1999:

directed by Terry Jones
written by Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Eric Idle, Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones, and Michael Palin

Criterion #61.

This may be sacrilege but I think Monty Python’s record albums might be their most satisfying body of work. Or maybe just the TV show scripts themselves. My parents had the published scripts when I was a kid and I read them repeatedly, because certain sketches seemed to me absolutely hilarious. When much later I finally saw the shows, I was dismayed at how slapdash and underrealized they were compared to my imagination. The grimy BBC visuals never really made good on the ultimate promise of this kind of comedy: unchained, unkempt whim. (The animations did, but they stood apart; Gilliam had his own point of view, and the cartoons were there to compensate for the stasis of the sketches.) When the visual works on the TV show, it’s usually only that it embodies the standard dullardry of TV, against which the lunatic content can stand out all the more sharply; it never actually feels like it does justice to that content.

One would imagine that in a feature film, with its higher budget and greater technical flexibility, a visual style could be achieved that would come closer to the free spirit of the comedy. Terry Gilliam’s directorial work certainly heads in this direction. But Life of Brian isn’t a Terry Gilliam movie, it’s a Terry Jones movie. It’s shot rather flatly and often at what feels like an excessive distance from the action, or perhaps just with the wrong lens. It’s all framed rather like the TV show. But unlike on TV, there is nothing for the comedy to stand out against — the film stock and the sets aren’t hackneyed in some way that creates an ironic framework. It looks like a legitimate enough movie, albeit a scrappy and rather amateurish one. There’s nothing particularly funny about that.

In the commentary tracks, it is several times asserted that the camera has been intentionally set back from the action because a wide frame serves comedy: it allows the viewer to see the situation as a whole, and the interactions that make up the comedy, which would be obscured by close-ups and fancier camerawork. I disagree. Watching the movie I kept feeling like I was being ejected from the space: there’s not enough room here for you and the skit at once, so you’ll have to step outside, sorry.

Think of all the popular Saturday Night Live sketches on video that were spun off into failed, unfunny movies on film. I think it’s to do with a difference in social engagement. There’s comedy that calls on the audience’s social sense, and then there’s comedy that functions entirely within a fictional reality. SNL skits are nearly all in the former category. 99% of the entertainment value in, say, those Night at the Roxbury guys is that the performers are being so silly. It’s charismatic, titillating even, for people to be unabashedly silly. But you can only enjoy that charisma and titillation if you’re aware of the social reality of the act of performance, the space and time in which it takes place. On live TV that’s possible. In a film it’s not. Once you put an edit in your film, a cut from one shot to another filmed at a different moment, space and time expand to fill the entire imagination, and the social reality recedes to the horizon. There are no performers here, only a fiction to be enjoyed on its own terms. That left the Night at the Roxbury movie with just the remaining 1% to work with. Good luck, writers!

If Terry Jones were standing in front of me with a cloth wrapped around his head and fake teeth, braying in a stupid nasal falsetto, it might be funny, but not because the character is so amusing (what character?), only because this man is being so brazenly silly. It’s socially funny. This seems to come across on traditional two-camera TV, especially when there’s an audible studio audience to prevent the fourth wall from ever really getting filled in. But on film, such comedy stops being social, and so our response becomes more meta: what’s funny about it now is just that the film is being absurdly childish, that the filmmakers have been so cavalier as to do this instead of something proper. That too can be funny — Steve Martin’s standup generally worked this way. But it’s certainly no longer funny itself that Terry Jones is in nominal drag. (I mean, what else is new?)

I think this accounts for the diminishing returns on the Austin Powers movies. In the first one, the schtick was so unfamiliar that it suggested real characters. You could watch that as a movie, one which took place in an absurd and constantly collapsing world, but a world nonetheless. Whereas in the sequels, one was asked to be amused principally that the performers were being so funny as to dress up and talk this way. That attitude is doomed.

A little more on this. Setting aside A Night at the Roxbury, Will Ferrell has actually repeatedly shown himself able to thread the needle and successfully pull off that kind of social/brazenness comedy even in slick high-budget films, which seems to go against my theory. But I would argue that it’s because Will Ferrell, unlike Mike Myers — but like, say, Bob Hope or Woody Allen or the Marx Brothers or early Steve Martin — is not merely a real live person who gets silly in character, but is in fact an established clown persona with a consistent fictional m.o., and it is the clown character “Will Ferrell” who is funny in movies when he plays transparently stupid make-believe. Whereas Mike Myers is no sort of clown. He’s just Mike Myers, that Canadian guy who pretends to be various different flimsy characters. So when he wants credit for being so uninhibited and goofy as to play at being Fat Bastard or whatever, it just seems kind of sad and needy.

I won’t say that the Pythons ever seem needy, per se. But Terry Jones and Eric Idle and Michael Palin aren’t really clowns. They have no personae. They’re just themselves, having fun. So when they do a ridiculous 10-year-old’s-make-believe “character voice” in a feature film, there is definitely a sense of a comedy gap, at least for me. John Cleese is the closest to having established a clown persona — call this persona “Basil Fawlty,” if you like, or just “John Cleese” — so there is more of a cushion for his broadness. Graham Chapman doesn’t have any clown persona at all — which is to say I have the least sense that I know him — but to my mind, he always came the closest of any of them to actually acting, or at least committing to the material, which is the other way out of the bind. It certainly helps Life of Brian that, of all of them, he’s the lead. Even his brief appearance as throwaway silly lisping character “Biggus Dickus” is more satisfying than a lot of other stuff here. It feels like it seeks actual footing.

Is Life of Brian a satire? Well, mildly, at times, but I think overrated as such. It doesn’t have a cohesive point of view, only a sort of accumulated and diffuse one, which I would characterize as “conventionally irritable about people generally.” This attitude forms a longstanding foundation for British humor and for the meek American types to whom it appeals: “Other people: am I right? And all the difficulties they pose? Don’t get me started!” For something to be a proper satire, it has to do more than just commiserate with the choir.

People tend to remember this movie as consisting of the “followers of Brian” material. But this comprises only three scenes, which run from about minute 50 to minute 70 of the movie. That’s about 20% of the 90 minute runtime. It’s some of the best material in the film. It’s about the only material that has anything to say about religion.

Though in some ways even that’s off the mark. The target of the satire in those scenes isn’t really religious at all; it’s the drive to subordinate oneself, and “groupthink,” which is no more characteristic of religion than of any other sociological phenomenon (including comedy). Brian tells the crowd to think for themselves and they assent in enthusiastic unison. The joke is good but it has little to do with Christianity. Christ never really preached that people should think for themselves, did he? He preached that people should find charity in their hearts. Which frankly is not really what this movie does. The movie cheerfully throws the first stone at a herd of straw men. And that’s fine for comedy, which is allowed to be petty — who doesn’t hate dealing with stupid people, after all? They’re totally infuriating, I agree! — but it’s not really a trenchant critique of anything.

From the commentaries I gather that the writer/performers would happily agree that the satirical target of the movie is people generally, not religion and certainly not the life of Christ. And yet there it is: Monty Python’s Life of Brian. Something to do with something to do with the life of Christ has to be going on here.

Philosophical exercise: watch this fascinating and uncomfortable bit of television history and try to see validity in what the opposition is saying. (It’s really tough! But not impossible.) To my mind, the crux of the debate is in the Christianists’ repeated assertions that they can’t for a moment take seriously the claim that this film isn’t a burlesque of the life of Christ, since it so obviously is. They’re wrong, but you can’t blame them.

Even to a fan, what the movie as a whole unavoidably seems to be saying is that this biblical milieu is a particularly fruitful one for the Monty Python treatment. They have here somehow found a uniquely deserving subject for their trademark exasperated absurdism. This is the blatant subtext.

But it turns out that none of the writers ever really claimed this, at least not explicitly. It emerges from the commentary that the decision to write this movie was actually arrived at only gradually, haphazardly, by the group as a whole, Ouija-style. Discussing the development process, they each say things like “we just got the sense that there was rich, unexplored comedic material here, and that’s what we look for.” But that only shows that the shared impulse was subconscious and uncritical. Buried inside “we just got the sense” are all the ideas and assumptions that confront the viewer.

These are all men for whom religious iconography is completely peripheral to their lives. “Biblical stuff,” to them, is just one more bundle of arbitrary inherited tropes, exactly the sort of thing that is fodder for parody. The provocation of the movie is not so much that it has anything to say; it’s just that it arises cheerfully out of this mindset, which has more to do with their various upbringings than it does with thoughts they have. It’s kind of a generational statement more than a philosophical statement: “This bible stuff really and truly looks like fair game to us,” it says. It doesn’t really say much else. And I think that’s what was actually troubling about it to the older generation — and, incidentally, what remains problematic about it for me as a viewer seeking entertainment — that it is driven by nothing much beyond a desire to shrug off the old anxieties: “Who says we can’t make this movie?” And, sure enough, they can. But what kind of a movie is that?

