Let's add a miscellany of films:

Assassin (2015), directed by Hou Hsiao-hsien. This film looks as if it is going to be an example of wuxia, a martial arts film. However, it is something else indeed, a mood piece with a plot that is both simple and daringly opaque. Unlike most martial arts films, or films in general these days, Assassin moves at an excruciatingly slow pace, with moments, long moments, of silence and stillness. The few bursts of action punctuate the stillness forcefully. Mostly we have beautiful people in beautiful costumes placed carefully in beautiful sets or in beautiful landscapes. The plot has the eponymous character exiled in order to prove herself a ruthless assassin, and the film places the viewer in something of an exile too. Do we have the patience to see the film to its end? Well, we do, and we did. And the assassin, Nie Yinniang (She Qui), proves herself a woman with heart and compassion. She wanders off with the maker of mirrors.

 

The Land (1969), directed by Youssef Chahine. This is a film in the tradition of Alexander Dovzhenko's Earth (1930). It tells the story of a community of small farmers in Egypt who find their livelihoods put in jeopardy by a local landowner who sets out to build a road where the farmer's fields are. Their only hope rests in solidarity, a solidarity that proves illusory, impossible to achieve. Chahine's work, or at least the work of his that I have seen, champions the peasant and the worker, but rarely does this support for the common person end in disarray. We usually have a ray of hope at the end. Not so here. The workers cannot put aside selfish interests for the greater good. One member of the "camel police" proves a friend to the peasants, but his friendship is not enough to make things go well. Things definitely fall apart. The film sprawls, it tells a story with many characters and many story lines following the interaction of these many characters. The overarching theme is clear, but the intricacies of human interactions sometimes are less than clear.

 

Unknown Origins (2020), directed by David Galan Galindo. This is a Spanish film about comic books and superheroes. It has something of the sensibility of the Canadian film, Bon Cop, Bad Cop. It plays with a seriousness belied by a delight in costumes and allusions to Marvel, DC, and even the old Detective Comic. It is clever, if a bit nerdy. Perhaps the cleverest costume is the lead character's. This is David, a police detective who wears a conventional dark suit and tie. If the film is slight, then it is also campy and not without charm. If you have an interest in comics, then you might well find this an hour and a half worthwhile. If you do not like comics, then you might find this nonetheless an offbeat detective story.

Detective K: Secret of the Virtuous Widow (2011), directed by Suk-Yoon Kim. This South Korean film reminded me of the Detective Dee films from China/Hong Kong. It is a period piece, set in the late eighteenth century, and involves court intrigue, fancy costumes, much running about, a few disguises, and quite a bit of humour. Frankly, the plot lost me quite early in the film, but this hardly mattered because the pace is swift and the characters likeable. Detective K reminded me of Sherlock Holmes with his deductive powers and his Watson-like sidekick who is something of a dog whisperer. Oh yes, then we have the very large dogs. The virtuous widow is suitably virtuous and mysterious and alluring. I confess that I would have liked to know what was going on, but nevertheless I enjoyed the film.

Shutter (2004), directed by Banjong Pisanthanakun and Parkpoom Wongpoom. We first watched this horror film from Thailand ten or more years ago and it scared the heck out of us. Since Halloween is about to arrive, we decided to dust off the DVD and watch it again. The viewing did not disappoint, although I have to confess it did not scare the heck out of me this time. The film does, however, know how to construct a convincing and creepy psychological thriller and without all the Kensington gore we see in Hollywood attempts at horror these days. Shutter is closer to a film like Hitchcock’s Psycho, than to the Saw franchise or the Hostel franchise or to the remakes of Japanese horror films or even the remake of this film. In fact, we have one jump scare that comes right from Psycho. The two directors begin the creepiness near the beginning and never let up. Scenes in the developing room are frightening as is the "bed scene." The walking-on-the-ceiling scene is cool. A second viewing also allows us to see just how much of what we see throughout prepares for the revelations as we close on the end, an end that is a zinger, a hum dinger, and both inevitable and satisfying and creepy. As horror films go, this is a worth putting on your viewing list.

Jodorowsky's Dune (2013), directed by Frank Pavich. The greatest movie never made! Actors include Mick Jagger, Orson Wells, Salvador Dali, artists include H. R. Giger and Jean 'Moebius' Giraud, and music by Pink Floyd. Oh, and then the participation of Dan O'Bannon because Jodorowsky had liked the film Dark Star (who wouldn't like Dark Star?). This documentary has an infectious appeal as it traces the work of Jodorowsky through the collation of the script and story boards for Dune. Oh, and did I mention that Jodorowsky had not read Frank Herbert's book? I found this film a hoot. And of course El Topo and The Holy Mountain have their moments here.

Furious (2017), directed by Dzhanik Fayziev. Set during the mid 13th century, this film follows in the wake of late Eisenstein masterpieces Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible. It is a rousing patriotic song with lots of crunching battles. Echoes of Eisenstein conjure up the heroic history of Russia, but there is a touch of Tarkovsky too, especially in the palette. This celebration of Russia even has the Russian Bear; the Bear turns up just when things seem lost, like the Cavalry in so many Hollywood westerns.

 Just a few films for the beginning of August.

Les Bonne Femmes (1960), directed by Claude Chabrol. This is Chabrol’s third film, and it is a strange character study that focuses on four shop girls. Jane (Bernadette Lafont), Rita (Lucile Saint-Simon), Jacqueline (Clothilde Joano) and Ginette (Stephane Audran) are all clerks at a light fixture and electrical appliance store owned by a flamboyant old tyrant (Pierre Bertin). The film begins with a shot of the Arc de Triomphe, an irony if there ever was one. The Paris we see here is drab to the point of dullness (in Alexander Pope’s sense), neon at night with loud clubs and nudie shows, a public swimming pool, a zoo with animals in small cages (we get the point!) and an array of shops. The four young women have little ambition beyond finding a man. One woman sings at a cabaret at night, and another has a creepy fellow with a motorcycle who follows here from place to place, and another has a stuffy boyfriend. None of these young people has much of a life beyond a dull job and nights of carousing. There is a bit of a mystery here, and things do not end well for the young woman who finally encounters the motorcycle man. None of these women has much beyond kitchen appliances in her future. Just as the women lead dull lives, the film delivers dull entertainment with just a whiff of misogyny. 

 

L’Amour Braque (1984), directed by Andrzej Zulawski. Supposedly based on Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot, this film is idiotic in the extreme. Kinetic, loud, boisterous, confusing, fast-paced, wild, and overly flashy, L’Amour Braque is a film easy to dislike. And I disliked it. The violence, the misogyny, the crassness, the pretentiousness turned me off almost from the beginning. I say “almost from the beginning,” because the first scene in which Disney-masked men rob a bank is fun, and we have a bit of cavorting that is reminiscent of scenes from The Joker. Such cavorting, however, soon becomes tiresome. No one here has a trace of likeability, although the camera enjoys lingering over the face of Sophie Marceau. She is one of several women in the film who appear abused and in undress for no apparent reason. The title translates as ‘Mad Love’ but the only madness here is madcap capering by all involved. Characters say they are in love, but I find no love here, just plenty of human behaviour that is demeaning. If I were you, I would not go out of my way to see this film. Perhaps it captures the 1980s and films penchant for kinetic editing that surfaced in music videos of the time, but this does not make it an involving film – or even interesting in any satisfactory way.

