Federico Fellini | Le notti di Cabiria (Nights of Cabiria) / 1957

circling

by Douglas Messerli

 

Federico Fellini, Ennio Flaiano, Tullio Pinelli, and Pier Palo Pasolini (screenplay), Federico Fellini (director) Le notti di Cabiria (Nights of Cabiria) / 1957

 

Almost all of Federico Fellini’s films are episodic, and many—as critics have noted—are structured circularly. But none is more circular in form than his Nights of Cabiria. Its central character, Cabiria Ceccarelli (Giulietta Masina)—who, one might argue is not just at the movie’s center but is the film itself, its raison d’etre—travels through vast spaces of post-war Rome without going anywhere. Her life, filled with dreams and aspirations, remains in stasis, and, accordingly, one might almost describe Fellini’s early masterwork as a comic study in duration.

 

     Part of the problem with the delightful Cabiria, as Roger Ebert pointed out in his 1998 review of the film, is that this character moves against the rhythms of life itself. “On his sets [Fellini] played music during almost every scene, and you can sense in most Fellini movies a certain sway in the way the characters walk: Even the background extras seem to hearing the same rhythm. Cabiria hears it, but often walks in counterpoint, as if to her own melody.”

      Like Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton walking against the storm, the ridiculously dressed, pixyish Cabiria uses this and the character’s other eccentricities to great comic effect, swaying, shrugging, even physically wrestling with others around her to maintain her personal defenses again their cynicism. While her fellow prostitutes dress to reveal their buxomly shapes, Cabiria, in stripes and a matted faux-fur top-coat, emphasizes her skinny impishness, looking, at times, like a young boy in drag instead of a grown and ageing woman. Wherever she goes, an argument is sure to follow, even if nothing is said as when she becomes determined to move from her usual stopping grounds of the Archeological Passage to the posh Via Veneto, where the tall and well-dressed women of the night look down disapprovingly upon her. Any man choosing to go home with Cabiria might almost be seen to be making a personal joke.

 

     Indeed, in the very first scene of the film, Cabiria’s current boyfriend-pimp steals her purse and tosses her into the river. Unable to swim, the character almost drowns, saved only at the last moment by children and a local worker. Later, she is picked up by a well-known movie star Alberto Lazzari (Amedeo Nazzari), after a fight between him and his girlfriend. Just to punish his girlfriend, Lazzari takes Cabiria to a swank nightclub, where she immediately becomes entangled in a bead curtain.

     Later, at his lovely estate, before she can even take a sip of champagne or bite of duck, he orders her to hide in the bathroom when his angry girlfriend returns. As the couple make up their spat, Cabiria spends the night in the bathroom with the dog, sneaking out of the mansion early in the next morning, only to go crashing into the glass doors. In short, this off-kilter figure has difficulty with both entering and exiting; movement either forward or backward is difficult for a figure who moves in circles. At least she has received the actor’s signature to prove her “luck” to her friends.

     After revealing her belief in joy and love under the spell of a cabaret hypnotist, another man, Oscar (François Périer) courts her, claiming that he desires the same things in life. Finally, it appears, that Cabiria has found the love she has been seeking; but he too, taking her to a cliff in the woods, robs her and would toss her over the cliff were she not to beg him to let her live.    

     Although she bought and, later sells a ramshackle shack in an industrial field at the edge of the city—a house of which she is very proud—she seems never, at least as we observe her, to actually have even a one-night-stand, let alone a romantic success.

     Cabiria’s belief also extends to all things religious, despite her avocation. But a trip, with other fellow prostitutes, to what purports to be an appearance of the Virgin Mary (a similar situation is played out in La dolce vita) ends with a claustrophobic rush of bodies, terrifying the plucky sinner. A far more spiritual encounter is Cabria’s late-night observation of a saintly good Samaritan, who, with his own money, brings food to the desperate cave-dwellers outside Rome. It is there, also, where Cabiria sees what might someday soon be herself, as she encounters a former prostitute, now a haggard and wizened being, living in the dark of these caverns.

      But even these more spiritual revelations do not truly alter Cabiria’s thinking. Like a dancer moving against the beat, she remains locked in a pattern of refusing to believe the very realities Fellini presents her with. If there was ever evidence that Fellini was not a neorealist at heart, it is in this film; Cabiria, portrayed by his own wife, is the fantasist that the director would soon become, particularly in the film presumably about Massina, Juliet of the Spirits.