Nowadays there’s a lot of “ironic racism” as comedy — Sarah Silverman and the like, you know the stuff I mean — the function of which is to cater to the audience’s anxieties about being racist — anxieties that are of course being drummed up constantly these days. A clownish effigy of “racism” is established so that everyone can feel the relief of recognizing that at least they’re not that racist! And then people come to enjoy playacting the clown role, because they associate it with relief and relief makes them giddy. What I don’t like about this phenomenon is that it only has comedic value in relation to the assumed anxiety. If an audience member is comfortable with him/herself, then there’s often no actual humor in it. And that’s what seems to be at work with Life of Brian. The movie only really works if you agree that it was rather naughty to make it.

On the other hand, I do agree: it was rather naughty to make it. And the relevant anxieties persist, even now, even past the age of South Park. And it continues to be valuable for there to be signposts like this movie out there, saying, essentially, “Look how close you can come to blasphemy without doing anything wrong! Even a movie like this is perfectly respectful of Christ and Christianity, so I’m sure anything you say won’t be a problem. Real spirituality is a lot more resilient than that; real things always are. So relax.”

So, y’know, maybe my real problem with the movie just goes back to Terry Jones and the mediocre filmmaking: at times it’s clear that, on the surface, the movie wants to justify itself as being a burlesque of Life of Christ movies, of Hollywood biblical epics and their goofy tropes, just as Holy Grail was a burlesque of medieval adventure cliches. See the Ben Hur title styling above. Properly done, this is quite a different thing from burlesquing Christ himself; only Cecil B. DeMille should take offense. But it simply hasn’t been properly done. The viewer can’t tell the difference because the movie doesn’t look like anything in particular.

I’ve had a hard time writing this entry because I don’t know what I think of this movie.

Ultimately what we have here is a comedy cobbled out of assorted sketch ideas, some of which have a superficial satirical impulse but not a coordinating one, set in a New Testament milieu with very carefully calibrated defiance of convention but to no particular greater purpose… and all presented slightly flat, owing to insensitivity to the film medium. A bunch of the sketch ideas are good. A bunch are just middling.

For all these reasons, for my part, I think Monty Python and the Holy Grail is a much funnier and more satisfying movie. Much. (Meaning of Life just doesn’t work, at least as I remember it; the better production values end up making the black humor chaos feel menacing and cheerless.) Holy Grail takes place in a fantasy setting and simultaneously feels like it’s held together with tape, both of which help keep it within a spirit of play. It’s like there’s not enough room for anything to fall flat. Limitations, which is to say appeals to the imagination, go a long way in making the audience’s engagement broader and freer. That movie functions much closer to the space of the Terry Gilliam animations.

I think people tend to esteem Life of Brian more highly than Holy Grail — or highly at all — principally because the things it seems to touch on are actually important. Spiritual leadership, politics, ideological hypocrisy. That kind of stuff puts off sparks of intelligence just by showing up. But I think mostly it just shows up. And that’s fine! I’m glad it’s not a message movie or a self-important satire. I much prefer blithe comedy, which is what this is. The problem is solely that the comedy is, you know, hit and miss, and more than a little sloppy.

The non sequitur minute inside an alien spaceship is funnier to tell about than it is to watch. I’m glad it’s in there so that I can know about it as a thing that exists in a movie.

The whole movie is kind of that way. Kudos to them for making a comedy life of Jesus. I think my final word is: it’s fun that this happened and exists. But watching it might be beside the point.

Having poked around online I see that the above is very much a minority opinion. Well, take that, majority!

By the way, this isn’t some kind of cranky grown-up “you needed to see it when you were younger” thing. I did see it when I was younger, and felt the same. Albeit in fewer words. I thought it seemed like it had some vague agenda that was getting in the way of its being any fun. I figured it must be trying to do some kind of grownup thing that I didn’t care about. So I was actually kind of hoping that now as a grownup I would get more out of it. But I didn’t.

The commentary is by all five surviving Pythons, recorded separately and then edited into two tracks, one with Terry Jones, Terry Gilliam, and Eric Idle, one with John Cleese and Michael Palin. But none of them are talking to each other; the groupings seem simply to be for convenience. Feeling kind of ho-hum about the movie itself, I found more interest in these commentaries, which are pretty good. There’s something very odd and interesting in contemplating the actual personalities of these six men of rather different temperaments who were committed to being professionally silly together. It’s not quite as rich as John vs. Paul vs. George vs. Ringo but there’s something of that kind of juice to it if you let there be. I especially liked the on-set BBC documentary (I told you, I always love on-set footage!) which includes a segment where they all talk quasi-candidly about one another. I find it intriguing.

This is the third commentary I’ve spent with Terry Gilliam. By the way, he spends most of the time saying unsarcastically that Terry Jones was absolutely right to put the camera in all these places that he, Terry Gilliam, would never have wanted to put it. And very obviously feeling the opposite. This is Terry’s way.

Once you start seeing people’s behavior in terms of anxiety, you can’t shut it off. It’s everywhere!

Other stuff on there include the trailer (is that Morgan Freeman?) some correctly deleted scenes, and some amusing radio ads by the Pythons’ mothers (and Palin’s dentist, which apparently is not a joke). Not included is this interesting audio document, which didn’t come to light until more recently.

Relationship to the preceding movie. Hm. Tough this time. I guess they’re both about adult children of unappreciative mothers.

Apart from the songs, the score is essentially deadpan “movie music” music. It does the job and is helpfully well-bred and professional in a movie that can use all the surface professionalism it can get. It is by Geoffrey Burgon. I would normally have selected the end credits, but it’s an instrumental of “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life,” which of course is by Eric Idle, whereas I’m trying to highlight the score composer with these selections. So our selection is the prologue, which accompanies the Star of Bethlehem and the journey of the three kings. The yelp of Brian’s mother falling over at the end is, in a sense, the punchline. The Prologue.

Apparently this preceded the feature on its first UK release.

2000: 2013:

written and directed by Ingmar Bergman

Criterion #60. Autumn Sonata.

Find your porn name! Here’s how:
1. Take the title of the last Ingmar Bergman movie you watched.

(Summer Interlude. Wild Strawberry. Fanny Alexander. Saraband. And of course “Shame.”)

This is a through-the-wringer movie where people devastate one another. It belongs to the “interpersonal emotional exorcism” genre, one of the leading dramatic forms of the 20th century.

When I was younger I was cynical about the prevalence of this genre and its characteristic sights and sounds. It seemed like just so much crocodile angst. In 2000, walking out of the theater after True West, one of my companions dismissed it, annoyed, saying something like “it was just another one of these plays where civility devolves into histrionics.” That stuck with me as a succinct expression of the aesthetic skepticism I had always felt.

Well, that was a long time ago. In the intervening years, I’ve become a bit of an expert in adult angst. And it turns out it’s no myth. There actually is such a thing as needing help achieving emotional release. As a kid, of course, I could hardly imagine such a condition. The possibility of bawling was always all too close at hand; I was hard at work on being more repressed. The idea that anybody might need to be guided back to their pain and tears was as absurd as the idea that people might need to be guided back to peeing.

But sometimes that’s just what they need. So now I understand why there are hundreds upon hundreds of plays and movies about people peeing, peeing, peeing like they’ve never peed before. “Mother, look at me! Look at me! All my life you’ve denied that I have to pee! But look! Look at me go! See how you like it now!” It turns out that as one ages and tightens there can arise a need for assistance.

That, it seems to me, is the value of brutal, painful, dramatic catharsis. A movie is a safe way to have tears wrung from you, which creates an opportunity to smuggle out some of your own, the ones that have been weighing you down. At several points while watching Autumn Sonata my eyes were wet with empathetic pain and something like shame: the feeling that the hard emotions in the movie were awfully close to home for me, and embarrassing and/or therapeutic as such (the two are nearly the same thing).

But as Bergman’s anger and/or self-disgust ascended into more and more outlandishly vindictive extremes, I found my empathy and my eyes drying up. This was someone else’s catharsis, not mine.

In fact, for all its artistic nuance and obvious intellectual class, I’m not even sure it’s a particularly enlightened or purposeful catharsis. It seems like it’s made of private bitterness that hadn’t yet mellowed enough to be molded, tempered, countered, and thus turned into something useful to an audience. There are places where the self-pity becomes too pure, which is to say too grotesque, to see any other way.

Now, I should acknowledge that I personally have, in my adulthood, already managed to break the seal on my own pit of shame and resentment, analogous to the stuff unleashed by the two characters in this movie. So I am not necessarily in the market to be shocked into self-recognition by art; I’m already too familiar with this territory. And facing it is hard and a big deal, so for a movie to show it being hard and a big deal seems right and worthwhile. But for those who haven’t yet broken that seal, such a movie ought to encourage them to take the risk, or at least give them some sense of what it’s worth. Autumn Sonata is all about the ordeal of admitting your pain but seems quite pessimistic as to whether therapeutic change is actually possible as a result. The ending brings the audience to the question of hope, but scrupulously avoids answering it, remaining grim-faced. In fact it strongly hints that daring to express their inner feelings has only served to further alienate these characters, both as individuals and in relation to one another.

