Breaking the Waves (1996)

Lars von Trier’s work is often very difficult to describe.  A plot summary would often make them sound silly, simple.  In reality his work is the opposite, and even if you disagree with what the director is saying, it is difficult to deny the power of his work.  Breaking the Waves may be in parts too simplistic, but the experience of watching it makes up for its weaker moments.

Bess McNeill is a good Scottish girl marrying an outsider in her community, Jan.  He works the oil rigs, and after their wedding which is as beautiful for Jan as it is for Bess, her husband goes off to work.  Bess is raised in a religious community that seems centuries away from our time.  Women are not allowed to speak aloud in church, cannot attend funerals, and must obey their husbands and the Lord.  Bess spends much of her time talking to God, asking for favors, and she answers herself in God’s words.  I found these moments a bit awkward and very unoriginal, but this has to be accepted as part of Bess’ character.  Is she really hearing the voice of God?  Well, yes.  As long as Bess believes, she does hear.  God promises to send her husband home early, and Jan is in a terrible accident when renders him paralyzed.

I was not as absorbed into Breaking the Waves as I have been with other of von Trier’s films.  The big problem is that the opening scenes or chapters are much too long.  They linger, and while as episodes they are not bad, the plot as I’ve described isn’t really what the film ultimately becomes.  About one hour into the film Jan, now a quadriplegic, asks his loving, devoted wife to sleep with other men.  He himself cannot experience love and if only Bess could tell her about her sexual encounters Jan will feel close to her again.  This is very interesting, at first naughty and in a dark way kinky.  But Bess is not all together.  She struggles with pleasing her husband, torn between his words and the word of her religion.  She asks God and he replies through her she must obey her husband.

She attempts to sleep with her husband’s doctor, a decent and very handsome man, but Bess cannot command her sexuality with intimacy.  She is on a bus, makes eye contact with a dirty old man, and masturbates him.  She tells Jan about it and he seems to get better.  Bess starts to believe in her ability to save her husband.

Von Trier is always asking profound questions, but with Breaking the Waves he is asking more about human beings than God.  Except for the ending, which I will admit to finding farfetched, this is not a religious film.  It is a film about faith; as all good religious films are—they do not presume too much—and it questions what most believe about God.  What is sin?  Can one be a sinner and still be loved by Him?  As God points out through Bess, Mary Magdalene is one of His most beloved creatures.  It is the harsh faith of the village elders, who have the power to banish people from the community, who decide what sin is.  In a way, the film questions whose faith is stronger.  Bess, a simple minded girl, the first heroine in von Trier’s trilogy of naïve and brutalized women, is like a loyal dog.  She does not matter; only the health and life of her husband counts.  The others with this stone and wood building and their bible do not understand what Bess has turned to, and for that they banish her.

Her family cannot understand her either.  Her mother is the first to warn her about banishment.  Her grandfather, a village elder, is non-vocal but his glances and presence impose much.  It is Bess’ sister-in-law, Dodo, who both knows what Bess is doing and why she is doing it.  They are best friends, have been since Dodo’s wedding to Bess’ brother, but his death brought them even closer.  Dodo cannot believe in Bess’ reasons for sleeping with other men.  She is concerned for Bess’ mental health and also for the sick control Jan is having over her.  She is a nurse, is treating Jan, and knows what the drugs and constant surgery is doing to his mind.  For Bess it doesn’t matter; as long as Jan’s condition improves, she will continue to be promiscuous.

Von Trier always gets great performances from his actors.  Emily Watson is probably the most substantial she has ever been on screen.  She has a pixy-like sweetness that really makes Bess a 3-dimensional character when she could have easily been a cartoon.  It’s surprising to discover that this was her first film.  She is intense, too, and very brave.  Often in this director’s movies actresses have to do things ordinary actresses would never be expected of, typically scenes of sexual explicitness, especially when portrayed so honestly.  It is however not the explicitness that makes these performances brilliant but the intensity and commitment by these actresses.  After all they agreed on the roles.  It makes me hopeful for Kristen Dunst’s upcoming turn in von Trier’s Melancholia.

