Terence Davies | The Long Day Closes / 1992

the process of erosion

by Douglas Messerli

 

Terence Davies (screenwriter and director) The Long Day Closes / 1992

 

Davies’ 1992 autobiographical film, The Long Day Closes, is less a cinematic narrative than it is a series of tableaux, filled with the works’ “characters” shot head-on or in silhouette and abstractions of shadows, wallpaper, carpets, blankets, and windows through which we mostly witness the Liverpudlian rains. Each of these “still-lives” are beautifully composed and framed with particular attention to form and texture, and most are accompanied by music, popular musical numbers, folk songs, and film scores, 35 in all.

 

      The artfulness of these tableaux is, at first sight, a bit irritating, particularly since nearly all of these figures are such loving and perfect beings, the young boy Bud (Leigh McCormack) presented as fresh-scrubbed cherub patiently taking in the world around him or imagining it in terms of the films he has witnessed, his mother (Marjorie Yates) as a handsome, long-suffering yet caring and joyful woman, and her elder sons and their girlfriends as always pleasant and entertaining. A local bricklayer, working outside the family’s window, is a strapping and muscular man who, when he catches the young boy staring at him, responds with a knowing wink. Even the constantly arguing neighbors make it apparent that they are deeply in love. The only evil in this near-perfect panorama are Bud’s school teachers, always ready to slap their student’s palms with a short switch, and three school-yard bullies, who taunt and occasionally beat Bud up. Yet even then the boy seems to survive with a cheerful mien or calmly retreats to his cinematically-inspired imagination. In Davies’ gorgeous color palette even the Liverpool streets and run-down houses seem poetic.

     As the director has admitted, this was the period of his own life, after the death of his father, which he most loved. As a boy I lived—in a far more “protected” suburban community—during those same years, and there was much I loved too (the movie makes open references to several films I saw and enjoyed at the same period: Carousel, Meet Me In St. Louis, etc.) And I too harbored Bud’s growing homosexual urges; I also was taunted by school bullies. Yet I never could imagine my world as so perfectly arranged as Davies’ friezes. And as beautiful as his tableaux are, they smell of a highly artificed peephole-view of life. 

      Despite this, however, The Long Day Closes is highly moving, in part because we know, even from the carefully arranged floral arrangement and formally floral-like characters of the credits, that this world is doomed soon to “close,” that the “day” it describes is about to wither, just as the flowers. As one of Bud’s incompetent professors points out to his students, the world is subject everywhere to the “process or erosion” through rivers, wind, glaciers, oceans, and the processes of life itself. Bud’s perfect work, in short, is being slowly eroded. Bit by bit, his childhood perception of a perfect world is eaten away, not only by the slaps across his wrists and the pummels of his body, but through the gradual pulling away from home of his brothers and their lovers (on one their jaunts he unsuccessfully begs to join them), the falling out of friends (he painfully observes his best friend joining another boy on their way to the movies), and the process of aging we see occurring on his mother’s face. Lice are found in his hair by the detestable school nurse. Even the lovely patterns of wallpaper and shadows become, as the movie progresses, more and more abstract, at times entirely distorting the “real” world of his beloved house. The figures of his devout Catholicism become increasingly carnal, a vision of Christ turning into a burly laborer not unlike the handsome worker we see early in the film. From within, Bud’s growing sexual urges threaten the placid world which he adores, forcing him more and more to retreat into loneliness. 

      Accordingly, the beautiful series of tableaux that Davies presents us seem more and more as a series of nostalgic snapshots as the film progresses, becoming, in the end, an album of images that in their very frozenness lock out the brutal reality from which Bud has imaginatively tried to protect himself. If the film collapses time, presenting us with little temporal narrative, we nonetheless recognize that the middle-class world which the director argues “had great beauty and depth and warmth,” is being slowly rubbed away by the boy’s maturing awareness, his increasing recognition of potential and uncontrollable danger, change, and death, as well as his growing sense of his own “outsiderness.”               Critic Michael Koresky has pointed to Davies “abiding discomfort with his homosexuality,” which we sense through that early scene in the film when the handsome bricklayer winks, the young boy’s desire quickly turning into shame. And, in that context, we perceive Davies, despite his unconventional cinematic approach, as ultimately a highly conservative figure. He himself admits that in his youth “Everything seemed fixed, and it was such a feeling of security that this is how it will be forever, and I really believed that.”