I, and I think the entire psychological tradition all the way back to Freud, would disagree that that’s how things work. People can heal. So why is Bergman insistent on keeping things unrelievedly bleak?

Answer: because that was the state of mind in which he made it. The screenplay is the expression of a single emotional state, not a development. The film’s universe is static: pain is felt, relief is speculated about but never realized. According to the Criterion essay, in Bergman’s original treatment of the script, he wrote that at the end of the exorcism, “the daughter gives birth to the mother.” That sounds like a much healthier vision. But he apparently couldn’t figure out what that would entail, so instead he ends it where it began. That’s a spiritual block as much as a creative one. And, you know, I can find spiritual blocks sympathetic as such.

But that’s behind-the-scenes information. Within the movie there’s no such excuse. The movie is following the playbook called “I Know You Don’t Want This But You Need It,” mercilessly harping on things that make you feel bad… but it climaxes in the extreme register of a revenge fantasy, and then abruptly turns aside, petulantly saying, “well, actually, maybe you didn’t need it.” Which left me feeling like, “well dammit, maybe I didn’t.”

It is exquisitely put together, with many beautifully sensitive details, and the acting is very fine. It is art, and no mistaking. But it goes over the top. It’s ultimately unfair, unkind to its characters, and thus to its audience.

That all said (!):

I got the sense that this emotional imbalance, this dysfunction of the cathartic pattern, was not actually precious to Bergman. I got the sense that what he really cared about was just the premise — a mother and daughter confronting one another — and the unkindness and pessimism were simply what his subconscious presented to him in the course of trying to work out the dramatic consequences. And this makes it easier for me to accept that it ends up wrong, because, in a way, that’s incidental. The movie is actually front-weighted. The exposition of the characters as they present themselves in ordinary life is the part it loves best. You can feel it. Despite the red-eyed melodrama of what follows, that stuff’s not actually the point.

Put another way: the subtler first half of the movie is excellent, and the noisier, more hurtful second half of the movie can be read as the mishandled denouement.

That’s what it’s about, by the way: 40-ish Liv Ullmann is the daughter, 60-ish Ingrid Bergman is the mother, and they vent at each other about how they’re each damaged. This Be The Verse.

Also on the scene is a sister with some kind of terrible degenerative disease, just to up the misery. Mission accomplished!

I guess it’d be fair to say that I’m very torn. Your response will depend on whether you can just let this stuff slide as a kind of poetry or are going to take it seriously. If you can let it slide, by all means watch. If you’re going to take it to heart, beware: this isn’t a happy person’s movie. I think I basically said the same about The Seventh Seal: “that’s aesthetically all well and good but how does this morbidity benefit anyone?”

Autumn Sonata is very beautiful to look at; at least on the new restored Blu-ray it is. The cinematography by Sven Nykvist is painterly, evoking Vermeer and probably other specific artists I can’t identify. The lighting is remarkably lovely throughout. Cutaways and flashbacks get dreamy expressionist lighting, with whole scenes swimming in red or brown or white, but where other movies handle such effects cartoonishly, here the dreamy scenes are just as tasteful and fully inhabited as the more naturalistic lighting of the main action. The movie is, just like a Vermeer, simultaneously modest and luxurious to look at. Its beauty makes the best possible case for its dramatic concerns. Maybe the beauty can stand alone.

Probably not the whole way through, but for a scene or two it can. The scene when daughter and mother play Chopin at each other is really wonderful and stands well apart from any of my reservations about what comes later. One of the best and most sensitive uses of onscreen classical music that I’ve ever seen.

While I’m on the subject: The “sonata” in the title refers to the form of the drama itself, not to any actual piece. (I thought to link to Wikipedia’s “Sonata Form” article here but it’s too confusing to be helpful. So just trust me.) I take Bergman to mean that there are the two subjects, daughter and mother, and a third element, connective tissue, in the form of the crippled sister. The two subjects get their exposition in a minor key, then everyone goes to bed and the nightmarish development starts, which of course complicates and troubles all the material and ultimately brings it to crisis. Then we have a brief straight recapitulation of the opening situation, with the two subjects now linked but unresolved and with a stronger feeling of tragedy. The husband provides a stately intro and corresponding coda. (The Chopin prelude played onscreen has a similar minor-key emotional trajectory but no second theme and no development.)

This is my own analysis; Criterion doesn’t help on this count, which they ought to have. You might argue that this strong formal conception contradicts my claim above that the ultimate trajectory isn’t really the point. But I think it bears it out: in looking for a way to make his movie work, Bergman took refuge in a fatalistic formal pattern, rather than have to resolve any of the emotional problems on their own terms. He just wanted the art to work out, not the characters.

In a way the movie arises out of the inherent natures of famous actresses Liv and Ingrid. The movie can be seen as simply a study of the tension between their two types. Both performances wonderfully live up to this vision, all the way up to the peaks of intensity, but especially in the more restrained passages. You could perhaps edit out some of the most extreme stuff and make a quieter and subtler movie, a less insistently painful movie, that I would admire unequivocally. (I mean, you couldn’t really. But close to it.)

Ingrid Bergman had a real actor in her, it turns out. It feels as though she is tapping into a level of honesty never previously called for. That alone could be enough to recommend this movie. Of course, I’ve only ever seen her in her most glamorized and impersonal Hollywood roles, so my surprise may be unfair to her. In a pleasant 1981 interview included on the disc (which seems to have been previously unavailable), she mentions how shooting Casablanca was completely infuriating because nobody had decided what the plot was: since nobody could tell her what her character felt, she didn’t know what to play; so, she says, when she watches it now she is dismayed to see her face with absolutely no expression on it. This gave me some thoughts about how Casablanca is a magical iconic film for exactly this reason, that it is an expressionless dream in which surreal Hollywood emotions, purified and unimpeded by any intentions, have complete sway — but that’s a thought for another time.

This disc has so much extra content on it you wouldn’t believe. I wanted to get this all down before I ventured into it and skewed my impression. I suspect that after spending 5 more hours with this movie I’ll be brainwashed into loving it. Well, I’ll be back after the horizontal line to report.

Kinda.

The three-and-a-half hour behind-the-scenes documentary was wonderful. It made me inordinately happy. It has nothing to prove and nothing to say and so for this long span of time – more than twice the length of the movie – one just gets a sense of the people, the atmosphere, the work to be done, the feeling of being there. All of which are so gratifying to me. It put me in mind of my most rewarding days working in theater. It had a very strong psychological effect on me; it’s a long low-key social immersion in another reality. I always enjoy making-of footage in this same way, and this was just an endless feast of it. I didn’t get tired. In fact at the end of nearly 4 hours I was still able to feel disappointed that there wasn’t more, that various other scenes from the movie weren’t documented.

I suppose it could be compared in scope to the giant behind-the-scenes documentary spread across the Lord of the Rings DVDs, which taken all together is even longer, but in that case the immensity of the production necessitated a more traditional editorial assemblage, with talking heads and a series of “topics” and background music and so on. Here we simply see the footage, in order, from each day. It seems to have been edited for interest, but not for structure.

I know that in reality I still haven’t actually met Ingmar or Sven or Ingrid or Liv. But I’ve done something. I’ve met them more than you have. (Until you watch it. Then we’ll be even.)

Spending this kind of time on set also revealed the answer to my question above about how this movie benefited me. The primary benefit is between the lines: the movie is wonderful access to the carpets and clothes and soft presence of this world. That includes the relationships, the conflicts, the personalities, the worldview. The light. It includes everything except for the scripted confrontations and lines of dialogue and formal aspirations of the screenplay. The action is just a framework on which this valuable space and time and feeling is hung, not the other way.

In a scene of rehearsal, we see Ingmar talking about subtext to the actors and then adding, “But I’m just a hack compared to Chekhov.” And that’s right, he is. The play is frustrating. The show is good.

Yes, the movie’s feelings, which is to say Ingmar’s feelings, aren’t quite constructive or fair. But they’re still feelings. Watching this film is to be surrounded by feelings, real ones, and that is a very valuable thing. While I’m in it I might be dissatisfied about the particulars, but I’m dissatisfied about lots of things all the time. How wonderful to be dissatisfied while immersed in feeling.

The set of an Ingmar Bergman movie is a particularly satisfying place for me to visit, but I probably would enjoy a continuous film festival of any strangers’ home movies. Can that be arranged?

(Oh right, of course it can! For a second I forgot how things worked nowadays. I’m not sure why they work this way, but they do.)

Anyway: going straight from that undeniable document to Peter Cowie’s standard scholarific commentary just throws into relief how cramped such stuff always is. Trying to work from Bergman and Bergman’s respective memoirs, interviews, etc., our commentator talks about stuff like “tensions on set,” in standard pat phrases that purport to be historically insightful. “But,” I think, “I was just moments ago on the set, and can report that whatever was going on wasn’t anything like what the phrase ‘tensions on set’ sounds like.” Admittedly, any really unpleasant moments had been edited out. But more important is that having been inside the reality of that space, I retained a strong intuition about how wrong that whole mode of talking about the creative process is. Our simple narrativizing minds want to hear that Ingrid Bergman and Ingmar Bergman either did or didn’t get along well, or that “there was an incident” or that “they fought over” something. But that reality of the situation, as of any social situation, is that no description of it can be completely true, and hardly any story is even true enough to be worth telling.

