the news that these triplets had to endure. If the actions of those with whom they worked were indeed corrupt, cynical, and even inexcusable, the pain these three brothers had to endure by the discovery of the truth might not be worth it. Yet, at least the two remaining brothers now know one another, and speak out strongly about the truth; and that is the undeniable power of Wardle’s film.

 

Los Angeles, July 5, 2018

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2018).

Jean Renoir | Boudu sauvé des eaux (Boudu Saved from Drowning) / 1932

disorder restored

by Douglas Messerli

Jean Renoir (screenwriter, based on a play by René Fauchois, and director) Boudu sauvé des eaux (Boudu Saved from Drowning) / 1932

 

The first of Jean Renoir’s masterworks, Boudou Saved from Drowning, was based on a boulevard farce by René Fauchois. I’ve never read that play, but it’s certain that Renoir’s work, which takes it regularly out of the Lestingois home and bookshop, is far superior in that, through those maneuvers, it connects the bourgeois activities of the Lestingois family to the Paris at large.

    Both husband and wife are represented as sweet-meaning fools, Madame Lestingois (Marcelle Hainia) being a woman more interested in money and order than anything else, and the gentle bookseller (Charles Granval) having illusions of being a great humanist. In fact, as we see from the beginning of the work Lestingois is simply an old lecher, fawning (quite literally) on his maid, who readily accepts his attentions, probably with illusions that she might eventually replace her mistress.

      Yet, as critics have pointed out, Renoir’s sweet satire does not openly mock these figures as much as he simply points out their own self-delusions, and to do that even more effectively, he deposits Boudu (Michel Simon), a man with no delusions and no social restrictions whatsoever, into their home after Lestingois valiantly saves the tramp from drowning.

     Once in their home, this pagan (not at all like a hippy, with whom Pauline Kael compared him: most hippies were rejecting their own traditional upbringings, while Boudu has had so such past) wreaks havoc simply by clumsily lumbering through their well-kept quarters, sleeping on the floor, spitting into the bookseller’s sacred volumes, wiping his grubby hands on Madame Lestingois’ undergarments and seducing her while simultaneously attempting to entice the maid, Chloe Anne Marie, into his arms. 

     Renoir presents him a bit like a reverse Charlie Chaplin figure, who instead of desiring to become respectable, is irredeemably wild. It is really Boudu, not Lestingois—as he sees himself—who is a kind of Pan, the god of the wild and the purveyor of panic.

       Our first glimpse of Boudu is in the forest, so to speak, in the woods of what appears to be the Bois de Boulogne, tending his beast, a ruffian dog which escapes his arms and goes missing. Is it any wonder that when he loses his charge and, accordingly, has lost his purpose, Boudu wants to drown himself. He has no desire to be “saved,” let alone be reformed. Even Emma Lestingois realizes this in her deliciously comic comment that if they are going to attempt to save tramps, they should be from their own class. Boudu is truly classless because he is classic, a type that has appeared time and again in films. He reminds me, for example, of the inveterate hobo played by Walter Brennan in Capra’s dark comedy, Meet John Doe, who describes anyone living indoors as “healots.”

     If in the end, it appears that in Boudu Saved from Drowning might have been converted to the bourgeoisie through his marriage to Chloe, Renoir delightedly shows Boudu’s return to nature through a second “drowning”—by intentionally tossing the entire wedding party into the river. This time we recognize that this creature of nature can swim quite wonderfully, as the other cultural “swimmers” must be saved at the very moment he lustily swims to shore, divesting himself of his societal attire by trading clothes with a scarecrow before heading back into the wilds. Disorder has been restored.

 

Los Angeles, January 28, 2017

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 2017).

Charles Chaplin | The Immigrant / 1917

inside / outside

by Douglas Messerli

 

Charles Chaplin, Vincent Bryan, and Maverick Terrell (screenplay), Charles Chaplin (director) The Immigrant / 1917

 

Chaplin conveys the intensity of those determined to make a better life in a new land, and the kinds of sacrifices they had to make to get there. The very first moment of the film, shows the Immigrant Chaplin leaning far over the deck of the ship, presumably, like most of his fellow travelers, suffering from intense sea-sickness; but no, this traveler is simply fishing, and brings up a nice specimen from the ocean, while all around him others begin their journey with deep stomach pains.

 

       The tramp figure meets Edna Purviance (often Chaplin’s leading lady), this time as a lovely young girl accompanying her sickly mother. She discovers that their entire savings has been lost, a gambling pickpocket having robbed them; but Chaplin, also gambling wins most of the money back and restores it to her, but in so doing, is, himself, accused of the theft. She saves him from arrest.

       Most of the “fun,” if you can describe it as that, of the first part of this bipartite story, is about the simple swaying motion of the boat. People, living in abject conditions, are comically swung across the decks, bowls of gruel spin across the communal eating tables, and everything and everyone appears in eternal motion, like the passengers themselves, neither here nor there. Chaplin captures the very personal emotions of the travelers through his swinging camera and rotating objects: there is quite literally no stability anymore in their lives.

 

     When they finally see the great symbol of their acceptance, The Statue of Liberty, they are suddenly cordoned off by a rope, as if a wall has suddenly separated them from all of their hopes. Today no one cannot see this moment without thinking of the constant governmental threats of further bans and plans for immigrant control.

      The second “act” of this “comedy” occurs in a cheap Lower East Side restaurant where the tramp figure accidently reencounters his would-be lover, Purviance. He has just found a coin, and is out to enjoy a sumptuous meal of beans, delighted to be able to treat her to the same. However, we have just observed that the coin has fallen through the hole in his pocket, and, like the happy young diners of Hello, Dolly!, he is about to be met with hostility and embarrassment when it comes time to pay the bill.

       We watch, in anticipation, as others are humiliated and even beaten (again by the bully figure of Eric Campbell) for their inability to pay, as the Tramp gradually discovers the coin is missing. When he finally finds what he believes to be his coin, that has actually fallen from another man’s pocket, the whole tension of the film shifts to the heavy shoes of the waiter and the tramp, as they step over and try to reel in the piece of silver which might oust or save the two diners from any position in the society into which they have now entered. It is truly a matter of inside/outside, which now becomes the central metaphor of the movie; might they, at least, enjoy a simple dinner or will they be tossed into the wilds of the street?

      Chaplin, always the believer of the ideal, ends the film on the positive, literally picking up his would-be fiancée and taking her into a small marriage bureau to tie the knot. This immigrant dream ends most happily, even if we cannot even imagine how the two might survive in their new world.

 

Los Angeles, March 13, 2017

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2017).