March 4: The Fall (2006 -- Tarsem Singh)

★★★

I was in in a city northeast of Mumbai 15 years ago.  The city was hot and crowded, but on top of a hill, I wandered into a palace cemetery with the usual collection of ruined mausoleums.  There were few people there in the relative cool, and the quiet was soothed further by a man playing a stringed instrument.  Sitting beside a small mausoleum, the musician told me that the deceased had left a bequest that would pay for a musician to play at this tomb……forever.  I was touched by what must have been the deceased’s love for art, that he would devote the proceeds of a lifetime’s work to something as ephemeral as music, and that his love of art had reached out beyond his own death to give me that little pleasure on that afternoon.

I remembered this experience after I watched Tarsem Singh’s The Fall.  There’s the obvious Indian connection, but this film is also one man’s passion for art – cinema, in this case --  that is so great he put a big part of his own fortune into this single work.   And you can tell The Fall is the singular vision of an individual: There is little of Hollywood film language here, and the images simply overpower the narrative.  These images are ravishing, from Pacific atolls to Himalayan lakes and  Indian Palaces with  Balinese kecak performance.  The glory of the film is its images, and The Fall celebrates them throughout.  It reminds me of the 1937 Snow White, a movie that is so driven by the love of the images that its animation can produce that the narrative becomes a thin excuse to go from one wonderful set of visuals to another.  The same is true here.

That’s not to say that The Fall lacks typical characters or that the characters lack a narrative arc.  Roy deals with his depression throughout the narrative frame of the hospital, and he and  Alexandria build a relationship that is important to both of them in that context, too.  And the film has some thematic content as it plays with the relationship between the narrative frame and the events in Roy’s story – actors have different roles in the frame and the story, like the actors do in The Wizard of Oz, and characters and events in the frame affect the narrative of the story.  In fact, the characters and actions of the story become the language that Roy and Alexandria eventually use to talk to each other.  And the characters here are also moving.  You especially feel sympathy for Alexandria, through whose perspective we see the events of the movie.  She experiences drama that is more intense than most children experience, and her life is anything but simple.  Language is a barrier for her, her migrant-worker parents face discrimination, and she herself will return to work in the orchards where she’s previously fallen and broken her arm.  Cinema, story-telling, will provide her with much of the little pleasure she will have.

Yet despite these compelling cinematic elements, The Fall keeps returning to its colorful, striking images.  A spectacular red tent on wheels is dragged through an alpine desert by hundreds of slaves; a giant square of white fabric with a large red blotch stands out against a bright background, creating an image like a Rothko on a wall; and a captive runs through a cinematic maze constructed out of shots from an ancient observatory.  These are the parts of The Fall that resonate after the film ends.

It’s easy to see how someone could think of this film as a vanity project.  Singh is a wealthy man, and he comes from a music video background that makes him more skilled at visuals than at directing actors or creating compelling stories.  But The Fall is an instance of beauty created out of one man’s love of art. It comes from the same impulse as the music that is still being played in that Indian cemetery thanks to the bequest of an art lover.

March 3: Léon Morin, Priest (1961 -- Jean Pierre Melville)

★★★★

February 24: Wise Blood (1979 -- John Huston)

★★★★

In a Macon teacup, mix Flannery O’Connor’s Southern Gothic flair with John Huston’s unrelenting existentialism and you get Wise Blood, a small, American New Wave jewel.  A lot of people think this is flawed film, but it seems tight and consistent to me.  I think Huston chooses the Landlady at the end of the film as his directorial voice, and when she says, “The world’s an empty place,”  she expresses the central  truth that the characters in the movie have to cope with.  This is not the catholic Flannery O’Connor’s film; it’s John Huston’s.  And God doesn’t usually have a role in a Huston film.

Man struggles hard in these movies, but there’s little redemption or reward waiting a Huston hero.  Sam Spade’s statue turns out to be a sham in Maltese Falcon, the surviving miners watch their gold dust blow away at the end of Treasure of the Sierra Madre, the drunk diplomat is killed in Under the Volcano, and Marilyn departs in The Misfits……and all after so much love, creativity, investment and fierce struggle.  Hazel Motes is another in this line of Huston characters who strive mightily only to face a defeat which comes not from a character flaw but from the reality of a haphazard, empty universe.  Hazel yearns for redemption but sees that the people and institutions who claim to have access to it are dishonest or simple.  And in the end, even his solitary quest for righteousness fails because there is no higher authority to appease. 

There’s no god in Wise Blood, as Asa Hawks and daughter Sabbath have long ago figured out.  We see them hawking Jesus using the same techniques as the guy selling potato peelers at the beginning of the film; Asa even fakes having tried self-mutilation as a way to redemption, for if there’s no redemption to be had, there’s no point in suffering for it.  This is the lesson that Hazel learns at the end of the film when he is blind, wrapped in barbed wire and unable to walk, delivered at last into the hands of a woman he doesn’t want to marry, the Landlady.  She, of course, knows there’s nothing else, and her abiding concern is not to face the emptiness alone. 

