Saturday, August 9, 2014

August 9: Sorcerer (1977 -- William Friedkin)

★★★

If this had turned out to be the film that Friedkin intended, it would have been fantastic.  Unfortunately, Sorcerer has many problems, and the coup de grâce is that it never approaches the quality of Clouzot’s cover of the same material, The Wages of Fear.

In Clouzot’s tight film, the opening section sets up a world whose values inform the subsequent road adventures.  These values – pessimism, opportunism, amorality -- heighten the suspense as well as give us an investment in the characters.  Friedkin might have been trying to do the same in the opening section of Sorcerer, but the film rambles into a two-stage opening that neither creates a sustained mood nor establishes characters that we care much about.  In the first stage, we meet the characters on their individual home turfs as assassins, robbers, terrorists and con artists; after this extended section on four continents, we then see these characters for a while in a small, Latin village.  This extended introductory section of the movie has so much sprawl that we have no time to connect with any of the quartet; worse still, the information in this section is only modestly important later in the film.  While we eventually have the Palestinian bomber, Kassim, blowing a fallen tree out of the road, the Frenchman Victor’s fraud is irrelevant to the rest of the film, we learn so little of Latin Nilo in the intro that he’s even hard to recognize when he arrives in the village, and the calm efficiency we see of the American Jackie in the introduction has little take up in the rest of the film.  It feels as if Friedkin is aiming to recreate the pervasive existentialism of Clouzot’s opening, but Sorcerer instead gives us a long, diffuse introduction to some bad guys who inhabit a world that isn’t necessarily corrupt.

When the trucks finally get rolling, so does Sorcerer.  While there are several fine action and thrill scenes in the film, the best by far is the scene of the trucks crossing the rope bridge in a storm.  As the trucks lurch and lean, it’s only the most jaded of viewers who won’t gasp and wonder how Friedkin created the effects.  But such action sequences aside, the other elements of the film are sour here.  We are most attached to Victor through the introductory section, but his role is diminished in the travel section; conversely, the man we see the least in the introduction, Nilo, becomes one of the most important characters on the trip.  As Nilo becomes the coward we recall in Clouzot’s Jo, we are far less disgusted here because we don’t know much about him and we don’t see the hypocritical contrast between the gangster poseur and scared weakling Nilo soon becomes.  And one of the strangest transformations is when a shot of the grimly determined Jackie cuts to a shot of Jackie having a hallucinatory nervous breakdown.  And that in a desert that has suddenly replaced the rain forest.  Such contrastive cuts can have an effective role, but in a film that doesn’t use this technique for the first two hours of narrative, it feels more like bad film-making than innovative styling.

Friedkin’s ambitions are evident here -- grand existentialist statement, explicit anti-Americanism, intertextuality with his earlier Exorcist success (witness the title, flashes to pre-Colombian masks, and the menacing grill of one of the trucks).  But Friedkin’s failure to focus and his lack of control prevents Sorcerer from delivering on any of them, and there’s not even enough excess to provide the kind of pleasure we might get from a similar effort by a director like Herzog.  Sorcerer delivers us some grand action scenes in the middle of muddle that neither achieves the profundity it aspires to nor satisfies our desire for a tight aesthetic experience.

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