Alfred Hitchcock | The Wrong Man / 1956

the dark side of the moon

by Douglas Messerli

 

Maxwell Anderson and Angus MacPhail (screenplay, based on a story by Maxwell Anderson), Alfred Hitchcock (director) The Wrong Man / 1956

 

It is strange to think that only two years after making one of his greatest films, Rear Window, and in the same year that Alfred Hitchcock directed The Trouble with Harry—perhaps his most joyful film of this period—as well as the remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much, that the 1956 black and white movie The Wrong Man, was a dismal box office failure.

      Several reasons are generally cited for this fact, the most obvious being simply that the film, based on a true story with few of the original facts altered, was simply too bleak. Moreover, in its documentary-like tone and structure, the film does not seem like a Hitchcock product. It has little of the gruesome wit and irony of most of his movies, and lacks, at least superficially, the cinematographic brilliance of the other films mentioned. The director himself seems to back away from the work, appearing in a brief shot before the film begins to tell the audience the movie is based on real events, instead of appearing in a tongue-in-cheek cameo, as he usually does, within the frame of the story. Even the phenomenal composer Bernard Herrmann seems to have become more somber, certainly less flamboyant in this film—although his stunning jazz piece (Manny works as a string bass player in a jazz group performing at the Stork Club), interrupted by almost sickening moans of the instruments, is highly memorable.

     To see the hard-working, good family man Manny Balestrero (intensely played by Henry Fonda) be systematically destroyed by the US justice system is so painful that it is a hard movie to watch. In some ways, The Wrong Man combines all of the fears and paranoias of the mid-1950s, a period where the whole country was, in a sense, put on trial, everyday men and women accused of anti-American sentiment and actions. Although I have often suggested that the 1950s was far more interesting than the decade is usually presented, this particular aspect of the period, along with the angst of nuclear destruction, put everyone on edge. It is little wonder, accordingly, that people did not flock to Hitchcock's dour film. Even a critic writing as late as 2004, Christopher Null, describes it as one of Hitchcock's "most forgettable works of his mature era."

     Having recently watched the film again, however, I now think it, along with Shadow of a Doubt, is one of his most excellent, if frightening, depictions of American life. Films like Vertigo, North by Northwest, and even Psycho are much closer to European cinema-making than either Shadow of a Doubt or The Wrong Man, the latter of which is as grounded in the streets of New York as many of the 1940s film noir, and, as we now perceive, highly influenced artists like Scorsese in Taxi Driver.

     It is not that the police in this film are villains, or that they are even particularly insensitive enforcers. The dilemma of this film is not that any group of men or women torment Manny, but that—once he has visited the local insurance office to see if he might get a loan to pay for his wife's upcoming dental bills—the whole world order crumbles, truth and memory slipping away into nightmare reality. He is identified by women of the insurance office as a man who twice before held them up, women can hardly bear to look at the accused themselves, one of them almost sickening to even glance in his direction.

     The police quickly create a line-up made up of persons, among whom the women might have previously seen in uniform, as justice continues to crack, leaving Manny Balestrero to face the shattering effects upon his life.

     In this world turned upside down, coincidences predominate. When asked to write the words that appeared in one of the hold-up notes, Manny makes the same spelling mistake as did the criminal, reinforcing the police's belief in his guilt. His simple statement, "I made a mistake," echoes in a Kafka-like cry of existential guilt, repeated later in his wife's fractured vision of reality that it is she who has made the mistakes by needing dental care or through simply not being a good enough wife. Even Manny's two innocent sons mope about as if they have helped to create the mountain of evidence that appears to insure Manny's imprisonment.

     Truth has little significance in this dark world. The fact that during the first robbery the couple had been away on vacation and during the second robbery Manny had a swollen cheek seems to matter little. None of his fellow vacationers can be found, some having died, others disappearing into oblivion. The young lawyer (Anthony Quayle) to whom Manny and his wife are recommended is well-meaning but inexperienced (in this instance, Hitchcock did change the facts, since originally he was a New York Senator at the time of the trial).