     The poignancy of the film, accordingly, arises from this false perception of the world. Bud’s “day,” with the cobalt-colored night sky, must finally come to a close, Davies’ hero, just like Orson Welles’ central figure in The Magnificent Ambersons (which The Long Day Closes references) getting his comeuppance for his blindness.

 

Los Angeles, February 8, 2014

Reprinted from International Cinema Review (February 2014).

René Clair | Le Million / 1931

the coat makes the man

by Douglas Messerli

 

René Clair (screenplay, based on a play by Georges Berr and Marcel Guillemand, and director) Le Million / 1931

 

The major “figure” in René Clair’s delightful comedy, Le Million, is not a human but, as in the Gogol short story, a coat, this a threadbare suit coat. Within its pockets lies a winning lottery ticket owned by Michel Bouflette (René Lefèvre) who is busy with another woman, when his girlfriend, Beatrice (Annabella), takes it away to mend. When she discovers her lover with another woman she gives she passes on the coat to a visiting criminal on the run from the police, a chase scene that includes nearly all the tenants of building, that ends with the thief, Granpere Tulip (Paul Ollivier) hiding out in her room.

      If my description seems to make little sense, so does the film, upon retelling, become more and more outlandish. For Clair’s work does not simply involve several Keystone Kop like chases, inexplicable characters such as Tulip and his “gang” of thieves, an artist-friend of Bouflette’s, Prosper (Jean-Louis Allibert) who betrays his friend, a haughty opera tenor who later purchases the coat to wear in a production of The Bohemians, and an opera-stage battle similar to that of the Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera of a few years later, but the work is musical that even sings of the moral conditions of its characters, particularly of Prosper.

      In short, to make logical sense of the antic events of the plot would be senseless. Clair’s work demands that the viewer, as in the later Marx Brothers’ work, let go of all reason and sit back and laugh at the insanity portrayed. With nearly everyone on the chase for the coat and its lottery ticket, characters come and go, in and out of rooms, with the swiftness of subway turnstile. Women seduce men, men seduce women; ballet dancers prance into operas that contain no dances, gangsters join singers upon the stage (as in Porter’s Kiss Me Kate), and taxi cab drivers join up with butchers, grocers, bartenders, and renters to get their part of “le million” the lottery ticket offers its rightful owner. If Tulip is a criminal, he is also the philandering hero’s savior, producing the missing lottery ticket when it appears all is lost, an act that sends everyone into a long line of absurdly merry dancing. Whether, after paying off all those he owes, Bouflette will have any money left to live on is questionable. Does it matter? Everybody wins in this trifle of a film, which proves that the coat makes the man!

    For all of its light merriment, however, Clair’s frothy confection, in the end, seems fairly empty. Money is at the center of everything, and even though the picture’s end returns the central character to his “true” lover, shows up the self-inflated tenor and his gargantuan soprano as snobbish fools, and permits everyone to escape the clutches of the power-hungry police, variations of greed still seem to be at the heart of this phantasmagoric fable. This Beatrice spends more time leading her Dante astray than guiding him through heaven. As the two interlopers who begin this movie look down into the frenzied cast of characters twining through the rooms below, the audience also can only feel a bit like the outsiders observing the fun that will result, surely, in one grand hangover.

 

Los Angeles, March 15, 2014

Reprinted from International Cinema Review (March 2014).   

Yasujirō Ozu | 出来ごころ Dekigokoro (Passing Fancy) / 1933, USA 2013

dressing and undressing

by Douglas Messerli

 

Tado Ikeda (screenplay, based on a story by Yasujirō Ozu, writing as James Maki), Yasujirō Ozu (director) 出来ごころ Dekigokoro (Passing Fancy) / 1933, USA 2013

 

Passing Fancy, Ozu’s 1933 silent film, like so many of his other films throughout his career, is a thoroughly enjoyable film, filled with wonderful moments, whose plot is hardly worth recounting. A poor, lazy, and slightly despicable “everyday” man, Kihachi (Takeshi Sakamoto) lives alone with his young son, Tomio (the charming Tokkan Kozo). Next door lives Kihachi’s best friend, Jiro (Den Obinata), with whom he works at a brewery, and the restaurant where he and Jiro drink and eat almost every morning and evening, run by another friend, Otome (Chouko Iida).

