Friday, June 17, 2011

Wild Strawberries (1957, Smultronstället)

Wild Strawberries is about an aged doctor, Isak Borg, traveling to receive an honorary degree.  He is accompanied by his daughter-in-law, and during their car trip Isak recalls episodes from his past.  Convention would assume the Professor is experiencing his memory due to the acute awareness of his own death, but Ingmar Bergman’s film is more celebratory of life and its creatures’ follies.  Isak isn’t remembering because he is dying.  He remembers because he is alive, and self-doubt is not reserved for the young.

A lifetime achievement award seems to summon the end of one’s life, especially for those who have devoted all their passions to their work.  Alfred Hitchcock, when receiving the honor from the American Film Institute, thanked his audience and proclaimed, “I think I will go on.”  Sadly he didn’t, but Isak Borg will go as stubbornly as his still living elderly mother, going strong at 96.  To understand the deeper truth to Bergman’s film, it helps to have an understanding of the director through his film work to see how his perspective changed with age, and in particular the transition period Bergman found himself in during Wild Strawberries.  Bergman had made 16 movies before Wild Strawberries, and his cinematic counterpart had been actor Birger Malmsten, a handsome but gouache Swedish lead.  In their films together, Malmsten portrayed an insecure, repressed young man wandering to find his way.  His romances were messy and dangerous, and life was not kind.  If Bergman never intended to make Malmsten his alter ego, the scripts the director was writing were certainly self-possessed.  Isak Borg, in the context of Bergman’s heroes, is very telling of a director who for the first time was receiving great international praise for his work.  Gone is the stubbornness and childish defiance of Malmsten’s characters.  Isak has achieved something.  Bergman had too, and their fears are that their accomplishments are meaningless; that they were frauds fooling at times even themselves; and the fear of being exposed as empty.  Insecurities are not limited to the youth who are finding their way.  Bergman was growing as an artist, but the fears any professional has, at least in Bergman’s case, did haunt him well into middle age.  Lifetime recognition proclaims to others but most chillingly to the recipient that they’ve achieved all they can in their profession.

We remember the past not as our former selves but as the people we are the moment we are remembering.  “Flashbacks” as narrative devices are actually active moments in a film, existing in the present.  This is one of Wild Strawberries’ biggest accomplishments.  Isak can remember the past, his eccentric extended family, the wild strawberry bushes on their property, with the insight of so many years’ experience.  We all would do things differently if we could.  Even without regrets; if we’re lucky, time gives us experience that allows us to become our selves.  There is no one age where we truly understand who we are and the story isn’t written until the later years.  That does not mean death.  There is a beautiful moment at the climax (though that word might be inaccurate given the unique qualities of Bergman’s narrative structures) when Isak is taken to see his parents during the film’s final fantasy flashback sequence.  He sees them from across a pond, and the expression on Victor Sjöström’s face is one of great serenity.  He is not crying or gushing of happiness.  What I’ve always been impressed with is Bergman’s lack of sentimentality; not because I dislike emotion.  On the contrary, Bergman’s approach allows him to be honest, and instead of tears Isak Borg looks at his parents with fondness and understanding.  Having lived a life of his own, sharing probably in similar emotional experiences as his parents, he can understand them and appreciate them as human beings.

Convention would, after the Professor’s final flashback, tucked in bed and ready for sleep, allow Isak to die.  In Hollywood storytelling that would tie things up, package the story, and give us a sense of resolution.  Such endings are so pessimistic because life goes on, even for the elderly.  Isak, I believe, undergoes some very profound and subtle changes that allow him to grow at his old age.  It’s great that Bergman will allow his character the dignity to experience at least one more day with this new perspective.

The youth in the film is very special.  They oddly are liberated from doubt.  They are carefree and hopeful.  Bibi Andersson, one of Bergman’s many brilliant leading ladies, plays a duel-role: Sara, Isak’s cousin in the flashbacks, the woman he loved and wanted to marry, and Sara, a hitchhiker going with two male friends to Italy.  Let’s talk about the modern-day Sara.  Her biggest woe is deciding which of her boyfriends she really likes.  There’s Viktor, a theologian, and Anders, a doctor.  Their fights over God give the film its biggest laugh.  They box over God’s existence, and when they return defeated to Sara, she asks, “Does God exist?”  Andersson is especially sweet, and her scenes give the film much of its beauty.  Sara of the past is theatrical, possessing the neurosis apt of a formal, hierarchal society.  In the modern world of the film, the elderly retreat into themselves: Isak, of course; his mother, and Miss Agda, Isak’s housekeeper and comic combatant.  Isak’s son and daughter-in-law are repeating the mistakes of the past, but the new youth is hope for the future.

