September 24: Author: The JT LeRoy Story (2016 - Jeff Feuerzeig)

★★★★★

Among the many surprising delights of Author: The JT LeRoy Story is that Jeff Feuerzeig doesn’t put the title character at the center of the film.  Instead, JT LeRoy is a story, and the film delivers us the author of that story, Laura Albert.  Feuerzeig has produced a fascinating, complex, suspenseful and insightful documentary here that goes beyond the what-happened of the JT LeRoy story  to consider its challenging implications.

People use the word “hoax” to describe Albert’s creation of JT as the author for her work.  When she invents a fictional biography for him and recruits her sister-in-law to play JT in public, it’s easy to see how people might feel that way.  But Feuerzeig undercuts this conclusion very early in the film as Albert describes for the camera the first time she created JT.  She had been feeling down, so despite her age, she called a teen suicide hotline and JT came into being as the voice for her to talk to a phone counselor there.  Part of the excitement of the film is that Albert has preserved a cassette recording of that initial and countless other phone conversations, so we can hear the creation of JT at the moment he comes into being.  And Albert also tells us how this creation felt, how she was able to say things she hadn’t been able to express and how she feared she’d lose him the way many of her other boy characters had gone away.  From this compelling opening, we see right away that Albert has created JT in order to help her understand and navigate the world, the very definition of what art does.  JT is her work of art, a voice that enables Albert to create.

Feuerzeig had access to a veritable treasure trove of documentary artifacts for the film, and he uses them ably.  Albert had recordings of all her conversations with agents, councilors, authors, celebrities and friends, a compulsion that might be related to her effort to establish her own identity and is certainly analogous to her mother’s compulsion to document her daughter.  Albert’s mother had taken many photos and home movies of her daughter, artifacts that Feuerzeig also had access to for this film.  The director makes skillful use of all these materials, and as Albert’s story of JT’s rise and fall proceeds, Feuerzeig draws on the recordings to flesh out the events and the old film clips to develop Albert’s back story.

From what we learn about Albert’s background while we’re watching JT become more and more famous, we come to understand that Albert has had an unusually difficult childhood of sexual abuse, abandonment, bullying, drug use and neglect.  As we learn more of this background, it becomes clear that, while Albert simply made up some elements of JT’s story (she’d never been to a truck stop, for example), she’s also drawn on elements of her harsh life to create not only JT but also his writing.  The voice of JT enables Albert to access her terrible experiences and communicate them.

We even discover roots for Albert’s getting her sister-in-law to play the role of JT in public.  As a child, for example, Albert had used her Barbie dolls to enact her various fantasies, as we hear from Albert and see in some photos.  An even bigger exteriorization of her inner life was her dressing her sister in punk style and sending her out to experience the scene and report back to her.  Despite her love of punk, Albert couldn’t bring herself to go out, so she dressed, coiffed and counseled her sister on what to do, and then she waited at home for her sister’s return with descriptions of the punk experience.  It’s a short step from this behavior to creating JT and sending him out to literary gatherings.

Author: The JT LeRoy Story also documents the celebrity scene that adopted JT and made his unmasking such a scandal.  While some celebrities were outraged when they discovered the real person behind JT, others seemed to recognize the psychology at work in Albert, and they remained supportive of her throughout the exposés and press onslaught that followed.  The first time we see Albert owning up to having created JT is with Billy Corgan of The Smashing Pumpkins, and we’re pleasantly surprised when Corgan openly accepts it and remains friends with everyone in her circle.  Later, as revelations about JT mount, Albert is writing for David Milch on Deadwood, and Milch, too, supports her and seems to understand the importance of JT to her writing.  As the story breaks, her therapist, director Gus van Sant, and Tom Waits all call to offer further understanding and support, and if you’ve never had a warm spot for Courtney Love, her recorded response to Albert’s situation will create one.  An unexpected warmth and humanity in celebrity circles is one of the nice surprises Feuerzeig delivers here

This film firmly engages us 0n a technical level, too.  Feuerzeig tells Albert’s story with so much tension that it’s hard for an audience to look away.  From the earliest moments of Albert creating JT in order to talk to a therapist on the phone -- and then visiting the therapist in person as a “friend” of JT’s -- we’re left in uncomfortable disbelief at her actions.  The creation of JT’s public figure amps up the tension even further as JT/Savannah Knoop attend readings of JT’s work, engage celebrities, go to Cannes and participate in a film adaptation.  Through all of these, the audience is expecting that the deception will be uncovered at any moment, but even the several days that JT spends with Asia Argento in Italy leaves the secret intact.  And as Albert creates a network of identities for the people in her circle, the multiple layers of false characters adds to the tension that the film only relaxes when it turns to Albert’s past.

