Claude Chabrol | Les Biches (Bad Girls / The Does) / 1968

the ogre

by Douglas Messerli

 

Paul Géguff and Claude Chabrol (screenplay), Claude Chabrol (director) Les Biches (Bad Girls / The Does) / 1968

 

Claude Chabrol’s Les Biches—which I choose to call The Girls instead of Bad Girls (which the original American distributor titled it) or The Does (as it later came to be known)—is less a psycho-sexual murder tale, as many critics have described it, than a kind of gay black comedy in the manner of theater writers such as Joe Orton, particularly in Entertaining Mr. Sloane (produced in London four years earlier) or Pinter’s early 1960s works. In fact, the murder occurs almost as an afterthought, in an epilogue, and one gets a strong sense that, had one or another of the women involved behaved ever so differently, it might not even have occurred. The murderer’s name, Why (a nickname awarded her by her friend Frédérique [Stéphane Audran] when she refuses to divulge her real name and questions Frédérique’s need to know) echoes with the mysteriousness of the act, as if the character and the director himself cannot answer for her behavior.

     Chabrol’s film is almost purposely vague about not only this issue, but all the relationships between all the characters involved. The beautiful, but slightly awkward Why (Jacqueline Sassard)—as one of the campy gays inhabiting Frédérique’s Riviera house, declares, she is beautiful, but I’m not sure of her “buttocks”—is picked up off the street, where she survives by chalking out pictures of does by the wealthy lesbian. At least Frédérique appears to be a lesbian, gradually drawing her new friend into her house and bathtub. The willful Why, in turn, rejects and accepts this love in alternative waves of indecision. It is clear she is drawn to the well-heeled woman, but we are not sure whether it is an issue of sexuality or of financial security, which the grainy texture of the cinematographer’s Paris sky reiterates, as if everything is seen through a glass darkly.

      Once the couple reach Southern France, the sky seems to clear up a bit, but the situation becomes even a bit more confusing. Who are these strange beings inhabiting the house, and—once again, the questions dominate the scene—why? We might postulate they are there simply there to entertain the slightly bored heiress—their actions throughout define the concept of "camp" humor—but we cannot be certain of their roles, nor we can comprehend their relationship with the persistently angry cook. For however hard we might try to explain anything, we grasp that what may seem intensely serious is merely an absurdity, as if very attempt to glimpse "the real" takes us further from any truth. As the only outwardly “straight” figure of this drama later admits, "Nothing surprises me in this house. Nothing!”    

     “Whether or not they have sex, we soon perceive a physical attraction between these two women, but the moment we tangibly sense it, all is challenged by the arrival of a handsome unknown guest, Paul Thomas (Jean-Louis Trintignant), who in the midst of playing a poker game with Frédérique, her two gay friends, and others, cannot help but stare at Why. As he leaves soon after, Why follows, with a ridiculous pretension of going for a walk, the ever vigilant and suspicious Frédérique sending Robéque and his friend to tail them. 

     The very fact that she is being followed may help explain Why’s actions, her intentional reencounter with Paul and their presumed sexual relationship after. As she has shown herself again and again, Why is as determined to challenge and to engage her new lover/mother, to ask questions. Once again it is not certain whether she is seeking a relationship with Paul or trying to explain his attraction to her, an attraction not unlike the meeting between the two women.

 

               Paul Thomas: Bon soir

               Why: Bon soir

               Paul Thomas: You brought me luck. I was losing a lot.

               Why: Why did you keep looking at me?

               Paul Thomas: Are you annoyed?

               Why: No, but why keep looking at me?

               Paul Thomas: Was it so noticeable?

               Why: I asked you “Why?”

               Paul Thomas: Why? You’re…you’re a girl. You’re pretty, and like pretty

                      Girls. You take me for an ogre?

               Why: May I?

               Paul Thomas: Why?

               Why: Because you are an ogre.

               [She goes into her car]

 

     It may be hard to perceive the handsome architect, who creates look-alike villas for the Riviera beach, as a man-eating monster or cruel figure out of Perrault’s fairy tales, but in many senses Why is right in her evaluation. Paul will “eat up”—or to put it nicer—will “take up” nearly any attractive woman. Even he admits that had he developed a further relationship with Why he would have abandoned her in a few months. And it comes as no surprise—on both sides—that the socially and financially powerful Frédérique will take her revenge on Why by developing a relationship with Paul, and that Paul, in turn, because of her wealth will reciprocate. Within a week the two have become a seemingly permanent couple, leaving Why not only without an answer, but without either male and female lover, or, if we want to go further down the Freudian road, without a father or mother.