The Children Are Watching Us (1944), directed by Vittorio de Sica. This is an amazing film, partly because of the compelling performance of Luciano De Ambrosis as the child protagonist, Prico. Prico is a five-year-old child caught in a family experiencing dissolution because of the mother’s adulterous affair. We watch as young Prico does typical child things: ride his scooter, play in a hayloft, try to swim, and so on. We also look on as Prico watches his parents squabble, and as he peers in puzzlement as his mother meets a strange man in the park, or as he looks through windows or bannisters at goings-on he does not understand. The camera work recording the watching and the playing is fluid with long tracking shots that seem to depart from characters, to intensely intimate close-up shots, to the masterful final shot of Prico turning from his mother and walking the length of a huge cavernous room and departing through the doors. As I watched, Henry James kept coming to mind. Like James, De Sica and his screenwriters, especially Cesare Zavattini with whom De Sica collaborated on many films, are sensitive to the child’s bewilderment in a world of adults whose actions he does not comprehend. This poor kid is passed from one adult to another, from one place to another, while his mother and father attempt, vainly, to work out their differences. This is a film that deals with daring themes, especially the break-up of a family, themes that went against Fascist values of the time. Quite remarkable.

 

Stromboli (1950), directed by Roberto Rossellini. The first of five films Rossellini made with Ingrid Bergman, Stromboli brings together the Italian realist style with Hollywood melodrama. The action mostly takes place on the isolated volcanic island of Stromboli. Here Karin (Ingrid Bergman) finds herself a fish out of water, newly wedded to Antonio (Mario Vitale), a humble fisherman. Karin is Lithuanian and has survived the war using any means available; she now finds herself, rather unwillingly, in a strange and even hostile environment. She married Antonio while in an internment camp because her application for an Argentinian visa failed. Now she finds herself in a place she cannot abide.  Her attempts to have the local priest and then the local lighthouse keeper help her get away prove less than successful. She is beside herself, finds that she is pregnant, and decides to cross the island on her own to find a boat to somewhere else, anywhere else. The film has the volcano, flying birds, barren rocks, thrashing tuna captured in huge nets, a ferret and a rabbit, labyrinthine pathways to communicate the emotional inner life of the film’s protagonist. The island contains elemental life, life in extremis. Simple Antonio cannot understand why his wife does not just settle in and conform to the ways of the island, ways Karin finds primitive and uncivilized. The ambiguous ending has Karin wake near the top of the mountain to express a sense of renewal, although whether this sense of renewal means she will return to the village and her husband or continue on her trek across the island to find escape remains unclear. This is a slow bubbling boiling film.

 

Europe ’51 (1952), directed by Roberto Rossellini. This is the second of Rossellini’s collaborations with Ingrid Bergman, and it tells the story of Irene Girard (Bergman), the wife of a wealthy American living in Rome with their son, Michel (Sandro Franchino). Feeling neglected and unloved by his parents, especially his mother, Michel dies after trying to commit suicide by throwing himself down a spiral staircase. The spiral is a motif that turns up elsewhere in the film as a reminder of the spiralling out of control that enters Irene’s life after the loss of her son. The film reminded me of Sam Fuller’s Shock Corridor (1963) in its narrative arc. Europe ’51 is, of course, quite a different film from Fuller’s raw portrait of a descent into madness. Irene may end up in a mental institution, but she is decidedly not mad. She is more saint than insane. Rossellini positions Irene between the Marxist left and the Christian right. She quotes scripture, much to the consternation of a priest. She is at the bedside of a dying prostitute. She works in a factory and decides the labour market is more aptly thought of as a slave market. She seems most content with a gaggle of children about her. Her desire is to spread relationship and love, and of course this desire must be thwarted by the “powers that be,” men! Irene’s activism does not conform to either the right or the left politically, and consequently she is made to suffer. This film sits comfortably alongside Rossellini’s Joan of Arc at the Stake (1954).

 

Journey to Italy (1954), directed by Roberto Rossellini. Here is a film that looks forward to Anotonioni, Godard, and Wenders in its use of space and its concentration on the existential tangle of its characters. The two main characters are Katherine (Ingrid Bergman) and Alex Joyce (George Saunders), an English couple on a trip to Naples to sell a villa that Katherine has inherited. Finding themselves alone for the first time in a long time, Katherine and Alex discover they do not like each other. She spends her time visiting museums and archeological digs, and he spends his time flirting with other women. We have Vesuvius to remind us of emotional turmoil below the surface of things, and Pompey to remind us of life’s brevity and life’s surprises. In other words, the setting becomes another character influencing these two English persons. The interaction between these two is fraught with tension. Things reach a crisis when the two, encapsulated in their metal automobile, find themselves amid a throng of pilgrims following a statue of the Madonna. They must emerge from their encasing and enter the throng, resisting the pull of the acolytes. Here in this moment of fervour, they realize their love for each other. 

 

Maigret and the St. Fiacre Case (1959), directed by Jean Delannoy. Starring Jean Gabin as Inspector Maigret, this is a traditional whodunnit. All the elements are here: country village with an assortment of characters, big country house with faded aristocracy, local priest, and seven suspects for what Maigret thinks is a murder, although the local doctor has issued a death certificate stating “heart attack” as the cause of death. And indeed, Maigret’s friend, La comtesse de St. Fiacre (Valentine Ressier) does die from a heart attack while sitting in a church pew. She has just opened her missal and discovered a newspaper clipping inside. This causes her heart attack. Who could have placed the clipping there? Who would want this unassuming woman dead? Is it the wastrel son? Or the ne’er do well secretary/art critic? Or the priest, the doctor, the grounds keeper, the grounds keeper’s son, the driver/butler? Maigret will sort things out. He gathers all the suspects at a dinner to expose the dastardly murderer. All this is carried out efficiently and nostalgically. There is nothing left to take from this mansion except the 12:15 train. 

 July is here and so are a random set of mini reviews.

Death Takes a Holiday (1934), directed by Mitchell Leisen. Death takes a three-day holiday posing as Prince Sirki. He wishes to know what it is like to be human. He finds out. This is a strange one. Death becomes infatuated with Grazia (Evelyn Venable), a young woman who loves life and is infatuated with death. Frederic March as the titular Death is excellent. The filming has a creepy look suitable to the subject. Money, war, and love are the three “games” humans play, although for three days war is put on hold, money talks, and love will out. The sets are opulent, the dialogue clever, and the performances fine. 

 

The Villain Still Pursued Her (1940), directed by Edward F. Cline. Here is one for the ages, a parody of conventional Victorian melodrama with overly formal speech and over-the-top characters who regularly break the fourth wall to speak to the audience. The narrative has an innocent mother (Margaret Hamilton) and daughter (Anita Louise) set upon by the villainous lawyer Cribbs (Alan Mowbray), complete with black cape and large moustache. Cribbs has design upon the daughter and upon the house of mother and daughter and the larger fortune of the Middleton’s who hold the mortgage on the mother and daughter’s house. When he appears onscreen, an unseen audience sets about hissing. Edward Middleton (Richard Cromwell) is the innocent young son who falls into Cribbs’s trap and becomes an inebriate. We also have Edward’s friend, William Dalton (Buster Keaton), who finds it difficult to remember his own name. The film has two breaks in the narrative while title cards call members of the audience to fetch their children or go to their cars. Keaton has a couple of pratfalls, and we have the obligatory scene of pies tossed into people’s faces. This is a strange little film in which everyone goes about performing with studied seriousness. The whole concoction is directed by Edward F. Cline, a director who also worked several times with the likes of W. C. Fields and Wheeler and Woolsey.

 

Dishonoured Lady (1947), directed by Robert Stevenson. This melodrama turns on psychiatry. We have beautiful Manhattan magazine editor, Madeleine Damien (Hedy Lamarr), suffering from thoughts of suicide. In fact, the film opens with a dramatic attempt on her part to commit suicide. At the advice of her therapist, Dr. Richard Caleb (Morris Carnovsky), Madeleine gives up her job and penthouse to move to Greenwich Village and become an artist. Here she meets a young doctor doing research. This is David Cousins (Dennis O’Keefe). Of course, they fall in love. But wealthy lothario Felix Courtland (John Loder) desires Madeleine, and he does his best to seduce her. She is in his house when young Jack Garet (William Lundigan), arrives and murders Mr. Courtland. The police suspect Madeleine and she ends up on trial for murder. She refuses to defend herself because David appears to have abandoned her, and she thinks she has nothing to live for. The rest you can figure out easily. Love will win the day. This is not a melodrama without interest. It has touches of noir. It has Margaret Hamilton as a landlady. It has Hedy Lamarr. 