It was a real place with real people in it and we all know how big and sloppy a thing that is. What I saw was: Ingrid Bergman asked Ingmar a question and then he answered, and her eyes were down and then they came up, and then he smiled, and he slouched a little while he was strolling around to talk to the other guy, and so on and so on ad infinitum, mountains of actual evidence with no obvious significance or name, to interpret which is the business of life. This is the attitude that films invite us to bring to them; why can’t we bring it to the reality from which they spring? Why would I ever trust someone’s interpretation of a film if I can see how bluntly and presumptuously they interpret reality?

I’ve worked on theatrical productions that came out either good or bad, and sometimes people fought and sometimes they didn’t, and sometimes people felt tense and sometimes they didn’t. But I know that there is no simple way of connecting those dots, or even drawing those dots. The experiences are infinitely complex and come down to nuances of personality that great artists like Ingmar Bergman spend whole careers trying to shed even a little light on. Whereas academics try to corral “evidence” and “back it up” with “citations” and “argument.” Someone’s memoir is a terrible source of evidence about social nuance. Yes, often it’s all we’ve got. Let’s try to be frank in those situations and recognize how little it really is.

For one of those commentaries it’s a pretty good one. It comes from 1995, from the original laserdisc. The other features are new to the 2013 edition.

Apart from the monster-mentary, they also include the Ingrid Bergman interview mentioned above (I inserted those lines about Casablanca because they seemed to belong up there, even though it’s above my horizontal divider), which is a nice 39 minutes touching on her whole career. There’s a shortish Criterion-produced Liv Ullmann interview from just last year — she looks fine — in which she contributes a bit to the “did they fight or what?” storytelling but without overstating anything. It’s basically sweet. And then there’s an introduction to the film for TV broadcast as taped by Ingmar in 2003, in which he dwells on the question of Ingrid’s difficulty. Based on the other stuff on the disc I get the sense that he’s overstating it. It probably should come as no surprise that Ingmar Bergman seems like he might have been a bit emotional and potentially touchy. And maybe the rest of them were too. So big deal. Artists are like that; that’s their thing.

Sven Nykvist comes off as awfully calm and un-touchy. Boy, he was really good.

So, in sum: The disc is great, and I don’t know that I necessarily love the movie but I was certainly rewarded spending this time with it. Even if it is a Dagmar Downer.

There is no original music, just some classical selections. The choice here has to be the onscreen Chopin performance — not Liv’s, which is unsteady and anxious, but Ingrid’s, which is cold and fixed. This is the high point of the movie. Both performances are actually by pianist Käbi Laretei, Ingmar’s ex-wife, who can be seen advising in the documentary and holding everyone to very high standards for believability in the use of the piano. Bless her! It was worth it. Chopin: Prelude in A minor, op. 28/2.

Back at #30 (M, remember?) I declared “disc one” of the Criterion soundtrack anthology to be complete. 30 tracks later I think we’ve gone a bit over 74 minutes for disc two, but I forgot to keep track of this aspect of my obsessive project until now so what are you going to do. Some CDs hold up to 80 minutes, right? Sure. Anyway, 30 is a nice number so it’s time for a recap. We’ll do one again at 90, etc. Here’s the table for relistening convenience, like last time:

Yeah, looks like your “disc two” is 75:18, so you’re going to need a pretty fancy CD burner. Oh well. Luckily nobody, including me, even briefly considered doing that. What an incredibly annoying and unlistenable CD this would be. Though there’s plenty of good stuff here.

Standouts are:

34. Andrei Rublev
44. The Red Shoes
48. Black Orpheus
49. Nights of Cabiria
51. Brazil
57. Charade

Yes, this was a long entry, but it was a serious movie and a really freaking long disc so that’s how much came out of me.

2000:

directed by Liliana Cavani
screenplay by Liliana Cavani and Italo Moscati (in collaboration with Barbara Alberti and Amedeo Pagani)
story by Liliana Cavani, Barbara Alberti and Amedeo Pagani

(Some sources have it that the proper “original” title is the Italian Il portiere di notte, I guess because it was produced in Italy, but to my mind that’s not sensible. The dialogue is all in English and so are the title cards.)

Criterion #59.

“Night porter? I hardly know her!”
(Oh, wait a minute, I do know her! From when I used to rape her in that concentration camp. Right.)

This movie sucks.

It’s not trash because the material is offensive. It’s trash because if the material weren’t offensive, there’d be no movie. Being able to épater le bourgeoisie is meaningless; anyone can if they want to. Everyone’s got an asshole. The question is not whether you can manage to take a picture of it. The questions are 1) why you’re taking it, and 2) how good the picture is.

As for 2, this movie sucks. It’s completely static and undramatic. It doesn’t live properly. Very bad looping of worthless dialogue. Clumsy, plodding pacing and editing. A general and constant impression of second-rateness.

As for 1:

First of all, let me digress and say that I don’t much like the term “exploitation film.” People who use it tend to specify what’s being exploited, but not what it’s being exploited for, which is just as important to the concept of exploitation. The implied answer, I guess, is: “for attention, which equals money.” But that’s rarely the psychological reality. Often, in fact, the purveyors of such stuff are profoundly fond of the thing they are selling, and eager to get it out there. Not cynical at all, and certainly not indifferent to the questions of degradation that the term “exploitation” is intended to expose; it’s just that they truly don’t think that what they’re doing is damaging to anyone. Critics need to remember that pornographers really do approve of pornography, and very often the subjects don’t perceive themselves as being exploited or degraded either. So “exploitation” is sort of a leading term, part of a missionary moralism that tries to save e.g. pornographers and their subjects and their audience from a system that none of the parties involved think is bad for them. Only their critic-saviors do. It’s sort of a Marxist term that’s too often used as an aesthetic term.

(Alternately, it’s sometimes just used to mean “low budget film,” with the rather offensive implication that when a major studio tries to profit from a movie about X, that’s simply the upstanding world of business, but when the little guy tries to profit from a movie about X, that’s an attempt to “exploit” the popularity of X to make a quick and dirty buck: sleazy coattail riding. Thus the same term can be Marxist and elitist.)

That all said, I do feel like this movie is exploitative. It chooses intentionally offensive material as a way to win prestige and attention. I don’t much hold with the concept of “taste,” when I can help it. But it’s all too obvious that this is quite deliberately “tasteless.” If you just imagine this same movie with the swastikas removed — imagine that the guy was just a run-of-the-mill peacetime rapist — it becomes instantly transparent how absurd and pretentious all the languorous self-seriousness is.

I found it immensely boring. The only interest it held was a kind of bated breath about how offensive it would, presumably, reportedly, eventually be. But you have to watch for a whole damn hour before it gets to the Nazi sex. Yawn! And who are these characters apart from being the figurines in this scandalous tableau? They’re nobody. What am I supposed to care about other than my own sophistication?

It’s a narrow fantasy of “difficult material” just as pornography is a narrow fantasy of sexuality.

Yeah. Hm. That gives me a thought. So actually, I take it back. Maybe it’s not necessarily exploitative after all. I can imagine it as uncynical, as just clueless and asinine. It feels a bit like “dark” comic books often do: like hopelessly constricted minds doing their best impression of going exploring.

It’s possible that the filmmakers really didn’t understand the difference between sadomasochistic sex fantasy and actual torture.

My inner Herr Doktor Freud says: the people who get turned on saying stuff like “I’ve been a very very naughty girl” are the ones who can only conceive of freedom in terms of disobedience, because they have a complex: they can’t help but constantly project a disapproving authority above themselves. This projected authority is an imaginary party to all their acts and will thus figure in their fantasies, in various guises. This movie is about Nazis who are just such projections, Freudian functionaries. That’s considered tasteless not because the emotional impulse is horrific — it’s not — but because there were also real Nazis who killed real people, people still remembered by the living… So for the sake of a publicly exhibited movie, why couldn’t you get your Freudian function fulfilled elsewhere, just as a courtesy? For example, how about a movie about a meek young director and a viciously authoritarian censor who suppresses her film, who have hot sex when they meet 20 years later? I would be fine with that. (Though it too would be super-boring if it were made as badly as this.)

So yeah, this is sort of like fan fic from a gross webpage with a black background and flame gifs. Fifty Shades of Gruppenführer. (Don’t go googling! I’m sure it’s out there.)

The saddest thing, the greatest offense, is that when I make the effort to really give the material the broadest possible benefit of the doubt, I recognize that the scenario does have real potential. The subject is private meaning, private emotion, which does not respect taboo. We must hole up with our private selves for as long as we can until we are inevitably hunted down by society’s unfeeling concepts of good and evil, right and wrong, guilt and justice. And Stockholm syndrome/S&M are categories of emotion that are at least somewhat problematic to most people: the more taboo the material feels to the audience, the more urgent our sense of that conflict. Okay. I see the rationale. But this movie does not have anything even close to the skill necessary to make good on that potential. It’s like the sophomore drama society, in way over its head.