Feuerzeig also uses visual techniques to keep us focused on the screen.  Much of the film is an interview with Albert, and the director has enlivened that visual with a backdrop of two enlarged, written pages, a visual that not only engages but adds signification.  He also breaks up the interview with animated interpretations of what’s being said, and he breaks to cassette recordings of conversations and old home movies of Albert.  One of the more interesting of interruptions is when Albert says that her husband, Geoffrey Knoop, liked to talk music with Billy Corgan and Feuerzeig superimposes the two spindles of a cassette recording over the heads of the two men in a photo precisely while they’re discussing music on the tape.

Author: The JT LeRoy Story is chock-a-block full of compelling elements.  There is celebrity, psychological compulsion, deception, tension and engaging cinematic techniques.  And the story challenges us to consider the strong links between creativity, art and identity itself.  And truth and morality.  This is a lot to pack into one documentary, but Feuerzeig succeeds in doing so, and in making it interesting.  And in perhaps a happy ending to the story, Albert is still writing, but she no longer needs JT or any other identity to do so.  She can claim her story as her own.

September 20: Desert Migration (2015 - Daniel F. Cardone)

★★★

There's a great idea at the heart of Desert Migration.  A description of this community of older gay men who are AIDS survivors from the 1980s reaches out and touches many populations.  One of its major contributions, of course, is to talk about the lingering effects of the horrible AIDS epidemic that swept the gay community in the 80s and what it’s like to have survived that.  The film's concept also gives insight into what it's like to simply be an older gay man.   And for all its focus on the gay community, it deals with things that any older person has to deal with.  It's a great idea that reaches into a number of areas that we don't see represented in film very much

And Desert Migration succeeds in many of these points.    People thought an HIV diagnosis meant almost certain death in the early period of the epidemic, and several of the men here describe how they responded to that.  Michael, for example, went on an alcohol and drug binge until he realized he wasn’t going to die, and several others talk about spending all their money until the same realization came to them.  In these cases, living through the epidemic meant the men faced not only rebuilding their lives, but doing so with compromised health and few resources.  This is a unique aspect of the epidemic, and one rarely addressed.  The men in this film also talk about surviving friends and lovers who were their age or younger, reminiscences which have poignancy in Desert Migration and speak to a lasting legacy of the AIDS epidemic.

Beyond the effects of surviving AIDS, the men also find themselves coping with issues common to both older gay men and to older people in general.  One of the major challenges they face is loneliness and isolation, and Desert Migration shows us how its dozen or so subjects cope.  Joel, for example, volunteers as a clerk in a nonprofit shop, and Juan-Manuel has launched himself as an artist.  A half dozen of them maintain a friendship, and we see them at a dinner.  In a more gay-oriented direction, Erik and Doc have a leather relationship, and Doug dates at a local gay bar while Steve participates in Western dance classes at another.  They all try to cope with being alone by using the resources available to them. However, some of the men don’t break out of their isolation and remain alone and lonely.  Will, showing us the sores on his back, remains unhappily solitary, and Keith philosophically accepts being alone.

In addition to the scope of Cardone’s concerns, he brings several other strengths to this film.  For one, he accepts many elements of gay culture as a given and simply uses them without excuse or explanation.  Doug has a Peter Pan complex, but in the film, he is coping with age and AIDS by flirting and staying as young-acting and feeling as he can.  And he’s happy.  Leather is also an element in several of the men’s lives, but Cardone treats it as blithely as an Appalachian director might show a quilting bee.  And the gym and bars play outsized roles here without getting much explanation.  It’s a directorial approach that normalizes unique aspects of gay culture, showing the world from within those norms.

And Cardone brings several stylistic flourishes to the documentary.  His clips follow something like the pattern of a day, with morning activities among the subjects followed by those of midday and evening.  It’s a documentary structure familiar to people who know the city symphonies or classics like Man with the Movie Camera, but it works here to show how a specific group lives.  And within that structure, other loops connect between events.  For example, we see Erik setting up a sling assembly (late afternoon) and only later see Doc showing up to use it (evening).  These elements give some structure to the many snippets of information we get throughout the film. 