      As Manny’s wife Rose (Vera Miles) slips into insanity, it is as if jazz player, a religious believer, were suddenly suffering the trials of Job. The only bit of luck he receives, if one can call it that, is that a juror screams out early in the trial concerning the mundanity of court room details, apparently in the belief that Manny's guilt is obvious, thus assuring a retrial, and giving the defense more time to prepare.

     One cannot imagine the final events to be anything but fiction, so perfectly do they fit with Hitchcock's sense of moral outrage against institutional systems and individual fate. Quite by accident the head detective in this case encounters another recently arrested man in the precinct hall who looks vaguely like Manny, and turns back from his exit to further investigate, discovering that he is responsible for the robberies for which Manny has been accused.

     In the frame of the movie, however, Manny's new freedom seems hardly to matter. His wife, locked away in an asylum, apathetically ignores his claims that everything will now be all right. She, so the doctor proclaims, is still "on the dark side of the moon."

    Only a written after-note tells us that two years later Rose recovered, allowing the family, perhaps, to return to some normalcy. But one doubts, after all they have been through, that everyday life was ever possible again.

 

Los Angeles, September 3, 2011

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2011).

Simon Trevorrow | Mary / 2021

death in a family

by Douglas Messerli

 

Simon Trevorrow (screenwriter and director) Mary / 2021 [9 minutes]

 

The name Mary has about as much a relationship to this film as the statue of Mother Mary, which Aaron (Pat Moonie) accidently breaks in his hurried attempt rise from his bed and get dressed, has to with the problems between him and his sister Jane (Raelene Isbester).

    Aaron has returned home for his mother’s death and has been staying in his now empty home, with the assumption that he would help pack up his mother’s belongs so that they might clear out the house to sell it. However, when Jane arrives she sees that no progress has been made. Empty boxes lie standing in the living room with old books strewn across the floor.

 

    Two glasses and a wine bottle sit on the coffee table, and from the evidence of a condom Aaron quickly retrieves from the bedroom floor as he rushes to met his sister, it’s clear he has spent the night with someone in his bed. The arrival soon after of a young man, Tom (Simon Trevorrow), to pick up his forgotten wallet gives further proof that Jane’s brother has spent the night with one of his old gay mates.

     Jane says nothing, but her obvious irritation about Aaron’s inability to attend to things at hand shows an impatience that obviously isn’t focused just on the empty boxes and the junk that remains in their mother’s house.

     As they both work to clean out the rooms, it becomes more and more apparent that there is no love lost between them. And when she finds a broken statue of Mary tossed in the kitchen garbage can, she explodes in a kind a fury which might suggest that it was a holy relic which she had hoped to carry off to her own house.

     But then her quick toss of a Bible into an empty box has already displayed her own disdain toward religion. And it soon becomes clear in their argument that years before they have been asked to leave their church, evidently on account of Aaron’s homosexuality; so neither of them have been brought up in the church. She has no interest in the broken statue, but simply uses it as a symbol to represent her general disdain of her brother.

    Aaron is furious not because she has said anything particularly negative about his having spent the night with Tom, but that she has said nothing, that all their lives she and his mother have never once spoken of the numerous boys he has brought home, never even commented that one might look better than another or asked anything about them. Evidently, the family’s way of coping with Aaron’s homosexuality has been to keep totally silent about it, and in that act they have not truly loved or embraced him in their family love. As Aaron argues in his pique of Jane’s attitude toward him, now that their mother has died, this may be the very last time that they see one another.

      His plane leaves evening, and she invites him over to their house at 4:00, but his suggestion is that they simply forget about it. About to leave, she remains for a moment as if she might respond, turning toward him as if she is about to speak, but the screen goes black, and we realize also that there is nothing to be said. After all these years of silence there are no words that can heal the isolation in which his mother and sister has placed him. He is a stranger even in the house in which he grew up.

       This often happens to gay men even in well-intentioned and somewhat open-minded heterosexual families. They are not attacked or even criticized as much as they are ignored—just as their companions are erased—forced to remain as outsiders even as their families often pretend to embrace them. If there is no rancor between them there is also no deep love, none of the family ties which might bind the uncle to his nieces and nephews, his sister, even a mother. Aaron became an outsider forever the moment he expressed the fact that he was gay.