Breaking the Waves seems so alien to most modern people: firstly the idea that the church can play such a significant role in life, and secondly because of the cruelty of being someone of faith.  Though Bess accepts her duty with relative ease, what Jan or God or she herself asks of her is too cruel.  The northern Scottish environment, the lack of technology—the reliance on public phone booths, for example, to receive a call—is so backwards.  So is the idea that a person can be banished from society for actions that others disprove of.  In their eyes Bess is a prostitute.  She dresses like one to attract men, but I never viewed her actions as perverted.  Bizarre, yes, but perhaps because I have walked with her I could understand.  The coldness with which friends and family, in the sake of tradition, greet each other is equally bizarre.  I was wondering if von Trier might have been exaggerating his story to be more effective.  That could be true, but then I remembered that in the Amish community one could be thusly banished, so this extremely religious mentality does exist today.  Most of us, including myself, simply do not experience it.

It’s hard to say whether I liked the picture.  If I had to be honest I would say I didn’t think it was a masterpiece as many have said.  It is in parts too long and boring.  Some of the actions and thoughts the characters have make little sense.  Let me rephrase that—they come out of nowhere.  When the Doctor steps in to talk Bess out of her delusion, he confesses his love.  He speaks and reacts to her indifference the way a lover would, so this “love” isn’t just plutonic, it’s more sensual.  They had only a few scenes prior, and nothing hinted at the Doctor’s feelings.  Ultimately it doesn’t matter.  You should see this film if it sounds interesting to you, and my opinions and observations aside, I think I’ve done a fair job explaining the extensive setup of the story.  It is interesting and worth sitting through to the end.  Those who are religiously inclined might find more topical or at least theological discussions to engage in with the film, but as a movie it is far from perfect.  But von Trier’s films are never perfect.  He is more instinctual, and his films are crude but powerful works of art and his audacity is enough to check out every one of his films at least once.

A final note, two versions of the film exist: an American version and the European version.  It’s obvious which is “censored” and you should seek out the European version.  I cannot describe all the differences except for one, based on a screenshot comparison I found online: during their wedding night, Jan lets Bess explore his body.  Von Trier’s camera lingers on a shot showing actor Stellan Skarsgård’s penis.  In the American version, his hand cups his privates.  If seeing Skarsgård’s junk isn’t your thing, consider this: the character’s hand covering his genitals tells the audience they’re watching a movie.  The image takes us out of the experience, and this is a film where every single image needs to be experienced the way its director intended.

Breaking the Waves (1996)

Director: Lars von Trier

Writer: Lars von Trier, Peter Asmussen and David Pirie

Stars: Emily Watson, Stellan Skarsgard and Katrin Cartlidge

Denmark

In English

Runtime: 159 minutes

IMDB link:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0115751/

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:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0050986/

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:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0134993/

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.

Certified Copy (2010, Copie conforme)

2 people explore the treasures of Tuscany on a lazy Sunday afternoon.  They are at first strangers, but the things they say to each other leave us questioning the nature of their relationship.  I didn’t have to make up my mind as to Juliette Binoche and William Shimell’s relationship.  It is obvious to me what is happening in Certified Copy, but whether or not we believe Binoche and Shimell are married is not the focus of the film. The film works as a puzzle.   It remains mysterious and objective, asking us to consider where the true worth of human experience exists: in a happy past or a less romantic present.

Shimell, an English opera singer, plays James Miller, an art expert who has written a book called Certified Copy, about the worth and unique authenticity of art forgeries.  He argues that a reproduction is just as valuable as the original, partly because the original is itself a copy of a real event.  Binoche plays an unnamed woman, a fan with a teenage son who waits impatiently while James is giving a lecture.  Her son teases her, insinuating his mom has a crush on the author.  And, she seems to.  Binoche leaves her number with his Italian translator and she and James meet on a Sunday.  He signs multiple copies of his book for her, one made out to her sister, Marie, who with her simple love for her husband is in sympathy with James’ philosophy of art forgeries: it is not the work itself that has value; it is our appreciation of it that gives it its value.