Cardone isn’t afraid to use showier techniques in his documentary either.  He often uses time lapse photography for effect, as in the scene that shows the sunrise progressively illuminating the mountains near Palm Springs or the few cars on the streets of the city.  The technique calls back to Godfrey Reggio, who uses it to great effect in Koyaanisqatsi and subsequent films.  More affective still is the way that Cardone fuses soundtrack with visuals.  We often gaze at clips of the silent subjects, who themselves stare back at us, while we hear the voice track of comments from an interview with the subject that was done at another time.  A technique like this could be tremendously informative, giving us two information feeds at the same time – the visual and the verbal, the present and another time – and freeing up the filmmaker to be able to use only an interview's sound track without the video footage that could be weak or distracting. 

However, in Desert Migration, Cardone often misses the opportunity to use this technique to strengthen his film with the result that the technique soon becomes shallow flash.  It would have been enlightening, for example, to hear the men reflect on the lingering effect of seeing the loss all around them in the early days of the AIDS epidemic, but Cardone doesn’t seem to have pushed such questions;  instead, he leaves us to listen to remarks we might have expected to hear.  This weakness in interviewing is well-illustrated in a comment by Juan-Manuel about excluding negative words from his vocabulary.   Because Cardone doesn’t include elaboration of the remark, Juan-Manuel’s comment is left to hang, sounding almost frivolous, because we don’t understand the background for it.  A disappointing part of this film is that Cardone is content with trite or clichéd comments when a few follow-up questions could have yielded insightful remarks from these men.

There’s an echo of this interviewing weakness in the way Desert Migration looks, too.  Most of the visuals are striking, but they often seem more flashy than purposeful.  When we see the time lapse of sunrise on the purple mountains, it’s an appropriate visual for a voiceover talking about the healing energy of the area.  But most of the time, we watch clouds, palm trees, and sparse traffic that isn’t related to the content at all.  Perhaps more objectionably, some of the footage in the film seems like gratuitous stimulation.  We didn’t need to see the horrible sores on Will’s back to understand that he feels like he’s rejected because of them, and it’s unclear why we watch Doc do a nipple piercing.  It’s a graphic, compelling moment, but one that is more sensational than informative.  We learn nothing of Doc from this footage or the accompanying voiceover.

With so much attractive stylistic veneer in this film, we can almost be forgiven if we don't think much deeper.  For example, many of the men here are strikingly muscular, and working out clearly plays an unusually big role in their lives, but the film hardly addresses the motivations behind it or how it makes the men feel.  A man like Doc, who we first see in full-frontal, multiply-pierced nudity, never talks about his extravagant body art.  And we watch Bill flipping Post-its a couple of times, but we never learn what is behind that action.  Likewise, why do we hear the long discussion of real estate? 

Daniel Cardone has a great idea for a documentary here, but he leaves us with too much of an attractive cinematic surface and fairly shallow observations.  Desert Migration is a contribution to documentary, particularly documentary about gay men and AIDS, but it also leaves us wishing the film-maker had been more rigorous with the film.

September 5: April and the Extraordinary World/ Avril et le monde truqué (2015 - Franck Ekinci & Christian Desmares)

★★★★

April in the Extraordinary World is a smart film that is fun to watch.  Gallic wit and love of history move forward right away in a somewhat elaborate history of how this alternative era came about.  The militant Napoléon III, killed in a lab accident, is succeeded by Napoléon IV, who promptly signs a peace treaty and averts the Franco-Prussian War.  Science stagnates as leading scientists mysteriously go missing, and we soon see a 20th century world with none of the benefits of early modern scientific discovery.  As imagined by Jacques Tardi, an intelligent design reigns in the look of this alternative world.

Without scientific progress, we find the Twin Towers in this world are designed not by Emery Roth but by Charles Eiffel.  In another witty gesture, Pop’s phonograph doesn’t run on electricity, since that hasn't been discovered, but a small steam engine powers the record player.  And with no internal combustion engines, the film casts witty asides about airships and cable cars; an announcer enthuses about a mere 87-hour trip to Berlin and proclaims the opening of a bridge between France and England, tunnel-drilling equipment evidently being un-invented.  And the summit of Montmartre is now a monument to one of the Napoléons rather than Sacre Coeur.  This extraordinary world is one conceived with great wit.