     Although Nights of Cabiria ends, oddly enough, with a procession of young and beautiful boys moving forward through the forest, and catching up the forlorn waif in their march, we know that that movement forward will not last long. Surely Cabiria will at some point turn back, retrace her steps, and end up very near to the place where she has begun.

     In her constant circling, finally, Cabiria is a kind of female Pierrot or Pierrette who in her circles imitates the rounded hat, skull cap, or dunce hat and the circular and crimped collar worn traditionally by the figure; and in her circling Cabiria also parallels the movements of the moon and the tides with whom both Pierrot and Pierrette are always connected.

      By the late 19th and 20th centuries, in part because of Pierrot’s and Pierrette’s endless inabilities to ever achieve the love of their Columbines or Harlequins, the characters, male and female, also come to be seen as outsider dreamers who are unable to attain normative love.

 

      Hence in cinematic works as various as Victor Saville’s The Good Companions (1933), Marcel Carné’s Children of Paradise (1945), and Kenneth Anger’s Rabbit’s Moon (1950/1979), as the Pierrots are tricked, mocked, and threatened by their would-be normative lovers, they are represented in the heteronormative context not only as fools, dreamers, and dunces, but are generally associated with the queer, homosexual worlds which, given their being seen as societal outsiders, associated them with the godless worlds of the angels banned from heaven, those individuals devoted to the worship the moon, witchcraft, vampirism, the occult, and cabalistic visions, as well as to worshipers of idols of sacrifice such as Moloch (homosexuals and lesbians, obviously, had themselves, in their same-sex activities, sacrificed the possibility of bearing children), and a people later committed illusions of reality, specifically the magick lantern and film itself.

      Moloch is particularly important in this context because of Giovanni Pastrone's grand 2 ½ hour silent epic film 1914 film Cabiria, named after the young girl at the center of his film who survived the volcanic eruption of Mount Aetna and later came close to being sacrificed to Moloch in Carthage before finally becoming united with her Roman savior Fulvius Axilla. The film was based, in part, on Gustave Flaubert's 1862 novel Salammbô which was a great favorite of Anger’s.* Fellini, it is presumed, named his central character Cabiria in honor of the 1914 movie character.

 

*Kenneth Anger is particularly interesting in this context because as a gay artist he embraced in his second cycle of filmmaking precisely these outsider spiritual activities, influenced as he was by English occult writer and philosopher Aleister Crowley. Some of these elements are quite apparent in Rabbit’s Moon, Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954), and Lucifer Rising (1972-80), all of which I discuss elsewhere in the My Queer Cinema volumes.

 

Los Angeles, October 18, 2013, revised June 11, 2024

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2013) and My Queer Cinema blog (June 2024).   

 

Richard Linklater | Before Midnight / 2013

fleeing love

by Douglas Messerli

 

(Richard Linklater, Ethan Hawke, and Julie Delpy, screenplay), Richard Linklater (director) Before Midnight / 2013

 

Love and marriage, in Richard Linklater’s trilogy of three films, Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, and Before Midnight, the latter of which was released this year, is presented as something that happens by accident and is transitory at best. Indeed, in a luncheon party at the very center of Before Midnight numerous characters come together to discuss how they perceive their relationships. Each of them pontificate on their ideas, some even arguing—particularly the two young lovers among the group—that in the future love will be a virtual reality with whomever the lover imagines, rather than, as the central characters Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Céline (Julie Delpy) experience it, as a series of highs and lows to be suffered and negotiated. Yet another guest, Natalia (Xenia Kalogeropoulou), who has recently lost her husband, summarizes the transitory nature of every relationship, explaining how after her spouses’ death she kept trying to remember every gesture of his everyday behavior and the precise elements of his face and body; her sadness emanates from the fact that she now has begun to lose those moments, finding it harder and harder to momentarily bring him back to life in her memory, and realizing that she is now truly losing her husband forever.

 

     And it is this realization, that whatever joys love and marriage have provided to Jesse and Céline necessarily must come unwound, beginning with the most minor of things, that permeates this beautiful film. In their case, Céline perceives her happiness shifting when Jesse—after taking his son from a previous marriage, Hank (Seamus Davey-Fitzpatrick), to the airport for his return home to the US after staying the summer with them in Greece—attempts to discuss his regrets at not having been a better father. In fact, it is his ex-wife, an alcoholic who remains vengeful about their breakup—who has refused to allow Jesse, who with Céline and their twin daughters live in Paris, custody of his son—who has kept Jesse from playing more a role in his son’s life. His consideration that he would like to play a larger role in the boy’s life, accordingly, suggests to Céline that he is hinting that they should move to Chicago—at the very moment when she is at a crossroads in her French-based career. Thus, for her, his mid-life ponderings signal the beginning of the end.