Isak and Marianne, his daughter-in-law; their relationship I found intriguing.  Maybe because it is so unusual to see this family relation depicted in fiction, but it is poignant that Isak discovers much about his own son through the conversations with Marianne.  Evald, the son, is a stranger to Isak and yet he hates his elderly father.  Isak is surprised by this, but he accepts it.  Maybe his son’s feelings are understandable to him.  The two opposing characters, Isak and Marianne, traveling in a car, might make the film seem like a buddy picture, but Wild Strawberries lacks the required and implausible confessions and revelations seen in the genre.  Instead these characters experience growth unparalleled in most films.  By depicting moments—conversations, glances, experiences not directly related to plot (the visit to Isak’s mother, for example) Bergman, as he nearly always does, gives us people more than characters.

The film is a bridge between Bergman’s past and future work.  He has the formal structure and the theatrical rhythm typical of his early film.  Bergman came from the theatre, and he continued to write his films like plays, and many of his published screenplays are indeed in play form.  His cinematographer during the 1950s, Gunnar Fisher, achieves his most delicate work in Wild Strawberries, a more naturalistic view of the world that looks ahead to Bergman’s work with the masterful Sven Nykvist.  Bergman’s screenplay and scenario is more typical of the chamber dramas that define his 60s and 70s output.  Isak Borg will make way for the weak, mawkish male figures in films like Persona, Shame, and Scenes from a Marriage.  As Bergman’s success increased, his insecurities did too, but it is easy to imagine the director at peace towards the end of his own life—a journey we can imagine as frightful and full as Isak Borg’s.  His last films are proof of this; Fanny and Alexander and Saraband are rich in their human qualities.  Sorrow still exists but the director had realized that the poor parts of life are eclipsed by the joys, and he was talented enough to make these beautiful moments as profound and rich as the heavy drama.  These films show the great Bergman characters accepting peace where they find it, and where the past has made room for it.

Wild Strawberries (1957)
(a.k.a. Smultronstället)
Director: Ingmar Bergman
Writer: Ingmar Bergman
Stars: Victor Sjostrom, Bibi Andersson, Ingrid Thulin and Gunnar Bjornstrand
Sweden
In Swedish
Runtime: 91 minutes

IMDB link:


Saturday, June 4, 2011

Nocturnal Uproar (1979, Tapage nocturne)

Nocturnal Uproar was Catherine Breillat’s second film, released in 1979, and is one of her rarest movies.  It has finally found an American home video release, a DVD from Pathfinder Home Entertainment which, despite being released only last week, is already difficult to locate.  The film is about a filmmaker, Solange, played by the beautiful Dominique Laffin, who intellectualizes sex, who has lots of sex, and who seldom makes movies.  Maybe she’s too busy in the bedroom for such distractions.

Solange is a young writer / director whose sexual conquests are vast and legendary.  She is married to a rich moneyman, someone who lets her indulge in her appetites.  First is her lead actor, a handsome American played by Warhol and Paul Morrissey regular Joe Dallesandro, but Solange states that ‘she loves him and is sick of him.’  Solange is always hungry, and when she meets a fellow director she becomes infatuated with him, wants him, and his initial resistance only makes her steadfast to the point where she develops an unhealthy obsession that has her questioning her thoughts on desire and sex.

Descriptions of the film state that Solange as a filmmaker does what her male counterparts do—sleep with lots of people, including her lead performer.  My problem is that whenever a film is about a filmmaker I find the material is often too fake, and the profession is treated as something intangible and sacred or taken for granted and the process of filmmaking is never done justice.  With Nocturnal Uproar it’s simply not used at all.  Solange functions as a filmmaker for only the first act and only slightly.  Sessions in the editing room are used complaining about her sexual partners, and then we never see or hear anything about her work.  The film changes focus before the half-way point, signs of an unfocused screenplay, and perhaps the film is less about a filmmaker and more about a woman.  But why have her be a director?  It doesn’t enhance the mise en scène nor give depth to the character; film director is such a pronounced profession that to have it go unused I found a distraction.

