directed by Roger Vadim
written by Roger Vadim and Raoul Lévy

2000:

Criterion #77: And God Created Woman.

Or, going by the cover: “…and God created woman.”
Or, going by the French: and God… created woman.

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This isn’t even a guilty pleasure.

Maybe it was just my mood but I couldn’t even enjoy looking at Brigitte Bardot, because that was so obviously the pitch. The movie was like an infomercial, paid product placement for her sex appeal. I get cynical when I’m advertised to.

This is a particular kind of junk that simply isn’t made anymore. Exploitation no longer feels the need for such a tedious display of manners.

There is a vast difference between a humanism that genuinely and unabashedly embraces sex, and a weaselly lasciviousness that is thrilled at the idea that couching itself as “humanism” will grant it legitimacy. This movie is like one of those courses for “pick-up artists” where a douche guru (like Tom Cruise in Magnolia) lets his dorky clients in on the secrets of feigning humanity at sex-master level: “Women have a psychological need to be listened to, so if you want to get in their pants you’re going to have to really listen to them, like, carefully.”

Roger Vadim seems to have been a lifelong pick-up humanist — whose proudest achievement was “winning” Brigitte Bardot, Catherine Deneuve, and Jane Fonda, among others — so I’m not sure how much he was able to be truly aware of the degree to which his moviemaking was empty exploitation, not actually thoughtful. He, like Hugh Hefner, seems to have lived refusing to concede that there was a difference. This movie sure seems to believe that it’s a real poem about people and life. That’s what makes it so worthless: it’s not even clear-headed and honest enough to offer up sex on a platter. It’s horny only in the smarmiest, most studied, most alienating way.

It’s “sex as life force” being sold in bad faith by someone who actually thinks of sex as a commodity. Like insincere copy in an ad for a luxury car: “The sexy new BMW is life itself.” Actually Bardot is the embodiment of insecurity about life itself, compensation.

There’s the very old pop-Freudian line about men with big houses, cars, cigars, whatever: “He must have a small penis.” But that line is a symptom of the same kind of pettiness. “He has a small faith,” is more like it. “He is afraid.”

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This was a whole genre for a while: Rochelle Rochelle. Guys like Roger Vadim found that the pick-up artist playbook worked not just on hot 15-year-olds, but also on the entire U.S. audience, who were so naive that they couldn’t distinguish practiced smarm from genuine freedom of spirit. “The French are so romantic,” and so forth.

Actually, it’s a match made in heaven. After all, a sexually inhibited society like ours isn’t going to find anything appealing about actual disinhibition, which will seem tawdry and frightening and inadvisable. Only phony overcompensation concocted by the equally inhibited will have the right ring of sexy fantasy to it. Ooh la la: “Bardot stars as Juliette, an 18-year-old orphan whose unbridled appetite for pleasure shakes up all of St. Tropez.” Shake it up, baby! Rock that damn boat that we the audience are in; someone needs to. And it’s sure as hell not gonna be us.

So many of the online reviews of Vadim’s memoir begin: “Man, you have to envy Roger Vadim: Bardot, Deneuve, and Fonda!” I don’t know if you have to, but you’re certainly supposed to. Those reviewers are just playing along, following their cues, and the name of the game is so obviously envy.

The name of the movie is And God Created… My Girlfriend.

Well, he got exactly the envy he wanted: Brigitte Bardot became the sex symbol of the era. Which turned out to be a sex symbol for the ages, because the whole notion of “sex symbology” was specific to that moment in history. It’s a strangely apt term, “sex symbol,” when you think about it. You need a symbol to stand in for sex when the real thing is under lockdown. Which is why we don’t have “eating symbols” (Cookie Monster) or “sleep symbols” (Rip Van Winkle) — we just eat and sleep.

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“Sex is a life force” yada yada yada, but the actual plot of the movie is of course about men and money, manly men trading in real estate, cars, and of course in the fate of the poor naked girl, with great manly-casual authority. Vadim couldn’t think of anything else, I guess. Here’s a snippet of the self-congratulatory dialogue, between older-but-wiser suitor #1 and hot-but-hotheaded suitor #2:

1: Does she cry?
2: Of course not.
1: Maybe she does when she’s alone.
2: She’s too much of a bitch for that.
1: When it comes to female psychology, my poor boy, you’re stuck in the Stone Age.

Whereas we and Roger Vadim are obviously well into the Bronze Age, so ha ha ha silly rabbit, you’ll never get the cars and St. Tropez real estate and SEX we’ve got coming to us.

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She never bares her breasts to the camera, just to be clear. It’s 1956 after all. In the first 30 seconds you see her naked butt in a very carefully framed perfect profile, and that’s it for the peep show. Like I said, it’s not even forthright about the main attraction.

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One thing I have not talked about is the actual Brigitte Bardot. Oh, like, the person? Who knows? She’s completely obscured behind all this wet T-shirt humanist schtick. Even in private, Vadim had been setting the rules for her performance of self-esteem since she was 15. Her role here is just his personal collection of deliciously coy things he’s seen girls do. But surely not Bardot herself. She’s clearly only going through the motions of being a free spirit, which is one of the most depressing possible displays. “I do work. I work at being happy,” she says, because it was written for her to say. This is the real fantasy: that she might have such poignant and summery philosophy in her heart… instead of whatever’s actually there. And Vadim has no compunction about contriving it and contriving for her to say it, as though that’s doing honor to her. How offensive.

Pornography would have been so much more respectful.

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That this piece of Eastmancolor beach-blanket trash “revolutionized the foreign film market,” as Criterion puts it, is certainly interesting. In fact every aspect of it is interesting from a historical point of view. Understanding it historically means giving up on it as a movie — and it deserves that, I see now. But while I was watching it I wasn’t ready to give up, so I didn’t come to it in that frame of mind. And there’s no chance I’m going to watch it again.

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Connection to the preceding movie: An unfulfilled woman’s fidelity is tested but she ultimately returns to her husband.

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No significant bonus features.

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I would love it if someone actually made a full-length Rochelle Rochelle — not as a string of lame Seinfeld references, but as an actual “strange erotic journey,” a full-fledged parody of the Euro-softcore artistically-justified-nudity arthouse-bait genre. That could be a funny movie even without the Seinfeld title, but the title is what’s going to land the pitch.

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Music is by Paul Misraki (1908–1998), a French-Italian Jew from Turkey (last seen here scoring #25, Alphaville). There’s a lot of diegetic pop and jazz throughout, coming from the many record players and jukeboxes of St. Tropez, and I’m not sure if he wrote all of it — credit is also given to a musical director, Marc Lanjean. But Misraki certainly wrote our selection, the Main Titles. I have no complaints; for a movie like this, this is right on the money. As with Alphaville, Misraki comes out much better than the director. The album would be pretty good party music.

Isn’t it interesting that sex, which is the common property of absolutely every human being on earth, is constantly depicted as though it comes from the farthest orient? Or the primitive jungle? One way or another, it sure ain’t from here and now. Here and now we scoff at flesh; we wear suits. Taking them off is like falling into a storybook desert isle, traveling back to the days of the pharaohs or something. Listen to those congas!

On the other hand, maybe all life, even life in a suit, can take place on a storybook desert isle. Out of context, this music doesn’t have to be sex. It can just be happiness.

I like all the sounds in this kind of music, prior to assigning them meanings. And who needs to assign meaning? X out “Brigitte Bardot” in your mind and note that the track sounds equally like Donald Duck. Now X out “Donald Duck” too.

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directed by David Lean
written by Noël Coward

[after the play Still Life by Noël Coward (1936); adaptation by David Lean, Ronald Neame and Anthony Havelock-Allan]

2000: 2012:

Criterion #76.

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I’ve been waiting for a writerly mood to strike before addressing this one, but after a week of holding out, the mood is still in hibernation and I want to move on, so we’re just gonna make do with the mood I’ve got, which I would describe as “menial.”

There were some lines in the Criterion essay about how this film became

an object of derision in the ’60s… One critic defined the message of Brief Encounter as “Make tea, not love,” and recalled how an art-house audience in 1965 jeered at Alec and Laura’s middle-class torments.

I’m also familiar with the Nichols & May parody, the implication of which is, of course, that the film and its characters are absurdly straitlaced and repressed and, in a word, British. Britishness isn’t actually a subject of the movie, but obviously it underlies every aspect of the production, so it makes an easy scapegoat for the emotional problem the story poses. In the skit, Mike Nichols tosses out that he “saw that you were English clear through” as though this is an exquisitely romantic line. (Yes, in context it’s also a joke about bad teeth.)

But pinning the characters’ problems on their silly 40s Britishness — i.e. on the one thing that sets us safely apart from them — is just a cheap and cowardly way of getting out from under the real issue. It’s a melodrama to be sure, but every melodrama is about something, and this one is about something much more universal than British issues or women’s issues or uptight Christian morality.

The movie is not actually about the constraints of a specific culture. It’s about everyone’s internal tension, between being in touch with oneself and being connected to other people. And it’s about the emotional disorientation one experiences when passing back and forth over that line.

Yes, on the surface it would seem to be a standard weepie about the noble sacrifice of marriage, but it’s worth noting that the audience’s tears aren’t wrung at any point during the ill-fated love affair; they come in only at the very end (spoiler warning, I guess), because that’s when the actual issue comes to the fore: that the protagonist’s world of feelings is “a long way away” from the people around her. Rather than suggesting that this distance might ever be reduced, her husband thanks her sincerely for “coming back to me.” Neither of them can even conceive of him meeting her where she was — or for that matter, of anyone meeting her where she was, other than a magical stranger who is never fully met and known. The tears run because her world frames the need to abandon one’s inner romance not as a cold and cruel responsibility, but as love and welcome: if you give up the world of the self, then, and only then, can you truly come home. Oh Auntie Em.

I cried. Yeah, they got me. But mostly who got me was Rachmaninoff.

Serge Rachmaninoff is communicating through music that he, for one, has been where she was, a long way away. Not to mention Eileen Joyce and Muir Matheson performing it; they know about that place too. And then not to mention Noël Coward and David Lean, and the public that embraces such a movie as this — or even that embraces “Flames of Passion,” the phony movie within the movie. The fact is, there’s ample evidence that one’s fellow man is just as emotional and romantic and familiar with that faraway place Laura goes to. And yet still we do not trust one another; we are fearfully reluctant to make plans to meet there and live there. We would rather laugh at the stupid old-school Brits for being so nervous about sex, as though that’s the problem. It’s not.

The beautiful thing about Brief Encounter, what makes it stand out among so many thousands of love-that-cannot-be movies, is that it pares the psychodrama of infidelity down to its barest essentials, so much so that one glimpses the disturbing truth: that infidelity is not actually about sexual ethics, or even interpersonal relationships, at all. It is about fear of the nature of emotions, plain and simple.

Emotions are involuntary, not willed, so vowing “to love and to cherish” is overstepping the bounds of what one has the power to vow. Having stood in front of one’s community and made this solemn promise to ensure that there are clear skies every day, one can only live in fear of the day that it will happen to rain and one will be found out as a liar. Brief Encounter is about the tantalizing relief of coming clean about one’s true nature, as a being of emotions with a piano concerto rippling in one’s heart. Is such a being anti-social? In a certain frightening sense, yes. Frightening at least to society.

Movies, and the act of movie-watching, hover in a shadowy space between being social and being alone with one’s heart. We feel the sting in this movie because as we watch it, we’re in the same zone as the character, letting images drift between us and the world. Is this dangerous? What will all those society busybodies think of us when they realize we were rooting for a woman to cheat on her husband for no reason at all?

It’s really a remarkably daring movie for its time in that it does nothing to get us “on side.” There is no cinemoral logic to excuse the infidelity: the husband does nothing wrong; the wife suffers no great injustice. She is simply a person with feelings.

So was Noël Coward really writing about being gay? I don’t know; maybe. Ultimately it comes to the same thing. Accepting the world of your actual feelings is hard for everyone. In some ways, homosexuals have a relatively easy task of self-acceptance, because sex is a game played in private, where the waters of authenticity can be tested one like-minded person at a time. And even that is terrifying. Whereas embracing not-yet-validated feelings truly alone, running counter to even one’s spouse, is overwhelming. It’s no less true for us now than it was for Brits then. In fact I tend to think it’s actually worse. The impulse to scoff and parody just shows that the repression has gotten even fiercer. The derision is a gauge of how risky it is to let go; the derision is the risk.

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It seems to me not coincidental that Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2, which serves as this movie’s landscape of the true inner life, the unlocked world of feeling, was famously written under hypnotic suggestion. Rachmaninoff’s hypnotic prompt was: “You will begin to write your concerto. You will work with the greatest of ease. The concerto will be of excellent quality.” I’ve always felt that the almost unparalleled emotional fluency of this particular piece, which has made it justly beloved, emanates from a purity of access to the emotional self that was made possible only through trance. The music quite literally comes to us from that world “a long way away” inside Rachmaninoff, who had gone into hypnotherapy after being paralyzed with anxiety by bad reviews.

Its melodies have the marvelous quality of always surging and at the same time always subsiding — the music inhales and exhales. It’s the exhaling that makes it feel so rare and strong and sensual. I suppose in some ways the same goes for this movie: it breathes in melodrama and then breathes it back out, and that’s when it starts to feel special.