Their dialogue is imprecise and mawkish when James first meets her.  Binoche is self-conscious and excited to be in the author’s presence.  They take a drive.  “I can’t believe you’re sitting in my car.”  This shot is amazing.  For several minutes, Binoche and Shimell are in a two-shot, photographed from outside the car, and the reflection of the buildings on both sides of the street obscure, in flashes, both actors.  Their dialogue is innocuous but the scene is riveting.  We’re really seeing two images; a visual clue to the idea of the film.  There are overlaid images in many moments in Certified Copy.  Director Abbas Kiarostami’s directorial approach at first seems breezy and loose, but in Shimell’s and Binoche’s first scene together as they wander about her shop, precise choreography between the two leaves Shimell alone among many art forgeries, and Binoche reflected in a small mirror in the background.  They face each other even when they are separated in the filmed frame.  A similar image happens later, when Shimell stands alone near a motorbike and in the side mirror Binoche is reflected off screen.  I can’t say I’m familiar with Kiarostami’s work; I don’t know if his double images are unique to this film or important in his overall body of work but they support the material, which is not so much about doubles but the multiple interpretations of what two people say.

We are like the tourists on Binoche and Shimell’s vacation.  We hear what they say and yet lack the greater context of their lives to truly understand.  The advantage we as an audience have is that unlike these tourists who exist as extras in the film, we get to follow these two people and hear the whole of what they say.  It is still not a fault of the picture that we are not given a blunt truth.  The film is a puzzle which cannot be solved, and when I saw the film for the first time I was so overjoyed to be actively participating in the story.  Depending on how I viewed the material, the story would change and satisfy me.  It also is very mysterious and good at dropping clues through dialogue and facial expression.  The flipside is that when we solve this puzzle, the second time around Certified Copy isn’t as absorbing.  We can view the early scenes and notice the subtle clues that support our theories.  I, for example, found great meaning in a quick line of dialogue by Binoche’s son which suggests much of the complicated dynamic between these three people.  To be honest the line is so quickly delivered and I don’t speak French and I missed it the first time.  But if films are meant to be viewed more than once then the lasting impact of Certified Copy will not live up to its reputation.  If I had written this right after I saw the film once, I would have talked only positively about it.  I didn’t know what to say then other than, ‘see it and interpret it for yourselves,’ and I hoped that I could elaborate on my own opinions about the movie itself with a second viewing.  Truth is I found it difficult to get into it in the same way.  Like a mystery film I kept examining the film for evidence and found the situation betrays itself.

I still admire it a great deal.  The digital photography is sublime, and Binoche is terrific.  I think many years down the line historians will make her out to be the greatest performer to ever appear in front of the camera.  It may sound like hyperbole but I really believe it.  The things this woman can do with her face are amazing.  She would have been fabulous in silent movies.  She’s also great at delivering lines, and without giving away my interpretation of the film the great material is the quarrels that this couple shares.   This is a terrific script.  It balances three different languages—English, French, and Italian—which Binoche can speak perfectly.  There is a great exchange between Binoche and the proprietress of a small café.  The proprietress assumes James is her husband, and the woman gives Binoche a reasonable speech about what husbands, even bad ones, give their wives.

I feel I must say a bit about how I saw the picture.  I sensed a great deal of hostility in Binoche’s voice early on towards James.  This is when I began to suspect things aren’t as they appear.  At first I was made uncomfortable by her forward, angry speech.  It is not at all how people behave to strangers and I felt embarrassed for her.  But James seems a willing listener.  Neither backs down on their beliefs and yet they never once put an end to their union.  I think something more is going on, something more complex than are they strangers or are they married, but a saving grace of the picture is its ambiguity.  It also makes it more of a puzzle, and it distracts somewhat from the generally brilliant experience it is to watch Binoche’s and Shimell’s performances.

Certified Copy (2010)

(a.k.a. Copie conforme)

Director: Abbas Kiarostami

Writer: Abbas Kiarostami

Stars: Juliette Binoche and William Shimell

France

In French, English and Italian

Runtime: 106 minutes

Certified Copy is currently available On Demand from Comcast and other service providers.  It should be released on DVD by IFC in the near future.