      Since the couple will soon be returning to Paris, their Greek friends have arranged for a night at a nearby hotel free from their daughters, whom the friends will care for. And, as we might expect, the simmering emotions both feel well up into an angry series of battles concerning his and her failures and the problems that, until now, they have basically left unspoken. As an ardent feminist, Céline resents the time Jesse, a well-known novelist, has been away from the family on sales tours and in writing venues; moreover, she slightly resents that he has used their own relationship as a central subject in three of his books.

     He, on the other hand, somewhat resents her insistence that Paris be their home base and her perception that his writing is more a joyful hobby than an actual career. But other deeper issues, their aging, the sacrifices they’ve been forced to make as a family, and basic differences in how they see the world bubble up underneath their primary arguments.

      What is amazing about Linklater’s slightly Strindbergian trilogy, is the fact that, despite his films being primarily a series of cinematic dialogues, they work brilliantly due to the wit of the language and the sincerity of the actors, who have shared in creating that dialogue. Like most couples, no matter how ridiculous and unfounded their claims are, they believe them, or, at least, act like they believe them. Unlike Albee’s Martha and George, who seem to be acting out a ritualistic nightly rite, Jesse and Céline throw up sometimes trivial matters and criticisms of one another that come from their own flaws as human beings; and, accordingly, they are both irrational and deadly serious in their attacks.

        It is the unstated absurdity of some of their positions which also allow Linklater and his characters to discover a more felicitous way out of their self-invented realities than any Strindberg couple. Having slammed their hotel door shut, Céline’s Nora-like figure retreats not to the cold streets but to a picture-postcard seaside bench, where Jesse, ever playing the clown, takes on the mask of a time-traveler, bringing a letter addressed to her future 82-year-old self, which describes this miserable night as being one of the best of their lives.

      Rightfully, Céline is further put off by his ineffectual attempt to win her back. She dismisses his ruse. But soon is again caught up in it because of her own fears of making a stupid mistake of leaving someone who has, as Jesse reminds her, continued to accept her despite her obvious personal traumas. She too, of course, has accepted just such literary nonsense from him. And like most couples who continue to bet odds against the fleeting transitoriness of love, they have no choice but to embrace the fiction instead of their very real feelings. And so too does the audience embrace the fiction of romance we have just witnessed. Whatever happens will never be as tragic as they might have imagined it—except perhaps when, like Natalia, they can no longer conjure up their images of each other.

 

Los Angeles, Christmas Day, 2013

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2013).

Álvaro Pastor | Invulnerable / 2005

admission

by Douglas Messerli

Álvaro Pastor and Antonio Naharro (screenplay), Álvaro Pastor (director) Invulnerable / 2005 [25 minutes]

 

Co-writer Antonio Naharro plays the central figure Elías in this Spanish short film, part of what I might describe as the second wave of films on and about AIDS.

     The film begins with a documentary-like patina, doctors interviewing males and females about their sexual activities and habits presumably before or after AIDS tests, interspersed with scenes from Elías teaching his science class.

 

    Suddenly we see Elías face to face with a doctor who asks “You weren’t expecting it?” Like numerous doctors of the day, she reassures him that “Things have come a long ways now and it has practically just become a chronic disease.”

      So the film announces its slightly different perspective from so many of the AIDS films before it: a study in being HIV positive even with all the drugs that save lives resulting in many of the same stigmas, of the struggles as a gay man to have sexual relationships, and of simply surviving with after-effects of the drugs—major issues with which the rest of the world seems oddly unaware.

      Elías is already in a relationship with a fellow-teacher Pedro (Andrés Waksman) and the tensions between them arise almost immediately, Elías bowing out of future dinner meetings as Pedro tries to the massage the worried look from his face in the faculty room.

      While one can surely condemn our “hero” for not immediately telling his friend of his diagnosis, one also can understand his reluctance, he himself having yet to adjust to the truth and obviously fearful of losing the only support he has, of feeling even further removed from the world from which he is still forced to closet himself. While those around him complain of student cellphones, inattentiveness, and other work-problems the issues that crowd into his head are nearly overwhelming.