They wrote it too. Script sample. After the night porter has sex with his giggling former victim, he goes down to the hotel bar, opens a beer, and soliliquizes: “When all seems lost, something unexpected happens. Ghosts take shape in the mind. How can one pull away from it? This phantom with a voice and a body: it is a part of oneself.”

That shit is deep! And mad challenging, yo, ’cause he’s a Nazi, what?

The photography’s okay. Dirk Bogarde seems to be trying very hard to make something of this, and Charlotte Rampling is, obviously, very game. In the abstract it’s admirable professionalism. But I didn’t watch it in the abstract.

Ties to the preceding movie: 1. Yet again, camera = rape. 2. The Magic Flute, recording conducted by Karl Böhm.

I’ll admit that some of my anger may be Criterion inflation. This is in many ways just a B movie with pretensions. If I saw it with no expectations in the course of screening random Italian films from 1974, I might say, “That wasn’t for me, but it was certainly weird and daring.” Maybe. But I would still have wished it had been a short, instead. (And a smart, too.)

It’s like a performance artist whose act is lying naked on stage for 2 hours, and who keeps peeking up to see if you’re shocked yet. I freaking get it, all right? What else are you going to do???

This movie can go night port itself.

Music by Daniele Paris. Here are the end titles. The music runs 30 seconds too long for the actual credit roll so some black leader is appended. Thus the movie manages to be clumsy all the way to the bitter end.

Furthermore, the editor screwed up and cut out a few seconds of music by mistake, leaving a jolt in the soundtrack. I have restored them from the main titles, which use the same recording (though with sound effects, so you’ll hear subtle traffic sounds for 2 seconds). You’re welcome.

So it would seem that Liliana Cavani is a lesbian. Gauche as it may be to admit this: that offers me a way of making some sense of this thing. From her perspective, this is all allegory; not just the Nazi and the prisoner but the man and the woman too. The real story is elsewhere.

1999: (out of print since 4/10)

directed by Michael Powell
story and screenplay by Leo Marks

Criterion #58.

I kept thinking of what Martin Scorsese said about Powell’s The Red Shoes, so here it is again:

What I like about it sometimes: it seems out of control, that their emotions are out of control. Not the characters but the people who made the film. That the passion is out of control and I think that’s something that’s very rare. Something very rare is created when that occurs.

This movie is also certainly something rare. As with The Red Shoes, the most striking thing is that it was made at all, in this particular spirit. Michael Powell must have been a very strange person. This madman slasher movie feels like a plea or a confession, like something fraught. Just the opposite of Hitchcock and Psycho, to which it is sometimes compared, apparently. Hitchcock was never, ever out of control.

(Well, I can’t speak for Frenzy because I’ve never seen it. Word is it’s very bad. From what I gather, it actually has more in common with Peeping Tom than Psycho does, but I may be wrong about that.)

Nowadays, the sicko serial killer genre has been very well established for decades. All such movies belong comfortably to a tradition; when someone makes a new one, it’s essentially a ritual act within that tradition, and thus unremarkable. But Peeping Tom came first, so it feels peculiarly purposeful. They created it deliberately, out of the infinite field of all potential movies. They really meant it. That’s why it remains creepy today: not because of the creepy goings-on, but because of its free and fervent interest in them.

I’ve said before that I generally find cheap, trashy movies much scarier than glossy prestige movies, because I do not trust their judgment. Well, Peeping Tom is certainly not itself seedy; rather, it’s a classy production that is determinedly fixated on seediness. But that ends up being similarly distressing. It is untrustworthy at one remove; it is dressed normally and speaking intelligently, but is making very strange conversation, all about madness. “I tell you this because, as an artist, I think you’ll understand.” Its intentions feel composed but unhinged.

So in the “will he or won’t he kill?” moments, whenever our protagonist drifts into a Peter Lorre trance while in conversation with an unsuspecting woman, I experienced a special kind of unease, different from anything in, say, Silence of the Lambs. In ordinary thrillers, I definitely squirm when the hook is put in me, but I know why I’ve been hooked: for the spice and the savor of it. I’m comfortable with that, within reason; that’s fair play. But at several points in Peeping Tom I had a more itchy and uncertain feeling, like maybe someone had only hooked me as bait for something else, whatever he was personally fishing for.

This is a portrait of a cameraman = voyeur = sociopath = murderer, made with an emphasis not so much on the horror as on the pathos of those equations. I’m not sure that I think those equations make much sense outside the confines of a horror movie. But this movie certainly takes its ideas quite seriously. It is a passable murder movie, but it is principally a psychology movie, an apparently heartfelt and sometimes intensely sentimental one. As such it’s very, very odd.

Psycho is a great murder movie that makes a hollow gesture toward being a psychology movie. I basically don’t believe in Norman’s rationale and never have; as far as I’m concerned, Norman Bates is just a type of villain schtick. Yes, each kink in the psychoanalysis at the end of the movie makes some sense, but it’s like three kinks too elaborate for the creepshow of the movie. If you take the time to follow the explanation and really think it through, Norman’s pathology as described is fascinatingly layered and interesting. But I’ll be frank with you: I had never fully and seriously thought it through until just now, because the movie doesn’t actually give a crap; it just knows it needs to unload that stuff so that the recipe will work out.

Lines like “Mother isn’t quite herself today” are only cute; they’re not a serious indication of anything. A Psycho that took Norman’s pain seriously would be quite a different beast. A harder movie to deliver, I think. The Silence of the Lambs devotes much more screen time to explicating Buffalo Bill’s mind, but it still comes off as mechanical (and/or prurient) rather than rich and humane and difficult. Our standard sympathies are never actually troubled. Peeping Tom really sincerely tries to care about what it’s like to be crazy. So it’s a little crazy.

In the Joseph Stefano screenplay for Psycho, after the psychologist is done explaining Norman, we read:

Lila begins to weep softly, for Mary, for Arbogast, for Norman, for all the destroyed human beings of this world.

But that sure doesn’t happen in the movie! (Hitchcock: “Who said anything about human beings?”) It happens in Peeping Tom.

Phase two of this response. Because I’m willing to go deeper if that’s what’s required of me! (Hint: nothing is required of me.)

Let’s return to the Duane Hall reference. The joke of the scene, essentially, is that Duane is obsessively troubled by his own ordinary capacity for perverse thoughts (e.g. driving into traffic) and unable to make peace with this part of his mind because he has been brought up in an emotionally-repressed WASP household. When a Jewish writer appears in his life, Duane imagines that this person will be more emotionally open and sophisticated, and so sees in Woody an opportunity to establish a sense of his own social normalcy, something that his family cannot provide. But the joke’s on him, because actually Woody is more terrified of Duane’s perverse thoughts than he is, because he is a completely fear-based person and in the Hall household is already completely preoccupied with his sense of being on hostile ground. His passive-aggressive punchline about being due back on Earth is a rigid refusal to dare to take Duane’s appeal seriously. Depending on the audience member’s psychology, the comedy in the scene is either that we are similarly fearful and passive-aggressive, and feel the relief of identification with Woody’s predicament (“Yeah: we’re all due back on planet Earth, weirdo! Sock it to that creep, Woody! Sock it to fear itself!”) or that we feel a compassion for Woody-as-author’s implicit self-recognition (“Yeah, it’s hard for cowards; one has to smile, sadly, at the pathos of all the coping he does just to deal with ordinary reality — and at the sad fact that people don’t understand this, and constantly expect more of him.”)

Anyway, above I invoked this moment to try to get sympathy for my uneasiness about the psychological needs of Powell and Marks as sublimated in Peeping Tom. But in so doing I’m just being a coward like Woody. The filmmakers offered up their fears to see what was out there. (Which is what the antihero of the movie can’t quite bring himself to do.) In historical reality, the critical condemnation of this movie basically ended Michael Powell’s career: “We’re due back on the planet Earth,” said the press. Do I really have to be part of that mob? If Michael and Leo happen to feel like perverts and psychopaths, like M, when they retreat behind their pens and cameras, and they’re brave enough to share those feelings, why can’t I sit here and take it? Gosh, guys, that’s interesting. No, I don’t think you’re as bad as all that; there’s no need to worry so much about this stuff. But it’s certainly an interesting nightmare you had. Thanks for making a movie of it.

In fact I can sit here and take it, and did, and got something out of it. I heard what they were saying and took it seriously. So this isn’t a fair critique of me, me.

A third possible reading of the Annie Hall scene, the one that I think probably best describes the way I tend to see it, is that there is something fun, savorable in itself, about this sort of fear-tinged social confrontation. “This is my room.” Woody has wandered someplace strange and now something strange is confronting him. Strange is kind of fun! Strange is satisfying!