There’s other cleverness at work here, too.  Darwin doesn’t have as much dialog as one might expect from a talking cat in a French movie, but he’s sharp when he appears.  Near death, Darwin describes  how he's looking forward to meeting Charles Perrault, though he says he’ll tell the author of Puss-in-Boots a few things about cats.  And Darwin is a typically aloof cat with his controlled manner, so his sudden lunges every time a rat appears are quite funny, lunges he unapologetically later explains as instinct.  Neither is he above teasing the humans, especially the not-always-sharp Julius.  “You’re in looooove,” he purrs, like a junior high kid teasing another.  And the portrayal of various famous 20th century scientists is also smart.  It’s not hard to recognize them – Einstein, Marconi –but when we see them giving their overlord lizard a massage or playing classical music in a quartet for him, there’s a humorous irony at play, and one related to a theme of the film.

In addition to having so much wit, April and the Extraordinary World is simply a pleasure to watch.  It has wonderful steampunk machines, like the house that turns into a Jules-Verne-style submarine and a walking machine with gangly, mechanically-jointed legs.  And there’s a flying aircraft that carries its legs like a fly.  The lizards have exoskeletons they’ve designed for themselves that let them walk upright on two legs.  In addition to such 19th century fantasy imagery, we see the Petit Palais as a ruin with steam machines and a giant oak growing in the middle, and when the heroes exit Paris underwater via the Seine, there’s a passing shot of a skeleton at the wheel of a sunken vessel.  This film knows its visual strength, and it borrows an idea from Up in telling April’s later story through photos hung on a wall.  There’s always something worth looking at in this film.

For all this, April and the Extraordinary World is still a children’s movie.  It approaches some heavy subjects, but it only gives passing shrift to them.  April has to learn to trust others and reach out, but that theme emerges from three mostly unconnected scenes.  The film also has an anti-authoritarian bias, but it doesn’t dwell on that idea.  There’s also an ethical warning here about science being turned to bad uses, but that idea surfaces at odd times, sometimes in an on-the-nose comment.  There’s an environmental message here, too, about over-exploitation of resources.  But this film isn’t consistently interested in any of these ideas.  It’s mostly an intelligent, visually-engaging romp, and it is very worthwhile for all it has to offer in that realm.

August 26: Anomalisa (2015 - Charlie Kaufman & Duke Johnson)

★★★★★

The strength of Anomalisa is way Kaufman marries his stop-motion puppet animation to the theme.  The film centers on Michael Stone, a middle-aged man mired in an existential mid-life crisis.  His world is filled with banality and repetition; nothing seems real, vital or unique to him, and the stop-motion world he lives in emphasizes this.

Most of the film is set in a bland city, Cincinnati, and most of the action transpires in a hotel-chain environment.  Everything from Michael’s taxi ride to his check-in procedure and his room décor transpires in the characterless patterns of business travel, and even the dialog sounds scripted by the hospitality industry, a fact especially emphasized when room service repeats Michael’s order back to him in embellished, corporate vocabulary.  The puppet world here is remarkably effective at highlighting the banality of this environment.  The artificial feeling of the sets as reproduced for stop-motion defamiliarizes this familiar corporate look and makes us notice it.  In addition, the puppets Michael encounters all look alike, all have the same seams and joints, and they’re all voiced by the same actor, Tom Noonan.  Even Michael himself is a part of the uniform blandness.  And when he seeks some stimulation to pierce the ennui that envelops him, he finds more of the same.  His call to his family in LA implies an unexciting home life, and when he reaches out to an old girlfriend in Cincinnati, he’s reminded of his communication failure and is again unable to have a real connection with an Other.  And in these episodes, Kaufman again uses the same puppets and the same voice, emphasizing the dullness of the world Michael sees.  Even gender differences succumb to the banality.

The existential prison that Michael has created for himself becomes clear in the episode with Lisa.  At first, her simple vitality and sincerity pierce the sameness around him.  Her voice is different (it’s Jennifer Jason Leigh), and the two ultimately have sex in Michael’s room, an intense, personal experience of the reality of the Other during which their voices merge.  However, even at this point Michael is already turning Lisa into an extension of himself, telling her what to do -- “Say something,” he directs her.  She soon becomes part of the homogeneity around him.  As they talk over breakfast that morning, she mentions the zoo, just as the taxi driver has, and we see Michael wedging her into his category of unexceptional.  Michael tells her not to click her spoon on her teeth when she eats, and soon Kaufman shifts her dialog into reverb, sonically implying her distance from Michael.  In his mind she’s no longer special, and he’s again alone in his unexceptional world.