 

Woman in the Dark (1934), directed by Phil Rosen. Poverty Row sometimes produced gems, and Woman in the Dark shines in its small way. Pipe-puffing John Bradley (Ralph Bellamy) has just got out of prison. He has spent three years behind bars for manslaughter; he killed a man in a bar fight. Despite a fierce temper, John is a good fellow. Helen Grant (Nell O’Day) has her sights set on John, but he is taken by the sultry Louise Loring (Fay Wray) who is on the run from wealthy lothario Tony Robson (Melvyn Douglas). The action plays out over a night during which John gets in trouble and ends up on the lam with Louise. Roscoe Ates as Tommy Logan provides some needless humour. As things transpire, Louise goes back to Robson, but just so she can uncover the truth of Robson’s evil ways. The film was released just after the Hollywood Code tried to tame the more raunchy elements of pre-code films, but Woman in the Dark manages to have quite a few racy bits, including the dress that insists on falling from Fay Wray’s shoulder, the focus on Miss Wray’s legs, or the disrobing scene. We also have some use of flashback that is noteworthy. 

 

Chamber of Horrors/aka The Door with Seven Locks (1940), directed by Norman Lee. This is a surprisingly effective little murder mystery with familiar ingredients: gothic mansion, mute and large butler, somewhat mad doctor, adventurous woman, dashing young man, ditzy female sidekick, sleepy detective, locked room, sinister cloaked figure sneaking about in the shadows. It also has a torture chamber and a tricky goblet. Oh, and a door with seven locks, the keys to which are what turn the plot. The villain, Dr. Manetta (Leslie Banks), expresses remorse at having to kill the fetching June Lansdowne (Lilli Palmer), remarking, “She plays Chopin delightfully.” The atmosphere works well enough, the actors enjoy themselves, the fights are furious, and the whole package is, despite the familiar trappings, quite enjoyable. 

The Cheat (1931), directed by George Abbott. Tallulah Bankhead stars as Elsa Carlyle, young wife of Jeffrey (Harvey Stephens). Elsa lives recklessly, losing much money gambling, losing money from a charity bazaar, and then turning to sly, sadistic Harvey Livingstone (Irving Pichel) for help. Livingstone is a twisted orientalist who has Japanese servants, a large statue of Yama, god of destruction, and a cabinet in which he places small dolls that represent the women he has enjoyed! These dolls, by the way, have a symbol etched or burned into their base that indicates that Livingstone possesses these women. This is all very kinky and unpleasant and pre-code. Poor Elsa finds herself entangled in Livingstone’s clutches, and when she tries to escape from his unwanted and aggressive embraces, he brands her chest in a startling scene. The branding represents Livingstone’s rape of Elsa. The final scene of this potboiler takes place in a courtroom where Jeffrey is on trial for shooting (but not killing) Livingstone. The stalwart Jeffrey is taking the blame for something his wife has done, and she finally blurts out that she is the guilty one, not her husband. She exposes the brand on her chest and the courtroom crowd goes into a frenzy, attacking Livingstone who has been sitting and smugly smiling at events. The film presents us with a nasty bit of orientalism. The lavish dance sequence in the middle of events is as obvious as one could look for. In all, the film meshes Japanese, Chinese, and Indian cultures in its orientalist unpleasantness.

 

Sin Takes a Holiday (1930), directed by Paul L. Stein. “Oh, Lady --- what clothes!” This is the tag line for Sin Takes a Holiday, and it cues us to the real interest in many of these pre-code films: the clothes the women wear. Silks, satins, and furs adorn the lovely women who inhabit art deco apartments giving Depression-era audiences something to wish for. Here the story has young secretary, Sylvia Brenner (Constance Bennett), working for a womanizing divorce lawyer, Gaylord Stanton (Kenneth MacKenna) who asks her to marry him just so he can keep on seducing other married women without having to worry about having to marry one of the women he seduces. Sound naughty? Well, this is pre-code naughtiness. After accepting his offer of marriage, Sylvia heads for Paris where she has an affair with the dashing Reggie Durant (Basil Rathbone). Reggie has been a ladies’ man, but he falls in love with Sylvia. She, however, has her sights set on her husband-in-name Gaylord. Perhaps the most noteworthy naughty aspect of this film is the character, Grace Lawrence (Rita LaRoy). Grace makes a living from marrying wealthy men, divorcing them, taking alimony, finding another rich sap, marrying him, then divorcing, and so on. She intends for Gaylord to be husband #3. As pre-code films go, this one is passable.

 

Millie (1931), directed by John Francis Dillon. “Impressively lousy,” this is how Danny Reid describes Millie. The melodrama follows the eponymous Millie (Helen Twelvetrees) from her late adolescence to middle age. She marries into a wealthy family, divorces after she discovers her husband cheating, is courted by another wealthy man, takes up with reporter Tommy, discovers Tommy also cheats, is friends with two sharp women, discovers her daughter, at 16, is set upon by the wealthy man who failed to seduce Millie, and finally finds herself on trial for murder. She did indeed commit the murder, but the jury acquits her because she shot the man who tried to seduce her young daughter. This is pre-code stuff, sexual inuendo, loose living, and getting away with murder. This is a pot boiler. Despite the rather over-heated plot and characters, the film manages to say something, 1930s style, about women, independence, and sexual predation. This film is interesting as a record of its time.

 

Kept Husbands (1931), directed by Lloyd Bacon. Before he was a cowboy, Joel McCrea was a “kept husband” in this pre-code romance about an earnest young man who finds himself married to a wealthy spoiled brat. The spoiled brat is Dot Parker (Dorothy Mackaill), daughter of Arthur Parker (Robert McQuade), steel magnate, and she thinks nothing of asking her father for ten thousand bucks here and another several thousand there. For everything to turn out right, young Robert Brunton (Joel McCrea) will have to find a backbone and take control of his life. Going home to mother just won’t cut it. As something of a one-man chorus, we have Hughie Hanready (Ned Sparks, he of the strident voice). The hint of adultery when Dot spends a long night with Charlie Bates (Bryant Washburn) is typical pre-code titillation. On the whole, this is tepid stuff, interesting as a period piece. But without a lot of staying power. There are a few good lines, and an unflattering portrait of the wealthy to keep us interested, but we know all too well how things will work out.

 

The Lady Refuses (1931), directed by George Archainbaud. Archainbaud went on to glory as director of several Hopalong Cassidy films and other small budget westerns. Here he directs the irrepressible Betty Compson as a woman from the streets, June, who finds herself hired by a dapper gentleman, Sir Gerald Courtney (Gilbert Emery), to attract his son Russell (John Darrow), and draw him away from the gold-digger Berthine (Margaret Livingston). June does her job well and finds herself loved by both father and son. She rejects both of these suitors because neither of them believes she is anything more than the woman of the streets she was when Sir Gerald first met her, when she was seeking refuge from the rain and from the police. This is a nice pre-code production that does not shy away from examining the manner in which men think of women, and the difficulties women have trying to live independent lives. Much of what goes on is implied rather than shown outright, and this makes for clever film-making.