      Australian director Simon Trevorrow’s short movie is not a work of anger, but of sorrow, of loss. For long before her mother died, Jane had also lost her brother.

 

Los Angeles, April 29, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (April 2024)

     

Omar Zúñíga Hidalgo | Brussels / 2010

business lunch

by Douglas Messerli

 

Omar Zúñíga Hidalgo (screenwriter and director) Brussels / 2010 [10 minutes]

 

In this short film which takes place in New York City, Gaspar (Oliver Smith) has lunch with his father Edward (Michael Douglass), an occasion which proves a disaster and provides us with an insight in why, despite repeated attempts, he can longer communicate with his always busy businessman father.

     Back in Brussels, where Gaspar lives, waits his lover Sven, a Chilean-born gay man with whom Gaspar lives. Sven remembers Chile, evidently, only as a young boy and has few ties to the country today, despite regular questions during Gaspar’s mother’s visits about his “home” country. The couple plan to visit Santiago sometime in the near future.

    That is about all the information with which we are provided in this barebones mood piece, that focuses in instead on an all-too-common meet-up with an uncommunicative parent, who clearly has utterly no true interest in his son and knows only the vaguest of things about him.

     Both are interrupted in their luncheon date by phones, and to give him credit, the first time Edward is interrupted he hangs up quickly, explaining he’s having lunch with his son. Gaspar does the same when he receives a call from his office in Brussels. But it doesn’t take long for Gaspar’s father to become engaged, soon after, in an angry discussion about a junior partner who has evidently seen a client without his permission.

      If previously, he has seemed only vaguely interested in Gaspar’s world, he now completely shuts him out, letting his son pay the bill as the two leave the restaurant, Edward attempting to buy a magazine about cars at a newsstand, something in which Gaspar might have been interested as a child, but has long outgrown.

      In a hurry to catch his plane, Gaspar leaves his father behind as he speaks mindlessly into the telephone.

       The film has very little to do with LGBTQ life as such, but can be seen instead a revelatory “slice of life,” which might provide an insight into this young gay man’s childhood and his long dissociation from an uncaring father. When one has to make an appointment to see one’s father, he can only recognize that the relationship is less of a family bond than it is as a client. Clearly, there is nothing but business to bring the son back to New York. Everything that truly matters to Gasper is back in Brussels.

      One has the feeling that this film is terribly personal, and has less to do with something Chilean-born director Zúñíga Hidalgo is attempting to reveal to his audiences than it has to do with a dilemma he is working to resolve in his own life.

 

Los Angeles, April 29, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (April 2024).

Mario Monicelli | I solti ignoti (Big Deal on Madonna Street) / 1958

the good soup

by Douglas Messerli

 

Agenore Incrocci and Furio Scarpelli [Age and Scarpelli] (screenplay, based on their story), Mario Monicelli (director) I solti ignoti (Big Deal on Madonna Street) / 1958

 

As critic Darragh O’Donoghue, writing in Senses of Cinema, correctly observes, Mario Monicelli’s 1958 hit film I soliti ignoti (Big Deal on Madonna Street)—in its genre of being a “spoof”— exists “in a parasitic relationship to the form or medium it parodies.”

     If you’ve ever seen a good robbery caper such as How to Steal a Million you’ll easily catch the humor of this great Monicelli film. But I’d also suggest one or two of Jean-Pierre Melville films (Bob le Flambeur, The Red Circle) and, in particular, Jules Dassin’s 1955 Rififi to which this Italian film pays homage before you visit it.

 

   After the early frames of such films, in which the “situation” is established, plot is dispensed with, as the movie hunkers down on the details of how the thieves will accomplish the task before they actually move in to achieve what they have planned.

     Already in the early scenes, we recognize that something about the figures who will later pretend to play the fine-tooled artisans able to successfully steal the jewels, is amiss. Trying, quite successfully to steal a car, the long-time crook Cosimo (Memmo Carotenuto) is run down by two Roman mounted police and imprisoned for a few months.

     Yet his accomplices cannot wait, having been told by another inmate that, as a bricklayer, he had intentionally created a paste-board wall between a vacant apartment and a successful pawn shop room wherein sits its safe.