Although he can’t see it, Michael’s stop-motion world is one of his own making.  Hair flowing as she rides in a car on the way home, Lisa writes him that their time was wonderful and special to her.  And at Michael’s surprise homecoming party, Michael’s exasperated wife tells him, “Do you realize we all love you?”  Michael, however, can’t see the world around him and the love it holds.  His is a world of stop-motion sameness though, as he stares at Anomalisa, the Japanese Goddess of Heaven that he bought for his son in a porn shop, he knows he’s missing something.  And Charley Kaufman's achievement in Anomalisa is a remarkably effective merger of technique and theme.

August 25: In the Courtyard/Dans la cour (2014 - Pierre Salvadori)

★★★

In the Courtyard is a bittersweet movie about communication.  Gustave Kervern’s stocky Antoine carries a portly sadness as he understands the pain in the people around him but is unable to soothe the pain because he can't communicate.  In particular, he’s can't help Catherine Deneuve’s Mathilde as she sinks ever deeper into a depression, but Antoine also almost unwillingly becomes friends with other wounded residents of the apartment building.  He lives in a world of pain he can see but not address.

This could be a story of great pathos or melodrama, but Pierre Salvadori enlivens it with comic touches.  From one of the earliest scenes, when a man in a park loses his temper because his protégé is unable to create large hoop bubbles, Salvadori’s humor distances us from the visceral psychic pain all the characters experience.  Lev has a dark, violent past he can’t express in language and Stéphane once had a promising soccer future cut short by injury, but Lev’s devotion to the Emissaries of the Institute of Light adds to humor to his character and Stéphane’s serial bicycle theft does the same.

Unfortunately, the shallow depth of the script holds In the Courtyard back from having the impact it could.  We see some of the personalities of both Antoine and Mathilde, but we’re not able to empathize enough with them as we watch them from the outside rather than feel what they’re feeling.  There are fun cinematic gestures in the film – witty editing in a park scene with children and a 50s-style dog-monster attack on a city – but for Salvadori to carry our hearts though the grim conclusion, we need more engagement with the main characters.

August 21: Gold (1934 - Karl Hartl)

★★★

Karl Hartl has picked all the right parts of early-30s German sci-fi to make Gold.  The technology in the film suggests Metropolis, the appearance of Brigitte Helm suggests Metropolis, and the underground chamber filling with water at the end suggests Metropolis.  There’s a lot of electricity in the air and scientific language like “atomic,” and there’s a scientist with a girlfriend and a mission.  And there are spies and bad guys who are out to conquer the world.  It should be a rollicking good ride.

But it isn’t; Gold drags as a sci-fi action/romance feature.  One of the biggest problems is Hans Albers’ inability to bring any charisma to the hero.  Werner Holk’s devotion to his martyred mentor, Prof. Achenbach, seems more dutiful than heartfelt, and it’s hard to imagine how an elegant, dynamic woman like Florence Wills, who dominates the screen whenever Helm brings her on, could be attracted to a frumpy, middle-aged man like Holk.  Michael Bohnen imparts far more range and energy to Holk’s nemesis John Wills than Albers does to the story’s lead, and the result is that the center of the film is dull.

Another problem is that script bogs down in places and unhelpfully fritters away time.  The opening section runs long in establishing Holk’s situation; the sabotage of the experiment dawdles, and the time Holk shares with his love, Margit, could have been reduced since there’s little screen chemistry between them anyway.  Too much is also made of the initial encounters between Holk and John Wills, and while the time Helm is on-screen is some of the best in the film, the long evening between Florence and Werner indeed seems long.  Then there’s an extra character introduced when Holk arrives on Wills’ boat.  Holk’s long-lost buddy has very little function in the film and even creates some confusion later when we see Holk with him at the film’s end on a boat that is different from the one he commands.  This character is a long and repeated digression.