 

The Woman Between (1931), directed by Victor Shertzinger. The woman between in this soap opera is Julie (Lili Damita), and she is between father, John Whitcomb (O.P. Heggie) and his son Victor (Lester Vail). You see, Julie has married John and this marriage has alienated John’s son Victor who does not like his father remarrying after his mother’s death. Then, as fortune has it, Julie meets Victor on board a ship returning to the U.S. from France, and the two of them fall in love. Here we have yet another pre-code exploration of human relationships. Julie also happens to be a successful business woman, running her own fashion empire. What is a befuddled independent woman going to do? For one thing, she sings a sultry chanson. How will this Oedipal situation resolve itself? Despite its flirtation with naughty themes, The Woman Between is slight, not one of the best pre-code films by any stretch. However, it does have William (‘Wild Bill’) Elliott as an extra in one of the party scenes. And it also has a couple of irritating young women to wring the most from an awkward situation.

 

Wild Girl (1932), directed by Raoul Walsh. Filmed to resemble the experience of reading a book, Wild Girl is a mishmash of genres: western, romance, social commentary, and comedy. Somehow Walsh makes it all work out smoothly. The filming takes place in Sequoia National Park, and among the huge trees the characters look small, like fairies cavorting. Joan Bennet as the titular ‘wild girl’ meets handsome stranger Billy (Charles Farrell). She has been courted by a few men, but this Stranger is the first one she feels drawn to. For his part, the Stranger is a southerner looking for the dastard who was responsible for the death of the Stranger’s sister. This dastard just happens to be the town of Redwood’s most prominent citizen, Phineas Baldwin (Morgan Wallace), who is a slimy womanizer who has, more than once, forced himself on Salomy Jane. Cleverly filmed and well-paced, the film has a number of set pieces, from the chilling lynching scene to the scene in which Eugene Pallette playing likeable stagecoach driver Yuba Bill imitates the sounds of neighing horses. Ralph Bellamy turns up as Jack Marbury, a card shark and gambler with a heart of gold, something like the John Carradine character in Stagecoach. The story derives from Bret Harte’s short story, “Salomy Jane’s Kiss.”

 

Kameradschaft (1931), directed by G. W. Pabst. The title in English is “Comradeship,” and the film is about German and French miners working together to rescue miners trapped in a collapse deep in a mine on the French side of the German/French border. The Germans and the French have an uneasy relationship, but when the chips are down, the miners realize they are comrades and come together to help alleviate a terrible situation. The film does not focus, to any great extent, on specific characters, but rather focuses on the rescue itself. Pabst and his set designer constructed amazingly realistic sets in an old airline hangar near Berlin. The mine collapse and the rescue are dramatic and convincing, and when we take into account when the film was made, the action is even more impressive. Fire and water are much in evidence. The thrust of the film is humanity’s ability to come together in the face of disaster, and Pabst communicates his message well despite the censorship of the time, just a couple of years from the Fascist rise to power in Germany. The actors manage to convey personality even under duress. Language proves to be awkward, but ultimately no impediment to the rescue effort. This is a dazzling exercise in film making, and I dare say it has lost none of its power despite being made over 90 years ago.

 Some World Cinema:

Law of the Border (1966), directed by Lofti O. Akad. Imagine a Turkish western, and then watch Law of the Border. The film has a hero (or anti-hero), Hadir (Yilmaz Guney) who is reminiscent of Clint Eastwood in his Leone westerns, taciturn, menacing, and prone to outbursts of violence. At least one scene in Law of the Border clearly reflects the Leone films. Set in a village near the Turkish/Syrian border, the film follows Hadir, an impoverished man trying to raise his son in an area where just about the only means of making a living is through smuggling. This is dangerous business, the border lined with landmines, and the authorities on the watch and ready to use their firearms. What lifts this film above the pulp storyline is the realist picture of life downtrodden and lean. Into the community comes a female teacher. On her arrival, the village does not have a school and none of the children has any education beyond the skills it takes to survive in a dangerous and barren land. The teacher manages to convince, with the help of the new local commandant, the villagers to use an abandoned building as a school. Hadir’s son proves to be bright, and Hadir can now envisage a better future for his son. Of course, matters turn dire. We have shootouts and landmines exploding. All in all, this is a gritty exercise in film making. Law of the Border turned out to be an important film in Turkey, reviving the career of Akad who had retired, but who now returned to make several more important political films in his home country.

 

Muna Moto (1975), directed by Dikongue-Pipa. This film from Cameroon is a devastating critique of a system of oppression, especially against women. Tradition can be both sustaining and celebratory and also burdensome and retrograde. We see this in the story of two star-crossed lovers who fall victim to the dowry and patronage system. The two principle actors, David Edene as Ngando, and Arlette Din Beli as Ndome, give intense and compelling performances. The camera is fluid and poetic as it details life in a Cameroonian village. Life is difficult, partly because of the colonists depleting of the fishing resources. Ngando works at night fishing and during the day chopping trees in an effort to get what he needs for the dowry. His efforts prove exhausting and futile. His uncle, who already has four wives, one of whom is Ngando’s mother, pays the dowry and tries to take Ndome for himself hoping she will give him a child. She does have a child, but not the Uncle’s. This is a delicately emotional film that delivers a stark vision of the clash between tradition and modernity.

 

Insiang (1976), directed by Lino Brocka. We recently watched Red Cliff, a film nearly 4 and a half hours long with hectic activity, bodies of horses and men flying through the air in slow motion. The film probably took months to film. Insiang, a 94-minute film from the Philippines, took 17 days from the beginning of production to its appearance in theatres. Both are astonishing films. Insiang begins as a neo-realist look at life in the slums of Manila, turns to melodrama, and then to tragedy. The pre-credit sequence takes us inside a slaughterhouse where pigs are being gutted. The opening is visceral, and it sets up both the latent violence that exists in the impoverished lives of the slum dwellers and the ending of the film. The plot takes us close to the lives of one family, especially the lives of the eponymous character, Insiang (Hilda Koronel) and her mother, Tonya (Mona Lisa). These two have a difficult relationship because Tonya sees in her daughter the husband who left her for a young mistress. Tonya has taken on as a lover a young man from the slaughterhouse, Dado (Ruel Vernal). He, of course, has eyes for the luminous daughter. Insiang has more than one man seeking her attentions, and she hopes to escape her life with a curly-headed fellow named Bebot (Rez Cortez). Bebot proves as trustworthy as Dado or the husband of Tonya. Anyway, these characters live lives in a crowded, noisy, dirty, and closed in space. We often see them, especially Insiang and her mother, behind barred windows or gates or fences or lattices. The drama plays out with intensity and even a certain predictability, a predictability that does not fully prepare us for the end of the film. This is a powerful, and I daresay important film.

 

Taipei Story (1985), directed by Edward Yang. This is a film that examines urban malaise. It begins with a good-looking couple examining an apartment for rent. The man, Lung (Hou Hsiao-hsien) seems bored and uninterested as he swings his arms like a baseball player. The woman, Chin (Tsai Chin) lists the commercial items that could fit here: stereo, tv, VCR and so on. Cut to the film’s near final shot of blood on the street adjacent to a pile of thrown out items such as a tv, a couple of soft chairs and bags of stuff and you see what such dreams come to. The film moves along at a slow measured pace, rarely, if ever, changing the pace. It is a slow burn. Throughout the film, we have references to the United States as a place of possibility and hope, but such possibility and hope are as illusory as all dreams. At one point a character asks Lung what Los Angeles is like. He replies that it is much the same as Taipei. Another connector is baseball. Lung, as a young person, was a fine baseball player with dreams of making baseball his success in life. Once again, we have a reminder of dreams failing to come true. Shots of the city in both daylight and at night keep reminding us of the combination of decay and glitter, of hope and its opposite. As I watched the film, I kept thinking of Kramer vs Kramer (1979), although the two films are quite different. Taipei Story is, however, about a couple’s strained and unworkable relationship. We also have a cast of peripheral characters nicely drawn. One of these characters, an architect, looks out a high-rise window at the city and remarks that he can no longer tell which buildings he has designed because all the buildings look the same. This pretty much sums up the vision of a world drained of energy, a world of boredom and ennui.