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Yes, I’ll admit I smirked when he said “You know what’s happened, don’t you?” and the script lurched rather unconvincingly to a higher pitch. But it was only after that point that the movie was able to reveal itself for what it really was — something deeper and more troubling than the standard middle-class infidelity melodrama it had seemed to be — so in retrospect I’m glad it went there.

It’s not realism. They’re allowed to say dramatic things to one another if they must.

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David Lean’s Summertime (1955) (Criterion #22) was very closely related, I see in retrospect. But the light hits it at a different angle. That feels to me like a more fundamentally optimistic film, even though it has such a similar psychological substance. At least as I remember it.

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The more recent covers at the top of this page are from the 4-disc boxset “David Lean directs Noël Coward,” which itself is spine #603, but within which Brief Encounter maintains its original spine number. That edition has a new restoration of the film and includes two documentaries. I however watched the original standalone edition, which is now out of print, because that’s what was at the library and I didn’t know any better until just now when I started putting this entry together. Oh well.

The disc I watched had only the commentary from Bruce Eder, another holdover from laserdisc days when the art of the commentary was still primitive. I watched about 20 minutes and then stopped it. I decided I’m allowed. He wasn’t offering anything of real interest, and it felt like suffering through his passionless, uninspired scholasticism was eroding the actual emotional experience I’d had.

There’s nothing actually wrong with it; it just serves no real purpose.

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Connection to the preceding: A flurry of classical music as someone is seen running in the rain.

Or, you know, a man crosses a social boundary by making a melodramatic protestation of love. Yeah, that’s pretty standard stuff; it’s like saying “there’s a car in both movies.” But they were pretty similar stories on that level: a doomed romance forces the protagonist to confront truths about him/herself.

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Here’s the Main Title: an extract — as is all the music in the movie — from Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2, Eileen Joyce with the National Symphony Orchestra conducted by Muir Matheson. This is of course the opening of the first movement. I think I’m not imagining things in taking this as a microcosm of the movie — a encounter with romance in the brief space between two passing trains, the second of which mercilessly blots it out in the middle of a phrase.

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Finding these images of unpeopled space to end the entries has turned out to be an unexpectedly interesting task, because it brings me in contact with the fine points of the editor’s craft. Shots that seem promising, that on first glance seem to start or end with empty rooms susceptible to freeze-framing, on closer inspection turn out actually to start with the character’s leg already inside the frame and moving. The impact of even a single pair of frames of motionless uninhabited space is, it turns out, real and subliminally disruptive, and many editors are very careful to avoid it. Others accept it and embrace the slightly alienating effect.

In the case of this movie I chased the editor (Jack Harris) up and down the whole DVD and could only find a handful of frames without people in them, none of which was ideal for my purposes. This one, with only an impending shadow, is the closest thing I could find. I could have used subsequent frames to eliminate the shadow with Photoshop, but that’s not an option within the game I’m playing.

2000:

written and directed by Kevin Smith.

Criterion #75. Don’t ask why. It just is.

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I saw Chasing Amy in the theater when it was new. In fact it was at a time when I was keeping a diary. Let’s check the log:

April 21, 1997
Monday

…

In the evening, see “Chasing Amy” with [_____], [________], and [________]. It’s interesting, but not RIGHT.

There you have it. I stand by that review.

The redactees are three girls from high school. Not people I felt truly close with, but certainly all in the regular cast, at least for that season.

Tonight was my first time seeing the movie since April 21, 1997. It was all very familiar, which I suppose might be surprising given the ways that my memory has wobbled off center in the intervening years, but that was a sentimental time in my life and all social activity felt momentous, so it makes sense to me that impressions of a movie seen in 1997 under those circumstances are easily resurrected. The intermittences of the heart, and all. 6625 days.

What I specifically remembered about the movie, and was able to retaste as soon as the DVD started, was a certain feeling that was near-constant throughout high school (and much of life on either side, too): the sense that the underlying gag, the premise, the social deal, was being slightly but crucially lost on me — or was all a big lie — or both.

A very particular and much-practiced feeling for me, from adolescence on up.

There’s something so deep and strong and silent about a mode of compulsive joking that everyone in a room shares, like the cold undertow at the bottom of a river. The joking that defines the communal vibe, attitude, cool, but is never taught or named or questioned. Self-deprecatory joking, or self-aggrandizing joking, or sexual insinuation, or some non sequitur phrase that keeps getting thrown at the conversation like a Wacky Wallwalker. All with a proud smirk: (This is how we are. This is so very how we are.)

So much of my adolescence was spent in a state of calculation: my gut would tell me confidently that everyone’s communal joking was nervous, small, a house of sticks being rebuilt again and again. That what was going around as “funny” was so obviously unfunny, so obviously some other thing in denial. Meanwhile my shy brain would counter skeptically, reminding me that these people certainly didn’t seem to be nervous or needy or phony; they seemed to be having a good time, they seemed to be in their element. I was the one who was nervous; I was the one who was intimidated.

The choice was always between irritably putting my foot right in the punchbowl (“Guys, seriously, why do you all constantly keep saying that people are ‘pimps’ and ‘hos’? How is that funny? What does that have to do with anything?”) or curling up inside in frantic shame (“Why don’t I get it? Why are the concepts of ‘pimps’ and ‘hos’ still so arbitrary and foreign to me when they’re obviously such immediate sources of comfort and amusement to the happy people around me? Why am I so small and childlike that I don’t know how to share in any of this being alive, being worldly, being here?”)

Neither of these options led anywhere. And yet at the same time I was also deeply aware that exactly when this kind of alienating stuff was going on, that was when the people around me were coming close to sharing some of their feelings, their real feelings. And I wanted to be there when that happened.

I didn’t understand why they were so fixated on drinking, on getting away with drinking, on the exploits involved in getting away with drinking, on knowing and being knowing about drinking and about other people’s exploits relating to drinking, on and on — it was all a weird, dull obsession that had descended upon the minds and conversations of nearly everyone I knew… and yet I also knew that whenever they were drinking and talking about drinking and talking about talking about drinking, for all the false bravado and theatrics of it, they were also right on the threshold of being at their most open and real. Which I wanted to be around very badly. So I came to have a sense of eager nervousness when people started being smarmy: “if I can just make it through the initiation round of bullshit without them noticing my skepticism and/or my hopeless childishness, I’ll get to hear from them, really from them.”

That’s the complex of feelings that Chasing Amy reawakened. Instead of picking apart Kevin Smith’s stilted worldview with my adult mind, as I probably would if I were seeing it now for the first time, I let it wash over me as I did then, and felt that chilly undertow. I could hear again the comfortable laughter of [_], [_], and [_], the laughter of all my classmates — “ha ha, you’re so speaking our language, movie!” — as I just tried to hold my balance against wave after wave of other people’s premises.

I’m quite certain I don’t have Asperger’s Syndrome; what I have is “phobia of having Asperger’s Syndrome.” But in practice they’re not so different. Here is my mind, desperately chasing Amy through this movie, as through so much of life:

“Oh, so is this how people are with their friends? So is this how people joke and hang out? Oh, are bars like this where it’s cool to go? Is this what people seem like when they’re having a good time? Is it more funny when people say “fucking”? That’s funny, right? I thought so! I totally knew that!”

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What I know now that I didn’t know then:

1) that my gut, as opposed to my anxious brain, is necessarily right, because for any individual, that’s the only real definition of “right.”
2) that seeing through other people’s phoniness and denial is a completely separate thing from being irritable about it, and I don’t have to give up the former just to avoid the consequences of the latter.
3) that irritability is my own phoniness and denial, just a form of fear.

Everyone has anxieties; everyone struggles against them; almost everyone makes the mistake of endorsing that struggle. But repression is, to quote Chasing Amy, “like a pair of goddamn Chinese finger cuffs.” The struggle is what maintains the trap. The jokes that get passed obsessively around the table like a magic joint are just the jokes that make each person feel a twinge of fear that he might be square, and want to prove otherwise. Thus the joke perpetuates itself. Subconscious anxiety — pride in the struggle — keeps that ball in the air indefinitely.

A typical laid-back night on the town in high school: “Oh yeah? Well, rest assured I can be cool too.” “Oh yeah? Well, rest assured I can be cool too.” “Oh yeah? Well, rest assured I can be cool too.” “Oh yeah? Well, rest assured I can be cool too.” “Oh yeah? Well, rest assured I can be cool too.” “Oh yeah? Well, rest assured I can be cool too.” “Oh yeah? Well, rest assured I can be cool too.” “Oh yeah? Well, rest assured I can be cool too.” “Oh yeah? Well, rest assured I can be cool too.” “Oh yeah? Well, rest assured I can be cool too.”

Just typing this is making me feel those high school feelings. (“They’re all saying the same exact thing over and over. This is surreal. Why am I the only one that notices? Should I point out to them that they’re all saying the same thing? Will they get mad at me if I do? Do they already know? Should I say it too? How do they all know to say it? Am I missing something? Are they really just saying that over and over or am I somehow imagining it? Why is this always so much harder for me than for everyone else?”)

The only way out of the finger cuffs is happiness, relaxation. And I was in no position to offer that to anyone. Or so I thought, which made it true. So they were all of them right: beer was indeed their best bet.

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Chasing Amy is about how Kevin Smith couldn’t get over the fact that Joey Lauren Adams had more sexual experience, and generally life experience, than he did. It really upset him and made him angry and jealous. For 2/3 of the movie, it seems to be a story about whether a straight man and a lesbian can happen to fall in love. Fine. But then suddenly the Kevin Smith character (“Ben Affleck”) reveals that for all that he lives in a world of constant “I can be cool too” sexual innuendoes, he’s actually completely freaked out and hung up on the idea of sexual freedom, and this is the real conflict of the plot. As writer/director, Kevin Smith’s psychology gets him to the point where he understands that this is a problem, but not to the point where he understands that it’s his problem. It gets framed as a “guy thing,” or a “you know how it is, man,” thing. But I don’t know how it is. I think a lot of people don’t.

His bittersweet ending is a glorification of the struggle: “I’ve done a lot of soul searching and now, too late, I realize that I need to change…” But that’s not how people sound when they truly mature: they sound like the same person, just less upset. I wish I’d known that at the time. I too, sitting there in the movie theater wondering why I didn’t feel comfortable, was seeking hard-earned wisdom, self-improvement, self-development, when I should have just been seeking relaxation, grace.

At least three times in the movie, Kevin Smith has various characters say something about the narrowness of their moral framework to the effect of, “You know me, man, I was raised Catholic!” But to what end? To him it’s no different from Jersey pride. Questioning one’s outlook — “seriously, dude, think about it” — shedding a hard-earned tear for your mistakes, your jealousy, your closed-mindedness — to him it’s all just another part of the game, the game of being awesome, making awesome jokes, hanging out the awesome way, keeping it real, going to the hockey game, sharing a beer, quoting Star Wars, what can I say, I was raised Catholic. Rest assured.

What’s more Catholic than anticipating a hard-but-necessary cleansing from the grave errors inflicted upon you by Catholicism? What’s more Jersey than constantly recommitting to being proud, rather than ashamed, of Jersey? What’s more childish than going to the grown-ups-only bar and drinking grown-ups-only beer and playing grown-ups-only darts? What’s more provincial than making a movie about the way your mind was expanded when you dated someone who was less provincial?

The other day I wrote in my notepad of deep thoughts:

Recognizing that you’re a jerk can be what makes you a jerk.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was writing about Kevin Smith.

As a kid from Jersey, who was raised Catholic, and likes comic books, and gets uncomfortable thinking about the full breadth of life, he seems like probably a nice guy. Even a talented one. As someone who knows and names all that stuff about himself, and makes a movie that sheds a tear for it, he’s got nothing to offer me. I don’t want to watch someone bang his head against his own walls and then tell me to “think about it.” (Which I believe was the pitch for Dogma.)

The end credits have a long indulgent section of personalized shout-outs from him, Kevin Smith, to all the people who worked on the film (plus “GOD”), with an in-joke for every one, a quote-of-the-day, a noogie.

This is how we are. This is so very how we are.

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The filmmaking is pedestrian and the world it creates is very thin, but I did find the movie basically watchable, which I credit to the onscreen ease of Jason Lee and, yes, Joey Lauren Adams. They seemed comfortable so I felt comfortable. Comfortable enough to watch, that is.

Given my memories, I expected to find myself downright angry this time around. But I wasn’t at all. I was glad to have a glimpse of my own past and perhaps my own future. The movie turned out to be a harmless prop in that process.

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The disc announces “Screen-specific audio commentary…” which I read as “scene-specific” and took to mean “only for a few select scenes,” as it has on other discs. But I guess that’s copy held over from the laserdisc days, when people had to talk up the fact that the commentary would correspond to what was on the screen. It’s a full-length commentary. I basically enjoyed it. They’re really all sitting together and being themselves. You essentially get to hear the dorky, antsy bantering that makes up Kevin Smith’s real world and from which he wishfully extrapolates the “awesome bull session” dialogues that make up his screenplays.