 

     The film begins at a rōkyoku performance, a kind of variety show including readings of famed Japanese texts. But most the camera’s attention is taken up by broad comic events, as the hot and mostly undressed crowd comically explore every aspect of behavior from petty thievery (of a found wallet), the attacks of lice (it appears the entire crowd badly needs a delousing), and the mockery of some of their neighbors. The whole event plays out a bit like a rowdy gathering of adult boys being boringly entertained. Most of these figures, particularly Kihachi, as we later learn, are uneducated and cannot even read. This is their most fulfilling cultural event.

     Soon after the theater performance, Kihachi, on his way home with Jiro, his son hefted upon his back, encounters a destitute woman, Harue (Nobuko Fushimi), to whom he immediately and ridiculously—given his age difference and lack of attractive features—is attracted, and becomes determined to court. Despite his young son’s apparent embarrassment of his father’s behavior, when she asks if he know of a place where she might sleep for the night, he sets her up with his friend Otome; Jiro, perceiving the poor girl as a former prostitute, dismisses and tries to dissuade Kihachi from any involvement.

      The kindly Otome, soon becomes interested in the girl, hiring her as a server. And Kihachi, meanwhile, becomes even more determined to become involved with the isolated woman, asking

for an advance from his brewery boss so that he might buy her a present, and, after lunch, refusing to return to work so that we can communicate with her. So begins a long series of ridiculous gestures on Kihachi’s part to flirt with a young girl who sees him as nothing but a kind of “uncle.” She is far more attracted to Jiro, but he, quite piously rejects her, attributing any her interest in him simply as another attempt to find great financial support.

      When Otome determines that Harue should get married, she visits Kihachi to discuss the issue, he hoping to be perceived as the perfect solution to the problem; but when he suggests that he is love with Harue, Otome laughs, dismissing him. Besides, she proclaims, Harue sees Kihachi only as an uncle; she is in love with Jiro. Will Kihachi please help convince Jiro that he should marry Harue, she implores.

       So must Kihachi come to terms, perhaps for one of the first times in his life, with his own longevity, which, given his self-destructive habits, may not be as long as he imagines. Although he agrees to convince Jiro to marry Harue, the facts that Otome has forced him to face drives him to drunkenness. At the very same moment, several of Tomio’s schoolmates gang up on him, mocking him for his father’s inability to even read the newspaper. Kihachi falls into a near stupor from drinking in response to Harue’s lack of sexual interest in him. The event is particularly painful

to the young child since he is one of the best students at school, which seems to have given him no protection.

       When his father returns home drunk, Tomio angrily mocks and scolds him for his behavior, to which the drunken father responds by beating him. Tomio, in turn, hits back, slapping his father across the face again and again and throwing his own textbooks at him. A few seconds later, however, the child breaks down into a near-torrent of tears, hugging his father to him in order to ask for forgiveness. We see him, a short while later, back at his table reading his school books once again. As a kind of make-up gift, Kihachi gives the boy 50 sen to treat himself to a treasure.

       At work the next day Kihachi is suddenly called home, someone reporting that his son is seriously ill. Rushing home, he discovers his son in a near comma, a doctor attending him. The boy, who has used the coin to buy a series of sweets—all of which he has consumed—is diagnosed with actute enteritis. Although the cause of the illness may seem comic, the illness itself is quite serious and, for a period of time, as the boy is attended by Otome, Harue, and Jiro, Kihachi is terrorized by the possibility that his son may die. Just as serious, he perceives suddenly that he has no way to pay the doctor; his method of living day by day has not allowed for any emergency or even an ordinary life.

       Perceiving the family’s dilemma, Harue suddenly speaks out, assuring Kihachi that she will raise the needed money, for which he sincerely thanks her but kindly rejects. Jiro, recognizing that she might raise such a sum only through prostitution which would not end well, approaches her alone, insisting that he will raise the needed money. And, in that same moment, revealing that he does love Harue and is ready to marry her.

     Jiro borrows the money from the kindly barber, determining to get a temporary job in isolate Hokkaido as a laborer to pay him back. Harue, accordingly, is equally pained that at the very moment she has found happiness that it will be whisked away from her. When Kihachi hears to Jiro’s decision he tracks down Jiro, slugging him out so that he make take his place on the ship travelling north. Although the barber insists that he need not even paid back, Kihachi leaves his son in Harue’s and Otome’s hands, and goes aboard the ship.