 

Revenge (1990), directed by Ermek Shinarbaev. This film is part of the Kazakh New Wave, a movement in Russian cinema that arrived just before the collapse of the Soviet Union. It begins with a prologue set in the seventeenth century in which we see the rise of a young Lord who comes into conflict with his best friend, the court poet. Then we move to 1915 Korea where the actual story begins. Before the film ends we have visited China and finally Sakhalin on Russia’s eastern coast. By the end, we have moved foreword to just at the end of 1945. The story finds impetus in the killing of a young girl by a drunken teacher back in 1915. This murder results in the father of the murdered girl seeking revenge, something he seeks vainly for years, ultimately passing on his desire for revenge to his young son from a second wife. The son seeks revenge for many years until … Well, you will have to see what happens. The film is noteworthy for its light. Scenes are filled with light, a light that counterpoints the darkness in humanity’s heart. We also have a number of cryptic but compelling images: a huge sea turtle far from the sea and seeking to return home, a rat dowsed in gas and set on fire running frantically until it finds a barn with hay, a hedgehog, a young man hemorrhaging blood from his groin, a fast-moving truck with an iron container chained to its bumper, more than one mute person, and more. The film seems to have something to do with time and space, as well as to the deleterious effects of seeking revenge. Some of what we see reminded me of images in films by Tarkovsky. All in all, this is a strange, yet powerful film.

 

Kalpana (1948), directed by Uday Shankar. This is the only film by the dancer and choreographer Uday Shankar, brother of Ravi Shankar. It is, among other things, a celebration of Indian dance, at one point noting that Hollywood often mistakenly presents Indian dance as if it were African dance. In any case, the film is much more than a celebration of dance. This celebration is part of a celebration of India, despite all its flaws. And flaws aplenty it has, according to this sumptuous exploration of what ails India. Shankar holds his ideology on his sleeve. He speaks openly here of injustices associated with caste/class, with rapacious capitalism, with education or the lack thereof, with misogyny, and so on. His call for equality of the sexes is forthright and moving. As for the viewers’ visual experience, we have magnificent dance sequences, surreal sequences, echoes of silent cinema, especially Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, and painterly compositions, one of which reminded me of Jacques-Louis David. All of this serves a story of a child growing into a man wishing for more than a life controlled by the expectations of elders and tradition. The young man, Udayan (Uday Shankar), finds himself desired by two women, his childhood friend Uma (Amala Shankar), and the wild woman he meets in the wilderness, Kamini (Lakshmi Kanta). Jealousy and anger surface, in a narrative that blends dream and reality. Released in 1948, Kalpana (apparently this means ‘Fantasy’) reminds us that Hollywood was in the heyday of musicals at the time. The film also reminds us just how stubborn are the forces of neoliberalism; the film resonates still.

 

The Cloud-Capped Star (1960), directed by Ritwik Ghatak. Huge trees, a train passing, lattice-work, close-ups reminiscent of Eisenstein, deep focus, odd camera angles, all give this film a distinct feel. The tree we see in the first shot lets us know about stability, rootedness, shelter, nature. That same shot transitions to a close-up of Neeta (Supriya Choudhury) , our protagonist; in the background moving across the screen is a train, letting us know about people on the move, change, and an unknown destination. The lattice-work we see throughout lets us know of constraint. In the first shot, we also hear the singing of Neeta’s brother, Shankar (Anil Chatterjee). Throughout the film sound is either mellifluous or jarring, dissonant. The odd angles tell us of people and places out of joint. The story deals with a family displaced by the partition of India in 1947, and especially the eldest daughter Neeta who is effectively the head of the house. The learned, but feeble, father (Gyanesh Mukherjee), the domineering mother (Gita Dey), the flirtatious younger sister Geeta (Gita Ghatak), the sports-loving brother Mantu (Dwiju Bhawal), and the older brother Shankar all have their own ambitions and rely on Neeta to provide for them. The story follows Neeta in her self-sacrificing decline into illness as she watchs her uncaring family find what they wish for. Neeta is, for sure, a cloud-capped star. This is melodrama, but with a trace of humour and fantastic cinematography. I have neglected to mention Neeta’s boyfriend, Sanat, who is graceless enough to marry the younger Sister Geeta. Sanat, in a love letter to Neeta, calls her a “cloud-capped star veiled by circumstance,” and Neeta is indeed an intelligent woman whose life is ruined by the destructive environment in which she lives. This is melodrama touched by tragedy.

 

Mysterious Object at Noon (2000), directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul (aka Joe). Dennis Lim describes this strange and mysterious film from Thailand as “part road move, part folk storytelling exercise, part surrealist parlour game.” This description is accurate, but it hardly touches the strangeness of the film. Viewers first see the words, “Once upon a time….,” and so we know we are in store for a fairy tale. But this is more like the building of a fairy tale as we meet characters who tell us bits and pieces of a story the arises from a mysterious small round object that falls to the floor early in the film. As each set of characters, and actors, tell the story, the story becomes more and more baroque. As we go along, we have a travelling fish seller, a crippled boy and his teacher, two deaf mute girls, a theatre troop, a gaggle of school children, among others, all adding to the story of an alien who comes to earth. Frankly, the story never does cohere for me, although I suspect it might for others. I get the sense we are being introduced to a story from Thai folklore. The filming is in grainy black and white, and it has a documentary feel, although this is not an out and out documentary. We also have moments I might call meta, where the making of the film is what we are seeing. Everything is quite odd, just out of reach, and yet compelling for some reason. The strangeness comes in the form of a sophisticated and complicated film looking primitive and naïve. This is quite an experience.

 

Before the Rain (1994), directed by Milcho Manchevski. This is the first film from a newly independent Republic of Macedonia. As for a summary, Noel Murray in AV Club (July 1, 2008) puts it succinctly:” In the film's first section, ‘Words,’ Grégoire Colin plays a young Macedonian monk who discovers an Albanian girl hiding in his quarters, and attempts to hide her from a local militia. In the second section, "Faces," Katrin Cartlidge plays a London photo-agent who's been having an affair with one of her foreign photojournalists, and struggles with how to tell her husband. In the third section, "Pictures," the photojournalist, played by Rade Serbedzija, returns to his Macedonian village and becomes embroiled in centuries-old skirmishes. Each section "rhymes" in different ways. There's a rumble of thunder in each, as well as a character vomiting, turtles, a snippet of Beastie Boys' "So What'cha Want," and the repeated line, "Time never dies… the circle is not round." For most of the movie, Manchevski subtly suggests that each section is taking place at roughly the same time; in the final five minutes, he reveals exactly which scene goes where, and underlines the idea that in the former Yugoslavia, it doesn't matter whether a person tries to help or stays neutral. Trouble ensues either way.” “Trouble ensues either way,” says it all. Clearly Manchevski has watched westerns and I can locate quotations from both Peckinpah and Ford in this film. The storyline turns on the futility of things, and somehow futility seems to be a word suitable to the situation humanity continues to find itself in.

 

Hive (2021), directed by Blaerta Basholli. Set in the village of Krusha in Kosovo in the aftermath of the 1999 massacre in that village. Many of the men have gone missing, and the surviving wives and families of the missing struggle to find news of their loved ones and to survive without the men in their lives. Fahrije (Yllka Gashi), along with other women of the community, organize to lobby the authorities to find their missing husbands, and also to create a company that makes and sells adjvar, a condiment made from red peppers and aubergines. These women have to contend with the deeply patriarchal villagers, including Fahrije’s father-in-law Haxhi (Çun Lajçi) and her daughter, Zana (Kaona Sylejmani). Fahrije also tries to maintain her missing husband’s bee hives. Those worker bees reflect the worker-bee mentality of the women who set about to control their lives. The handheld camera stays close to Fahrije as she sets out to make life work in an environment wracked by war, and held by misogynist traditions. The film is based on a true story, and it is a testament to independence and the will to survive. 