Ben Affleck, visiting on a break from filming Criterion #40, makes a lot of compulsive jokes about his nervous vanity as a smokescreen for his nervous vanity; he seems like the kind of guy who would anxiously pressure his wife to issue a correction on his behalf when she went up on stage at the Oscars. Kevin Smith sounds just like Ben Affleck but seems calmer. The other guys put out a lot less personality, except for Jason Mewes (“Jay”), who is used to being treated as stoner mascot, somewhat less than human, and plays along accordingly.

There are also a bunch of deleted bits, and some dumb “hey hey hey here we are talking to you, purchasers of the Criterion laserdisc” video segments in the menus (and in the color bars), where Ben can be seen repeatedly licking his brand new teeth.

Kevin Smith also lures the Criterion producer on camera to embarrass her, which I appreciated, given that that’s why I’m here. Susan Arosteguy. She’s still there.

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Connection to the preceding: Jay and Silent Bob are in both movies.

Okay, just kidding. This is a tough one.

A character reacts to seeing a couple sleeping together on someone else’s couch.

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The music, by Dave Pirner of Soul Asylum, is about as perfect for a movie like this as it could be. I’m entirely serious. When I heard the main title music start up I sort of sat up in my seat and thought, “Wow, I immediately know where this is going to be, in space and time and in the heart. I’m immediately ready to give it a real shot.” I can’t imagine doing nearly as well by the movie if I’d been asked to come up with some music to set the tone.

That main title (called “Tube of Wonderful” when it was released on the Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back soundtrack) is our selection:

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2000: 2008:

written and directed by Agnès Varda

Criterion #74: Vagabond.

(As last time: the current edition exists only as a component of boxset #418 “Four by Varda,” but it retains the original spine number 74.)

I have in the past used this space to express skepticism about the way titles are translated, but in this case the non-parallel English title is justified. Firstly: because I get the impression Agnès Varda chose it, and she’s entitled to choose whatever she likes. Secondly: because the French title (“Without Roof or Law”) is a play on a French expression, sans foi ni loi (“without faith or law”) which is just a stock phrase meaning ruthless/lawless/unscrupulous. Since there’s no way of translating the wordplay, there’s no way of translating the title.

Furthermore, Vagabond is a fine title.

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Another art movie with integrity from Agnès Varda. The atmosphere and subject matter are entirely different from Cléo, at least superficially — the film stock and the era are 20 years removed, so the movie is made of a whole other sort of “stuff” — but the underlying attitude is recognizably the same. To me that indicates that the art is working: I could tell this was another communique from the same mind, without her having to insert any self-conscious signals (“It’s me again, so here’s my ‘style’!”).

The construction is very simple: there is a psychologically opaque person at the center, and then in orbit around her are various people going about their lives, occasionally affected by her gravity, as she is occasionally affected by them. We are invited simply to watch, and to wonder what to make of the life we are watching. This is the same as wondering what manner of thing a person is. The protagonist, Mona, is a drifter with no attachments and no apparent objective — her personal freedom of action is nearly absolute — so existential reflections become quite natural. What exactly is this business that she’s engaged in, this business of staying alive?

One of the intriguing peculiarities of this movie is that it begins with the discovery of Mona’s dead body, and then the rest is presented in a pseudo-investigative/documentary retrospect, where sometimes the various other characters comment directly to the camera about their encounters with her. Naturally, this imparts a certain underlying sense of urgency, tragedy, and even mystery to the whole film — we can’t help but want to know: how exactly will she end up freezing to death in a ditch? Varda has identified the device as being knowingly borrowed from Citizen Kane. It’s worth noting that, exactly as in Citizen Kane, the mystery-story frame doesn’t determine the spirit of the work; in fact, it actually relieves the material of the ordinary narrative burdens it would otherwise bear, and lets it speak more genuinely as itself, which is to say more ambiguously. The forensic attitude is a handy shortcut to a philosophic attitude, a trick that works on audiences that might otherwise not be inclined to approach things philosophically.

In fact I think this might be the secret appeal of all mystery stories: the rigid puzzle machinery so completely obviates any dependence on the “soft” tensions of standard narrative that all such human things are freed to appear in a philosophical light, in all their potential richness. That’s why Sam Spade’s musings about dames feel so full of juice: because the audience is 100% certain that they’re not load-bearing.

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I said the subject matter was entirely unlike Cléo From 5 to 7, but from a certain point of view it’s actually very much the same: a woman walks (and is driven) from place to place, passing through a series of episodes and encounters, while the specter of death hangs over her. She is alone, then acquires companions, then is alone again, etc. An imposed formal scheme (the realtime clock in Cléo; the foreordained doom in Vagabond, as well as the recurring tracking shots with abstract music) contains her journey but does not define it.

I want to note that this very rich and flexible framework, shared by these two movies, is essentially the Alice in Wonderland framework, which has always meant a lot to me. One of the loveliest things about the Alice books is that the “specter of death” element is thoroughly soft-pedaled, hardly spoken at all, and yet still remains unmistakably present — I think because it is simply an existential reality of this particular dream-configuration. Over here is joy, and here in the center is the absurd, and over here is fear. They must necessarily all be present. As they are in both of these movies.

A thing that particularly struck me about Vagabond while I was watching was the fact that the various characters who populate Mona’s journey keep recurring and interacting with each other; they comprise their own little system of relationships and intrigues. So while Mona’s progress is inescapably, doomedly linear, the space around her is not, or at least not entirely. It loops back on itself, alive in its own way. This is also true of Alice: some of the most fascinating moments in those books are when characters who seem immutably fixed, each within their own wacky tableau, incongruously reappear later in other contexts (e.g. the Mad Hatter showing up in the courtroom to give evidence), as though to imply that there is a coherent social and geographical reality that functions even beyond Alice’s field of vision. Quite obviously there isn’t. But there is something, some principle of existence that operates without her, even in her own dream.

Mona’s gravity well at the center of her movie creates a similar bent-space effect: life in Vagabond doesn’t really go on without her, and yet it makes a point of demonstrating that it does, to the point of absurdity: when the student of the professor turns out to be the nephew of the old woman, the needless coincidence creates, if anything, the feeling that the interconnectedness of the people around Mona is from her perspective a supernatural phenomenon, a narrative dream-logic like Alice’s, to be understood in the same spirit. The world around Mona, with which she is only ever partially engaged, is not merely a world, it is the very principle of “a world,” condensed.

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I took the tracking shots with music to be the “truth” of Mona’s existence, a kind of meaning that stands outside of the kind of pat interpersonal projections that construct her in the eyes of the other characters. She isn’t comfortable being with people because this tracking-shot essence of life is not compatible with them, nor is this undeclarative, frequently untonal music that represents the emotion of her truth. The way the music always ends abruptly on a cut is like a snapping-to, a loss of grace as the scene of the next human encounter organizes itself and Mona prepares once again to become an object of someone else’s story.

In her brief establishing voice-over at the beginning, Varda says she likes to imagine that Mona emerged from the sea. But it is made explicit later that Mona has had a real non-mythical background, used to have a secretarial job before she fled from her life. I take the narrator’s flight of fancy as a kind of performance of her own equal culpability in mythologizing and projecting; an acknowledgement that even this movie, about the silent core of a person that exists beyond projection, is a kind of projection. It has to be; it’s a work of art, it’s fiction, it’s public. There’s no way around it. But it knows what it is, and doesn’t make grandiose claims about what it’s accomplishing. The director’s control is both loose enough and precise enough that we understand that what we’re seeing is a process of consideration, of musing and observing, not an assertion of anything in particular.

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I suppose I sound enthusiastic. I’m certainly being sincere in taking the film seriously. I admired it and found it stimulating. Nonetheless when it came time to tell Netflix how many stars it was worth in my book — a time that inevitably comes for every movie — I only gave it three, not the four that perhaps are here implied. So a note about why: the movie’s integrity was almost too great for me to be “moved” by what I saw. I felt I was in good company, worthy company, but neutral company at some basic spiritual level. I didn’t feel oppressed, but I also didn’t feel ennobled. I just felt life-y stuff. Take that as high praise for Agnès Varda. But it’s not the same thing as enthusiasm. I guess I reserve that fourth star for some degree of enthusiasm.

I felt more enthusiasm, I think, for the extras, where once again Agnès Varda has assembled her own little memoiristic bonus featurette-and-a-half with great warmth and charm. As I’ve said repeatedly, art is a social encounter, and Vagabond is very deliberately a social encounter with a moral and emotional neutral being, a Rorschach person. A Rorschach test can be interesting to undergo but it gives nothing; I could only come away with myself as I already had been, and with the neutrality I had been offered. Whereas Ms. Varda is a positive person and from her behind-the-scenes chitchat I felt I came away having been given something positive.

Am I really so dependent on others for my emotional experiences? No, not in life, not ideally; but when watching a movie, yeah, I guess. Isn’t that kind of the point?

I’ll grant that it’s often the case that this kind of bold, well-made Rorschach film turns out to be a long-term inflater (i.e. in my estimation, vs. a deflater; this is an old scheme of mine for talking about the afterlives of artgoing experiences). But only time will tell.

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Connection to the preceding movie: I’ve already outlined major ones, not to mention the obvious credit continuity. I guess something really fleeting and superficial might be in order too. Fine. The protagonist walks into a cafe where she doesn’t know anybody and starts a song on the jukebox.

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Music is by Joanna Bruzdowicz, a Polish composer who would go on to do several more collaborations with Varda. In this case the score is founded on a pre-existing classical composition, the second movement of Bruzdowicz’s String Quartet No. 1 “La Vita” (1973/83), which Varda heard and then asked Bruzdowicz to expand upon for the movie. The atmosphere it creates is of expressionism that has been allowed to develop freely in a purely conceptual space until it is nearly abstract, especially in relation to the noncommittal imagery of simply trudging across fields and roads. The immediate connotation is “high concert music,” but the juxtaposition with the completely earthy subject matter creates, as I said above, an impression of a kind of truth beyond mere drama. Unfortunately the music on its own isn’t anything special, at least to my ears. But that’s fine. It’s only “nothing special” within its own musical tradition, which is one that’s almost never heard in movies. So that makes it special after all.

Here’s our selection, the Main Titles:

We just upgraded WordPress, and now I suddenly I can embed this convenient music player. Pretty great, right?

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2000: 2008:

written and directed by Agnès Varda

Criterion #73: Cleo from 5 to 7.

(The second, current edition only exists as a component of boxset #418 “Four by Varda,” but it retains the original spine number 73.)

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One of the bonus features on the disc is a 1958 short film by Varda, L’opéra Mouffe, which centers around vérité footage of hard-looking elderly French people going about their shopping at an outdoor market. The documentary images are casual but pointed, quick keen sideways glances at real life. Many of the shots end just after the subject notices the camera and eyes it with suspicion for a moment.

Stuff like this gives me immediate access to the creative mindset that generated it: I’m very familiar with that good lively feeling of being alert to what’s going on around me, and to the potential cinema formed by my glances. In those moments it seems so simple. My existential window on reality is its own work of art already; it would only need to be captured, as-is.

But I’ve encountered many works of art made in this spirit and generally they fail. The documentary vitality, when it survives at all, usually just ends up exposing the needlessness of the work itself: “Yeah, this does kind of remind me of the feeling I get when life inspires me to make something, which is exactly why it’s such a waste of my time and attention to watch this fartsy assemblage of nothing-in-particular.”

What impressed me about L’opéra Mouffe was that Agnès Varda had actually managed to make something real and personal and worthwhile out of that kind of inspiration. “Oh, that feeling can go somewhere!” I thought — which was a happy thought, as you can imagine.

The observational core of L’opéra Mouffe is stolen footage of real people going about their business, but the film is not only that: it is cut together with music and staged scenes and invention of various kinds, sentimental and whimsical and symbolical and otherwise, and the whole is presented as the artist’s musings on the occasion of her first pregnancy. On paper that sounds extremely female in form and content, which I suppose it is, but often with the poem/diary works of female artists I end up alienated by too-private symbols, whereas this was thoroughly communicative.

Varda’s attention feels complete and uninterrupted. She is equally attentive to her dream and her reality, and to the thing she has made by juxtaposing them, the film itself. This, I think, must be the key to making good on one’s spark of documentary inspiration: remain just as attentive, just as open to experience, even after the moment of inspiration! If you are going to render your point of view into art, you must remain completely aware during the entire process, even as that process inevitably changes what it is that one is aware of. Keep attending to what’s actually going on, or you will betray your real purpose and the art will die. Too often — almost always! — vérité is actually a kind of counterfeit attention, a way of aping and alluding to actual attention, which fled at the approach of the artist’s ego. Somewhere between the moment of inspiration and the final product, most artists stop being open and start demonstrating that they are being open, that they were once and in fact still are very inspired and open — which at that point is no longer true.

But somehow Agnès Varda has her psyche in order and manages to stay honest and alert, and it shows. In the bonus documentary that she put together for the disc (in lieu of a commentary), she informs us that in preparing the new transfer, she took the liberty of making a tiny edit, shortening two consecutive shots by about a second-and-a-half total because it struck her that they would flow a little better. The excised second-and-a-half is shown in the documentary so that we don’t feel cheated, and so that we can consider the subtlety of the rhythmic difference. It is supremely subtle. Unlike every other decades-later “director’s cut” edit I’m aware of, it was not done to settle an old score or change some discrete conceptual element; the edit is a genuine artistic tweak, the result of that continual openness to the work on a musical level, a poetic level. I don’t think most directors would be capable of even conceiving of such an edit to an old film, except as a kind of boast. I didn’t get the slightest impression of boastfulness in Agnès Varda’s personality in the interview footage on this disc. She seems very warm.