So actually I think that’s what I was trying to say above. Yes, Peeping Tom isn’t just weird but also weird for being so weird… but that can be satisfying. Because any kind of distinction can be valuable, can be valued. Positive vs. negative judgments are a false paradigm. More true to experience is what Marty said: “Something very rare.” Rare is a nice word.

I know, this has really wandered off and I’ve talked about Annie Hall almost as much as Peeping Tom, but I can do what I like.

Music by Powell & Pressburger regular Brian Easdale is part of the oddness; there is some orchestral underscore, but the protagonist’s psychosis and the snuff films that embody it are always accompanied by clangy “modern music” piano solos, which sound like something between a dance rehearsal and a tied-to-the-railroad-tracks melodrama accompaniment. Often these are not really very compositionally expressive, though I’m not certain how intentional that was. To me they functioned more like an ambient anxiety, like a descent into the claustrophobic conservatory practice room of his diseased mind. Here then is the main title, surely one of the most bizarre main title cues ever written for a commercial movie. Piano performance is by Gordon Watson.

Lead performances by Carl Boehm (son of Karl Böhm!) and Anna Massey are quite good, in the way of this movie. Second-billing for Moira Shearer doing a single 14-minute scene, in which she finds an excuse to dance, seems like a commercial calculation, but I like her. (She dances to “Percussion Number by Wally Stott.” Wait, where have I heard of Wally Stott again? Oh right, he’s Angela Morley). Pamela Green as the pinup model has a nicely casual presence; I learn that she was an actual pinup model and left this chatty memoir of the making of the movie, which I find completely credible and which substantiates my impression that the movie is odd because Powell was odd.

Commentary, taken from the original 1994 laserdisc, is by Laura “the male gaze” Mulvey, a genuinely distinguished film scholar for a change and a fitting choice. She gives a very film-studies gender-studies critical-theory type reading, but it’s palatable enough, because she isn’t addicted to jargon or counter-intuitive claims. And because, of all movies, this one really does seem to invite it. It is literally about the Freudian psychology of a woman-murdering cameraman, it is literally about pornography and studio films in parallel, and is full of references to the actual filmmakers. And it’s pretty much titled “The Male Gaze.”

Watching it a second time behind the commentary, I see that it is a bit of a second-time film. The problem with the first time is that one is waiting for the chills and shocks and reveals, which are all reasonable enough but not actually the movie’s strongest suit. It works much better as a “text” to be returned to than as a show to be watched, probably because that’s how it was felt while it was being made. It makes perfect sense that this movie would have crashed and burned on first release, and then been substantially rehabilitated later: later is when you’ll like it.

Further thought. At the deep emotional level where I want to be when I watch movies, the complexities of this movie don’t ring true for me. I can’t find feelings here that I can use, other than the very simple horror movie feelings. At a high intellectual level I do understand all the games and ideas, but somehow they don’t manage to filter down to the ground floor. To me that’s the ultimate test of whether those ideas are valid: if the irrational, instinctual mind believes them too. Here I suspect that they are not valid because they are the rational preoccupations of the filmmakers rather than the irrational shadows they purport to be. The real irrational mind simply isn’t as complicated or dangerous as all that.

My simple mind watches this movie and feels the dual pull: the movie tells me that this man is a monster to be feared, who might hurt me if I were around him, and it tells me that he is sympathetic and good, that this is a movie where he’s allowed to kill these women. My deep mind feels this duality, but does not find an emotional way of making use of it. It only feels like a mistake, or a simple fork in the road: well, I can either like him or not. How do you want me to do this? Do you want me to alternate? It doesn’t really matter to me! There will be plenty of other movies, so the stakes are low.

At this level I think it fails to be what it aspires to be, which is interesting as a movie. It’s definitely interesting as a text. It’s not bad as a movie, but it’s no Psycho. And no Annie Hall for that matter.

And a final thought, now that I’ve seen everything on the disc. Better than the commentary is the UK “Channel 4” documentary from 1997, with satisfying appearances by all the right people. Much is made of the enigmatic personality of Leo Marks, who is certainly a fascinating figure, someone straight out of John le Carré. His sensitivity to psychology, as seen in the screenplay and in his interview segments, seems quite clearly genuine and distinctive: he is a dabbler but also certainly a “real artist” of some kind. But his veiled, obscurely but confidently composed personality — his guru-like demeanor — is exactly the gap in his technique. The documentary filmmaker understands this and frames him accordingly: the man is certainly a mystery, but it’s probably only because he carries his own obsession with mystery around with him everywhere. A codebreaker looks at the self and sees codes. But self-knowledge is not the same as self-decipherment; quite the opposite. Candor is not a form of cunning. The movie is eager to decode, but not to admit.

That’s its own kind of danger, and governs its own sort of thriller. I expect I’ll enjoy the movie next time I see it, because now I know: it is the patient. But I am safe with it. It wouldn’t hurt a fly.

1999/2004: 2010 Blu-ray:

directed by Stanley Donen
screenplay by Peter Stone
story by Peter Stone and Marc Behm

Criterion #57.

I wish I loved it. I do like it quite warmly. It’s a cheery, imperfect movie.

Here are movie stars. Movie stars are people so splendid that they can watch their own movies as they’re happening. Like us. Life is a movie and we fall in love while we’re watching ourselves in it. This is the essence of romance and feels very true. Romance is to be together in the dark while a movie starring you is going on.

The meaning of this movie, it seems to me, is in that scene, in the lines: “Do you realize you’ve had three names in the past two days? I don’t even know who I’m talking to anymore.” / “Well, the man’s the same even if the name isn’t.” Key to this exchange is that neither party is distressed; to the contrary, they are Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn on the boat in Charade, at the very pinnacle of ease and romance. The message is: who’s to say what it means to care, or not care, about the intricacies of this particular bauble of a plot, these particular identities… or, for that matter, identity in general? It doesn’t change the underlying ineffable reality of whatever it is that’s happening for “Regina” and “Brian,” or for Cary and Audrey, or for us watching, or even, perhaps, for the late Mr. Leach and the late Ms. Ruston. What is it that’s happening for them? Life, happiness, the unknown. Maybe a mystery story. Something.

Like I just said about Hitchcock in the previous entry: all film is essentially surreal. And since we recognize ourselves in film, perhaps all life is surreal too.

It’s nice for this to have come right on the tail of The 39 Steps. This is exactly the same charade, but with that extra layer of self-awareness added: where Robert Donat never tipped his hand more than to smile with preternatural aplomb, Audrey and Cary stop after nearly every scene to savor their pleasure at being alive and a part of this game. Charade is happy to be a movie, and is happy that we are happy that it is a movie. For all his playfulness, Hitchcock held to a kind of British propriety in not letting his characters openly admit, within the frame, that none of it mattered, that all of the intrigues were simply a form of joy. (But he finally, finally, eventually, got there, in the very last second of the very last thing he made.)

On the other hand, sometimes this movie feels like a thriller starring a tulip in a vase. (I don’t mean in a Magritte sense, though that does sound interesting. I just mean professional tulip Audrey Hepburn and Miss Hepburn’s Clothes By Givenchy.) At one point we cut to Audrey alone in her room, momentarily to hear Cary Grant at the door. She is lying on her bed perfectly poised with her pointy arms behind her head, in acutely stylish clothing, placidly staring. I’m not saying I object to watching this; nobody would object to watching this. I’m just saying it’s often not at all like watching a mystery, or a comedy for that matter. It’s like watching a tulip in a vase. Very pleasant!

The tulip meets a mahogany humidor. After an hour of mostly thrills and goofs, she quite seriously says “I think I love you” to Cary Grant. This is the moment in movies when my defenses usually snap up: “Seriously??” (Yes, I know, whatever that says about me. But whatever it says about me, I’m not alone in it.) But here it was okay. It was right that she loved him. The one thing we really believe about Audrey and Archie — or at least their avatars — is that they are both committed to this pleasurable bantering distance from any real troubles — not just as a performance of cool, but as a mode of encountering life. In each other, within the script, they find a fellow traveler through the cinematic darkness. So of course they love each other.

On movie terms, that feels like a very real kind of love. Such love doesn’t necessarily have to take the form of kissing, or getting married at the end, or really anything in particular. They seem to know that too. They don’t need anything from each other. That’s why I believed it.

More concrete link to the previous movie: the housekeeper finds a dead body, screams directly into the camera. Link to the movie prior to that: Audrey Hepburn and Juliette Binoche are very closely related types. Link to the movie prior to that: Hm. I guess that Walter Matthau was in JFK with Kevin Bacon and Kevin Bacon was in Apollo 13 with Apollo 13. Link to North By Northwest: all of it, obviously, plus Cary Grant talks to someone from the opposite end of the same bank of telephones. Link to To Catch a Thief: really, truly, all of it. And I note the inclusion of Princess Grace Commemorative stamps when the stamp dealer inventories the cheap packet he gave the boy. Seems intentional.

Did Hitchcock like Charade? Was he flattered or annoyed or indifferent or what? What did he have to say about it? Why isn’t this easy to find out?