       The ship does not even get out of port, however, before, after showing the other would-be laborers the message the school has sent his son, Kihachi suddenly realizes his mistake in abandoning his beloved son, and jumps overboard, swimming back to a peninsula which will eventually lead him back to Tokyo.

       Despite apparent emptiness of some of these comic tropes, however, Ozu’s film often becomes brilliant through minor but important cinematic techniques, the use throughout of mirrors to reveal what is often happening out of view off-screen, the often hilarious theatrical poses into which Tomio falls immediately after his bad-boy bullying of his worthless father, the linguistically absurd koan-like childish jokes of Tomio—“Why is the sea salty? Because there are so many salted salmon,”—which, with such like emphasis on language sometimes make this film seem as if it were a talkie, and the beautifully shot everyday scenes of life on the characters’ winding through the backstreets.

 

    Finally, Ozu, as he does in several films, uses a series of subtle behavioral and cultural clues that seem almost perfect for a Roland Barthes-like reading of elements of the story. In this case, it centers upon the way in which Ozu’s male characters, Kihachi, Tomio, and, to a lesser degree Jiro, employ various stages of dressing and undressing throughout the film. The characters, as I have mentioned, seem to be dressed in their underwear for the first scene of the rōkyoku performance, but, obviously, dress up to go to work and school, shedding their clothes again when they return home. In Passing Fancy they drop these articles of pants and shirts upon the floor, the woman stopping by often to hang them up on hooks. In particular, we watch Kihachi, abandon his work clothes for more traditional Japanese attire in order to woo Harue, a quite elaborate procedure that makes him the subject of mockery to those around him, while he struts out, peacock proud. They recognize such dress, clearly, as being itself a kind of “passing fanciness? The loose white robes of the traditional clothing seem more comfortable given the high temperatures of the Tokyo summer which they all suffer. But it is that very ceremonial quality of such attire that sets him apart from all others. For the most part, the males are happy simply to shed their work clothes as quickly as they can upon returning home, becoming figures closer to naked natives than to men assimilated to publicly approved attire. Even the intelligent child Tomio prefers, for the most part, to go shirtless. In a sense, all of this dressing and undressing, something in which the women do not participate, suggest their discomfort with participating in the social conventions of covering their bodies in costumes that represent position and values—in short, fashion. And in that respect, these figures are less “everymen” as they are undefined lumps of raw flesh, beings without the ability to enter the society at large. In particular, Kihachi, who pulls off his clothes with his own feet, suddenly relieved in the freedom of the act, seems as if he will never quite assimilate to the society at large. Despite his abilities, Tomio clearly needs to accommodate himself to the schoolboy jacket and pants if he is to transcend his father’s world. Jiro, the former officer, dressed at home, in a more comfortable in the traditional-like robe, but without the trimmings of Kihachi’s more formal attire (his robe is dark, not blindingly white), perhaps will learn to marry comfort with fashion and move into the whole of society in which he and his new wife can survive.

      If nothing else, Ozu’s early film is worth watching simply for its comic sense of humanity compared with a time, soon after, when everything will completely fall apart, and where officious costumes will be recognized as necessities, and wherein the well-educated Tomio will perhaps die in the war.

 

Los Angeles, May 16, 2014

Reprinted from International Cinema Review (May 2014).

Clint Eastwood | Jersey Boys / 2014

a sound in the night

by Douglas Messerli

 

Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice (screenplay, based on their musical), Clint Eastwood (director) Jersey Boys / 2014

 

Manola Dargis of The New York Times—a critic with whom I often find myself in agreement—describes Clint Eastwood’s newest flick as “a strange movie,” which, apparently, she perceives as a positive quality, since she follows that statement up with suggesting it’s a reason “to see it [the movie].” I also have to presume that she sees the quality of “strangeness” as having something to do with the director’s vision, not with the film’s focus on three New Jersey street boys and one college educated (also Jersey born and bred) composers’ relationships as members of the renowned singing group the late 1950s and 1960s, The Four Seasons.

      Although I’ve thought long and hard about this likeable but not terribly profound film over the last couple of days since I saw the movie in Los Angeles, I still cannot for the life of me perceive how Eastwood’s rather old-fashioned telling of the rags to riches tale is “strange.”