This has all been said so that now I can say “and the feature is like that too.” Cleo from 5 to 7 also has quite a lot of stolen Parisian street footage in it, with people glancing warily at the camera or with surprise at the unlikely glamour of Corinne Marchand strolling by. It’s so fully made a thing, scripted and acted and constructed, that at first it’s not nearly as obvious that it flows from that feeling of “Life is art already, just look at it!” But that’s a sign of it being so full a realization of that inspiration. Instead of reminding me of what it’s like to want to make art, it is itself a piece of art.

I don’t want to compare everything to Ulysses, but there is sort of a female take on Ulysses going on here. The city, the day, the hours and the minutes, these are aesthetic enough as they stand, without interference: a universe of endless aesthetic truth — against which one person’s life, any person’s, can never be fully Romantically consequential, even if it is deeply sympathetic.

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An interesting thing about this movie is that despite having that kind of universalizing framework, its protagonist Cleo is not a traditional everywoman as you might expect — in fact she’s a sort of celebrity, a pampered pop singer and a glamour girl, the only person in her world with movie-star looks. And there’s no denying that the movie deliberately trades on having a pretty woman on the poster and in every shot. Yet it’s still an everywoman artistic construction Cleo is inhabiting. Her progress is to gradually shed some of her bubble of glamour until she touches down on human contact at the end… but of course the glamour never goes away because it’s a movie!

Is the movie chiding us for envying the beautiful people, or is it saying “spoiled beautiful people are still people underneath,” or is it only half “problematizing” her looks (insofar as they’re written into the plot) and half genuinely reveling in them, as nouvelle vague chic? Or something else? I don’t know, but I find it a stimulating uncertainty.

At the beginning, beset with morbid anxiety, Cleo looks in a mirror and thinks to herself, “As long as I’m beautiful, I’m alive more than others.” The feminist thrust of the script eventually makes clear that Varda sees this as a kind of oppressive role-playing that keeps Cleo from her real self. But at the same time, the film is a film, it’s a visual and magical reality, and in its terms, there is something very true about what Cleo has thought: her beauty is equivalent to life, in the purest cinematic sense, in the mind of the movie-watcher. Look at the box art! And I think Varda knows this, or at least is sensitive to it. So there is a kind of philosophical ambiguity to the whole thing even after one has seen it all and heard the official line.

Another one of the bonus features is a clip from 1993 with Madonna (!) and Varda appearing together on a French interview show. Madonna says she had at one time been interested in doing a remake of this movie. This feels fairly absurd on the surface of it, but I can understand why this movie would appeal to her. There is a Madonna-like ambivalence in it about the significance of constructed identities and of being attractive; the movie basically is about how it’s not real to be chic and attractive, but of course one must be the most attractive person in the universe to have the opportunity to learn this lesson good and properly. Because lessons are for protagonists, and we all know what protagonists look like.

The last section of the movie is Cleo finding a real human connection with a soldier who shows up and starts talking cheerfully and openly with her. But we must also be aware, as she is aware, that what he is doing is hitting on her, that he has approached her for superficial reasons like anyone else, and that this cheerful openness is his tried-and-true way of endearing himself to chicks. That doesn’t preclude its being genuine or human. That’s the complexity of the movie. Despite the feminist undercurrents, it does not actually offer its protagonist any real break from her world of chilly, brittle sex appeal. Not even at the very end, I think. It’s only an hour and a half of her life, after all!

(The title is a play on what is apparently a standard French insinuation about men meeting with their mistresses from 5 to 7; the actual 90-minute movie only runs from 5 to 6:30.)

This brings to mind the thing that Kenneth Lonergan said about You Can Count On Me: that in real life, people don’t generally change very much or very quickly, so for a person to change even a little bit in the course of a movie should be portrayed as a big deal. This movie ends where that one did, with a glimpse of the potential for change rather than change itself.

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Cleo has a freer-spirited friend in the movie, first seen modeling nude at a sculpting studio. Cleo says she could never model nude, that she would worry about the artists finding faults. The friend says: “Nonsense! My body makes me happy, not proud.” This I think is the moral of the movie: life should make us happy, not proud — as should youth and beauty and health, if applicable. This is also, probably, the answer to any questions about why this movie can be rather arbitrarily about a head-turning Hitchcock blonde and still be feminist: because real life is all-inclusive.

Of course, it’s not actually a movie with a moral. It’s that spirit of observational inspiration — of thinking “hey look, the world is already a movie, going on right now” — spun out as it rarely is, into a genuine work of film art. One is drawn into its circle of sympathy and ends up looking at it just the way the model says she feels the sculptors look at her, beyond any vanity. I enjoyed its humanity and openness, and did not find faults, because I wasn’t seeing it that way.

(Well, except… the one and only quibble I had was with the incongruous indulgence in the middle when Cleo and her friend watch a twee little silent short that Varda made with her rather famous friends. This pulls you right out of the flow and forces you to think about “Agnès Varda” and the historical moment, which is really the last thing you want in a movie. Luckily it’s brief and can be more or less overlooked.)

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Connection to the preceding: a guy plays at an upright piano while chatting with the heroine. I mean, there’s plenty of dull stuff: driving around Paris, black-and-white, singing, whatever. I’m probably missing a really good one, though.

Yeah, the movie’s black-and-white. The title screen above is a fake-out: only the opening tarot card sequence is in color. Agnès Varda gives a pat explanation for why this is so, but I’m not sure her reason for doing it is the reason that it works. But it definitely works wonderfully. Besides the fact that a tarot reading is a great opening for any movie, the sudden cut from seductively cozy Wes Anderson tabletop color close-ups to uneasy black-and-white faces creates a very powerful philosophical jolt right at the outset, which throws one’s doors very wide open to whatever will follow.

Actually, that’s kind of the same as what Agnès Varda says about it, isn’t it. I guess she was right after all.

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Music is by Michel Legrand, who shows up in all his 1962 youthfulness as “Bob the songwriter” and fools around at the piano in Michel Legrand style. Then he hands a new song to Cleo and she sings it in a sequence that is obviously the musical centerpiece of the movie — the piano accompaniment gradually fills out with full orchestra — but can’t be my choice here because it’s a song and I don’t do songs. (The backing track for the song actually recurs later without the vocal, but I still can’t use it because there it’s covered with dialogue.)

Our options for unobscured music are in fact very limited: we basically have to go with the short cue that brings us into Cleo’s world immediately after the title sequence, at the start of Chapter 1, as she goes down the stairs and then out onto the street. I have omitted a couple of lines in the gap between the two parts so that we can listen to more than a minute of uninterrupted music.

Michel Legrand might have written “the circle of fifths” again and again throughout his career, but he had a real feeling for it. He was never phoning in the circle of fifths; he always meant it. This bare little cue, which seems to have been conceived mostly as something that could sync to her footsteps, turns out to be very effective stuff.

It doesn’t take much to do good work; you just have to mean it!

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2000:

written and directed by René Clair
based on the play by Georges Berr and Marcel Guillemaud (1910)

Criterion #72.

Le Million is the title in English too. I guess in 1931 Americans were still expected to know what Le means. By 1955, when the Les had to be stripped from Diabolique(s), we’d forgotten.

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This movie was a breeze, so it ought to be a breeze to write up too.

It took me about half an hour to get in alignment. At first, my sympathy instincts just weren’t kicking in and I couldn’t feel where the center of gravity was. It’s a farce, but the leads aren’t really clowns, they’re just mild-mannered 30s folk. Charlie Chaplin always seems to have a giant arrow pointing at him; in Le Million it took a good while before I could see any arrows. I don’t know if I should chalk that up to a) me and my state of mind at that moment, b) the different social instincts of the 30s, c) the different social instincts of the French, or d) this particular movie.

But once the tempo picked up in the second half, I found myself on board, understood everything in retrospect, and easily went along for the rest of the breeze.

That’s a familiar experience to me, where exposition fails and bewilders me, but as soon as we get to the “rising action” I suddenly catch up. Since high school I’ve had the idea in the back of my mind: I’m not so sure that “exposition” is all it’s cracked up to be. There’s something artificial and overrationalized about it. Usually the first thing that the author actually cares about is the introduction of the conflict. In this case it’s: “A man wins the lottery but misplaces the ticket, and has to go on a wild chase to hunt it down.” That’s a real creative inspiration. But then the next step in the creative process is this artificially imposed grind of working out the exposition: “So, hm, who is he? What is his life like before he wins the lottery? I need to establish all of this first.” This isn’t inspiration; more like duty. And the viewer can always tell the difference. So many works begin with a dispiriting dutifulness.

In reading a book or watching a movie, I pretty much always have a sense of the order in which it was conceived. One always feel things open out and relax when one finally gets to the image or idea that was the author’s original seed of inspiration: “Ah-ha, now this is something.” When that seed is the ending, I generally have a sense of itchiness through the entire preceding narrative: “Yeah yeah, but why is this the story? Why would a person think to invent this?” Then I get to the end and go “ahhhh, now I see what this actually was; I see what you were trying to say.” But if I’m going to spend hours with a book or a movie, I’d rather those hours be spent with something being said to me than with something trying to be said to me or preparing to be said to me, something that will only organize itself into a feeling of human contact after the fact.

So that’s my line against exposition: if you have something to say, you do far better to say it than to try to properly render it said. This certainly is exactly the nature of my troubles with writing. Come on, man, be breezy, breezy!

Anyway, having seen the whole thing, now that I know the intended function of everything that happens in the first 30 minutes, I’ll be able to enjoy this movie much more fluidly on a second viewing.

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It’s a very light-spirited, purely cheerful work. I’m glad to be able to add another movie to that stack, one of those things that is 100% clear-hearted and can only bring cheer. It feels a bit like a Silly Symphony, that way.

What’s the most recent all-happy movie you can think of? It just doesn’t seem to be done anymore; the world today has an angsty sense of being “beyond that.” I can agree that in Le Million (and Silly Symphonies) it takes a form that is very particular to the 30s and to which we obviously will never entirely return, but I don’t think the underlying spiritual idea is at all dated or “corny” or illegitimate. Artworks of utterly undarkened happiness are still as appealing and rewarding as ever; they’re just out of creative fashion. We’ve lost our sense of comfort with making such things, even though we’re still happy to watch the old ones and yearn for those quote-unquote “simpler times.” A self-inflicted wound.

(Important typo correction just now: not an “elf-inflected wound.”)

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Le Million is more or less a musical, which I think makes it one of the only movies I’ve seen from the very first generation of sound-film musicals. The one bonus feature on the disc is René Clair talking about the earliest days of sound — a good if short interview — and it seems like that’s the context in which Le Million gets discussed, as a case for Clair’s being an techno-aesthetic pioneer. I think it’s to his credit that I didn’t really take the time to think about the “inventiveness” of his sound techniques, because they just worked. (I did however make conscious note of the terrific special-effects shot with which the film begins, because it surprised me for predating the same sort of thing being done in animation, where I’m more used to it — compare the opening pan from Pinocchio, nine years later.)

The operetta-style treatment of the singing element has actually dated more noticeably than the technical stuff, I think, but I feel comfortable with it from Marx Brothers movies, which clearly are smirking a bit as they go through the musical motions. And yet just as clearly they’re not sarcastic parodies; they’re still inside of the tradition that they’re smirking at. Le Million felt similar: the movie certainly agrees with us that it’s a little funny that they’re singing. It just might not necessarily agree on the proportions.

A lot of what goes on here can be related to the Marx Brothers, most obviously the climax on the stage of an opera production, which seems like it can’t be a coincidence; it must have been deliberately lifted for A Night at the Opera. The best comic bits also have a flavor of Chaplin about them, like the situation when the protagonist, having sneaked onstage, is trying to be inconspicuous about tugging his jacket out from under a soloist singing a tragic death scene. I laughed hard at that. The attempt to get away with something impossible by “acting casual” is one of my favorite sources of comedy, and it was a mainstay of the silent era. I promise a full psychoanalysis of the phenomenon some other time.

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I am struck that the musicals of this era, movie and otherwise, are still mostly unknown and are unperformed. It looks like the soundtrack from this movie has never been released in any form, despite being a cute little miniature operetta. So I ripped all the audio for myself. There are about 30 minutes of singing and another 20 minutes of incidental music (fairly prominent) in this 81-minute movie, which feels very generous.

Yeah, so maybe a lot of it’s kind of square and dumb (like the “we’re marching up the stairs!” song)… but then again, the whole spirit of the thing invites us to relinquish the concept of “square,” and I always appreciate that kind of invitation. Is Row, Row, Row Your Boat “square”? Do you really want to be the kind of person who says “yes”? I’m glad for the opportunity to put all that aside. The people onscreen certainly don’t seem worried about whether they’re being cool, so why should I be?