      Robéque, his friend, and the angry cook, moreover, cannot bear the presence of this interloper, all of them certain that Paul is taking advantage of Frédérique, that he is, indeed, an ogre. Yet gradually, we begin to perceive that in Why’s long silences and languor (she spends much of the film in bed with headaches or lying languorously in the grass) she is plotting her own revenge. But even that is uncertain; perhaps she is just passively accepting the situation, attempting to find an entry, like Carson McCuller’s adolescent girl, as a “member of the wedding.”

      Chabrol has great fun with our confusions, and when all diners spit out the “doctored” soup at dinner, we might imagine that the act could have been committed by almost anyone form the cook, Frédérique’s gay comics, Why, or even Paul. Certainly, why and Paul most benefit from the result, Frédérique’s casting out of Robéque and his lover from this inverted Eden. And although Paul admits to feeling “rather guilty” about their ouster, Why reaps the true benefit of the absence of their prying eyes. In what must surely be one of the most brilliantly subtle and sensuous threesomes ever put to screen, Why slowly weaves her hands and legs between the two lovers, Paul and Frédérique, culminating in her voyeuristic witnessing of their sex through a keyhole.

     Clearly in revenge of the night before, Frédérique announces in a brief epistle that the couple have decamped to Paris, seemingly leaving the house in perpetuity—despite her assurances that they will return two or three days—to Why. As Why, caught with her hands upon Frédérique’s money stash, admits to Paul earlier on: “She lends me things.”

     But now, suddenly packing her bags and announcing she will never return, Why transforms from a passive and obedient sufferer into a forceful woman. Recalling Why’s fascination with a knife hung upon the wall earlier on, we suspect that the two escaped lovers or hypocritical frauds, whatever they might be, are about to face the ogre, the man-eating monster Why. The only question that remains is if Frédérique was her intended victim or Paul, at film’s end hurriedly on his way to the apartment; and what will he find there, a woman filled with lust or vengence.

 

Seoul, South Korea, October 2, 2010

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2010) and Reading Films: My International Cinema (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2012).

 

Bethani Mosher | Always / 2022

falling in love again

by Douglas Messerli

 

Bethani Mosher (screenwriter and director) Always / 2022 [20 minutes]

Camden (Melany Smith) is in a serious car accident, rushed in on a gurney as a bloody victim in the first scenes of this film. In a couple of days, however, she reawakens from her comatose condition, now surrounded by her father (Tom Carney), mother (Rose Grade), and sister (Alex Papiccio). She has some aspects of “recent-event” amnesia, and cannot remember the accident, her own apartment, nor any other relationships she might have had in the recent past. The parents according tell her that they have hired a caretaker, Ella (Heaven Devera) to be with her full time.

      Ella, presumably filled-in by her parents, remembers her favorite foods and has a full knowledge of Camden’s apartment, caring for her, feeding her, and providing her company for the next several weeks.

     We watch as Camden begins to fall in love with Ella, while, not even sure of her own sexuality, being afraid to tell her and admit to the all-too common syndrome of falling in love with one’s doctor or nurse. She questions Ella about her own past relationships, the nurse only recounting that she had someone with whom she was very much in love, but the relationship became, “well, complicated.”

     Camden, however, does tell her sister about her growing feelings for the wonderful woman with whom she has now been living night and day.

     We now begin to suspect the truth, that in fact Ella was her fiancée before the accident, and has remained at Camden’s side performing as her nurse with the hopes that she might regain her memory and their relationship return to normal.

     We might have perceived this fact even earlier in the film if we had realize called that the Irving Berlin song “Always” was the tune that clairvoyant Madame Arcati used to call up the previous dead wife of the central male figure Charles in Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit (1945).*

      Now Camden’s sister Carina insists the time has come for Ella to tell Camden the truth, despite what the doctors had previously argued. But Ella is fearful that if she does so, Camden will be confused and angry for her having lied to her for so long.

      The truth, however, does come out when looking for her scissors, Camden opens a small box from where a picture of her and Ella falls out, the two of them embracing and very much in love.

     In order to maintain the narrative viewpoint of Camden, director Bethani Mosher has kept her audience in the dark as well, but now they know the truth, she intercedes several times with flashbacks, presenting us with another view of the day of the accident when Ella receives the terrible news of Camden’s loss of memory and yet another scene where they made their original vows while lying side by side in bed.