Perhaps the film is more personal for Catherine Breillat.  Is it a record of her working methods during this period?  Her films have always dealt with sexuality and maybe the filmmaker was simply using the medium to express her own thoughts and experiences.  I love that; a great deal of why I love the cinema is the auteur theory which states the director is the author of a film; that links in an artist’s work can be found from work to work.  Breillat surely qualifies, and I can see how this film influenced her later work.  For example, it seems to be a precursor or even a veiled prequel to Sex Is Comedy, an infinitely more insightful look at the filmmaking process and sexual manipulation, and there’s a series of shots showing 2 characters descending a spiral staircase that she would repeat 30 years later in Bluebeard.  The problem with Nocturnal Uproar is that it isn’t insightful about the cinema, it isn’t insightful about relationships, and it isn’t even honest about sex.  I don’t want to sound perverted but the sex scenes in this film almost all look fake, though it is obvious that actress Laffin is being touched between her legs.  The film develops into a woman’s sexual obsession for a man who toys with her, someone who may or may not have alternate intentions with his amours.  This is a great subject for a film but it is arrived at a little too late.

Considering gender and sex; can a woman be as sexually free as a man?  Sure she can prey after the men who attract her like some men do for women or even other men, but because women have been brought up to be and perhaps instinctually are more in tuned with their emotions can they have indiscriminate sex and not, on some level, feel tied to the men they have?  Is the act of being penetrated, of having someone inside of you, too intimate a feeling to simply toss off sexual intercourse as a fling?  On some level I believe this.  The intimacy created by inviting someone inside physically is a more intense sensation, one that requires more trust and strength than being the more dominant sexual partner, and perhaps Breillat is arguing that women cannot be free sexually and perhaps more generally they lack freedom in Christian-dominated societies.

The film works better as an intellectual exercise than it does a movie because frankly it isn’t visually interesting.  It’s all dialogue, and while the majority of Breillat’s work relies on dialogue here her characters have very little of interest to say.  They seem more to be parodying what a Breillat film will become rather than offering genuine insight into sexual or human relationships.  Catherine Breillat again gets a gutsy and rather brilliant performance from her lead, Dominique Laffin, whose innocent looks and beauty reminded me of Irene Jacob.  Laffin is nude a lot, mostly from the waist down, an interesting decision by the director, and she performs the part great as written.  I only wish it were written better.  She is however an actress I loved looking at, and I was shocked to read that she died at 33 of a heart attack.  Life is sometimes a bad joke.  Joe Dallesandro was a surprise to see.  He’s not a great actor but he has been great on screen, particularly in Flesh, the Warhol Factor’s best feature.  Here he is playing someone like himself, a handsome young actor who’s photographed more for his looks than talent.  It’s sad that while still young, the effects of drug use seemed already to be working against him in 1979.  The character of Bruno, Solange’s filmmaker lover, isn’t that impressive.  He has his games with Solange but I never believed that she would become so obsessed by this man.  Yes she is flirtatious but the parts are not well developed and we never see their intensity build.

Catherine Breillat may be a crude or uneven filmmaker—some of her movies are masterpieces, others insufferably slow and thoughtless—but that is the nature of her art.  She uses the cinema not to entertain or even to enlighten but to rummage through her own demons.  This explains the existence of Nocturnal Uproar.  It is an impulsive film, indecisive; maybe this is the film she should make now, with some 30 years distance, to truly make her intentions felt.  Maybe now after a life lived, a stoke which must be life changing, she can grasp at a more clear understanding of her younger self and write about a sexually desiring filmmaker who uses men until she tires of them.

Nocturnal Uproar (1979)
(a.k.a. Tapage nocturne)
* the DVD goes by the title "Night After Night" *
Director: Catherine Breillat
Writer: Catherine Breillat
Stars: Dominique Laffin, Bertrand Bonvoisin and Joe Dallesandro
France
In French
Runtime: 97 minutes

IMDB link:




A great resource for Breillat on DVD:
http://breillat.blogspot.com/

I have been in touch with Pathfinder Home Entertainment via email and they confirmed that Dirty Like An Angel, currently Breillat's only unreleased film in the US, will be released this fall.