The score is credited to Armand Bernard, Philippe Parès and Georges van Parys; I can’t find any source that will authoritatively tell me how that collaboration breaks down. From googling, I glean that Armand Bernard led the orchestra (and is seen doing so at the opera in the film), and thus, I speculate, may have served principally as arranger…? Philippe Parès and Georges van Parys were friends who apparently genuinely co-composed many operettas and film scores, but van Parys also worked without Parès and never vice versa, so he may have been the prime mover. (We’ve listened to music by Georges van Parys here before, in rather a different mode.)

The music is mostly in a light operetta style incorporating “jazz” in only the most genteel French ways. Highlights include a six-minute tongue-in-cheek dramatic scene from Les Bohémiens, the make-believe opera seen in performance, which must surely be one of the most accomplished pieces of “fake opera in a movie” ever written, up there with the aria from Citizen Kane.

There’s also a complete love duet, “Nous sommes seuls,” which serves simultaneously as self-parody and as a genuine romantic number, with the vain heavyset opera singers played for absurdity against the artifice of the music and lyrics, but the hero and heroine having a real romantic moment, hidden in the pop-up greeting-card world of the stage scenery. The sequence, like the movie as a whole, is a heartfelt love letter to the very operetta inanities that it teases. It’s a brilliant scene, especially for its time.

I really would have liked to make our musical selection one of the many chipper little bits of comic-theater underscore, like this one, because I think they’re of very high quality as such things go, but none of them is quite entirely in the clear (the one just linked doesn’t have an ending, and then dialogue starts). So our official track is going to be the Main Title, which is just an instrumental of “Nous sommes seuls.”

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Connection to the previous movie. This one’s solid: A couple has a cute romantic moment on a bench on an opera stage, surrounded by the touching quaintness of theatrical scenery, plywood trees and paper leaves. As you just saw.

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2000:

adapted and directed by Ingmar Bergman
original libretto by Emanuel Schikaneder (1791)
original Swedish translation by Alf Henrikson (1968)

Criterion #71: The Magic Flute. (Or is it Ingmar Bergman’s The Magic Flute?)

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Do we know for sure that in 1791, a popular-style opera like this (a “singspiel”) was meant to be sung prettily? I think the thing about opera that’s always confused me is that it’s so fixed on being pretty, even when nothing about the material seems to call for it. As a kid I couldn’t make head or tail of operas because I couldn’t hear them through the singing, which seemed always to be spoiled by this strange foreign element, this obsession with “beauty.” Is it possible that our ideas about what constitutes prettiness are more recent and anachronistic than we realize? That even in reading 150-year-old descriptions of “bel canto” singing, we are misinterpreting them according to our modern-day sensual enculturation? (So to speak?)

Maybe doing The Magic Flute brashly in the style of a present-day musical would be anachronistic, but better an anachronism that conforms to our living intuitions than a 19th-century anachronism maintained artificially.

Why can’t people ever do operas completely without pretension? I feel a hunger for productions of opera that treat it as naively as our high school production of Oklahoma: simply as instructions for a show that is guaranteed to work as it was designed to work. Community theater is sort of like the Wile E. Coyote approach to art, where you order the box from the ACME Corporation and then set it up according to the instructions, and press the red button and bingo, one satisfied audience. All the important artistic calculations have been made for you! Foolproof! Just add water!

So I don’t really understand why equivalently low-rent opera productions are so insistent on bringing the beauty and the glory. I guess it’s just that the skill involved self-selects people with a more intrusive ego agenda; a dentist and a librarian can get through “The Farmer and the Cowman” without ever having to think about breath control and their larynxes (larynges?), but who at the bake sale is going to sing Der Hölle Rache?

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This movie makes me sleepy, which I’ve come to think reflects well on a piece of art. It’s not a movie’s responsibility to keep me awake; it’s up to me to not be sleepy, as a matter of course. If a movie reveals my sleepiness to me, that means it has relaxed me, which means that in some way it feels true and right. To fall asleep to something is to have found harmony with it.

I thought I’d seen this DVD many times already — I was given it as a gift maybe 14 years ago — so I folded laundry while I watched… but I came to realize that every time I’d watched it, I must have gone into a trance. I realized this because I found I’d gone into the trance again, and when I looked up, what was onscreen was completely unfamiliar to me. It turned out there were sections of the movie I had truly never before paid attention to. So I had to watch it twice, which delayed this entry for a while.

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At my last go-round with Ingmar Bergman, I said that to be watching one of his movies is to be surrounded by feelings, and how wonderful a condition that is, regardless of what you think critically. It’s in fact the most luxurious possible situation from which to take issue with the work of art that makes it possible. And that’s my review of this one too: I am not in love with the movie, but I am genuinely grateful for the place from which I find myself not loving it.

My feelings are very very mixed. I have so many different ways of taking this movie! Like a lot of art, it makes many different possible attitudes available to me! I aspire to choose the rewarding ones and release my grip on the frustrated ones… but it’s very hard! I have such a strong intuition that frustrations can be shaken into submission and spun into gold. And won’t that have been worthwhile? In my whole life of critical crankiness, my complaints have always felt to me, in the moment, like a symptom of my having such gleamingly good intentions: “I so diligently tried to spin it into gold, but this damn straw just refuses to spin properly, so naturally I’m going to call it out!”

But of course that’s a very clouded idea of what constitutes “good intentions.” Straw after all is just straw, and there’s nothing wrong with it. There’s always going to be straw in the world; straw has its place. So, yes, I’m trying to learn not to be obsessed with it, as best I can.

Right now, “as best I can” is only okay. So here come a lot of excruciatingly nuanced complaints.

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The seed of the film seems to be that Ingmar Bergman had a formative aesthetic experience seeing The Magic Flute as a child, and this project is as much about his memory of that experience as it is about the opera itself. It is all seen through the eyes of a child.

Though Bergman puts a little girl’s face on the screen repeatedly as though she’s the audience, little Ingmar is the real audience, and his outlook is psychologically particular. This is a child who experiences a great warm sense of wonder, but also one to whom nothing is given directly. In his mind, the opera production is decidedly not for him; it is mysterious and it is his privilege to see it. This goes without saying; this is the emotional ground of the movie. Being silently present near where the grown-ups are going about their business, and observing it raptly, is the natural mode of relation.

As material, The Magic Flute suits this outlook nicely because it already doesn’t make sense to anyone, adult or child alike. Mozart and his Masonic collaborators, writing a secret members-only allegory, treated their audience like children watching from the stairs. So Bergman’s childhood experience of The Magic Flute was probably that here was a work that captured the true existential condition.

For my part, I always identified more with the framework of Alice in Wonderland, who is also a polite observer in a world that runs according to its own bewildering rules… and yet at the same time tacitly understands that, despite the show of indifference and exclusion, it is in some obscure way all staged for her. Her journey of encounters with people who just barely have time or sanity to spare is the journey for which the world exists. The mysteries around her are not wondrous adult realities for her to meekly admire and hope someday to earn entrée into; they are just absurd vanities through which she can see immediately. Jam tomorrow, jam yesterday, but never jam today. It’s she who is humoring them, whether or not they know it. And sure enough, at the end of each book, there’s a kind of existential concession: it is all about her; she’s on trial, or she’s being toasted as the new queen. Yes, the grown-ups are still monstrously unpredictable and not managing proper eye contact, but they are admitting to her full personhood, in their way. (Also cf. The Wizard of Oz).

Whereas The Magic Flute is all about the process of kneeling before mysteries, earning induction into the benevolent esoteric order of the temple. This is the construction Ingmar believes in. He feels it as fundamental. It is the source of all goodness. He is dependent on it to tuck him in at night. In fact, in the movie he alters the opera to turn it explicitly into a mommy vs. daddy story, in case we don’t get it.

Like so many opera productions tend to do, this movie takes the opera as preexisting — not just the ACME kit, but the living performance itself: it’s known, it’s a given. It doesn’t actually need to be “done” in the simple community theater sense, because it’s already been “done” for all eternity. Rather, it’s being “visited,” “enjoyed” as an institution. The moment when the audience takes it in for the first time is elided.

There’s plenty of love for the idea of a first time, but there’s no proper first time. No direct offering, only the implicit, indirect one. This is young Ingmar’s sense of what makes the opera great: adults already know it, and he doesn’t. He will goggle in timid wonderment.

At intermission, Bergman shows us the actors backstage, out of character, smoking, playing chess — but all still charmed, weightless. We’re not being shown reality, we’re being shown “actors” and “dressing rooms” as another layer of the child’s imagination: the soft impression that backstage these actors were maybe partially still their characters, too. I can remember having such an impression. But like so much of what’s at stake here, the real impression wasn’t something that could ever be pictured. By staging it here, Bergman does not offer it to me again; he only refers to it.

I’m aware of Bergman’s project and can recognize myself in it, which is appealing. But that recognition is dependent on my conscious maturity; it’s quite a different thing from feeling a natural affinity of the sort he felt as a child. Had I seen this movie when I was young, I think I would have been struck by its peculiar evasion and underplaying of the show itself; to what end, I would not have been able to make out. And if the idea is ostensibly to honor the spiritual life of the child, then I want to honor that part of my response. I shouldn’t have to recognize nostalgia rationally to feel the underlying order of a work of art.

I guess I’ve become exceedingly touchy about nostalgia, and it’s because sentiment that’s very important to me often gets packed away inside it, like a hard shell. I want one without the other, but separating the two is difficult and requires a new kind of attention from me. This movie contains, closely linked, the true sentiments associated with watching a work of art like The Magic Flute, and also retrospective conceptualization of those sentiments. Explicitly pointing the camera at so much “quaintness” and “charm” is a kind of schematic imposition of something that in its authentic form was subconsciously felt rather than consciously observed. The truer artistic path would have been merely to create that same impression on us now. We as an audience are just as capable of pure feeling as young Ingmar was!

The mistake that Bergman makes is thinking that he deepens his art by not simply being the grown-up who provides it for the child, but being the grown-up who wistfully is aware of everything. In fact, that awareness only weakens the trance he wants to recreate. “You are getting sleepy… You are getting sleepy… Feels weird, doesn’t it? I know, right?… You are getting sleepy…”

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My overarching reservation about Ingmar Bergman is that he wants us to be aware of how much he feels. But this is exactly what a child doesn’t care about from an adult, and frankly what an audience doesn’t care about from an artist. Wanting us to feel what you feel is one thing; he also wants us to feel that he feels.

Of course, it’s a fine line. It really comes down to where I and my mind are, when I’m watching. If everything in the movie just happens to correspond exactly to that moment of my inner life, I would in that moment just see Bergman as a great soul-friend.

But art doesn’t have to be so contingent, to just sit waiting for the magic sympathy to come around. It can be seductive; it can be manipulative in the best sense. To do that, the artist has to just go about his work and ply his chosen craft; he can’t be looking for anything other than the satisfaction it gives. I may be wrong but I get the sense Ingmar Bergman always wanted something from his audience; his huge artistic generosity was the prelude to the eventual ask. Of course, he could never get there in reality, but psychologically I feel it lurking.

Maybe that’s just because I know the feeling.

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Mozart surely knew exactly what he was doing, and surely hit on exactly the spirit he intended for every number. So when narrative moments of tension or mystery or horror are accompanied by blithe major-mode twiddling, it must indicate an 18th-century distance from the characters and their travails. When the music sounds like this, the audience is surely not expected to feel the dramatic situation in our modern way. Rather, they’re expected principally to feel the real situation: “we are being told a charming story and shown a charming show.” In such a culture, emotional immersion is a special effect, used sparingly. For the most part, it’s just a play, and that’s a good thing!

In Bergman’s version, this distance exists, but only at the private psychological level discussed above. He does not seem to see that the sweet inconsequentiality he brings to so much of the action isn’t just his personal avuncular wink from behind the curtain. His direction often seems to be telling us that “officially,” the movie is emotionally invested in the story, even when the music has already belied such investment. Bergman acts as though he and Mozart are in cahoots under the grown-ups’ table that is the opera. But the music is the opera. The “official” version does not exist.

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By the way, as for The Magic Flute itself: I’m pretty sure the big Masonic secret, and the reason for all the hermetic rigmarole, was atheism. The outer trappings of Freemasonry are a kind of vague, mystified, sentimental humanism, to test the waters. But after sufficient grooming and ceremony and loyalty oaths and haunted housery, if you were deemed trustworthy, you’d be brought into the circle of trust and they’d tell you outright: yeah, there’s no god, there’s just mankind, and we have to do our best.

Just a hunch.

The weirdness of The Magic Flute, it seems clear to me, is a straightforward Masonic allegory: the Queen of the Night is the church. We begin believing she’s our mother and our protectress, but then we grow up and find out that she’s actually a cruel and jealous tyrant, and that can be a rough transition for all involved. But if we can pass through the silence and the darkness and the fire, guided by our magic flute of art and love, and our jingling bells of childlike purity, secular humanism can and will win the day, huzzah! And even simpletons like Papageno will benefit because they don’t actually care about religion as much as they say; they really just want girlfriends. They’ll go along gladly into the glorious new world.

But as a “charming fairy-tale opera,” it’s all messed up. In a fairy tale, if you come across the strange temple of an unknown cult, the story itself does not join the cult, obviously! Here we start in generic fairy-tale space and journey toward this cult, and then, surprise!, the premises of the story go inside the cult’s belief system, without ever actually selling the value of doing so to the audience.