 

     Putting off the invitations to spend his nights with Pedro, Elías returns to gay bar life, picking up an American trick to fuck. A moment later he is attending his first AIDS support group meeting wherein we get a glimpse of the both the positive and negative—one woman has now been HIV positive for 20 years, another says her doctor has lowered the dosage of her medications, while others relate how they got there: cheating husbands, loneliness, sexual addiction. Some reveal that after their HIV diagnosis they lost their jobs, their parents stopped communicating with them. When asked how he, a newcomer is, all Elías can respond is, “I’m not sure.”

      Just reading the drug regimen, so it seems, is a bit like encountering the instructions of how to put together a complex piece of furniture from Ikea. In the midst of these cinema moments, he encounters his friend Pedro at one of the bars, both surprised to see one another there. They kiss, and it is difficult for Elías to immediately ignore another sexual meetup.

      We are not certain, in fact, whether or not this scene represents an earlier memory, for soon after we see the two at dinner describing their first sexual experiences, a discussion more likely to have occurred in one of their first meetings. If so, his new regimen brings on his memories of their past joys, revealing the teacher’s recognition that their relationship now may be something only of the past.

      But when we observe him with Pedro again after sex, Elías seems once more troubled as they discuss their relationship of only a week, planning perhaps to move in together. Is this also something of the past or more recent? Had they just met when Elías discovered his condition? Even so he might have infected his friend from their earliest of encounters. 

      Guilt present and past is obviously creating strong feelings for Elías, and whether or not the sexual activities we witness are of long ago or after his diagnosis, their effect on others might be similar. Was the earlier scene in the bar a remembrance of an event that might have led to Elías’ infection? Time suddenly becomes a swirl of sexual memories for a man who suddenly must deal with such a life-altering illness.

      What is clear is that for years Elías had unprotected sex, in bathrooms, bars, and strange beds, feeling himself perhaps invulnerable, particularly after the age in which so many young men and women had died. Those who came of age after new drugs had been discovered simply did not need have the same fears—at least so they imagined, even if, as students of science, they knew of the consequences.

 

     We see Elías almost manically scrubbing down a window, after showering checking over his entire body to see if there are any signs of AIDS. Things have radically changed in his life, although superficially they seem to go on just as before. Finally, he sits down with Pedro and almost off-handedly announces that he is HIV positive. He says he understands fully if Pedro wants to break off their relationship since his own face will soon dry up and his ass will shrink so that his friend may no longer want to fuck him. He takes a ton of pills every day. But most of all, he’s sick of pretending. We now know at least some of their joyful times together, in and out of bed, were after his diagnosis.

      The anger, subdued as it is, quickly follows: “And you knew all the time that you had this?

 

     In the very next frame, a night scene, Elías is wandering the streets alone, the whole world moving on without him, the camera panning on other couples, heterosexual and possibly gay. Obviously, he has broken up with Pedro.

      Soon he is back at the bars having sex, a voice reporting he has run out of condoms, the other muttering, “It doesn’t matter.” Presumably, Elías is that other voice.

      During the days he lectures to his students about new discoveries in viruses, but at night he fucks his way through the bars, increasingly taking drugs other than those he must swallow each day at home.

     Pedro returns to him, but in the midst of a deep embrace as they move toward to sexual moment, he suddenly stops, declaring that “he can’t.”

     At one appointment at the doctor’s, he encounters his ex-lover Lucas. They pretend to each other that things are going well, Elías asking him to text him, an event we perceive unlikely to happen.

     After an argument with his father over an inconvenient visit, Elías suddenly calls up visions of the two of them at the zoo and other lovely moments with both his father and his mother. It is enough to make a grown man break into tears, as Elías now does, his life whirling out of control into what seems like a vortex of wrong decisions. His newest results from an AIDS test comes back positive.

      Elías tells his father about his condition and is embraced with deep love. Before his class—in an enormously brave school-teacher coming out scene the likes of which I’ve not witnessed since Frank Ripploh appeared in front of his class drag in his 1980 film Taxi zum Klo (Taxi to the Toilets)—Elías chalks out a drawing of the human immunodeficiency virus, the AIDS virus, explaining that it’s a virus spread through blood or semen shared with another man or woman, “And I have it.”