 

24 City (2008), directed by Jia Zhang-Ke. Filmed as a documentary, 24 City reminds me of Martin Scorsese’s Rolling Thunder Review in its blending of fact and fiction, real people and actors. It tells the story of an airplane parts factory, and its destruction in order to replace it with luxury apartments. Most of the film depends upon “interviews” with people associated with the factory from its early days to its closing (actually it is moving and not just closing). In other words, the film slyly moves through time without actually depicting those various times. The people we meet all have a melancholy story to tell. The film is quiet, slow, intense, and somehow moving in its presentation of people whose lives have depended on a factory that controlled their lives, and that now, in its fall, leaves them unmoored, drifting too far from shore. This is an unusual film, well worth seeing for its picture of China as it was and as it develops in the present century.

 More from Japan.

The Story of the Late Chrysanthemums (1939), directed by Kenji Mizoguchi. Near the beginning of his career, Mizoguchi sets a pattern giving us the story of a woman who sacrifices everything for a man. He presents his story in slow long takes with the camera more often than not set at a distance from the actors, or from a middle distance. Rare are close-ups or full face-on shots. This gives the proceedings the air of a theatre performance, something pertinent here because the story follows the life of a young kabuki actor, Kinunosuke (Shotaro Hanayagi), from a famous acting family who at first fails to impress with his performances, finds himself leaving Tokyo for Osaka, then falling farther when he joins an itinerant group of performers, and finally after much suffering learns his trade. He does all this with the help of the long-suffering woman, Otoku (Kakuko Mori), who becomes his wife much to the chagrin of his father. The point seems to be that arts demands suffering, and suffering nurtures great art. In any case, Kinunosuke’s art takes the life of Otoku who is willing, even anxious, to sacrifice herself for the man she loves. What is noteworthy about this film is the camera, its placing and its fluid movement. Take for example an early scene in which the two young lovers walk along a quiet dark road. The camera is placed in a ditch below the path on which the two people walk so that we look up at them. The camera placement is odd and therefore catches our eyes. What we are seeing is that these two people are elevated above the petty gossipers and disapprovers who attempt to thwart their love. Much of the time, we watch as people, often quite a few people, perform their tasks in the distance. All the world’s a stage, etc. 

 

The Life of Oharu (1952), directed by Kenji Mizoguchi. Here is another masterful exploration of patriarchy’s greed and self-interest. Mizoguchi’s film tells the story of a privileged woman’s fall from a position of comfort into degradation. Oharu (Kinuyo Tanaka) is a lady at court who falls in love with a lowly page (Toshiro Mifune). This is a forbidden love and results in the page’s execution and Oharu’s exile from the court and Kyoto. Thus begins her downward journey into various humiliating situations – concubine to a lord, wife, mother, nun, courtesan, wouldbe suicide - until she finally becomes a prostitute. Through it all, Oharu maintains her dignity. The film ends with her a mendicant going from house to house seeking alms. Mizoguchi characteristically films most of this from a distance, his camera slowly following the movements of people, often from a heightened position. Two scenes stand out: one in which Oharu disrobes to give her garments to a greedy seller of fabrics who claims she has taken the fabric from him, and the other in which a wealthy lady for whom Oharu works reveals that a disease has caused her hair to fall out. These two scenes powerfully show just how powerless women are, how fragile is their place in society. As ever, Mizoguchi’s camera locates items that underscore what is happening, two short stalky pillars in the scene in which Oharu becomes the page’s lover, the many busts of disciples of Buddha, the temple, the stone wall, and so on. This is not a ghost story (I think of Ugetsu), and yet is has the haunting effect of a ghost story. 

 

What Did the Lady Forget? (1937), directed by Yasujiro Ozu. Ozu’s second sound film is something of a dry-run for The Flavour of Green Tea Over Rice. Like the latter film, What Did the Lady Forget? Has a middle-aged couple at odds with each other, and a niece visiting who brings with her the winds of change. The niece, as in Green Tea, is named Setsuko (Michiko Kuwano), and she is strong-willed and modern in outlook. This is a small film, running just 71 minutes, and it is distantly reminiscent of the screwball comedies Hollywood was beginning to produce at the time. At one moment, Setsuko mentions Frederic March, a reminder of her interest in Hollywood films, and quite possibly Ozu’s interest in these films. The film does have one shocking moment when the doctor professor Komiya (Tatsuo Saito) slaps his wife Tokiko (Sumiko Kuishima), and she reacts by admiring his manliness. This film is, perhaps, lesser Ozu, but lesser Ozu is far better than other films then and now.

 

There Was a Father (1942), directed by Yasujiro Ozu. Ozu is one of cinema’s most recognizable directors with his fixed camera, nearly always just above ground level, his tendency to include shots of spaces empty of human activity, his framing through doorways or windows or hallways, and his emphasis on family and sacrifice and time. There Was a Father clearly follows the Ozu aesthetic. It is a wartime film that alludes only obliquely to the war. What sets the film within the wartime sensibility is the emphasis on patriarchy, on the father as a figure to be honoured and obeyed, and as a figure willing to sacrifice his happiness for the success of his son. Shuhei Horikawa (Chisu Ryu) is a well-liked teacher in a provincial town. While on a school excursion with a group of his students, one of the students dies in a boating mishap; one shot of an upturned boat is enough for Ozu to communicate what has happened. This image tells us not only that a student has drowned, but also that Horikawa is now alone and his life upturned. He never recovers from the sense that his negligence caused the student’s death. He now sets out to see that his son finds the success that he, the father, could not have. This means sending his son to boarding school, and moving away for work in an office in the big city. Father and son, from that time on, see each other only occasionally. Although the wartime virtues of duty, sacrifice, and hard work are front and centre, these take on a distinctly ambiguous air as Ozu examines the relationship between father and son over many years. The love between father and son is perhaps most endearingly shown in scenes of the two fishing, tossing their long rods in unison. Early in the film these shots suggest a unity between father and son. Late in the film we see a similar shot of father and now grown son only from a different angle. This second shot ends with a feeling of separation rather than unity, and not long after this, the father takes ill and dies. The film offers Ozu’s characteristically quiet, yet intense, world of families struggling to come to terms with outside forces and with time itself. The trains we see here might remind us of the inexorable movement of time, the movement both away from and toward home. Ozu’s cinema is the cinema of mood and stillness, even as time delivers its challenges to human desire for security and peace. Ozu is a very special film maker.

 

The Flavour of Green Tea Over Rice (1951) directed by Yasujiro Ozu. Ozu is one of cinema’s most recognizable directors, and also one of its most subtle, sly, delicate, and consistent directors. His consistency lies in both theme and aesthetic. He deals with family conflict, intergenerational tensions, and class differences. He deals with tradition confronting modernity. His camera rarely moves, and when it does, it does so smoothly, quietly, and unobtrusively; it also rarely, if ever, rises above waist level. He frames shots with doorways, windows, hallways, streets, often layered to give a strong sense of the frame as confinement. Such compositional geometry finds punctuation in still shots of signs or trees or man-made structures such as a water tower. His titles, The Flavour of Green Tea Over Rice, Late Spring, Early Summer, The Floating Weeds, Tokyo Twilight, Late Autumn, The End of Summer, and so on evoke time; they have the whiff of nostalgia. In short, Ozu is a special director and his films offer delicacies that are rare in cinema. The Flavour of Green Tea Over Rice is one of the most satisfying of Ozu’s films taking us to baseball games and bicycle races, as well as to a pachinko parlour and a spa. The story follows the marital difficulties of Mokichi (Shin Saburi) and his wife, Taeko (Michyo Kogure), the efforts of their niece Setsuko (Keiko Tsushima) to avoid an arranged marriage and get on with her new friend Noburo (Koji Tsuruta), and the relationships with close friends of Mokichi and Taeko. This film comes just before Ozu’s most famous (and celebrated – number 4 on Sight and Sound’s most recent list of the greatest 100 films ever!) film, Tokyo Story. I found it just as good as Tokyo Story, maybe even more satisfying. I should mention the importance of food in this film. Food brings people together and it may also nudge them apart.