IMDB link:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1020773/

Birds, The (1963)

The Birds begins like a sitcom, or at least like a low-rent TV project from the 60s.  We’re introduced to the pretty girl, Melanie Daniels, played by Hitchcock’s final cool blonde Tippi Hedren, as she is kept waiting for a pair of birds from a bird shop.  A handsome, mysterious man who knows all about her plays a prank, sort of payback for Melanie’s infamous practical jokes.  The man is Mitch, a lawyer, and Melanie is a playgirl with a rich newspaper tycoon father.  She buys a pair of love birds for Mitch’s sister, Cathy, and secretly brings them to Mitch’s family home in Bodega Bay, California.  Their playful banter is disrupted by a swooping seagull who takes a peck out of Melanie.  We meet Mitch’s mother, Lydia, who would disapprove of any woman Mitch brings home.  Just ask the town’s schoolteacher, Annie.  When Mitch’s father died, he broke off their relationship, and she moved to Bodega Bay just to remain close.  That was four years ago, and she and Lydia are now friends.  It seems Lydia hates the idea of being abandoned.  Melanie and Annie become accidental friends when Melanie lies to Mitch, insisting she was coming to Bodega Bay to visit her old college chum.  Annie’s name she got from the general store.

Ordinarily in a Hitchcock film, this material would be the real story, and indeed it is in The Birds.  The bird attacks are merely the MacGuffin, but there is a superficial quality to this film.  The characters are thinly sketched and merely archetypes.  Mitch is the strong handsome lead, Melanie is Hitchcock’s heroine, the character through which the story will unfold; Lydia is a dominating Hitchcockian mother, selfish, violent even, and Cathy is the innocence that was intended to really jab at the audience once the horror starts.  Annie is the only human being in the cast.  We can understand her pain.  She sticks close to the man she loves because that is all she can have.  This character is similar to Norman Bates and Marion Crane from Psycho.  The others are quite frankly boring, and the performers can’t save them.

A weakness of the picture is usually something that saves Hitchcock’s subversive characters: the actors.  Here the two leads are a letdown.  Tippi Hedren is fun to watch.  She’s beautiful but not typically so.  There’s an odd quality to her.  Her voice is high-pitched, raspy, and awkward, and as a movie personality she does well.  She’s very curious, though.  Sometimes she delivers her lines well, other times, more often than not, she is unconvincing.  I can’t really fault Rod Taylor as Mitch.  I just wasn’t interested in him.  Hitchcock should have chosen Rock Hudson, someone who looked younger, more boyish and possessed more charisma.  Mitch and Melanie’s relationship was not organic.  It felt forced.  I wonder why disasters are always aphrodisiacs in the movies.  There’s an embarrassing scene on the sand where we learn something of Melanie’s back story.  We find out her playgirl days have made her a mature woman, that the lifestyle ruins reputations and she is devoting herself to good causes now.  We also learn of her deadbeat mother, and partly due to Hedren’s delivery but mostly to the script, the sentiment is false and truly laughable.  It’s predicable, and Hitchcock is too good to be predicable but there you have it.

The supporting performers are fine.  Jessica Tandy chews the screen in subtle ways as the mother.  Of course Suzanne Pleshette is fantastic.  She brings a rare quality to a Hitchcock role: grittiness.  Annie is a real woman: attractive but not glamorous, frank, honest, and a little bit depressed.  I personally found Veronica Cartwright very effective for her generation.  I guess I must say this because when I saw the film with an audience, everyone was laughing at the portrayal of all the kids.  It’s just too old-fashioned for modern viewers.  I may be being a bit grumpy but why then were these people in the theater?  They know the film is old—grow up!