Since the opera is already confusingly half-allegorical, Bergman’s softening, nostalgifying technique just turns it all into a kind of soup. Two hours of pleasant soup, shot with amber love by Sven Nykvist.

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There is a part of this movie that for all my mixed feelings never fails to move me, and that’s in the gentle touch of sexiness that Bergman brings to the Pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-Papagena duet at the end. At this one moment in the film I feel that Bergman’s spirit is exactly in harmony with Mozart’s, and it lifts me.

But then I think: Ingmar Bergman, with this vision of romantic joy bubbling inside him, married and cheated and divorced so many times. No images are objective. They all come from people.

Art does not connect us to the eternal; it connects us to the eternal as perceived and conveyed by others. For those of us with social hangups, sometimes it can feel like we need that permission before we can venture there ourselves. But it’s good to keep in mind that as long as it’s someone else’s creation, it’s someone else’s glasses we’re looking through. Seeing it for ourselves can only be done by ourselves, and there’s no telling what it will be for us until we see it.

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One of my notes, as taken on my iPhone:

“Sarastro is Ms. cast. How does this thing know Sarot stroke but not miss cast?”

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Connection to the previous movie: someone sits in the dark and is tempted by apparitions.

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There are no bonus features on the disc! That was easy. Here instead is a picture of Papageno and Papagena in 2012.

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Music time. The score is apparently by one Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart, who was a prolific film composer also known for his work on The King’s Speech (2010), The Shawshank Redemption (1994), Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011), and Batman Begins (2005). Obviously our musical selection is going to be the Overture, all 8 minutes of it. Conducted by Eric Ericson. While you’re listening to this, I guess you should imagine a lot of close-ups of people’s faces.

Oh right, I had things I was going to say about that sequence, too. But this has gone on long enough.

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2000: 2012:

directed by Martin Scorsese
screenplay by Paul Schrader
based on the novel by Nikos Kazantzakis (ο τελευταίος πειρασμός, 1953; translated by Peter A. Bien as The Last Temptation of Christ, 1960)

Criterion #70.

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Historical Jesus is a movie I’ve always wanted to see. As I imagine it, it’ll be a movie with a strong sense of place, something that puts the man’s life in familiar human terms. Something that offers me the sensation of recognition: ah, I get it, I feel it now. As things stand, my sympathy for Jesus, and for all the supporting players in his story, is still only roughly sketched, with just a few points of color. I want some skilled artist to come fill in the detail. Sometimes we know exactly what art we could use; I feel certain that I could use some non-Christian art about Christ.

So I had very high hopes for this. I realized that it was going to be more essentially poetical than Historical Jesus, the movie in my head, but I was led to understand it was still going to be about Jesus as a recognizable human being, about the story of Jesus as the story of a man’s struggle with real circumstances.

Reader, I had been misled. I realize that false expectations are a bad reason to dislike a movie… but I cannot tell a lie. I found the film bewildering in the watching, unsatisfying in retrospect, unsuccessful in the ultimate analysis.

The Last Temptation of Christ is not about a man who happens to be Jesus. It is about a man… who turns out to be JESUS!!!

The spiritual struggle it depicts is encapsulated in those exclamation points. OMG: The Movie.

It may sound like I’m making a highly nuanced (or petty) distinction, but as a non-Christian I can say that it is for me an immediate and unavoidable difference. An ordinary man’s struggle to be a prophet of love is a universally valuable subject for a movie. A man’s struggle to come to terms with being THE CHOSEN ONE, AND NOT JUST ANY CHOSEN ONE, BUT THE BIG ONE! CAN YOU EVEN IMAGINE!?!? is only to be distinguished from Harry Potter to the degree that one is already a member of the fan club.

I do not pay regular dues to this particular fan club. I can respect it from a distance. But this was not a movie for mere spectators. It thought it was, but it wasn’t. If you don’t already feel the epic weight coming from your offscreen beliefs, what’s onscreen doesn’t really make sense.

I was bewildered, rather than just bored, because it so closely mimicked the movie I wanted it to be, and I was doing my darnedest to play along. We get a gradual progression: from Jesus in fearful denial of his spiritual calling to Jesus as increasingly bold spiritual leader. Well, I had come to the movie expecting exactly that! I figure the “voice of God” is a kind of psychological experience, and in any case metaphor can overlap with the supernatural. I was ready to work with that!

But every scene or two, the movie would shake me off: Nope, he’s explicitly doing non-metaphorical miracles. Nope, he’s explicitly not arriving at these thoughts by himself, just delivering them from on high. Nope, the disciples aren’t following him because he has something to offer them, they’re following him because they can sense that he’s Jesus Christ! Or something!

The awkward relationship between the “human” and the “superhuman” storytelling constantly leaves gaps in the sense, which the viewer has no choice but to fill with “or something!” Perhaps a sufficiently Christian viewer can convince him/herself that this is The Holy “Or Something,” the sacred mystery. Once you’ve committed to sanctifying your experience of The Bible, an incredibly esoteric archaeological text, then obscurities and inscrutability become part of the package of spiritual experience. This movie’s gaps and paradoxes can just be folded into the great awe.

But what we’re dealing with here is not a thousand-year-old palimpsest; it is, like Big, a movie from 1988, and so has no reason not to be clear and feel right. It just doesn’t feel right. I spent the whole movie sagging uncomfortably in the gaps. The characters relate to each other neither familiarly nor epically; the actors are all trying to split some unsplittable difference. The camera looks around with solemnity but not conviction. The few showy gestures feel overassertive; the rest feels underassertive. What goes on is mostly loose, watery.

The movie is two-and-a-half hours of hearty whole wheat dough, uncooked and sticky. Maybe a taste, sure, but eating an entire batch of uncooked dough is inadvisable, and this is a big batch.

And I can’t help but feel that the filmmakers kind of knew that they were getting away with something they didn’t understand, hiding behind poetry instead of inhabiting it. Making cohesive statements about profound spiritual matters is perfectly possible; this movie, with all its dreams and visions and riddles, and no solid ground, seems like kind of a phony.

Then again, the spiritual is never objective; what genuinely sustains Martin Scorsese might naturally seem absurd to me. Movies capture whole frameworks of reality, and peering into another man’s spiritual framework is always a strange experience. The core of spirituality is always so obviously something biographical: an image from elsewhere in life that happens to have been infused with that stained-glass feeling. In Mel Gibson’s mind, corporal punishment is carried out endlessly. In Carl Theodor Dreyer’s mind, a weeping innocent is surrounded by glowering faces. In Martin Scorsese’s mind, gruff men with New York accents argue inscrutably. I believe it.

They really do all talk with New York accents; the whole movie is like some kind of strange stunt casting. “Harvey Keitel as Judas Iscariot” is as bizarre and unconvincing in practice as it sounds on the page. The film climaxes with a standard mob-movie scene: Jesus (having been tempted to accept the life of an ordinary man) lies in his false deathbed and receives surprise visitors from the good old days, the apostles in age makeup. “What happened to you?” asks Jesus of Peter. “I got old,” he replies with a tough-guy smirk. “You got old,” repeats Jesus wistfully.

I have no doubt that this is all deliberate, and that Scorsese was aware of creating something extremely personal. But I think he didn’t realize that having gone so deep into his own private dream, there would be no turning back and claiming to have created anything of general religious significance. He should have gone all the way and had it take place in a half-Jerusalem, half-New York; be half the story of Christ and half the story of himself, or his father. (Or at least of Robert De Niro.) Like I said about Cocteau: only when the inward-turned gaze is completely unabashed does it finally become sympathetic. It is in the evasion of ultimate private emotions that art becomes irritating. The Last Testament of Christ feels brave to a point, but then evasive beyond.

All films are holy visions; all visions are holy. Jean Cocteau’s ego-films were no less spiritual than this. More spiritual, I’d say. So too is Taxi Driver. A strenuous effort to confront “the spiritual” head-on can be misleading, can distract the artist from himself. What we are really seeking, what is really spiritual, is always off to one side.

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The theological crux (so to speak!) is in the notion that Jesus has to die on the cross: what does this “has to” mean? This question is basically at the heart of Christianity, right? Well, the movie does not address this question. It holds up the “has to” as a holy and terrible fact, and makes a great prolonged drama out of its consequences — the dangerous “last temptation” is the temptation to believe that he doesn’t “have to” — but it does not actually touch it or humanize it or explore it. It just is this way. He just has to. ‘Cause that’s what Lucy says.

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Lucy’s the boss, so you’ve got to listen to Lucy!

Hm. The song is rather ominous, isn’t it.

Interpretive key: Simon (= Peter, apostle), is usurped by Lucy (= Lucifer). Lucy says, “I wanna be the queen of the world, yes I do.” Lucy says, “I want everything my way.” Lucy says, “I’m gonna be a beautiful girl, yes I am.” Which is the form he takes in the movie. Also as in the movie, Lucy tricks her followers by telling them they may put down their hands, rather than keeping them up on the cross. (Just look at them all posed like martyrs!) Ultimately Lucy betrays them all, even the prophet Linus (= Jesus), who gives in to the last temptation to run in place (= lead a mortal life of no eternal consequence), giving dominion of the earth back to the wild beasts.

LUCY’S THE BOSS, LUCY’S THE BOSS!
LISTEN TO LUCY, LISTEN TO LUCY!

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This movie has the same ending as Brazil. (“Uh-uh I didn’t say Lucy says!”) If anything it’s even more toxic here.

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Given the task at hand, Willem Dafoe does an admirable job, and after seeing Fishing with John I feel warmly toward him. But see above for all the reservations that his performance could not, or at least did not, overcome.

The photography is mostly handsome, though I had the clear sense that the filmmakers were out of their element and did not intuitively know how to look at the Moroccan landscape. Movies shot in California always look like they know exactly what they’re seeing and what it’s like to see it. Movies shot on exotic location sometimes have a bit of an uncertain eye. In image and substance, this movie felt like tourism. Dutiful tourism.

Or: like Scorsese’s very eager and conscientious eating of his spinach. He is a good boy and will eat it all, and really taste it, and care about it! Look how good he is: he’s eating it even when nobody asked him to! Even when no one really wants him to, in fact!

Conscientiousness is not an aesthetic virtue.

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I watched the movie back in December, and drafted the above immediately after. (Except for the “Lucy Says” part — that I put in just now, in a different mood! Could you tell???)

The plan, as usual, was then to watch all the other stuff on the disc and add further comments down here. But boy, I really didn’t want to watch that stuff.

I mean, within a day or two I did watch the on-set footage, which I always enjoy, and I did enjoy it — especially seeing Martin Scorsese videotaping himself in the mirror with a bulky 80s VHS camera and musing, in his excitable way, “I wonder if that red blinking light means that it’s recording.” And then I flipped through a bunch of the “extensive collection of research materials, production stills, and costume designs,” but it was really quite like spinach-eating. After reading about 20 screens worth of dry summary of the archaeological record concerning crucifixion — simultaneously grim and tedious — I had to take a break.

Then a week or so after that, I watched half of the commentary (Scorsese, Dafoe, Paul Schrader, and uncredited actual screenwriter Jay Cocks). It was fine, I guess, but a little too vindicating of my assessment above. Scorsese says outright that he thinks the movie isn’t successful and represents a mistake on his part — that he understands now that his lifelong struggle to think about religious concepts actually gets in the way of his artistic spirituality, and so this movie is all a kind of barking up the wrong tree. Really, almost in so many words. Meanwhile Schrader and Cocks and Dafoe are all talking about the care and intelligence they tried to bring to this difficult, awkward assignment. That would be interesting to hear if I thought the assignment had been basically worthwhile. But I don’t, and the director is brave enough to admit that he doesn’t either.

So this really is just the “dutiful conscientiousness” show, which is the ultimate turn-off, and after a couple hours I turned it off. I then proceeded to delay and delay and delay watching the rest of the stuff on there (assigned to me by my own principles of dutiful conscientiousness)… to the point of renewing this library DVD every Monday for weeks on end, never touching it. Just now I went to the library website to click my weekly click, but instead of doing my bidding, it gave me a pop-up warning with a big red exclamation point: “TOO MANY RENEWALS.” Apparently there is a limit of 10.

Well, having reached this limit, I take it as a sign that I have sat out my sentence, done my due penance, and am no longer under obligation to watch the rest of this DVD. I may return it to the library and proceed on to Criterion #71. Woo-hoo!

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Connection to the previous movie: audienceless vanity project in which a man searches for meaning in a barren landscape.

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Oh right, I always mention the music with these. This movie has a charismatic score by Peter Gabriel that proved to be extremely influential in establishing the sound of what most subsequent “world music” pop/soundtrack borrowing would sound like. I’m pretty sure you can thank and blame Peter Gabriel for all movie scores with a drone, exotic keening, and propulsive drums. This tree he planted in 1989 would grow a thousand increasingly lame branches. There’d be no Lion King without Last Temptation; neither would there be any Jason Bourne et al. These days, what doesn’t sound like this?

That link goes to the opening track from the album-ified version of the Last Temptation score, but I couldn’t make it my official ripped selection because in the movie it doesn’t have a clean start or finish. So instead I’m offering up the end credits as our Track 70. (A shorter version with a different mix is titled “It Is Accomplished” on the album.) The “world” elements aren’t very prominent on this cue — it’s a fairly straight-up Peter Gabriel pop instrumental in “In Your Eyes” mode, bookended by some wild ululation.