     After several frustrating attempts to find a man without a criminal record to “substitute” for Cosimo by confessing to the well-known crook’s crime—most of the men they approach have beloved mothers or lovers, having no interest in spending even a short while in prison—they finally come up with an aging and deteriorating boxer, Peppe (Vittorio Gassman), who at first refuses them, but when he is defeated by a third-rate colleague goes along with their plot just for the money.

 

    The warden, however, not only does not believe his confession but throws him into lockup as well. Complaining to Cosimo that he has now been sentenced to three years, Peppe’s sad news is awarded by Cosimo revealing the entire story of the intended heist.

     Upon getting most of the details, Peppe reveals that, in fact, he has been given a year’s probation, strolling out of the prison walls with the intention of gathering the small gang of second-rate thieves to accomplish what appears to be a “sure thing.”

      They quickly discover, however, that the apartment is not vacant but is rented to two elderly sisters who have hired a female maid, Nicoletta (Carla Gravina), with whom ladies’ man Peppe quickly falls in love, but not before she tells him that the sisters travel to the country on weekends, he arranging a sexual rendezvous with her the next Sunday.

     So his small gang, originally organized by Cosimo, consisting of the young petty thief Mario (Renato Salvaton); a Sicilian crook who needs the money for his sister Carmelina’s (Claudia Cardinale) dowry, whom he intends to marry off to a pious fool, until Mario and she furtively fall in love; a poverty-stricken photographer, Tiberio (Marcello Mastroianni) who has had to sell his camera in order to pay for the baby supplies and food for the son he is caring for while his wife waits out a short sentence in jail; and an elderly pickpocket, Pisacane, who prefers throughout to eat rather than actively participate in their preparations. An elderly safecracker, Dane (Totò), is paid up-front by the group for explaining to them the basics about how to break into a safe; he refuses to participate in the final caper.

     While Peppe assures them that the break-in will be an easy one, even the usually severely abridged Google entry turns their short trek into a near-epic voyage: “to get into the apartment they must cut a lock on a coal chute, slide into the basement, sneak into a small courtyard, climb onto the roof of a first floor apartment, break into the vacant apartment through a window, then punch through the wall between it and the pawn shop”—all before applying their unfamiliar tools to the nearly impregnable safe.

     Meanwhile Cosimo has been released from jail, and in revenge of his former partners, plans his own a course of far more direct action, first attempting to rob a woman who has just left the pawnshop, and then, directly trying to intimidate the pawnshop teller by laying the gun before him warning of his intent plays out a scene that reminds one of the later Woody Allen schtick in his film Take the Money and Run, in which Allen as the would-be robber writes out a note saying “Please put $50,000 into this bag and abt natural, because I am pointing a gub at you.”; in this case, when Cosimo asks the teller “Do you know what this is?” the employee simply picks up the gun and glibly announces its name and make, almost ready to name him a price for putting it into hock.

     At approximately the same time his former gang members slide down the coal shoot only to discover no soft coal dust but filthy water at its end. As you might expect, everything that can go wrong does.

     Although Peppe has been given the keys to the apartment, but out of love delivers them instead, as he promised Nicoletta, to the janitor, putting himself and his crew through the grueling tasks of crawling up ladders, breaking through doors, moving heavy furniture, and drilling into the walls, the first of which leads into a waterpipe.

 

    Pisacane, as usual, discovers tracks down a late meal, a large pot of pasta and chickpea soup which he describes to the others, still at work in their attempts to break down the supposedly paste-board structure, a delicious. Only after a longer period of hard efforts, do they discover that the wall they are slowly breaking through leads into the kitchen where their colleague is enjoying his soup. The sisters have evidently recently redecorated their apartment, moving the furniture.

     Frustrated with their failures, and all wishing to return to the women and families they have left behind, they sit down with Piscane to enjoy the good soup before fleeing.

     The next morning a bemused television reporter reveals the news that several unknown persons had broken into an apartment during the night to steal a pot of soup.

     Given the long sentences these inept robbers would surely have suffered had they actually broken into the safe and absconded with its contents—we might even imagine that it could have been empty—we feel that the ending of this hilarious work is most certainly a happy one. Unlike Melville’s films, here there are no jewels to dispose of, no comrades to later dispose of. Cosimo’s tattered gang is saved by its own ineptitude.