Actually I was very upset when I left the theater.  There was too much laughter during the screening.  An old couple sitting next to me said that the great thing about seeing a film like The Birds with an audience was hearing the nervous laughter during the tension-filled scenes.  I did not contradict them but they were out of touch.  No one respects the movies anymore.  I saw the film at the Coolidge Corner Theater in Brookline, MA, the Boston area’s most well known independent theater.  Their programming is often banal, showing the more ordinary independent stuff.  I’ve noticed that the audiences typical of Coolidge are kind of would-be movie snobs, the sort who prefers to drop various names and titles during discussions but who have no true understanding or appreciation for the cinema.  There was a lot of laughter during the area premiere screening of the complete Metropolis and there was laughter at The Birds.  Moments like the attack at the birthday party.  There’s a shot of a little girl face down on the grass as a seagull pecks at her head.  I didn’t find the image funny.  There was one moment where the film shut the audience up.  It’s probably the most well-known shot in the film, where Lydia wanders into her friend’s house and finds him dead with his eyes plucked out.  You could feel the audience was disturbed.  It was a thick atmosphere, but people still found things to laugh at.  Perhaps the idea of birds run amuck just isn’t believable.  I grant you that while walking down the streets of Boston it is ridiculous to imagine that the common pigeon will start attacking.  But this is the movies—this is a Hitchcock movie!  Suspend your disbelief otherwise stay home.

The moment I expected laughter (and was actually dreading because I found the constant laughs inappropriate) was met with silence.  It’s the semi famous moment when Melanie watches as a trail of spilled gasoline catches fire.  Hitchcock chose a strange series of parallel action, where the shot of the encroaching fire is disrupted by freeze-frame images of Hedren with her mouth agape.  The problem with it is that her shots are held too long and the people behind her move at normal speed.  The silence from the audience is probably due to the very palpable scene Hitchcock had staged.  It is one of many of the film’s later moments that are filled with tension and dread.

The Birds was ahead of its time in one way: it is the first of the modern-day disaster pictures.  In fact, I found parallels with two very popular and effective ones: Night of the Living Dead and Jurassic Park.  Spielberg’s movie is reminiscent because, like The Birds, it has innovative special effects and is terrifying about Earth-bound creatures attacking humans (granted dinosaurs are long extinct), but both also lack seriously developed characters, leaving the only points of interest with the attacking animals.  Night of the Living Dead is a more apt companion film, and it is easy to see that George Romero took the structure of Hitchcock’s picture and many of the ideas as well.  In both films there are languorous openings that suggest a different kind of story will be told instead of the one we’re given.  Both feature characters terrified by the danger outside their home, boarding up the place, and then turning on each other once the terror becomes unbearable.  They both also succeed as brilliantly claustrophobic and downright depressing exercises, though Romero’s film is much more shocking and sophisticated.  Though it was made only 5 years later, Night was made in a different time in American film.  The Birds begins carefree, with hope and promise for its characters but all joy is robbed by birds.

Where Hitchcock succeeds is also where he fails.  The Birds was a film Hitchcock almost never made.  After Psycho, another accidental project, Hitchcock was developing Marnie as a return vehicle for Grace Kelly.  The Birds was made instead because Kelly regretfully turned down Marnie, and with Psycho’s unbridled success the director turned out another devastating horror film.  It feels to me that Hitchcock gave up with The Birds.  He was cashing in on the audience’s expectation of his moniker but he failed to find the key to his success: a tight script and convincing characters.  The Birds never feels like a work of cinema.  It feels like a cynical exercise, even though it is technically well made and possesses some great cinematic moments from The Master.

The film is innovative too in its sound design.  It is very effective, and apparently much of the credit goes to composer Bernard Herrmann.  Herrmann is the greatest, most important composer of the 20^th Century, but The Birds exists without a note of music.  The composer, Hitchcock’s creative partner for nearly a decade, convinced the director that the film would work better with only the sounds of birds.  In comes a machine called the Mixtur Trautonium.  Along with the Theremin, it was one of the early electronic musical instruments, and this machine, a precursor to the synthesizer, created the shrieks for the birds.  I noted, however, that we seldom hear actual birds in the attacking scenes.  I recognized cats and chimpanzees, but in the chaos these were believable sounds.  In fact, the sounds probably caused much of the chaos.  Hitchcock must have been appreciative as Herrmann received onscreen credit as “Sound Consultant”, but this may be equally due to their friendship.  Another nice bit of sound is during the final scene, the massive shot of the exterior of the house littered with waiting birds.  There is the sound of wind, of pressure, something almost subliminal that suggests unease.  This reminded me of the great electronic score for Tarkovsky’s Solaris.  There was a problem, though, and it might have been unique to the print I saw, but the bird attack scenes were way too loud.  The dialogue and other scenes were at a normal volume, but the frightening scenes could have been turned down.