 

     Those “interruptions,” postponing Camden’s reaction about finding the photograph, break up the emotional thrust of the story, so that when the narrative finally returns to witness Camden’s sense of shock, along with her complete appreciation of Ella’s painful secret and her joy in the realization that her new love for Ella has made it seem as if she has fallen in love with her all over again, her feelings hardly register for us. We already know that is no other way that she might react. In short, by delaying the expected response, Mosher has even further erased any wonderment to Camden’s sudden discovery.

      An added coda, “six months later,” in which we discover Camden having suddenly regained her memory and is seen sharing that celebratory moment with Ella, again seems unnecessary. The very fact that she has fallen in love all over again with the same person establishes the fact that Ella is Camden’s true love and that their marriage should immediately proceed. Being told what we already have intuitively known, makes the ending seem almost meaningless and the film as a whole unnecessarily overlong.

     Perhaps if we had been let in on the truth of the situation from the very beginning, we might have shared far greater sympathy with the beautiful Ella and fully comprehended her frustrations as opposed to simply witnessing a love in process. To realize that the love Camden begins to feel for her caretaker was always there creates an ironical tension that might have given the film the full weight that Mosher obviously intended for this somewhat sad and wistful romantic comedy.

 

Los Angeles, August 14, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2023).

 

*A similar pattern of the dead returning in the body of another being tested for their abilities to remember their former lover occurs in Alexander Hall’s Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941), remade by Warren Beatty and Buck Henry as Heaven Can Wait (1978).

 

 

Zaida Carmona | La amiga de mi amiga (Girlfriends and Girlfriends) / 2022

 bed to bed

by Douglas Messerli

 

Zaida Carmona and Marc Ferrer (screenplay), Zaida Carmona (director) La amiga de mi amiga (Girlfriends and Girlfriends) / 2022

 

Somewhat like the male gay dating scene of smaller US cities of the 1970s and 80s before AIDS, Zaida Carmona’s contemporary Barcelona lesbian world consists, if this film is to be believed, of individuals who have all had mutual partners, moving from one to another with sometimes the greatest of ease but at other moments with some bitterness and even aggression.

     The actors who play these women, many using their own first names in the general film and perhaps as well in the film within the film being made by Zaida, seem at moments to be possibly presenting autobiographical renditions of themselves, while also toasting and at moments roasting the heterosexual movies about just such floating relationships by French filmmaker Eric Rohmer, whose influence is perhaps made more apparent in the script—Zaida meets several of her girlfriends coming and going from Rohmer films—than it is in the actual cinematic work; thankfully, since I am not a big Rohmer fan. But there is the same light, sun-washed Rohmerish tone to this work as the director tours us through the Catalan lesbian and art landscape.

      The director also lingers a bit too long on her almost incidental plot, the events being retold again late in the film as Zaida explains her unhappiness to the returning couple for whom we see at the beginning of this film she has agreed to housesit as they rush off for a holiday with their children. They are perhaps the healthiest and sanest duo in the film.

       Zaida, as the film begins, has returned to Barcelona after having broken up with her ex-girlfriend Gabriella and, having been also ghosted, is quite ready to disparage her former lover to anyone who may want to hear the details. But she soon meets up with her old friend, Rocío (Rocío Saiz), who has since established what looks to be a stable relationship with Lara (Alba Cros). Lara, a fellow, a more successful filmmaker than Zaida, who seems quite willing and ready to read Zaida’s script to help to pass it along to friends is a woman who has long attracted Zaida, and the two keep crossing paths at a local revival theater who is featuring all of Rohmer’s movies. You, get the picture, almost immediately, there will certainly be some crisscrossing in the affairs of the heart in this film, as Rocío and Lara try to set up Zaida with the local musician Aroa (Aroa Elvira), who has just broken up with Julia (Thaïs Cuadreny), who herself seems ready to bed-down with nearly anyone she meets.

       As Leslie Felperin, writing in The Guardian, summarizes it:

 

“Before long, Rocío is having an affair with Julia, Zaida is making out with Lara and Aroa, and everyone is very excited – meaning the torrent of dialogue goes by so fast the subtitles can barely keep up.”

 

      Zaida performs a musical duo with Aroa and quickly moves from bed to bed before the end of the film, falling in love all over again with Rocío and realizing by film’s end that she has once more ended up with nothing but a series of nice bedroom, barroom, and theater-going memories. The viewer realizes, moreover, that, although pleasuring the eyes, he or she is still quite hungry for something more profound and emotionally expressive..