What does any of this have to do with the movie? It’s exactly what it sounds like: yet another collaborator’s conscientious effort to make sense of Marty’s assignment about melding present-day feeling with the ancient setting. Since Peter Gabriel was just writing music, he didn’t have to specifically put JESUS with a capital JESUS into his contribution, so he comes out looking the best of any of them. There’s an interview with him on the disc, and some kind of gallery of the ethnic instruments, which I may or may not have flipped through. I suppose that interview might well be interesting.

But it has already been determined by the 10-week rule that I am done here and am moving on.

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It is accomplished!

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2000: (out of print 4/2010)

Criterion #69: Testament of Orpheus.
= disc 3 of 3 in Criterion #66, “The Orphic Trilogy.”

As you can see, the full onscreen title is actually Le testament d’Orphée : ou : ne me demandez pas pourquoi, i.e. “The Testament of Orpheus : or : Don’t Ask Me Why.”

This subtitle appears as a line of dialogue in the movie, immediately after a character informs us that the “idol of celebrity” has six eyes and four mouths: don’t ask me why. So here it means: “Don’t ask me what any of this stuff means. It’s poetry, not symbolism.” Just as at the beginning of Orpheus and Beauty and the Beast, once again, Cocteau is giving the audience unnecessary “instructions for use.” This time he managed to get anxiety into the title itself. Well, the subtitle, anyway. The title proper is just a self-aggrandizing tag: “Orpheus, the Eternal Poet of my prior films? Yes, yes, c’est moi. Now receive this, my last bequest of Poetry to the world.” (Place back of hand on forehead and pose.)

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In a nutshell: Portrait of the Artist as an Artist Portraitist, Asleep. Jean Cocteau is onscreen in nearly every shot, playing himself, wandering around inside his own surreal dreamspace, thinking about himself, and interacting with characters from his own prior work, reenacting motifs from the preceding two films. This movie must be the absolute high-water mark for cinematic self-involvement. Bosley Crowther: “It is hard to think of anybody (with the evident exception of Jean Cocteau) who, however egotistical he might be, would have the nerve to make a full-length film about himself. But M. Cocteau has done it.” You’ve done it, Jean! By Jove, he’s done it! He said that he would do it and indeed he did!

Of course, the previous two movies were also all about him. But he wasn’t visible, identified by name, talking about himself and making other characters talk about him. Whereas this is Jean Cocteau’s Playhouse, starring Jean Cocteau playing “Jean Cocteau.” And he even stages that: at one point he and his boyfriend pass another Jean Cocteau walking in the opposite direction. The two Cocteaus peer back at each other suspiciously before the other turns the corner and disappears, leaving our Cocteau dismayed and irritable. “He hates me,” Cocteau tells his companion. “As well he might,” he replies, “He suffered mockery intended for you.”

That excerpt should suffice to indicate the texture of this very strange movie. It is not, like the two before it, a thinly veiled expression of the artist’s hangups: it is a completely unveiled staged catalogue of the artist’s hangups. Having worked my way through miles of Jean Cocteau to get here, absolutely none of those hangups were new to me. But the baldness of the project was, and to my surprise that baldness made it my favorite of the three films. The egomaniacal circularity of it all had a hypnotic effect. The movie has a kind of unary pulsating weirdness that feels like integrity. It’s like a little planetoid, held together exactly by its own gravity.

The integrity derives from the fact that this is how all selfhood operates. My self generates itself, and this self consists of no more and no less than that process of self-generation. Like the sun, which is its own burning. A work of art that operates similarly, as a fixed process of existence, is always going to be of value as a meditative object. No matter how vain and angsty and petty its materials. I found this other person’s dream very easy to relate to, much moreso than the preceding films with their awkward modicum of “modesty” and “objectivity.” In those films I saw various kinds of evasion. Here I saw a person’s mind as its own existential sun, with no escape. This I can believe.

I don’t know if Manny Farber’s dichotomy of “white elephant art” vs. “termite art” is so great or necessary, but it has force and has stuck around in my head. (Summary: White elephant art = top-down = calculated to fulfill imposed forms, satisfy inherited ideas of quality and dignity = mostly worthless; termite art = bottom-up = form is generated only by the inexorable “termite-like” processes of the artist’s work = valuable.) Farber’s idea seems to be that “form” is inherently suspect, and that the real artistic goods will always be ragged-edged, like a fungal growth. But this kind of self-sustaining/self-devouring film seems to me to be the ultimate in termite art, and yet also satisfyingly well-formed: a complete organic process that happens to take the shape of a perfect sphere because it is organized around a single obsessive center: “I”.

Other planetoidal works from my recent experience, which came to mind while watching: Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers, also about the dreamlife of the real author as he writes the very work we are reading (gay, French); Roussel’s Locus Solus, also about surreal dream-images hashed out with ostensible analytical rigor that only becomes more of the same dream (gay, French); Proust’s Big Book of Proust, also about the inner poetry of the “I” that generates the work we are reading (gay, French); Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, which is of course all dreamy-analysis and analytic-dreaminess, and which also circularly contains dream-descriptions of itself and its author and its writing and reading processes and its own circularity (not gay and not French, but heavily influenced by French writers.)

Also — rather less pertinently — the scenario at the beginning of the movie, where Cocteau is a time-traveling ghost who encounters a professor at different phases of his life, surprised me by calling to mind the horror story “The Professor’s Teddy Bear” by Theodore Sturgeon (warning: extremely creepy). Surely Cocteau was not a reader of Weird Tales and the plot similarities are a mere coincidence. Nonetheless it does point up a sort of pulpy Twilight Zone thread in Cocteau’s work — think of the car radio that receives broadcasts from the underworld, in Orphée — which throughout this trilogy has appealed to me as the one unabashedly enthusiastic element, free of self-regard. I don’t know from where exactly this sort of off-kilter sci-fi stuff got into Cocteau’s head, but its ego-function is simply as intriguing fodder for Cocteau-as-spectator, lover of fantasy, and in this role he and I overlap quite genuinely.

I endorse Testament of Orpheus, with full knowledge that it is not for everyone and in fact maybe not for anyone. Not even for Jean himself. It simply is. It is a disembodied self-indulgence, a dream about dreams, but without any dreamers. That feels like a real kind of art, to me. One with no inroads and no function. If you can dig it, this is a fun one.

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There are a passel of celebrities in it for no good reason. Like, Pablo Picasso, for a second. He is in a tableau recreating the society onlookers from Blood of a Poet. His onlooking is fairly hammy. Elsewhere, Brigitte Bardot is in there (as well as Roger Vadim; everyone stay tuned for Criterion #77!), as is Jean-Pierre Léaud (everyone remember Criterion #5 and stay tuned for Criterion #185!). And of course Yul Brynner in the role he was born to play: Athena’s receptionist or something. And others.

At the end Cocteau says out loud (I paraphrase): “You may have noticed some celebrities along the way. They were not included because they are celebrities, but because they suit their roles, and because they are my friends.” Or to paraphrase more loosely: “Follow me on Instagram #SaintTropez4eva OMG I’m such a dork ;).”

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Cocteau has found a really fantastic location, a bauxite quarry in Provence, and he uses it to the fullest. It already brings with it all the mytho-symbolist suggestive atmosphere he needs. Some of the most compelling sequences are the ones where he lets the location be the show and just wanders through it.

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My criticism that Cocteau does not know how to handle pacing has finally been put to rest. By the age of 70 he had either figured it out or let his collaborators guide him a bit more. The film has flow and a sense of mystery in the cutting. That counts for so very much, in this game of the unknown and the unknowable. That alone would make it my favorite of the three.

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So now that it’s over, what was “The Orphic Trilogy”?

Well, I am hard pressed to find any evidence that it was so named or considered by Cocteau; seems like he thought of all his works as thematically and spiritually interrelated, not just these three films. The first reference to an “Orpheus trilogy” that I find in Google Books is in a 1975 book of film theory, in which the modes of reportage and creative interpretation are intermingled; the reference to a trilogy can easily be read as being that author’s own observation and coinage. There are a couple more such references in the following two decades. Then after Criterion released this box set, suddenly the tone changes and “The Orphic Trilogy” is widely referred to as a thing. What I’m saying is that it might not be a thing.

That said, the links among the three films are quite explicit, and this third one is so overt about being a riff on a riff that it actually begins by replaying the last few moments of Orpheus as a refresher, or as a dovetail joint. But when one thinks of a “trilogy” one tends to think of something like an altarpiece in three panels or a story told in three chunks, or a sequence of three adventures in the same world. These films are more like three times that an artist did the same thing, with cumulative knowledge of his prior efforts. But they fit into a body of work that (I am led to understand) increasingly consisted of doing the same stuff over and over in varied forms.

I don’t hold the boxset or its title against Criterion; it makes good sense. I just think that as far as my finding something to say about the mysterious spine #66, there is no such overview for me to take. The films fit into one another like nesting dolls and leave no synthesis left for the viewer. This last one has already eaten up and incorporated any kind of perspective I could try to have at this point. The anxiety of the artist will always get there first!

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This movie sets out to be a kind of ultimate arthouse movie and succeeds. Watching it is like scuba diving through endless poetical seaweed; not to pick it or identify it, just for the sweet sleepy creepy ambiance. I made a tongue-in-cheek movie like this when I was in high school, where (if I recall correctly) an everyman is questing through a dreamscape after an apple, but menaced by a paperclip. I made it because I thought such things were funny, but a special mesmerizing kind of funny that some pretentious people considered serious — which was what made it so funny! Now I see that what I was doing was not parody after all, but the thing itself. Daring to be absurd — daring to seem pretentious! — is the same serious joke, the same risk and the same reward, at any age. There are parts of this movie that made me chuckle because they were so hilariously damned poetical. But I was always simultaneously able to be on the flip side of that chuckle, underwater.

Like I said for Blood of a Poet: dream-art is a good thing, and we should love what we have of it as best we can.

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Villa Santo Sospir is on here as a bonus film, but I’ve already seen it because the new issue of the preceding disc took it over after the boxset went out of print; remember how that worked?

The only other bonus feature is an essay by Cocteau, which is again, as usual, both sympathetic and anxiously overarticulate about how none of these things can be articulated. “Everything that can be explained or demonstrated is vulgar,” he says (actual quote this time!), while of course in the process of explaining and demonstrating. I know what that’s like. Where else can that energy go? One must simply wait it out, and make speeches with it while one waits.

Here is a passage I would like to keep, so I copy it out:

This time, in my film, I was careful to make the special effects serve the internal, not the external, development of the film. They should help me to make this line of development as supple as the thought processes of “un homme qui gamberge” — to use a splendid term not found in our dictionary.

“Gamberger” means to let the mind follow its own, uncontrolled course; and, while it is different from dreaming, daydreaming, or reverie, allowing our most intimate notions (those most tightly imprisoned within us) to escape and flee unseen past the guards. Everything else is just “thesis” or “flair”: I am repelled by both.

A thesis forces us to “buckle the wheel,” to twist it so that it will obediently follow an artificial line, while flair incites us for no valid reason to accelerate, slow down, or reverse, and although it is very tempting to use these devices, the effect of surprise only carries weight when they are integrated into the task and remain unobtrusive.

Good advice here for those seeking peace of mind, and I like having a suitably new word for it.

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This movie has the most elaborate music credit of any so far:

Musique enregistrée
sous la direction de
Jacques Météhen

Indicatif musical et Trompettes
de
Georges Auric

Structures sonores
J. Lasry et F.B. Baschet

Piano-jazz
Martial Solal

The majority of the underscore is classical. We hear one movement by Handel three times (Concerto Grosso, Op. 6 No. 4 (HWV 322): I. Larghetto affettuoso) and if I weren’t so set on picking original music, that would be our “theme from Testament of Orpheus” for sure. Under the title we hear, appropriately enough, Gluck: Orfeo ed Eurydice — Minuet. During the scene of building a flower in reverse motion, we hear Bach: Orchestral Suite No. 2 BWV 1067 — 6. Menuet, 7. Badinerie And late in the movie there’s a theme from Tristan und Isolde but I can’t find it right now on Spotify so forget that. This stuff all goes uncredited and unidentified so I enjoyed identifying it, especially the Handel which I didn’t know before. That’s the only reason for all these Spotify links. Anyway, I assume that stuff was all conducted and maybe arranged by Jacques Météhen.

As for the Lasry/Baschet “structures sonores,” these are used for eerie sound effects in a few places, mostly corresponding to the appearance and disappearance of the hibiscus bloom that Cocteau carries around throughout the film (representing his poetry/soul, of course). (I had heard of Baschet’s musical sculptures before because of my interest in film scores, but not this one — they are a footnote in the pre-Jaws work of John Williams.)

The “piano-jazz” by Martial Solal makes just two brief appearances as the sound of “young people,” one of Cocteau’s fixations.

So that leaves us with Georges Auric again, who we see has not actually composed much original music at all this time: just an “Indicatif musical” and “Trompettes.” The trumpets are some unremarkable fanfaric stuff when Cocteau finally reaches the temple of Athena. (spoiler: She turns away coldly, then kills him when his back is turned. But then he returns to life and continues wandering the earth. She is essentially the same character as Lee Miller in Blood of a Poet.)