 

    The students sit silently in startlement as the film imagines as alternative where they all go screaming from the room, as they might have only a few years earlier if someone had announced that he had AIDS.  But they remain, one student finally daring asking the important question, “Were you infected by blood or semen?” a smile crossing Elías’ in his recognition that things have indeed significantly changed.

     In 2005, the year in which this film was released, according to a UN report there were 4.9 million new infections of the AIDS virus globally, bringing the total number of people living with the virus to 40.30 million individuals. Such important and profound movies such as Invulnerable should not go ignored.

 

Los Angeles, April 19, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2023).

Derek Price | Distance / 2012

leaving without knowing how to explain why

by Douglas Messerli

 

Derek Price (screenwriter and director) Distance / 2012 [7 minutes]

 

French Canadian writer and director Derek Price’s Distance is more a proclamation than it is an exploration of its important subject, men who after several years of heterosexual marriage suddenly come to perceive that they are gay.

      Charles (Julien Masterson) has evidently been unhappy for some time, but on the particular day on which this film is focused he has come home early from work and has been waiting for his wife to return home from shopping.

      Camille (Mélodie Courval) is startled to see him sitting at the dining table and immediately wonders if he is well. He has not been feeling well, he admits, but it’s not like the flu or a cold. At

first he backs out of immediate explanation, but soon after, as images of past parties with their friends flash through his mind—particularly an incident when Camille seems to be paying particular attention to the husband of another friend—he wants to talk to her immediately.

      But she is somewhat miffed, having just gotten in the door. Can’t it wait until she gets a drink of wine?

      Apparently not, for Charles simply tosses it out like a commonplace event: “I’m gay.” Camille is not even quite able to comprehend what he’s saying, until he repeats it, insisting that she very much knows what he means. After a period of suffering in silence, he’s finally come realize he’s a homosexual.

      And no, he assures her, he has not been with another man. He has simply come to the realization and feels it is now only fair that they stop playing husband and wife so that they might both find fuller happiness in their lives.

       Her furor, perhaps understandably, immediately flares. Fair? Fair to whom? Is there even such a concept in his statement that their made their entire five years together meaningless? A lie? She throws a bag of food his way moves to strike him, Charles attempting to hold her off. She pulls away, coming back toward him only for both of them to break down.

        For moment, as they kiss one another, it almost seems like the situation the film has brought up has been forgotten, particularly as they retire to the bedroom, surely to try to restore their relationship once again.

      But a few frames later, it is apparent that it hasn’t worked. Charles is unable to have sex with his wife, and sits up at the side of the bed, simply to apologize for his failure, she comforting him as the credits role 7 minutes into this fraught situation.

      None of the more complex months or even years of marital difficulties is spoken of. Nor is anything mentioned about their inability to communicate as a couple. Or about his betrayal of trust or at least the belief she has place in the relationship. Had they spoken of having children? How had they met in the first place? Were their clues to his other desires? When did Charles first begin to suspect his sexual preference, and more importantly, having had apparently no homosexual experience, how is he certain of his apparent change?

      Of course, any homosexual could probably tell you how they know they’re gay, the attractions they have felt perhaps since childhood to other men, the long denials they have made to themselves and others, one of the worst of those “coverups” having, this case, been the marriage itself.

      Yet the director doesn’t feel it necessary to explore any of this. The film simply reports it as an irrefutable fact. What will happen to the two of them; how they will amicably or even angrily split up their possessions; how might Camille be able to support herself? None of these challenges are even imagined in this work, which itself seems to be “distancing” the cinematic representation of the film’s central issue from the actual event.

      Being gay and leaving a heterosexual relationship is surely not a thing that one simply “announces,” unless one is truly a coward and is afraid to even more fully attempt to explain the thousands of circumstances that went into that decision. A couple of flashbacks to a dinner party may reveal a moment or two of suffering, of even hint at a gradual shifting away from another, but does even begin to explain the phenomena that even feature films such as Arthur Hiller’s Making Love (1982), which attempted to treat the subject seriously; or Woody Allen’s Manhattan (1979), which turns the issue into a one-line joke; or Nigel Finch’s The Lost Language of Cranes (1991), which represents the phenomena as having both tragic and comic results, nor the many others that have featured this subject over the years have been fully able to explain the causes and effects to its own characters and audiences.

 

Los Angeles, June 10, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (June 2024).