 

Los Angeles, July 14, 2020

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2020).

 

André Téchiné | Les Sœurs Brontë (The Brontë Sisters) / 1979

becoming ghosts

by Douglas Messerli

 

Pascal Bonitzer, André Téchiné, and Jean Gruault (screenplay), André Téchiné (director) Les Sœurs Brontë (The Brontë Sisters) / 1979

 

French director André Téchiné’s 1979 film, The Brontë Sisters, focuses on the daily lives of the famed Brontës while basically ignoring their literary contributions. Of the three featured sisters and one brother, Emily (Isabelle Adjani), Charlotte (Marie-France Pisier), Anne (Isabelle Huppert), Branwell (Pascal Greggory), Branwell’s art is commented on and actually shown. The fiction and poetry of his own and his sisters is briefly mentioned, and, at one point, Charlotte and Anne do travel to London to convince one of their publishers, Mr. Smith (Julian Curry), that their writings, published under the pen-names of Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell actually represent their and Emily’s work.

    Yet, I would think it might be safe to say that if a young viewer had never read the original novels or seen the movie versions of Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, or The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, he might wonder what all the fuss is about. These provincial daughters of a religious leader living on the moors, although seeming basically intelligent and pretty, seem to lack the talents which might allow them to easily survive within society. Although Anne finds a position with a local gentrified family to educate their daughter, the others seem, as Branwell argues, to need to get out and see the world.

      Perhaps recognizing this fact, Charlotte convinces their moneyed aunt to pay for her and Emily to travel to Brussels to study French which, hopefully, will allow them to return to teach that language to locals.

      The journey ends in a kind of disaster for both. Although Charlotte loves the school, secretly falling in love with the married and rather heartless Monsieur Héger (Xavier Depraz), Emily is terribly unhappy faced with the bourgeois young Belgian women who make fun of her plain and English manners.

     She prefers the moors, where, often dressed as a man (it allows me to walk faster and more easily, she argues) she wanders, at times accompanied by Anne. Emily likes the hardy and plain holly, while Anne prefers roses.

     Their Brussels episode, however, is interrupted by the death of their Aunt Elizabeth (Alice Sapritch), which Emily appreciates as an opportunity to return home, while Charlotte, when they arrive too late to see their aunt before she dies, chafes at having had to return, rushing back to Belgium and the unresponsive Héger.

      Perhaps it’s inevitable that the director of numerous gay-themed films should, instead, focus on the male of the family, Branwell, an alcoholic and, later, opium addict, upon whom his sisters dote. Emily (and later even Charlotte) wait up nights to allow him secret entrance back into the house after he has wasted his evenings at the nearby Black Bull Inn. Ann even procures him a job as tutor in the same house in which she works, for the Robinson family’s young son.

      Indeed, we might at first suspect that Branwell is confused about his sexuality, particularly given the immense effect that his sisters—two of whom, not portrayed in this film, died while he was still a child—had upon him. Téchiné even toys with this idea in presenting his relationship to the sculptor Leyland (Jean Sorel), whom Branwell describes not only as a would-be mentor, but as a man of great beauty and power. Clearly, the proud Leyland was also taken with Branwell, deigning to even visit the young artist later in Branwell’s life, when he no longer had any talent and could offer the elder no intelligent company. Even the biographers speak mutedly about his possible gender problems, although to me it sounds like an issue that less concerns gender than it does his sexuality, his attraction to the male sex, so missing from his life.

      But it was the flirtatious wife of Robinson (yes, just like the Mrs. Robinson of The Graduate) that led to his downfall. Although Téchiné’s film shows us some rather racy scenes, particularly given his lowly position—and especially in the eyes of her cruel husband, who she dares not cross—we are never quite sure just how much of their passion has been realized. Mrs. Robinson, in fact, complains bitterly about his own lack of commitment to their relationship; she too, apparently, is a Romantic, seeking a man who might simply kidnap her, allowing her to escape her husband’s boorish world.