     Retaining the hook of the original stage musical, in which each of the four members of the chorus share in the telling of how the group came together and what tore them apart, the director seems hell-bent on creating a biopic about musical creators similar to the dozens of such films throughout Hollywood history—the kind of slightly torrid, but mostly sanitized story that Michael Curtiz shot about Cole Porter (Night and Day, 1946) and Norman Taurog directed  about the career of lyricist Lorenz Hart (Words and Music, 1948)—both of which ignored their characters’ homosexuality—Michael Curtiz’s version of the life of jazz cornetist Bix Beiderbecke (Young Man with a Horn) or Jerry Jameson’s film on country-western singer Tammy Wynette (Stand by Your Man)— to name some at random.     

     Like almost all such works of this genre, Eastwood and writers Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice chose to slow down the pace of what was basically a review on stage into a slower moving story about the lighter and, more importantly, the darker sides of these performers’ lives. In all such films, the first objective is to simply lay out all the difficulties the musicians faced in achieving their dreams—here played out within a culture in which there are few choices available in order to get out: the mob, imprisonment, or becoming a celebrity. Singer/bad-boy Danny DeVito (Vincent Piazza) claims they hit two out of three, but, in fact, DeVito himself is imprisoned, the group has a mob friend in Gyp DeCarlo (Christopher Walken), and they do become a radically successful act—suggesting, in their perverse New Jersey code, they have unfortunately hit the jackpot! So that his audience can still identify with these figures, Eastwood and his writers downplay the jail sentences and mob connections, focusing as much as possible on the groups’ on-stage harmonies. Yet, like most works of this genre, we quickly perceive that off-stage, at least, three of these four figures fail in their personal lives.

      Dargis winces at the film’s depictions of the bedroom battles between the film’s central figure, Frankie Valli (John Lloyd Young), and his wife, Mary (Renée Marino), but I’d argue that their offstage encounters—which stand in for all the characters’ marital problems—are no more or less stereotypical or badly told than these figures’ relationships with their parents and the Italian community into which they were born, all which Eastwood flashes out to his audience in the form of ridiculous framed tableaus of pictures of Frank Sinatra beside the Pope and through quick glimpses of domestic delights such as spaghetti with tomato gravy, and mutterings in Italian 101. A serious robbery of a neighborhood shop’s safe alternates with a comic spoof in which the get-away-car, whose front end faces the stars is counterbalanced by the heavy safe stuffed into its trunk. Even murder, a serious concern of the nervous mothers of Valli’s neighborhood, is played out as a sham. Valli is so beloved of mobster DeCarlo that he even offers the up-and-coming hairdresser the chance to shave him.  

  

     The fact that despite all of these comically mock-shaves with lawlessness and death that Valli grows up to be a basically nice boy is a miracle which the film does not even attempt to explain. Perhaps he simply is, as several of the film’s admirers of his voice proclaim, a kind of angel.

     On the other hand, although we might react to the complaints expressed and loneliness felt by Valli’s wife as somewhat trivial, we cannot help but shed tears—even if novice film actor Piazza has some difficultly in convincingly bringing them into his own eyes—for the effects his absence and his wife’s drunkenness have upon their daughter, Francine, who even after Valli has attempted to parent more successfully, commits suicide. And then there is DeVito, the fast-talking huckster, who, at the center of the film, is revealed as a far more pernicious force in his robbery of $500,000 from the group and his inability to pay back a large sum to the syndicate which has loaned the money to him. His behavior is not only dark, but destroys the Four Seasons, and, through Valli’s determination to keep the code of silence (omeria) by paying off DeVito’s debts, forces the lead singer to spend years of his life grasping for any gig he might get.

 

     Indeed, when you add these “dark” elements to the more elusive betrayals of “the group” by both Valli and the composer Bob Gaudio (Erich Bergen)—who handshake an agreement that excludes the other two singers—and by producer and lyricist Bob Crewe—who, through a contractual sidebar, forces the singers to backup other acts for two years before they can cut their own demo, and even then, demands that they pay for the recordings—the perceptive viewer may begin to see the film as more dark than light. Finally, we begin to realize that all those previously comic scenes were perhaps not so funny after all.