I do regret that Herrmann did not write music for the film.  I think it would have helped cement the film, made it tenser and its characters seem less simple.  The example to go by is Hitchcock’s own Torn Curtain.  Herrmann wrote a score but Hitchcock rejected it.  The film with its current score is good but like The Birds weakly sketched.  Herrmann’s score would have shaded in the characters, and I feel he could have only helped the film.  His and Hitchcock’s collaboration is legendary, and together they created the best American films of the 50s and 60s.  One artist fed off another, and their work is probably the definitive example of a director / composer relationship.  If nothing else, Herrmann’s score for The Birds would give us one more Herrmann score.

I’ve never been impressed with The Birds.  When I first saw it in high school I felt cheated by the ending.  Now I accept it and even think it’s the only way the film can end, but as a film it does not succeed.  The Birds showed Hitchcock failing by clinging to a formula that made him very wealthy in 1960.  While there are great moments of terror, the characters in The Birds are not compelling enough to carry us through scene to scene.  Because it is Hitchcock we stay, but you take away the birds and there is no film left.

Birds, The (1963)

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Writer: Evan Hunter

Stars: Tippi Hedren, Rod Taylor, Jessica Tandy and Suzanne Pleshette

USA

In English

Runtime: 119 minutes

IMDB link:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0056869/

My Man Godfrey (1936)

It’s very easy to tell when a film was made in 1930’s Hollywood.  Stylistically the lighting is very flat, the camera movement is limited, mainly photographed in long or medium shots to give the feeling of a play, and the characters are dressed in the latest fashions, so sheik for their time that today they stand out.  Also these films, less so as the decade went on, contain searing social commentary.  This is an adequate distillation of My Man Godfrey, a beloved screwball comedy more in the tradition of drama, though the characters are oddballs and the women speak at a mile a minute.

Godfrey is a “forgotten man”, one of the homeless living in New York Dump 32.  One night a group of society people come to him asking for his help for their scavenger hunt.  You see, the two women need a forgotten man to come back to a posh hotel for them to win the game.  As Irene Bullock, played by Carole Lombard, notes, one does not win a prize but merely the honor of winning.  Godfrey ruthlessly turns down Irene’s sister Cornelia, someone whose very name describes her witchy snobbery, but he helps out the friendlier and perhaps more naive Irene.  He wins her the game and she feels so indebted to him that she gives him the job of the Bullock family’s new butler.

The high jinks or at least the narrative takes off from here, but My Man Godfrey is seldom laugh-out-loud funny.  Most of the comedy comes from how out of touch the Bullock women are, and there are some genuine laughs.  But the film feels more like a depression-era fable, about a spoilt heir (spoiler—Godfrey) giving up wealth to communicate with the downtrodden, finding with those who struggle a kinship and honesty.  It is easy to see why when looking, say, at Irene’s mother Angelica; she keeps a protégé called Carlo who is nothing more than a freeloader, accepting insults from Mr. Bullock as long as he does not have to work for money.  In fact the very word causes him pain.  Angelica, or Mrs. Bullock, is a daffy, clueless woman who does not take into consideration how much money their family wastes, or that her husband constantly tries to mention his business troubles.  This talk upsets poor Carlo.

I will again admit to a bias against comedies.  I simply prefer dramas, but the screwball genre is interesting.  My textbook example is His Girl Friday, which is one of my favorite films.  That film is wall to wall laughs, and it gave me the impression that screwball comedies are farce and quick gags.  An online search regarding the genre informed me that it really is indefinable.  I like “Sex comedy without the sex”, as defined by critic Andrew Sarris.  The few screwball comedies I remember involve courtship, usually the woman directly vying for the love of the handsome, befuddled man.  They are innocent fun steeped in the moral traditions of another era.  In fact, at one point My Man Godfrey played more like an early 1900s piece than a more modern and less moralistic 1930s.  The 1930s of course were a very controversial time for American film, with censorship becoming a reality by 1934.  That the film is less comedic is not a fault of the picture.  As far as it goes in screwball territory it succeeds, but the film is about the carelessness of the idle rich.