 

Good Morning (1959), directed by Yasujiro Ozu. Ozu is special. Watching this film, I could not but think that Wes Anderson has seen and absorbed Good Morning. This film has the colour palette, the geometry, the stillness, the close-ups, the sensibility we see again in Anderson’s work. But Ozu remains distinct. Here he is in a light-hearted mood, as the jaunty music over the credit sequence lets us know. Light-hearted this film may be, but it takes on serious matter nonetheless. The focus is on communication. The children criticize the adults for making meaningless small talk, the adults rationalize such small talk as lubrication, a loosening of the gears of communication. Adults also indulge in gossip and rumour, communication that can be hurtful. Such small talk is a sort of flatulence, a point made several times throughout the film, not least when one adult male character farts, only to have his wife appear asking if he had called her. This occurs more than once. The children play a farting game, twirling an arm in victory when they have successfully farted. I might add that the sound of the farts differs from one person to another. Then we have silence as a mode of communication when the two principal boys refuse to talk because their parents will not purchase a television. The television is also a communication device, one that shows Sumo wrestling. Wrestling itself is perhaps a sign of communication in a rough but regimented mode. Regimentation is a way of life, as the boys’ school uniforms may indicate. The television also gives us an image of boxed in communication, and the people we meet here lived in compartmented spaces. Finally, this film, like its precursor in Ozu’s filmography, I Was Born, But … (1932), gives us a perspicacious view of childhood. We have playfulness, bullying, fear, confusion, stubbornness, secretiveness, desire, and the gathering of kids. Well male kids anyway. This is a special film by a special director. Highly recommended.

 

Double Suicide (1968), Masahiro Shinoda. Claire Johnston gives us this summary: “This film is a close adaptation of Chikamatsu’s 1720 doll-drama The Double Suicide at Ten No Amijima, and traces a basic conflict in Japanese drama, giri-minjo, between social obligation and personal emotion in the bourgeois milieu. Jihei, married with two children, falls in love with a courtesan, Koharu. As there is no possibility of being together in this world, Jihei sees the only solution as double suicide. When Koharu appears unwilling to die with him, he temporarily abandons her. Eventually, following a mandated divorce, Jihei and Koharu commit suicide together.” Filmed in kabuki-style, Double Suicide begins with puppeteers setting up for performance before it begins to tell the story. We also have a number of black-clad people populating scenes (kurago or puppeteers who manipulate the banuku puppets), moving props, and generally reminding us of Death! The camera is fluid, the sets rudimentary, the close-ups intense, the black and white cinematography stark, and the acting broad. The artificiality distances us from the action. Like the kurago, we witness the action but are unable to enter it. Of course, the end is clear from the beginning. Eroticism, Shinoda appears to say, when divorced from duty results in death. This is bleak. Interestingly, the two women, the courtesan Koharu and the wife Osan (both played by Shima Iwashita), share a mutual respect. As for the filming, we have odd compositions, freeze-frames, bizarre sets, and the black-clad kurago puppeteers moving about. All of this reminds us that narrative is manipulative, cunning, and institutional. The film is as much about narrative itself as it is about a double suicide or the tragedy of love.

 June has arrived. Here are a few more films.

A Woman’s Face (1938), directed by Gustaf Molander. This is an early Ingrid Bergman Swedish film, and it was remade a few years later in Hollywood with Joan Crawford. The story follows a young woman whose face has been badly burned and disfigured in a fire when she was a child. She is embittered and enters a life of crime. Events transpire that bring her to the attention of an accomplished plastic surgeon. This doctor operates on the woman and restores her beauty. She then becomes a governess in the home of a wealthy consul; her intention is to participate in the murder of the young boy, the consul’s son, in order that her criminal gang can benefit. As you might expect, things do not work out the way the gang hopes they will work out. Near the end, we have a magnificent set piece, a sleigh chase at night through the snow and across a frozen lake. The film is suitably dark for this season of noir. Although Anna (Bergman) leaves a life of crime, she also leaves the possibility of marriage behind as she embarks for a life of helping others in China at the end of the film.

 

"Not a film, but a two-hour study of sofas and pianos." That's how one critic described Carl Theodor Dreyer's final film, Gertrud (1964). The film does have pianos and sofas as part of its sparse settings. It also has a mirror, a statue, some paintings, a table, chairs, and a fireplace. All of these bits of furniture and art are placed carefully, deliberately, in order to serve the emotional intensity of the film. This is a slow burn of a film. The opening scene lasts just over twenty minutes, and another long take of Gertrud and her young lover lasts some ten minutes. The characters move slowly; they appear enervated. And yet they are insistent, stubborn, focused, intent on their desires. This is a film about desire. It stirs below the placid surface. For the eponymous character desire is everything, and as we know, desire cannot find satisfaction, completion, fulfillment. Amor omnia perhaps, but such a slogan only reminds us of melancholy, the melancholia of a world in which everything is unattainable, just out of reach, but always beckoning, leading one on. This film might remind us of work by Ingmar Bergman, or by Lars von Trier. It has light swallowed by darkness. The sets are spare and articles stand out as symbols. The mirror with its rococo frame is a reminder of illusion as well as vanity. The statue in the park is a reminder of both modesty and the pleasures of the flesh Gertrud talks about. Indeed, this is a film that talks. Scenes give us two or three people, moving slowly if at all, talking to each other, not looking at each other, confined in their own circles of desire. The principal characters are artists and politicians, a mixture sure to find trouble. Gertrud, unable to find the happiness she longs for, travels to Paris and joins a group of intellectuals who sublimate their desire in intellectual pursuit. Still, in the end, amor omnia.

 

Cold War (2018), directed by Pawel Pawlikowski. The first third of this film is dazzling in its cinematography. Well the whole film, shot in monochrome, offers superior beauty in its compositions and lighting, but the first third is especially impressive. Shots are reminiscent of photographs by Brassai or scenes from Tarkovsky. Just to look at this film is to have an experience worthwhile. The story spans the years 1949-1964 when the Cold War was growing colder. The two main characters are a pianist and composer/arranger who at the beginning is traveling the countryside looking for raw folk talent and music, and a young woman who hopes to find a place among the many other young people from the countryside looking to enter a folk group under the tutelage of the pianist and his company. These two fall in love, and the film follows their strained and complicated relationship over the next 15 years, taking them, separately, to Paris, Yugoslavia, Italy, and finally back to Poland where they had begun their journies. Along the way, the cold hand of authoritarianism grows colder and as it does the lives of these two become less and less workable. The cinematography and the music also change becoming less shining and more cacophonous until we are back where we started in a ruined church. In the beginning we saw this place in winter, but it had striking beauty; at the end we see this place in another season and the beauty has diminished, just as the lives of these two have become less capable of moving forward.

The Passion of Anna (1969), directed by Ingmar Bergman. In Swedish the title is "A Passion," a more apposite title because the film explores passion or its absence in not one, but at least four people. Each of these people is played by a familiar Bergman actor. This is Bergman territory we know well, intense inner drama. The backdrop of images - water, snow, dead animals, fire, alcohol, photographs, the island, a sun dog - keep reminding us of rage and anger and desire and accident and generally existential hollowness. These are people out on a limb hacking away at that limb heedless of the fall once they have hacked through that limb. One sequence shows us famous footage from the Vietnam War on a TV screen, footage that captured the attention of the world. It shows the shooting of a young Vietnamese person. Just what this piece of historical actuality is doing in the film is worth asking. Here we have the savagery of human interaction as starkly evident as possible. This is a film replete with dislocation, loneliness, aimlessness, and anchoress desire. As the film's final shot indicates, the film is about disintegration. If the film has to do with passion, then it is passion on the wane, passion unable to find purchase, unable to find fulfilment. It is lots of fun.