       What is clear is that Branwell is not that man; and seeing her mistress toy with her brother as he falls for her wiles, Anne quits her job with the household, Branwell being fired soon after. In one of his opiate fits, the Brontë brother removes himself from his own portrait of his sisters. He has become a ghost.

       It quickly becomes clear that Branwell prefers the manly laborers he finds in his drinking buddies at the local inn. But even when Mrs. Robinson’s monstrous husband dies, she will no longer allow Branwell to visit her for having failed in his “heterosexual” commitments. Clearly, if he was homosexual, he lived neither in the right time nor place.

       It is almost as if Branwell’s debauchery, resulting in his death from excessive drinking soon after, that signals a downward spiral of the entire family. Soon after, Emily is diagnosed with tuberculosis, refusing to receive medical treatment and also dying. Anne, ill as well with tuberculosis, requests that she see the ocean before she dies, Charlotte traveling with her to the water’s edge, where Anne dies as well.

   Only Charlotte—perhaps the most romantically inclined of them all—survives, beginning a relationship with her father’s curate, Arthur Nicholls, and traveling with him to London where she sits in the opera box of British author William Thackeray (performed, in a brilliant moment of casting, by French literary theorist and semiotician Roland Barthes).

   In the end, if the director does not literally tell us about these four siblings’ actual artistic contributions, he shows them, elliptically, through their lives. We have enough of all their fictions presented—the romantic hauntings of the moors, the harsh teachings of both religious and secular leaders, the unhappy marriages of the husbands and wives who surrounded them, the near-impossibility of lovers being able to sustain their relationships, and the magical moments of imagination that allowed their fictional figures to transcend their worlds, even while being destroyed by them—that we still get a strong sense of these individuals’ literary oeuvres. If nothing else, we certainly learn the context in which their wonderful tales were hatched. The harsh world in which they lived killed them while also giving birth to their remarkable writings which history would not forget.

 

Los Angeles, May 26, 2019

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (May 2019).

Luis Buñuel | Belle de jour / 1967, USA 1968

coach without riders

by Douglas Messerli

 

Luis Buñuel and Jean-Claude Carrière (screenplay, based on the novel by Joseph Kessel), Luis Buñuel (director) Belle de jour / 1967, USA 1968

 

Rumor once had it that the producers, Robert and Raymond Hakim, had originally sought through Luis Buñuel’s Belle de jour to create a financially successful sex flick. But given the impressive films which the Egyptian brothers had previously produced (including Pépé le Moko, La Bête Humaine, Jour se lève, The Southerner, Casque d’or, and L’Eclisse) it seems highly unlikely that the two would seek out Buñuel to deliver such a “popular” work. Certainly, what they got in Belle de jour is a fascinating film that has been described by some as “kinky,” “obsessive,” and even “sadistic,” but, in fact, is quite chaste.

      As critic Roger Ebert summarized in his 1999 review, “There is no explicit sex in the movie.” If the director puts us in a seemingly “underground” world of afternoon prostitutes working out of a Paris apartment, whose customers include a jolly Chinese man possessing a small lacquered box which utters an inexplicable noise but whose contents we never see; a gynecologist who performs as a servant with a whip; a violent young gangster, Marcel (Pierre Clémenti), who falls obsessively in love with the title figure, whose nom de plume is Belle je jour (Catherine Deneuve); and a wealthy man who seeks sex with (at least theatrically) the dead—the director spends far more time presenting the afternoon prostitute playing the role of the near-perfect wife, Séverine Serizy, to her handsome, if somewhat ineffectual, surgeon husband, Pierre (Jean Sorel). In the end, it is their relationship, rather than the exotic afternoon encounters of the chic Séverine, that truly matters. In her 1968 review of Belle de jour, Renata Adler describes the film as a comedy.

      Apparently as a child—if we are to believe the several flashes of memory and dreams presented throughout the movie—Pierre’s perfect and beautiful spouse has been sexually abused by a family member, and, accordingly sees sex as something forbidden and “dirty.” What excites her about the act is not the gentle, quite passive exhortations of her loving husband, but rather the illicit brutality and violence of the act. While Pierre placidly waits for her to come round to a healthy desire for him, her dreams speak of a world in motion (almost all her fantasies involve a coach) in which her companion, frustrated by her sexual refusals, might grow impatient, even ordering her to be raped by his coachman.