My quibble with the movie is essentially that it is loose sometimes when it wants to be tight and vice versa. But that’s the price of charm; if you want to catch it in a bottle, the bottle needs to be various different sizes. Or a vase. The whole thing plays much better on second viewing, when it no longer has to work.

Also, the last act is rhythmically stronger than the rest, which is helpful to the overall impression — thanks to a considerable assist from Henry Mancini, who hits all the necessary nails squarely on the head for 15 minutes straight.

Here’s the main title, which accompanies the great Maurice Binder animated titles. I love credit sequences like these, not just because I love abstract animation anyway, which I do, but because I love the idea that this world of abstract imagery somehow is the movie, is somehow an approved translation into dream-terms of the very DNA of the live-action movie that follows. The idea that a movie can have a subconscious, and that it is right to begin inside it. I enjoyed many things in Charade but the single moment that most excited me may have been when those arrows first snaked onto the screen at the very beginning, to the sound of pure percussion pattern. This is a story, it says, but first and foremost it is a pattern. Cool. That already makes me feel good. Can’t you feel your “cares” begin to drop away with the recognition that underneath all the things of man and Hollywood are these arrows and colors and stripes and a steady beat?

One other thing about these credits. Charade, notoriously, happens to be in the public domain, and thus legal to distribute freely. How did this top-class studio release fall through that particular crack? This is how. Look close. The copyright notice lacks the word “copyright” or the (c) symbol. Even though it’s very clearly, obviously, intended as a copyright notice. Even though it announces the date of publication, explicitly reserves all rights and specifies their owner. Can you believe the law is really so vindictive as to immediately place this film in the public domain upon its first commercial exhibition with this faulty notice? Well, it’s not any more, but it used to be.

So thanks a lot, Maurice Binder and/or unidentified Universal employee(s), and thanks a lot, U.S. law prior to 1978. Anyway, be warned: don’t pay for any release of this movie other than the official Criterion edition. Don’t watch one for free, either, if you can help it; the quality is always much worse than it needs to be (this goes for the Netflix streaming version, too), whereas the Criterion Blu-ray looks great. To its credit, Criterion makes no mention at all of the public domain issue and simply treats the film as though it were fully owned by Universal, which is after all the only decent thing to do.

The commentary track by Stanley Donen and Peter Stone is very good. Charming, personable. The same warm good cheer of the movie can clearly be heard in their two personalities. Donen seems to genuinely believe that some listeners might never have seen the movie before, and is intent on not spoiling surprises for first-time viewers. Stone thinks this is absurd but plays along.

During the swinging revelry of the orange-passing game, the two reminisce that they shot this during the Cuban Missile Crisis and that everyone felt that they were doing something incredibly frivolous and pointless given that the world was about to end. To me, this knowledge only deepens the romance of the scene, and in fact of the whole movie.

The woman who does a take when George Kennedy is holding Cary Grant at gunpoint and tells her to wait for the next elevator is clearly a non-actor but still does a pretty funny take. It’s both amateurish and effective; I watched it several times. I often think “if I had to do this bit part, could I do it?” Probably not as well as she does.

1999: 2012:

directed by Alfred Hitchcock
after the novel by John Buchan (1915)
adaptation by Charles Bennett; continuity by Alma Reville; dialogue by Ian Hay

Criterion #56.

I love this genre.

Movies like this transform “story” and “character” and “theme” into something more like one of those crib toys with ten different doodads: a bell and a spinner and a twirler and a ball and a phone and a rubber button and so on. Do they form a whole? Absolutely they do. Just look: it’s a whole. What ties that whole together, you might ask. But what kind of a question is that? Just look! Humpty Dumpty and Jack and the Beanstalk, and the Tortoise and the Hare and others. Obviously it’s about fairy tales etcetera. What is the phone there for, then, you might ask. But what kind of a question is that? Just look!

I will pretty much always take a good Fisher Price Activity Center movie over a movie with a message.

A good one, I said. What does it take for one of these movies to be “good”? Well, it does have to form a whole. You can look at the Fisher Price picture yet again if you need to: it’s all framed and united and designed. That is the function served by “plot” in these movies, and it’s an important function. In lesser movies, the various doodads are just dumped out of a box at your feet: here’s your damn Christmas present. That’s insulting.

So plot does matter quite a bit. But all the same, a movie like this does not actually tell a story; it just puts us inside a bubble of story-ness and then rings the bells and spins the spinners, without breaking the bubble. One arbitrary thing must lead to the next inexorably, as though this particular arrangement of doodads were actually a single perfect and necessary thing, being gradually revealed. There’s an art to it, but it’s an abstract art. Or a mostly-abstract art — like dance, or graphic design.

Because The 39 Steps is old and black-and-white and mostly shot on stagy sets, its bubble is very pure and complete. I felt cocooned in and safe, like I was floating with Glinda. Or, more aptly, coasting through the countryside in a luxe sleeper car, lulled by the muffled clacking of the tracks.

Hitchcock’s genius was his unwavering commitment to the bubble, even as over the course of his career the bells and spinners got bigger and louder. He was able to teach everyone else what was really going on at the movies: something unreal, something loopy and spooky and sensory. His coups de theatre are celebrated not just for their effect but for their instructional value as proof-of-concept. It wasn’t just that seeing a man on Lincoln’s nose was gratifying; it was also that a pioneering demonstration had been made of how and in what spirit it can be gratifying for there to be a man on Lincoln’s nose. Surrealism isn’t just for Freud, and nonsense isn’t just for jokes.

This is all to say that there should be a 39 Steps-themed crib toy. You could easily reskin the standard one to have Richard Hannay and a policeman running through the highlands along the bottom instead of the Tortoise and the Hare. One of the spinners can rotate to gradually reveal a picture of a hand missing a pinky. Etc.

Overheard at the laundromat just now. The very large woman who works there was folding clothes while watching TV. A customer stood next to her and watched with her for a minute.

Customer: What’s this?
Laundry lady: It’s Castle. You don’t watch Castle?? You’ve got to!
Customer: It’s about lawyers?
Laundry lady (delightedly correcting him): It’s a show!

She put it better than I did.

I am generally skeptical about “deep readings” of bubble movies like this. It’s not that I think they’re completely illegitimate; it’s just that they’re not usually done very sensitively. There’s a “visual essay” on the disc, in which a film scholar notes that the final shot of the movie, with chorus girls in the background and Mr. Memory dying in the foreground, juxtaposes “eros, the life instinct,” with “the death drive.” My objection isn’t that this is false; my objection is that it’s a clumsy, worthless way of gesturing toward something true. A kid watching naively, who has no clue what “the death drive” means or what such an analysis could possibly be saying, is better attuned to what’s really happening in that shot than an educated adult who has instant access to all the irrelevant cultural baggage that comes with those terms. Such analysis dumps extraneous crap in front of the film, blocking your view in the name of elucidation. Here’s your damn Christmas present, college boy.

Deep reading an image or a plot is basically a game. The Fisher Price Activity Center juxtaposes eros and the death drive too, come to think of it. Ask not for whom the bell goes ding!

Deep reading the psychology from which a movie springs, and to which it appeals, is another thing.

The sex in this movie takes the form of Madeleine Carroll taking off her wet stockings while handcuffed to Robert Donat, so that his hand can’t help but be along for the ride, no matter how limp and blameless he tries to make it. Subsequently, they have no choice but to sleep next to each other in a four-poster hotel bed. The appeal of the handcuff gag is the same as the appeal of “Seven Minutes in Heaven” and various other teenage contrivances to have sex forced on oneself: it relieves one of the responsibility of owning up to anything. It appeals to the repressed, who dare not pursue their own desire but would love for some hilarious fantasy circumstance to impose it on them. This is the framework for sex in so many old movies, and while it’s convenient for film scholars to talk about such devices as a way of getting stuff past the censors, I see it more as a way of appealing to widespread inner immaturity. God help us if these two characters were actually to have the hots for each other and acknowledge it: how drab and potentially tasteless. But if a Rube Goldberg machine appears and when the ironing board tips over and pulls the cat’s tail and releases the balloon, it yanks his hand so that he can’t help but touch her butt: now that’s entertainment!

As a teenager this stuff always seemed intuitively charming to me. But that’s because I was a teenager. Now I feel a little embarrassed for Hitchcock, or perhaps for all of Britain, snickering excitedly in the dark, sleepover party whispers, about “Well, but what if you were handcuffed together and then she got her stockings wet and had to take them off? Then you’d have to touch her leg! Snort!”

Okay, okay: it was still amusing. I guess at my present age I still thoroughly enjoy being yanked around by my trepidations about being hunted by a murderous spy or jumping from a moving train or whatnot; less so my trepidations about girls, because they’re much diminished. But yes, I can still “get it.”