William Powell’s Godfrey seems most out of place in a screwball comedy.  I think it is his character that blurs the lines of genre.  He is world-weary and so sure of himself.  He minds the social hierarchy and is careful to remain distant but compliant with the at-odds Bullock sisters.  Irene loves him and Cornelia is after revenge for his initial snub.  Godfrey, as he says to an old friend, was not equipped to handle struggle in life.  His rich upbringing left him child-like.  The adult world disillusioned him.  The film feels at times something like a Frank Capra film, or Make Way for Tomorrow, with its biting sociopolitical observations.  I have to say Godfrey’s character distracted me a bit.  Not only is he never meant to be funny, his character seems above the film, as if he merely watches the Bullocks and judges them.  This is in fact what Godfrey does, but as such he belongs in another film.  Cary Grant never played a screwball character like this.  He was often the male lead and he was always as sharp and odd as the women he was up against—Katharine Hepburn, Rosalind Russle and Irene Dunne.  The fault is not Carole Lombard who is very good here; nor is it actor William Powell, but Godfrey’s.

There is nothing wrong with the film.  I suppose I liked it.  It held my attention totally from the fascinating opening titles sequence, but I must admit I was underwhelmed.  The story was not exactly predictable but the scenarios and resolution were not surprising.  That didn’t bother me, though.  What saves the film is the talent.  Carole Lombard does some of her finer work here, maybe because her character is more interesting than some of her other roles.  Irene is a girl who knows what she wants and can’t accept or understand why her feelings can’t be met by others, in this case Godfrey.  She is so good that I think a great compliment to her is that I recognized where Lucille Ball got her comic persona.  Alice Brady plays Mrs. Bullock and steals the show.

Perhaps I need to devour more screwball comedies in order to appreciate My Man Godfrey more.  I haven’t seen enough even for my own liking.  I don’t know if it’s necessary because I did have a reaction to the picture, a lukewarm one, but because the film exists in a time and genre that makes it an historical piece of work—a definitive 1930s screwball comedy—a wider understanding of the niche genre might broaden its appeal.

My Man Godfrey (1936)

Director: Gregory La Cava

Writers: Eric Hatch and Morrie Ryskind
Original novel by Eric Hatch

Stars: William Powell, Carole Lombard and Alice Brady

USA

In English

Runtime: 94 minutes

IMDB link:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0028010/

 

My Man Godfrey is available for free viewing at The Internet Archive:
http://www.archive.org/details/MyManGodfrey1936

Woman Under the Influence, A (1974)

I didn’t know what to say after watching A Woman Under the Influence.  I was stunned, silent.  There were times when I simply couldn’t look at the screen.  Watching its characters was intrusive and so painfully embarrassing that I felt safer with my hand shielding my eyes.

The film begins with a housewife, Mabel, sending her three kids away for the night with her mom.  She has planned an evening together alone with her husband, but Nick calls and cannot make it.  He works for the city and a water mane has burst.  Mabel is upset, passionately so, and checks into a bar and brings home a stranger.  Nick insists to his co-workers that Mabel is not crazy, and because we’ve only just begun to witness their life together we side with Nick.  But it becomes very clear that something is wrong with Mabel, and John Cassavetes’ brilliant film depicts a series of episodes or moments in their life together that are beyond realistic and probably the only honest and horrifying scenes of mental illness ever shot.

We all leave the house and leave the secrets inside.  The outdoors provides a temporary escape, and it is possible that those who suffer such fates are very enthusiastic in their public selves to overcompensate for the pain at home.  This is Nick.  The first time the screen became unbearable was during the long breakfast / dinner scene where he brings his coworkers home, possibly to prove to Mabel that he did work and ease the tension of her mind.  Mabel has just woken up from her night with the strange man, and after a dazy introduction with Nick’s coworker friends, Mabel and they make a huge spaghetti meal.  This is one of the best scenes I think I’ve ever seen in an American movie.  I can only compare it to the extended Christmas family meal from Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander.  This early morning dinner scene continues as if we were a spectator at the table.  Cassavetes’ direction is relentless; we get intimate in the harmonious moments, like when the unstable Mabel asks each of the coworkers their name.  She and Nick share some very odd personal glances.  It is obvious that something is going to go wrong.  When he lashes out at her for insisting a little too much to dance with one of them, the dense, terse mood was so recognizable from real life that I had to force myself to turn back to the screen.  It’s a moment where film ceases to be a series of flat images on a screen and where it becomes the present reality.