     Although obviously loving this movie for more than I did, Canadian reviewer Pat Muller in Point of View Magazine aptly praises Carmona for “lending” her “drolly incestuous town to her hybrid sex comedy. Everyone is in on the joke and playing some variation on themselves as part of Carmona’s self-reflexive exercise. The European flavour and liberal attitude to love and sexuality, moreover, accentuate the youthful atmosphere fuelled by a euphoric electro-pop soundtrack.”

 

Los Angeles, August 29, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2024).

Claude Chabrol | Les Cousins (The Cousins) / 1959

kissing cousins

by Douglas Messerli

 

Paul Gégauff (screenplay, based on a story by Claude Chabrol), Claude Chabrol (director) Les Cousins (The Cousins) / 1959

 

Often described as being related to director Claude Chabrol’s first film, The Beau Serge, his 1959 feature The Cousins brings the country cousin, Charles (actor/director Gérard Blain) to the city and into the apartment of his decadent cousin, Paul (Jean-Claude Brialy), who, with his thinly-trimmed beard, is even made up to look a bit like the devil he is.

       It is not merely that Paul’s hip apartment—filled with African masks, antique guns, and marine-related paintings, and at the center of which is a large, open hearth—is a location of nightly heavy drinking and sexual orgies, which in 1959 may have seemed particularly “morbid,” as The New York Times’ Bosley Crowther described them, but that Paul himself, apparently into sadomasochism, likes to put on Wagner and wear a Nazi gestapo hat, torturing both women and men with whom he is in love.

     His nasty friends, Clovis (Claude Cerval)—an ironic name, surely, given that King Clovis was the founder of France—and an Italian count (Carrado Guarducci) join him and his women friends in his nightly carousals. One of his favorite Wagner works is “The Ride of the Valkyries.”

     The handsome “mamma’s” boy, Charles, has little chance in such a debauched world, although he attempts to study day and night for his law exams and regularly writes long epistles home. But a single kiss by the woman these celebrants describe as “the slut,” since she has evidently slept with all of them, sends him into a spin, as he immediately falls in love with the girl, Florence (Juliette Mayniel).

      Clovis is particularly furious that Florence seems to be pretending something she is not and arranges for her to be found in Paul’s bed when Charles returns from his college classes—classes which, it’s evident, Paul never attends. 

      Charles’ discovery of the sexual “betrayal” sends him into an even deeper loop as he now finds it even more difficult to concentrate. But it is clear that something else here is going on in their relationship. As any psychoanalyst might explain, the sharing of a sexual partner can easily be perceived as an urge to share the other’s bed. Moreover, the Wagner record Paul also loves to play is Arturo Toscanini’s version of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, which suggests a far deeper “love-urge” going on in Charles’ internal thinking, an unrequited relationship with his attractive cousin himself; the sexual betrayal involving Florence is just the surface of an intensely more complex homoerotic relationship that neither Paul, Charles, nor the director dare too deeply explore.

     When Paul easily passes the law exams without doing any studying, and the hard-working Charles fails them, their unspoken love triggers a death-wish as deep as the two lovers in Wagner’s opera suffer. And it is only through death that their love can be consummated.

      Taking up one of Paul’s wall-hung handguns (can there be a better example of male-male expression?), Charles puts a single bullet into it, determining, in a kind of reverse Russian roulette, to let chance make the decision of whether or not his beloved cousin lives. As in everything else, Paul, it seems, is lucky, and survives. He appears to be indomitable.

      But the next morning, after hearing of his cousin’s “failure,”—the subject is his law exams but the subtext is Charles’ failure of being able to actually destroy his cousin—and attempting to reiterate their nonexistent comradery (apparently without even recognizing that Charles does share in his heterosexual revels—although we might ask whether they were, in fact, “celebrations,” but rather tortures of the opposite sex), and with Tristan and Isolde once again booming out from his record player, Paul picks up the pistol where Charles left it and, as yet another “prank,” releases the trigger while Charles stares back in horror.

      Chabrol does not even let us hear the gunshot; we see only a small puff of smoke. And Charles, at first, seems not even to have felt the bullet’s entry into his body as he stands a few seconds in utter disbelief before slowly falling to the floor (a kind of death that Fassbinder will later brilliantly exaggerate in his The American Soldier).

      Paul, obviously shocked by the turn of events, goes to his cousin to momentary stroke his forehead—with a wonderful visual mix of hands, feet, and heads—before retreating, as the doorbell rings, forcing him to face his tragic future.

      His fate was determined, we now recognize, from the moment he invited his loving cousin into his life.

 

Los Angeles, September 30, 2016

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2016).