The one part of the production that Hartl gets right is how the film looks on the screen.  With the Metropolis team, Hartl gives us a huge, flashy atomic apparatus for changing lead to gold.  There is more than ample action around this machine, which itself creates tension because it can barely contains its own power when it operates.  Other great technology includes a train-pod for underground transportation, an innovation that we see in later sci-fi, and there are massive doors and elevators.  In addition to the technology, the world of Florence Wills offers striking visuals.  Florence’s statuesque beauty dominates the screen when she has a full-figure shot, and her sculpted facial features demand our gaze when she talks in close-ups.  She may have the highest eyebrows in cinema.  Hartl adds to her visual power by dressing her in striking gowns, like the dotted one she wears when she first meets Holk and the one she wears later that has an outlandishly feathered collar.  There’s lots to look at on the screen in Gold.

Hartl also uses engaging cinematic techniques.  For example, after Holk is taken to a hospital when his experiment explodes, Hartl uses a long pan that goes from Margit and around the hospital room until it stops on Holk’s face.  The camera holds there and shot dissolves into the same pose with Holk healed and in his home office, a tour de force camera sequence.  In addition, Hartl uses rapid cuts to build up each of the major explosions in the film, creating suspense by using quick cuts to various people and places around the apparatus as the soundtrack hums and crackles.  And Hartl avails himself of the low key Expressionist lighting that is not uncommon in his time.  All these techniques create a visual interest that can engage us when the story becomes slow or the actors fail to touch us.

Although it was a major hit at the time, Gold isn’t must-see cinema.  It certainly looks good frame-to-frame, but it fails to move an audience because of its several shortcomings.  And while the film was completed shortly after the National Socialists came to power in Germany, it’s very unlikely that the party was able to exert much influence on a project that was already so far along in development.  While Gold has a slap at capitalists, especially British ones, the economic critique here is far more cinematic than it is ideological.  Gold is an interesting experience but not a necessary one.

August 20: Gilda (1946 - Charles Vidor)

★★★★

This film is a studio system star vehicle, and Rita Hayworth deserves it.  She owns the screen whenever she appears, from her justly-famed entrance flinging her hair up from the bottom of the frame to the fulfilled look on her face as she and Johnny exit the door at the end.  She brings intensity to all the aspects of her character.  She deploys her considerable sexual allure when she digs at Johnny by seductively dancing with another man early in the film, and she’s a nonchalant minx on the arm of another man when she returns home late one night to Johnny's glare.  She brings the same sex appeal to bear on her two big dance sequences, one a bare-midriff tropical performance and the other her famous club performance, wrapped in strapless, black gown with arm-length gloves.  Director Charles Vidor enhances this latter performance with a close-up that excludes the gown and by having a couple of excited men offering to help her with her dress, but it’s Hayworth’s charisma that brings the electricity here.  She knows how to tease the camera and the men who gaze at the screen.

But Hayworth’s Gilda doesn’t control all parts of her life as thoroughly as she does her sex appeal.  Beneath her meanness to Johnny is her love for him, and she alternates between mourning the loss of whatever relationship they had and openly flinging herself at him.  Hayworth brings as much intensity to these scenes as she does to her vixen play.  Her hair flies as wildly when she’s angry as it does when she seduces, and it adds to the pathos of her submission to Johnny.

The same over pressured tension that drives Gilda also drives Johnny.  The male in this 40s film has to choose between his allegiance to the other male, Ballin, or to follow his heart to Gilda.  For most of the film, Johnny chooses patriarchy and coldly busies himself with keeping Gilda at the ready for Ballin, but Gilda suspects his motives are mixed. She thinks he’s keeping her from other men because of his own repressed jealousy.  There’s more than a passing similarity between Johnny here and the aloof Devlin with his loyalty to his job in another 1946 film, Hitchcock’s Notorious.  But in Gilda, even after Ballin’s death, Johnny continues to repress Gilda, coldly seducing her into marriage and then locking her away with a portrait of Ballin dominating her new home.  The extremes of Johnny’s emotions become even more apparent when he has Gilda brought back to him after her escape and the two confess their love.  Glen Ford isn’t able to convincingly deliver Johnny’s repressed turmoil, but the scripted actions of Johnny tell the story well enough.

A lot of this film is hard for a contemporary viewer.  We would prefer to see such a powerful woman more in control of herself, and the extremes of Johnny's actions are difficult to completely accept, even when we only see them as external actions.  But Hayworth’s performance alone make Gilda a cinematic pleasure to enjoy anyway, and when the overwrought psychology of the characters and the quicksilver quality of their relationship are added to the mix, Gilda becomes an genuine cinematic pleasure.