Gena Rowlands gives one of the best performances I have ever seen.  I won’t be able to express myself the way I want because I am still trying to comprehend it, but I was dumbfounded by her focus and concentration.  I won’t describe it further.  Such things need to be experienced individually, and if I oversell it the performance can’t possibly live up to my promise.  The expectation would be too great.  But I could not believe what I was seeing.  I will say that Ellen Burstyn winning for Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore falls in line with the gross negligence the Motion Picture Academy is historically famous for.  Peter Falk is great too, and his performance is quite dangerous.  I truly didn’t like his character, but I understood him.

Nick and Mabel’s relationship made sense to me, even though I hated that they are a couple.  They seem to do so much wrong and yet I don’t think they could make it alone.  Nick certainly couldn’t.  He’s the kind of mutt that clings to out of loyalty, regardless of the damage he causes.  Damage not just to Mabel but to their kids and to himself.  He seems equally unstable.  His temper is short, his force brash and violent.  His insecurities and ignorance can help no one.  Mabel has a clear illness, though I’m not sure how much of her illness stems from a chemical imbalance or is caused by the people around her.  I will admit I know nothing about true mental illness, but her parents, her father especially in one frightening later scene, her mother-in-law, herself and her family can never work harmoniously.  Everyone seems to know the right thing to do and everyone has a unique way of setting things right, but no one listens.  Mabel, who cannot focus like the average person, is treated like a patient in need but everybody else gets away with doing her in.  Worst is Nick, who may have a reason for his condition.  His reason is Mabel’s lack of stability, but he should be man enough to relinquish some control.  When he tries to help he sometimes hurts, but there are moments where these two seem to function together: the breakfast scene, or the night when Mabel returns from an extended stay in the hospital.  His direct temper, his lack of coddling her, seems to set her right for short bursts, and though the film ends with them tiding up, actually and metaphorically, they are still going to have the same problems.

John Cassavetes really needs to be commended for his screenplay.  Though his work feels very improvisational, actors Falk and Rowlands both agree that Cassavetes was a writer first.  He writes genuine scenes.  He writes long scenes, and he lets them develop through natural dialogue and then refuses to let go once the ugliness begins.  Most filmmakers would not show things so clearly because the effect it has on an audience isn’t pretty.  This isn’t a fun movie to sit through.  It was excruciating.  But it’s also brilliant, and while I was severely depressed watching it, A Woman Under the Influence was simply too good to shut off.  I remember four or five really long scenes, the dinner scene mentioned before, a spontaneous party Mabel throws her kids which is disastrous, a visit from Mabel’s doctor, Nick taking his children to the beach once their mom has been committed, and finally her return home, which is long and hopeless.  An average film would have some kind of big statement.  Either Mabel’s treatment would have cured her or she would take her own life.  Sometimes life is most terrifying when things simply don’t change.  People sometimes are beyond help, and a developed society cannot put an end to Mabel’s life.  She has to live with it.

These are my initial impressions after one viewing.  It is the first John Cassavetes film I’ve seen, and I’m eager to see more.  I would also like to revisit my thoughts with greater distance.  I feel I have not yet been lifted from the experience and my words are failing me.

One thing I do know is that I don’t want to see this movie ever again.  This is a knee-jerk reaction because as I write this I know this is a film I will study forever.  But the experience is so overwhelming that I don’t think that anytime soon I could handle it again.  It is a force.  It’s not a motion picture.  This is a living creature.  It’s not bound by anything.

Woman Under the Influence, A (1974)

Director: John Cassavetes

Writer: John Cassavetes

Stars: Gena Rowland, Peter Falk and Fred Draper

USA

In English

Runtime: 155 minutes

IMDB link:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0072417/