     At another moment, Pierre and a male friend, inexplicably surrounded by bulls, tie her up to a tree to demean her as they throw the animals’ excrement across her body. Locked away in a protective cocoon of privilege and wealth, it is only a matter of time that Séverine’s inner desires will force her to escape. Instead of saintly patience, so the director and co-author imply, Pierre should demand his manly rights!

      Obviously, much of this film’s fantasy, suggesting that Séverine’s condition is that of many women, is actually the wishful thinking of misogynistic males (perhaps Buñuel and Carrière included). Much of the film, accordingly—which I recall from watching it when it first was released and saw again yesterday—left me cold, as if I were simply witnessing a series of shallow male preconceptions of what the opposite sex desires, particularly as played out by the Serizy’s “friend,” Henri (Michel Piccoli), who admittedly cheats on his wife, Renée. He regularly visits brothels while attempting, throughout the film, to bed Séverine. For him all women at heart are “sluts,” desiring the degradation they deserve. Obviously, his wife allows his bizarre relationships. Out of this belief, he even gives Séverine the name and address of the brothel she soon visits, and, after some forceful commands from the lesbian-appearing Madame Anaïs (Geneviève Page), accepts her employment each day from the hours of 2:00-5:00. 

      Despite such puerile notions of the female sex, however, I soon discovered myself getting involved with Buñuel’s work simply because of the gradual transformation of Séverine (and, by extension, Deneuve in terms of her acting) as she moves from a frozen goddess to a woman who, like her fellow prostitutes, begins to enjoy herself, at some moments even having what one might describe as “fun.”

     In the playing out of male fantasies, moreover, Séverine even develops a sense of humor, chuckling at the under-coffin masturbation of one of her fantasy-playing clients. Particularly with her passionate sexual encounters with Marcel, Séverine flourishes, growing suddenly deeper and more profound in her perceptions of life. She even finally joins her own husband in his bed, he finally feeling free to suggest that they should have a child.

      As his wife blossoms, however, Pierre regresses, suddenly finding himself inexplicably attracted to a wheel chair. It is only a matter of time, after the jealous Marcel determines to kill Pierre that the husband’s desire to play a handicapped individual—a role in which he and the males of this film have previously cast Séverine—becomes reality. Even though Séverine is warned of Marcel’s intentions, she passively awaits until that event is played out, perhaps in her new somewhat feminist position, something to be desired.

     Marcel, indeed, after shooting Pierre, is presented almost as a hero, as he is chased through the streets in a scene that can only remind one of Jean-Paul Belmondo’s violent death in Godard’s Breathless.

      Pierre lives, surviving on—in his blind, dumb, and crippled condition—as a kind of signpost, a trophy of a husband, just as Séverine has previously played a trophy of a wife. She seems perfectly at home, for the first time, in the warm plush rooms against which she had previously chafed. The only danger she faces, so it seems, is the sudden reappearance of the brutish Henri, who despite his former assurances, reveals to Séverine that he now intends to tell Pierre of her secret life.

 

    When he leaves, Séverine timidly returns to her post, crocheting a pattern upon the couch. What will be his reaction we—and surely she—can only ask. Without the ability to speak, to see, to move—without the ability to survive without her, what could be Pierre’s reaction?

      Buñuel resolves the tension with another hilarious fantasy wherein suddenly Pierre stands, insisting it’s time for a drink, bounding forward from his wheel chair; he too has been only playacting. His return to life is met joyfully by his wife, who, hearing again the sleigh bells associated with her dreams of coaches, she observes the coach passing below their window—this time, however, without anyone seated upon its bench. Either together they have exited the world of fantasy forever or have permanently entered it to share a new dream-life. Even the director admitted that he did not quite know what to make of this final scene.

     Does it truly matter? All we need to know is that, in one way or other, “La Commedia è finita!” At least the comedy between the sexes is over and the characters must now face the consequences of their lives, which, of course—as an empty coach may symbolize—must include death.

 

Los Angeles, July 4, 2014

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2014).