And yes, it’s more complicated than all that, because Robert Donat’s character is not in fact snickering red-facedly; he is genuinely comfortable with whatever absurdly titillating circumstances happen to be dumped in his lap by fate. The fact that what’s happening to him would thrill a schoolboy amuses him. But we, the audience, are the ones thrilling, so we’re sort of the butt of that joke, aren’t we? “You should be so lucky, audience… and I should be so lucky,” thinks Alfred Hitchcock as he asks the actress to show a little more of her thigh. Doesn’t he? If these movies are based on his fears, one of those fears is clearly being put at risk of being aroused by a girl who has the composure that he lacks. Luckily his heroes always miraculously make it through the fire with their composure intact, just like they miraculously survive jumps from moving trains etc.

Music direction by Louis Levy, but as we learned back in The Lady Vanishes, that doesn’t mean he wrote it. The score is apparently actually by Jack Beaver, Charles Williams, and Hubert Bath. Which of the three was responsible for our selection? I don’t think anyone is alive who knows. I certainly don’t. Here’s the main title (opening with a fanfare for the British censor’s certificate: hooray, it was approved!). As with The Lady Vanishes, the main theme serves a clue-like function in the course of the movie. The way the main title is put together is extremely old-fashioned, typically operetta-like, but in my mind somehow that feels just right for this sort of movie. When the woodwinds and pizzicato cascade down toward the end (“PERIL!”), or when in the last few bars the fanfare resolves and then deresolves twice in a row a la Strauss (“HEROISM!”), I am completely charmed. If you close your eyes, you’ll feel like you could almost reach out and touch a mustache.

Beaver, Williams, and Bath sounds like a place to get nice candles.

Stuff on the disc: this interview, which is very good; this mini-documentary, forgettable; 22 minutes of the original Truffaut/Hitchcock interview tapes, fine (Truffaut describes various doodads as tres beau); the “visual essay” mentioned earlier, okay but bland; this radio version, just what it sounds like; and a few nice original production drawings like these.

The commentary track, by one Marian Keane, comes from the original 1999 disc and is firmly in the “By Martians For Martians” deflavorized academic mode. Sample sentence, her take on a POV shot: “When the newspaper is handed over to Hannay, we are in an intensely subjective sequence, and when Hitchcock sustains a subjective sequence, he’s investigating film’s capacity to reveal human subjectivity.” Typical BMFM mushy tautological nothingness; the word “investigating” is a classic red flag. I only made it about halfway through the movie and then stopped it. There’s really no point in subjecting myself to such stuff.

The black-and-white image is appealingly soft and sugary. Even after restoration, it does still flicker a bit. The sound isn’t great and probably never will be. There’s no getting around it: this movie is old.

As usual, Criterion’s packaging does some heavy compensatory lifting. “Actually guys,” it tells us, “old is the opposite of sell-out and sheep. It means taste and it means cachet. Duh, everyone knows that.” Well, that sounds great! That must mean the original period artwork would make a really hip cover, right? Right?

1999: (out of print by 6/01)

directed by Philip Kaufman
screenplay by Jean-Claude Carriere and Philip Kaufman
after the novel by Milan Kundera (1984)

Criterion #55.

Art experience is social experience, and time spent watching a movie is time spent in the company of actors. I like actors. I guess in some way everybody does, or at least everybody likes famous people. But I mean that I like actors for their actorliness. I like these people who treat being sensitive like serious business. I like what they care about and try to be good at, and what kinds of expression seem possible in the space they create. Yes, it’s true that actors often have emotional problems and are difficult and believe crazy things. But, you know, everyone has emotional problems, and everyone is difficult, and everyone believes crazy things.

In this movie, in the scene where Juliette Binoche delightedly singsongs “You’re jealous! You’re jealous!” to Daniel Day-Lewis, I enjoyed being allowed to share a moment of intimacy in the lives of two fictional characters, but more than that, I enjoyed contemplating a moment of real artistic intimacy between two actors. Whatever is recognizable and true-to-life about this dance that she’s doing and the sheepish way he’s responding, they arrived at it together, in trust, with shared purpose. Actors working together call on a mutual expertise in feelings. I wish everyone always called on a mutual expertise in feelings, so I feel comforted seeing that such a degree of shared experience is at least possible. He knew what she was doing, and she knew what he was doing. They each knew what the other meant, about people, about life, and then they honored it by living it out in the flesh. For the camera.

Even when characters in movies are hurting each other, the actors are actually doing something very intimately collaborative. There is something touching about the idea that any interpersonal engagement, no matter how contentious, is a mutual act of moment-creation, of life-creation.

(Of course, none of this is necessarily the case. Sometimes actors hate their scene partners and just do their own thing. Sometimes directors hate their actors and treat them like puppets.)

The Unbearable Lightness of Being is about the personalities and interpersonal dynamics in a love triangle. I gather that the book may be about a lot of high philosophy on top of that. The movie is pretty much just that, but with warm actorly care and a mellow spirit. One is free to think philosophical thoughts.

There are plenty of dramatic developments but it doesn’t have a plot per se. It offers emotional tone above all — all art does, I suppose — and here that emotional tone is personable; person-like. Actor-like, in fact. Why are some people rewarding to be around? What does their company offer? That’s the objective here, it would seem. At least that’s what it accomplishes.

It does reach a strong cinematic-philosophical flourish at the end. Having spent the duration in this particular company, I found that I was all in.

The film is not perfectly and ideally flexible, human, old world. It is an American-eye view. Sometimes all the nudity and the politics felt slightly more “European” than European. The moments do not quite just melt and reform; in the cuts from scene to scene, I felt the rooms and situations being produced and directed into existence. The movie sometimes slinks around behind the actors’ backs as though it knows more than they do. That I doubted.

I wasn’t transported; I was always aware that this was a production, an ambition, not the thing itself. But it was a congenial ambition, and the actors in it were real people.

The editorial presence gets one thing so very right that all hints of American calculation are readily forgiven: the music, selected from the works of Janáček, who was committed to pure intensity of feeling more than nearly any other composer. Almost everything he wrote is emotional to the point of philosophy. The most important selections here are “The Madonna of Frydek” from The Overgrown Path and the third movement of the Fairy Tale for cello and piano. But my ripped selection, the only piece truly in the clear, has to be the end credits, which is from the fifth movement of Janáček’s Idyll for strings.

Maybe the movie steals much of its emotional timbre from the music, and the actors themselves, and everything but the script and actual content, but that’s fine; the important thing is that it works as a place, a person, a familial attitude. Saying that it is congenial is not meant to be faint praise. Congeniality is a welcome gift.

I would be remiss if I did not address the title.

Get a load of that title. It’s so satisfying to say, and it takes some deep thought to parse. It’s either a beautiful poem or rhythmic nonsense. Who’s to say? That’s a powerhouse title. One of the all-time most dynamic titles. Much better than Nesnesitelná lehkost bytí.

As a service to the reader, here is my report on the meaning of the title as parsed by the movie: “lightness” is the innocent spirit of moral freedom that allows our man Daniel to pursue extramarital sex without any sense of transgression. His wife recognizes the aliveness of this lightness, contrasted with her weighty wounded feelings — that such freedom is a pure state of being, and thus philosophically preferable to her neediness — but she cannot find it in herself to emulate it or bear it in him, because loneliness and jealousy are real too. So the subject of the title is one’s lover’s existential freedom, which is both beautiful and unacceptable.

This might very well be a gross simplification or distortion of Kundera’s intention. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the title means something quite different in the book. Nor would I be surprised if it means exactly this. Bottom line: I am unsurprised.

Tip for being funny, brought to you by a primitive part of my brain: say this title but change some of the words. The crucial words here are “unbearable,” “lightness,” and “being”; focus on those. If you say the title but change one those three words to a word that sounds like it but is somehow different from it, you’re sure to win admirers and have some fun in the process.

All written before listening to the commentary (by the director, the co-writer, the editor (Walter Murch, offering some fascinating shop talk), and Lena Olin).

Watching this movie again with the intelligent, craft-oriented commentary, I can’t help but feel like now I’m seeing it all more clearly, “as it really is.” And it’s quite different from the movie I described above. “What was I saying?” I think. “Congenial? Person-like? American? No plot per se?” Not only are the voices not confirming these things, but even I can’t see them anymore.

But it’s all going to stand. That’s the movie I saw when I was alone, when I was me. The fact that my experience isn’t being described to me by the artists only goes to show that our respective roles are completely different. Watching a movie is a dream; making a movie can almost never be a dream.

Or perhaps a better way of looking at it is that this commentary reveals the very Americanness I meant: under the humanist flesh, this is a movie of bones. Other artists might well have made a soft commentary. This is a hard one. Smart; but smart can be a trap.

Case in point: Philip Kaufman tells us that he was inspired by the Czech attitude that sexual pleasure, being free and private and sensory, is not subject to politicization and thus that sex is “an act of resistance.”

I say: calling something “an act of resistance” is politicizing it. Some might say I miswatched the movie by seeing the sex as very much just sex, something to smile about, but I do not think I am miswatching life. And seeing things in movies is part of my life.

As with life, commentary does not actually improve understanding.

Remember the days before commentary tracks? Someone at Voyager/Criterion invented this gimmick and now we all buy into its value. But bonus features are aesthetic quicksand. Movie is a movie is a movie: if you gotta ask, you ain’t got it.