 

The Serpent's Egg (1977), directed by Ingmar Bergman. The most noteworthy aspect of this film for me is the cinematography by Sven Nykvist. It is crisp, sharp-edged, and stark, a perfect expression of the film's dark message - the coming of social and political darkness. The centre cannot hold. This is Bergman's only Hollywood film, the one film he made while on self-imposed exile from Sweden. It does not work for me, partly because David Carradine seems somehow in the wrong environment. However, the echoes of such German films as M, The Blue Angel, Pandora's Box, and Lang's Mabuse films catches the viewer with what those films missed, the serpent lurking in the Germany of 1923. The only reality is, indeed, fear. Touching on the dislocation caused by social division and xenophobia, this film resonates today in a way, perhaps, not available in 1977. It may not be the Bergman we associate with spiritual turmoil and psychological angst, but it does serve up its share of angst. Constant images of bars and narrow labyrinthian hallways and crowds and police/soldiers remind us of entrapment. The hospital archives are reminiscent of Kafka, and of course the medical and psychological experiments evoke the period's interest in eugenics, and mind control. The more I think of it, the more terrifying this film becomes.

 Just a few miscellaneous films for May. Politics!

Beanpole (2019), directed by Kantemir Balagov. This film chronicles the effects of war, and these effects are not pretty. Iya (Viktoria Miroshnichenko) is a nurse working in a Leningrad hospital that is filled with wounded soldiers. Iya is also unusually tall – hence the name Beanpole. She has a friend, Masha (Vasilisa Perelygina), who has just returned from war duty. Iya has been caring for Masha’s son, Pashka (Timofey Glazkov), but in one of her strange catatonic fits, a result of post-stress, Iya smothers Pashka. Masha takes the news without obvious emotion. Masha has a deep desire for a child, but she learns because of a war wound that she is infertile. She wants Iya to have a baby for her. Such is the plot. The film moves along slowly with a palette that is dour with red and green and a sickly yellow. The setting seems closed in, effectively strengthening the sense of the PTSD that most of the characters experience. What the film offers is a stark and unsettling view of trauma caused by war. The two women are a study in contrast, Masha being outgoing and domineering, and Iya being introverted and shy, trying to make herself less visible than she is. Moments in the film come close to the grotesque. Clearly, war has altered the lives of these people in ways that shatter any possibility of normalcy. This film resonates with our times, sadly.

Official Secrets (2019), directed by Gavin Hood. This is a political thriller that recounts the story of Katharine Gun (Keira Knightley), a government employee who in 2003 leaked an email from the U.S. government that encourages other countries, the U.K. for example, to assist in coercing several countries to vote in the United Nations for war against Iraq. These were the Bush/Blair years, the time of Colin Powell’s unfortunate speech at the U.N. concerning “weapons of mass destruction.” The film is a procedural that follows Katharine Gun’s decision to leak the document, her home life and eventual arrest, the reporters for the Observer newspaper who track the story (played by Rhys Ifans, Matthew Goode, and Matt Smith), and the civil rights lawyers who defend Katharine (played by Ralph Fiennes, Indira Varma, and John Heffernan). Hood manages to keep all the storylines moving briskly and effectively. The duplicity of governments is nicely set out and reverberates with contemporary politics, as well as with past events such as the Watergate events of some thirty years earlier. This is a tense and timely film.

Le Havre (2011), directed by Aki Kaurismaki. Anything by Kaurismaki is worth seeing, and Le Havre is among his best. This is a film about illegal immigrants and community and marriage and friendship and goodness. Aside from the story, the look of the film is attractive. Kaurismaki and his crew make the down and out parts of Le Havre look inviting. The colour scheme is distinctly Kaurismaki with its muted blue and grey and yellow. This is a film about life among the humble. The protagonist is the shoeshine man, Marcel Marx (Andre Wilms), who lives with his wife and canine friend in a run-down part of town. He shines shoes here and there in the city, sometimes with a Vietnamese friend. His wife Arletty (Kati Outinen) is not well, and she goes to hospital where the doctor says she has a terminal illness. Meanwhile, Marcel meets Idrissa (Blondin Miguel), an illegal immigrant from Gabon who is on the run from the authorities. Idrissa is on his way to London to find his mother. He is a boy in a strange and frightening place. Kindly neighbours help Marcel protect the boy, although one neighbour is less than kindly, calling the police more than once and ratting on the boy’s whereabouts. Marcel’s last name is no accident, and we have here a comment on policing, community, borders, freedom of movement, and kindness. The people we meet live on a shoestring, as it were, and they are all the better for this. Finally, I note that sometimes miracles do happen! This film is sure to win your hearts. Oh, I nearly forgot Little Bob whose appearance reminds us of Leningrad Cowboys!

Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom (2019), directed by Pawo Choyning Dorji. “Gross national happiness,” the motto of Bhutan, informs this film. Taking place in the remotest village in Himalayan Bhutan, the film lets us know that fulfillment (“happiness”) is possible without money or material goods or modernity. Happiness comes in a connection with nature and with song. Singing is important here as a way of honouring local deities and connecting with others, including animals, especially the yaks that provide food and fuel for the local people. Moving at a lyrical pace, the film celebrates community, connection, and education. The story of a fish out of water is familiar and, I suppose, even predictable, but here the location of the shooting, the actors, especially local unprofessional child actor Pem Zam, have charm and charisma. The film does not break new ground, but it does introduce us to a place where contentment, health, and satisfaction are possible, far away from the crowded and loud streets of the city, far away from modern conveniences, and far away from the self-absorbed urbanites we see frequenting bars looking for the happiness they think is available in a glass. 

Sharper (2023), directed by Benjamin Caron. Here is a film for our time, a film about compulsive liars, grifters, con artists, empty people interested only in spondulicks. The plot has twists and turns galore (some predictable) and the film moves from chapter to chapter, each chapter following a specific character, until the connection between all the characters becomes clear. The film is stylish and devilish with the actors – Julianne Moore, John Lithgow, Justice Smith, Brianna Middleton, and Sebastian Stan – turning in sly performances, as people who go through life acting slyly. The film begins in a bookstore, and this nice touch might just let us know that we should not judge a book by its cover or a book-buyer by his or her choices. Everything moves along smoothy, if coolly, until an end that spills into absurdity.

1000 Rupee Note (2014), directed by Shrihari Sathe. Budhi (Usha Naik) is an elderly widow whose son has committed suicide because he could not pay back a large debt. She lives alone in a rickety shack that also houses the family of the shepherd, Sudama (Sandeep Pathak). Budhi talks with this family through the flimsy wall that separates their two places. She also has a close friendship with Sadama. The first third of the film is quite lovely; Budhi has little or no money, but she gives whatever she has, tea, fluffy bred, a half rupee, to others, cheerfully and willingly. Her life is simple, and she manages to eke a living by cleaning the houses of the wealthy people who live nearby. Then the local politician, Uttamrao Jadhav (Ganesh Yadav), comes to the village to give a speech. He doles out money to the locals, including a few 1000 rupee notes to the poor widow, Budhi. In other words, he buys votes. The corruption here is a sign of things to come. Budhi and Sadama go to the nearby town or city to spend some of Budhi’s newfound wealth at the market. This is where things go awry, and Sadama and Budhi end up in jail. It turns out winning the lottery, so to speak, is not necessarily a good thing. Of course, Sadama and Budhi manage to be released from incarceration and find the money to return home. On the way back, Budhi takes the 1000 rupee note that the police captain had given her when he released her and tosses it out the window and into the river, a gift to the river gods. This is a quietly effective film, short and very sweet.