Lily, too, is more interested in relationships than god, so when Hazel gets too intense in his quest for righteousness, she abandons him and returns to her relationship with Asa.  And another corrupt preacher, Hoover Shoates, recognizes a good gimmick when he sees one, so  he steals Hazel’s ideas and applies his sales skills in hawking the new religion.  Shoates and Hawks are two of a kind – both know there’s no god or redemption, but they make their living by cynically exploiting others’ desire for it. 

In addition to the charlatans hawking salvation, Wise Blood provides a lonely simpleton.  Enoch Emory is an engaging youth, but one who has mental problems.  This hapless boy spends the film not trying to make contact with god but just trying to make contact with other human beings, all of whom reject him.  It’s from him that the film gets its name because Enoch affirms that he knows things because of his “wise blood,” but as we last see him alone on a bench in a gorilla suit, his final comment is about trying to be friendly yet being rejected.  Neither connectedness nor redemption is to be found in this film about the wise blood of a lonely fool.

It’s conceptual base notwithstanding, there are still some problems with this film.  The stiff delivery of lines and the overwritten quality of the dialog may reference the original material, but those elements don’t make Wise Blood a more engaging film.  And some complain about the blending of the 40s and the 70s in the film, though I find that provides the movie a less specific reference and doesn’t impact my enjoyment of the it.

This is a film to return to when, still today, the hypocrisy of religious discourse starts to grate.  At such a time, it’s comforting to sit down with a movie whose main character maintains, “Nobody with a good car needs to be justified.”

February 23: A Dangerous Method (2011 -- David Cronenberg)

★★★

February 22: A Separation/Jodaeiye Nader az Simin (2011 -- Asghar Farhadi)

★★★★

February 19: Beauty and the Beast/La belle et la bête (1946 -- Jean Cocteau)

★★★★

Cocteau’s 1946 classic has a stagy quality at times that can be off-putting to today’s realist audience, but there’s so much else that’s worthwhile.  I don’t know another film that that creates such a lush, original, atmosphere of magic – of fairy tale – while getting at serious yet barely ineffable wisdom.  Like the prelude says, we children have to believe what Cocteau tells us and we have to have complete faith in him.  Our reward is delight and an experience of beauty.

Much of the magic of Beauty and the Beast comes from the visuals.  The arm sconces that move and even point directions are certainly suis generis – original and vaguely disturbing as, on some level, it’s disquieting to think of amputated arms that move and even have will and purpose.  Likewise, the faces on the caryatids with eyes that follow the action suggest a haunted, profoundly disturbing rupture of reality.  The hand that serves wine, the mirror that shows truth, the glide down the hall that doesn’t require Belle to move her legs, the statue of Diana coming fatally to life – all these elements exist at the fine juncture of fairy tale and surrealism, an art movement that Cocteau was involved in.  Added to all this originality are lavish costumes,   extravagant furnishings, hedges that open and close, unique garden statuary and volumes of smoke.  There are few times in Beauty and the Beast that the eye isn’t ravished.

Then there’s the Beast himself, who manages to seem appealing when he drinks from Belle’s hands yet menacing as he struggles to control his animal element with his hands steaming from the kill.  You can feel the Beast’s inner tension as he restrains himself at Belle’s door, and you sense his need as he makes tentative advances at offering himself to Belle.  Jean Marais deserves credit for creating such a compelling character under all his make-up and exaggerated costuming; his character becomes the narrative center of the film.

In addition to these physical elements, Cocteau avails himself of contemporary special effects in creating this tale.  We see a magical transformation when the Beast carries Belle into her room and her clothes are daily peasant outside the door and elegant aristocrat inside.  Other striking effects are Belle emerging from the wall when she uses the glove to transport herself home and the transformation of the Beast into the Prince at the end of the film.  Even the Baroque ending with Belle and the Prince seen from below as they ascend into clouds relies on double exposure.  Such filmic elements add to the fairy tale atmosphere.

But what to make of this ending?  The handsome though vaguely unsympathetic Avenant pursues Belle in her home, but she rejects him to stay with her father.  When Belle later tells the Beast of Avenant’s proposal, the Beast is pained by knowing about his rival, who ultimately conspires to follow Belle to the Beast’s castle to kill the Beast and steal his treasure.  Gallant or not, Avenant isn’t easy to like in this film.  So when Avenant is killed by Diana while he is trying to rob the palace and the Beast is transformed into an Avenant lookalike, it’s hard to know exactly what’s happened.  You can certainly understand Marlene Dietrich’s famous reaction ("Where is my beautiful Beast?"), and that is perfectly part of the effect.  Jean Marias plays Avenant, Beast and Prince, and all of these are bound together in the film in a poetic way that doesn’t lend itself to analysis.  This linkage is another part of the elusive beauty here.

The magic kingdom of Beauty and the Beast is the most interesting part of the film; the dull causality of Belle’s home only serves to make the Beast’s palace more wonderful.  It’s very worthwhile to spend time in the lair of the Beast, even if you have to abide the duller fairy tale reality outside.

February 17: Vampyr (1932 -- Carl Theodor Dreyer)