 

 

Pedro Almodóvar | Los abrazos rotos (Broken Embraces) / 2009

without blood

by Douglas Messerli

 

Pedro Almodóvar (screenwriter and director) Los abrazos rotos (Broken Embraces) / 2009

 

For several years now I have followed the films of Pedro Almodóvar with great interest and, most often, enjoyment but I've also been a bit dismayed, particularly with his last few films, with Almodóvar's subtle shifts to a more and more self-conscious and highly referential film-making that detracts from the raw, sexual, and farcical energy of his earlier works. This director still makes beautiful, watchable, and even engaging films, but their conscious attentiveness to the art of the film—something I admittedly sought out in some of his first movies—has somewhat drained the passion from his work.

     Harry Caine (a name that calls up a series of Hollywood films from The Third Man, with its Harry Lime, creeping up into The Postman Always Rings Twice, based on a James M. Cain novel) is a writer and ex-filmmaker, now blind, who works on scripts with the help of his handsome young assistant, Diego (Tamar Novas). Caine (original name Mateo Blanco, played by Lluis Homar) establishes from the very first scene, where he quickly beds a young woman who helped him find his way home from the streets, that he is obviously still a kind of lecherous lover, reiterated by the arrival of his agent Judit Garcia (Blanca Portillo), who oversees the young woman's departure with silent disdain. She has a new offer for him to write a script.

     Diego and Caine, meanwhile toss out an idea of a new screenplay that Diego has imagined, a story about vampires who work in a blood bank, stealing the blood their customers provide without actually having to themselves embrace them for the necessary bite. Inevitably one vampire falls in love with one of the givers, and must resist the temptation to take the bloodletting to a new level. As the two joyfully toy with the story's erotic possibilities, we already suspect that the film ahead, although having nothing to do with Dona Sangre (Giving Blood)—will be more about temptation and resistance than all-out commitment.

    Enter the mysterious Ray X (Rubén Ochandiano), another man who has determined to become someone else, who wants to do a film with Harry. Harry turns him down; but when the stranger leaves Harry asks Diego to open a drawer and leaf through a series of photographs to see if the visitor appears in any of them. Ray, so we soon discover, is the gay son of the wealthy industrialist Ernesto Martel (José Luis Gómez) who has died, so the papers announce, that very day.

     Bit by bit the story is revealed of how Caine (then Blanco), backed by Martel, once directed a film "Girls and Suitcases" (a work that calls up Almodóvar's own 1988 film, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown)—a shift for Blanco from serious drama to farce. Searching for the correct actor for the starring role, Blanco-Caine finally decides on Martel's own mistress, who tired of being only a pampered lover, desires an acting career. Her photo-session, where Blanco dresses the mistress Lena (Penélope Cruz) alternatively as Audrey Hepburn and Marilyn Monroe, convinces him she is the right woman for his film, and, in the process, of course, he falls in love.

     Martel, suspecting their affair, encourages his son to shoot a "filming-of-the-film" documentary, the sessions of which he reviews each night playing them over and over, while, with the help of a lip-reader, interpreting their secret communications. The gay son, the perverse use of film, the vengefully determined scorned lover all remind sophisticated filmgoers immediately of Michael Powell's Peeping Tom. The rest of the story, as Diego and Harry attempt to restore the earlier film and Judit and he reveal the full history of that film and Caine/Blanco's love affair with Lena, takes us down the road of a Douglas Sirk-like tearjerker employing, along the way, several Hitchcockian tropes as well as reminding us of Almodóvar's own All About My Mother. The tale ends, as one might suspect, with a series of startling events, including a purposeful accident (the car that hits the couple was driven by Martel's gay son) which kills Lena and blinds Blanco. A final admission by Judit, presumably hidden from Harry, is that Diego is his and her son.

    Despite all of these highly emotional revelations, however, there is little real feeling evoked. The embraces, after all, have all been "broken" or were about to be, given Caine/Blanco's driven omnivorous sexuality. In his new identity Harry hides most of his past, even from himself. He lives, after all, primarily through his creations. And that is, it appears, Almodóvar's point: if this is a tale of passion, it is, as in Diego's and Harry's imaginary script, "bloodless."

     While I truly enjoyed Almodóvar's concoction, his emphasis on his cinematic influences and his own film history ultimately break the embrace of the audience and director necessary to sweep us up into an ecstatic movie experience. As sensual as his characters and sets seem, they remain only celluloid and light, shadows.

 

Los Angeles, March 25, 2010

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2010) and Reading Fictions: My International Cinema (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2012).