       Of course, it’s the music, the performers’ joyous release of their creativity, that generally clears away the cobwebs and makes all the difficult times appear to be worth the suffering. Eastwood explores these avenues in at least two directions, the first a rather odd one. In the character of Bob Crewe (Mike Doyle)—an important character almost gone missing in the stage musical—the writers have created a slightly over-the-top gay man, who is so constitutionally different from three of the former “Four Lovers,” that he almost wipes away any frown they might display within the spotlessly white rooms of his swankly ostentatious bachelor boy digs. Mes enfants, he sputters as he introduces the uncomfortable Frankie, Nick,  and Tommy to his haute couture dressed guests. With the patience of a snippy queen he explains the meaning of a new song the group is about to perform, “Walk Like a Man.” And with the mad hatter patter of an enthused wedding planner he plots their publicity voyage for a song (“Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You,” Crewe’s secretly gay anthem) that, disliked by the studio head, forces them to go around him. Whenever Crewe enters the film, he seems to wipe all the tears away, lightening the film up in the way such entertainment necessarily must end. The only other figure of the film that can almost match him is singer-composer Gaudio, with whom Crewe wrote most the group’s dozens of hits. From the moment Crewe spots him in the old Brill Building of New York City, his eyes nearly pop out with sexual delight, while the straight object of his admiration quips that none of them had actually seen someone who behaved in real life like Liberace did on television.   

      Of course, this too is all stereotyping. In real life, Crewe, whom Howard and I knew fairly well, was nothing at all like the “puff” Doyle portrays—although Doyle does look something like the young Crewe. But you have to give it to Eastwood in these scenes for finding another way to balance the darkness his subjects project.

     Obviously, in all such works, it’s the music and lyrics that matter most, for without them there could no film in the first place. Certainly, the successful Broadway show realized that in putting The Four Seasons’ songs front and center.

      If there is anything “strange” about Eastwood’s film, however, it’s the way the music functions—and ultimately fails—in this work. Growing up with these songs, I can say that most of them sound almost like anthems to my own youth, and mostly Eastwood—himself a lover of music—gives these ditties a chance to shine. From the early hits, “Sherry,” “Big Girls Don’t Cry,” “Workin’ My Way Back to You” (a non-Gaudio/Crewe song) “Walk Like a Man,” and “Rag Doll,” to the later works “Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You,” “Bye Bye Baby” and “My Eyes Adored You,” the movie allows the Jersey Boys to sing out in a joyous rapture—led by Young’s convincing falsetto imitation of Valli—that almost transports us back into another time and place—with Eastwood seeming able to transform his biopic into a musical after all!

      Eastwood, who reports that he saw the Broadway show on which he based his film in Las Vegas, San Francisco, and New York, clearly loves The Four Seasons and their sound, claiming in a recent Los Angeles Times article that he believes the Jersey singing group “has endured more than even the Beatles or the Rolling Stones.”

      If there is anything “strange” about Eastwood’s film, finally, it is that despite his love for this music, despite my own and possibly every other member of the cinema audience’s pleasure in hearing these toe-tapping bundles of nostalgia, the songs can’t really redeem the ultimate emptiness of the performers’ lives—or justify, as Nick Massi (Michael Lomenda) eventually screams out, as he prepares to leave the group, all those meaningless hotel room nights. The music is great fun, but two times through “Sherry” is more than enough. The charming Gaudio-Crewe baubles are not, as anyone who truly loves music must admit, as profound as the greatest of The Beatles’ or Rolling Stones’ masterworks. A sweet “rag doll” is just not significant as “satisfaction.” In short, the songs of The Four Seasons,” even if they have endured, simply do not hold up to loss of love and unfulfillment each of these figures faced in real life, or, at least, what the film represents as their “real” lives. Even as the fab-four wind up belting out their melodies at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the director interrupts it, as if even he recognized the song need not be repeated, for a voice-over final statement from composer Bob Gaudio—a man now living in Nashville.

 

    A few moments earlier Valli, asked by a reporter what moment of his career meant the most to him, responded “Four guys under a street lamp, when it was all still ahead of us, the first time we made that sound—our sound.” Clearly, Valli has never left his hometown in New Jersey, where he stands forever on the street, conjuring up not a life but a “sound.” 

     We never see that moment within the structure of the film, so in terms of the plot, it does not truly exist except as a kind of imaginative speculation of a possibility never transcended. And that is perhaps the darkest statement (about an event enacted only in shadow) of a film, in retrospect, that seems to be screened mostly in black.

 

Los Angeles, June 22, 2014

Reprinted from International Cinema Review (June 2014).