So our selection is going to be Auric’s indicatif musical, which I believe refers to the music played at the very beginning of the movie during the footage from Orpheus: a cue, newly recorded and maybe rearranged, from the Blood of a Poet score. This is apparently meant to serve as The Poet’s “theme music,” though it’s sort of a slithery little cue and, as is usual for Cocteau, an odd choice, dramatically. But in any case, it links the trilogy together (for those of you who have watched Blood of a Poet recently enough to recognize this snippet, that is) and is the only original music in this score that’s in the clear. So here it is: Prologue.

That’s enough. Good night, Jean Cocteau. It’s been real. No, wait, not real. It’s been not real.

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2000: 2011:

written and directed by Jean Cocteau

Criterion #68. “Orpheus,” of course.
= disc 2 of 3 in Criterion #66, “The Orphic Trilogy.” Or at least it used to be.

Criterion generally doesn’t let their DVDs go out of print if they can help it. But in 2010, about 25 titles went “OOP” at the same time, for backstage business reasons. The films in question had been licensed from StudioCanal, who opted not to renew their agreements with Criterion because they had just made a new deal with Lionsgate: Lionsgate would get exclusive US distribution of titles from the StudioCanal library, in exchange for which StudioCanal would get the Germany/Austria/Switzerland distribution rights to major new Lionsgate films.

I always find this sort of stuff rather unpleasant to contemplate, since I prefer not to think of movies as just so many marbles being traded and collected by a bunch of chortling executives. But they are that. (Everything is, in the end, because everything can be, and executives will be executives.)

The casualties included #67 Le sang d’un poète and #69 Le Testament de Orphée, thus killing the “Orphic Trilogy” boxset.

However, the middle film of the set, #68 Orphée, is not a StudioCanal property, so a year later Criterion came back out with a new standalone edition of just this one film. Plus, naturally, a lot of bonus stuff. That’s the edition I watched.

The upshot is: this title is both part of the ongoing boxset and not part of the boxset. Depending on what kind of system you’re using for your chart of my progress, this may call for a dagger.

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For my purposes here, there is a problem with the bundling of these three closely related films right in a row: namely, I’ve already said the stuff I have to say. Cocteau described this movie as an “orchestration” of the theme “played with one finger” in Blood of a Poet and that sounds right to me. So it means my big picture response is nearly the same.

To recap: Jean Cocteau is a sincere, sensitive, neurotic egomaniac. He chases his own tail in circles, but thinks what he’s doing is descending into the underworld. He believes that he is on the dark and perilous quest of a poet, since poets must lead the world in matters of heart and sensibility. Whereas actually he’s just alone because it’s his own tail and poses no problems for anyone else.

At times it seems like he and his art are deliberately crying out to be psychoanalyzed, but I think that’s actually not the case. I think he didn’t believe in the possibility of being understood, did not believe in psychology, only in its manifestations. There is something very lonely about the work.

One of the many bonus features is a French TV segment from the 50s called “40 Minutes with Jean Cocteau,” in which he is seen wringing his hands and staring fearfully while he says his same old stuff about the true poet being some elusive interior self, and musing about all the things people project onto him, in his fame, that have nothing to do with him. At one point, completely unprompted, he takes up some papers from his desk, announcing that they are sketches from the preparations for Blood of a Poet as he nervously thumbs through them, and then just as suddenly puts them back down, saying, “I don’t really want to show them to you.” He then shyly/proudly points out his diary, which lies open on the desk. Then, again seemingly unprompted, he takes out a large piece of paper and signs his name on it, finishing with his little star. All of this behavior comes across as being compulsive, anxious, like he’s desperately trying to figure out what to do in front of the exciting, scary cameras, and these are the things that spontaneously occur to his racing mind.

In fact “compulsive” is a good word for the spirit of most of his output. I think he frequently confused compulsion with inspiration. Since his compulsions were so intrinsically aesthetic, he got away with it. Or, better said: because was skilled in his compulsions, it didn’t occur to anyone to help him stop.

What I said about La Belle et la Bête in relation to fairy tales applies equally to Orphée in relation to myth: Cocteau’s opening injunction to the audience to “interpret it as you will” is fundamentally anxious, since it should go without saying.

Richard Taruskin, writing about the bad faith of Late Romantic music, makes an example of Mahler’s 2nd Symphony, at the end of which is an attempt to create a spiritually cathartic climax with the text “O believe, my heart, O believe!” As Taruskin points out, this is exactly what shows that the artist and his audience do not truly believe, since a believer needs no such command; only a doubter is moved by the very idea of belief. That example came to mind when Cocteau instructed us in La Belle et la Bête to watch it innocently like a child, and here when he told us that “A legend is entitled to be beyond time and place.” Who said it wasn’t? Believers don’t defend and explain such things, they just live by them, comfortably. Cocteau’s interviews are the same: all that articulate talk about what he’s doing and what it feels like and why it’s mysterious reveals that he actually stands outside it.

His doubts touch the craftsmanship as well. Often the movie seems to be doing what nervous actors do: indicating rather than being. Only the special effect shots are consistently and overtly the thing itself; only when the artist’s anxiety gap has been filled up with the business of technical trickery does the sense of affect really come through. The most artistically satisfying moment in the movie is its most elaborate trick shot: an upgraded edition of exactly the same wall-walking effect already seen in Blood of a Poet.

So all in all this felt a little disappointing. I wanted to be taken somewhere for real, given something for real. Is that so greedy?

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If you haven’t seen the film, the criticism above will be misleading. There is definitely something of some value here. And like I said last time, we should probably try to make the most of such dream-films because there aren’t many of them.

In some ways the flavor of Orphée is unique in my experience; it might be called naturalistic surrealism. Very odd poetic stuff is happening in scenes that aren’t outwardly distinguishable from ordinary Hollywood fare. Some characters are standing and discussing their situation; the car is pulling up to the house; the woman is staring off wistfully… but the logic of their reality is perpetually half-asleep.

In principle that sounds great to me. The movie that was indicated by this movie was a great one.

There were moments that moved me. The ending is a kind of poignant self-cancellation that felt familiar to me: it’s what calming down feels like to those who don’t know how to do it, like a kind of nauseating time travel.

Okay, fine, fine, I’ll do a quick psychoanalytical interpretation of the movie:

Eurydice = ordinary life = happiness = social self = heterosexual norm = Cocteau’s pre-pubescent identification
Death = dream world = fear = artistic self = homosexual feelings = Cocteau’s post-pubescent identification

He is unaware of the possibility of a fully unashamed homosexuality, so his commitment to his authentic experience feels like a commitment to fear and to a fracture. Thus the two components of his psyche are unreconciled to one another and he experiences a constant sense of mythic drama as they slosh back and forth, which the movie stages.

Duh, right?

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It’s got his ex-boyfriend and his new boyfriend in it, it’s got people representing his rivals and his colleagues, every image in it is drawn from his life in some way. “It is much less a film than it is myself, a kind of projection of the things that are important to me,” he wrote. Right, exactly so. And so I don’t want to talk about any of that stuff; it would be mere description. In a sense, that stuff is all merely genetic; it has nothing to do with my experience of the finished art, as an audience member.

My experience as an audience member was mostly a genuine neutral. The work simply was. I neither begrudge Jean Cocteau nor love him. Fundamentally, I am not him, and that’s the experience I had: I am me and this movie is this movie.

I said of poetry, at one point, that reading a whole body of it is more like encountering a person than like encountering art. So is this. There he is. And reviewing or critiquing people is a category error.

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The commentary “featuring French-film scholar James S. Williams” of course takes the biographical/psychoanalytic approach, because an academic can’t afford not to, but it’s not particularly trenchant or compelling. When he announced his intention to point out all the sexual subtext, I thought, “great, let’s have some fun with this,” but his idea of Freudian fun is to talk about how when men touch each other on the shoulder they’re being homoerotic, and how the hand going into the mirror is like a sexual penetration. That kind of thing seems easy and cheap and pointless to me. The movie is completely rife with overt psychosexual significance; why resort to the facile old Where’s Waldo “phallic symbol” game? Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and sometimes the person smoking it is meanwhile making a movie all about his inner life.

About 10 minutes in, the commentator describes a scene with a couple of men in it as being a “circulation of male gazes.” After that I started skipping around. I didn’t really listen to the whole thing.

So what else do we have here? A whole second disc’s worth of stuff:

• Jean Cocteau: Autobiography of an Unknown (1984), a feature-length documentary

But ah-ha, remember how this release stands in for the whole deleted boxset… well, this is the same documentary that used to be on disc one of the set, which I saw and discussed last time. (Conveniently enough, there were no bonus features on disc two of the old set, which this is replacing for me, so I’m not missing anything.)

• Jean Cocteau and His Tricks (2008), a video interview with assistant director Claude Pinoteau

Ordinarily this kind of discussion of effects and techniques would be interesting, but the techniques are all deliberately obvious so there’s not a lot to be said. However I do always get something out of seeing how a participant from the then can still be photographed in the now. The guy is pleasant enough. The notable thing here is that this interview was conducted and edited by Marc Caro (formerly of “Jeunet & Caro” fame, but no longer) and has some outlandishly childish strobing and looping effects stuck on to it for no reason, as though this is playfully artistic in the spirit of Cocteau. It’s not. You’d think Criterion would be advertising the name “Marc Caro” in their list of features, but they don’t. Surely it’s because what he delivered is so dumb and obnoxious.

• 40 Minutes with Jean Cocteau (1957), an interview with the director

As mentioned above. By the time I got to this I’d already spent many hours with Jean Cocteau so another 40 minutes was sort of gratuitous, but seeing him caught in the TV headlights was somewhat revealing.

• In Search of Jazz (1956), an interview with Cocteau on the use of jazz in the film

More old TV, but more in a Charlie Rose vein. Cocteau is more relaxed and in better form generally since he has something other than himself to talk about. His comments on jazz and youth culture were interesting in passing. I’m afraid I already forget what they were.

• La villa Santo-Sospir (1951), a 16 mm color film by Cocteau

A thorough self-indulgence — Cocteau called it “an indiscretion” — which is basically just a glorified house tour home movie where he very slowly goes over all the art he drew on the walls, often putting his finger in the frame and literally pointing at it. Another 40 minutes spent in the company of his nervous vanities; to me this was the most inescapably desperate and lonely document of his little kingdom of selfhood. But anyone’s home movies can seem that way to strangers such as myself. If it didn’t end with some reverse footage of him assembling flowers out of thin air, I doubt anyone would think of it as a real “film.” To me there was something particularly sad about imagining him tearing and crushing these lovely flowers as part of a scheme to create a film image of himself as a magical creator. But maybe he recognized that poignancy.

• Gallery of images by French-film portrait photographer Roger Corbeau

These didn’t seem any more remarkable than any other film photographs.

• Raw newsreel footage from 1950 of the Saint-Cyr military academy ruins, a location used in the film

I guess good for them for finding this, but it is really just that; raw footage of a location. Okay.

• Theatrical trailer

As I said, the film outwardly resembles a normal film, so despite its underlying strangeness, the footage lends itself readily enough to being turned into a run-of-the-mill trailer.

• PLUS: A new essay by author Mark Polizzotti and an essay on La villa Santo-Sospir by Williams; and an excerpted article by Cocteau on the film

The essays were both satisfying and on point. I appreciated that they were not unreserved in their respect; the main essay won me over immediately by saying that Cocteau’s was artistically self-fixated to the point where some of his particular obsessions “have taken on a whiff of the ridiculous.” Usually the essays are available on the Criterion site but for some reason these aren’t. The Cocteau article is just as you’d imagine, at this point.

• New cover by Fred Davis

Indeed. If you click on his name and flip through his portfolio you can see two showier alternatives that weren’t used.

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Music by Auric again, a tasteful score if sometimes a bit staid. And once again, somewhat ill-served in the editing by Cocteau.

It has one really excellent piece, a fancy scherzo with sort of a Frenchified Bernard Herrmann sound to it. Unfortunately I can’t use it as our official selection because there’s talking all over the second half. Here it is anyway because I enjoy it so much and it’s not available anywhere else. (There was a rerecording in the 90s of much of this score, including the scherzo, but they take it much much too slow.)

As frequently happens, by process of elimination, the official selection will have to be the Main Title despite its being one of the least distinctive cues in the score.

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This bland entry represents my best effort at relaxing and not forcing myself to engage too deeply, despite feeling like I was being begged to. Maybe if he hadn’t needed it so badly I would actually have been inspired to say more. But that feeling of one’s attention being needed can be stifling. “You see, you see, you see?” he is saying, his eyes nervously darting around. I am inclined to say, “Yes, yes, very nice, Jean,” and then let my face glaze over in passive defense.

Ultimately I aspire neither to do that nor to cave and cater to the demand. I want to just hold to a route of my own choosing. I’m still not great at it.

I won’t deny it: I’ll be glad to get out of Jean Cocteau-land. I am trying to get out of my own personal Jean Cocteau-land, and this kind of encounter is a direct challenge to that.

But the list is the list. One more to go.

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[edit:]

I forgot, I wanted to institute a new feature at the bottom of these Criterion Collection entries: a “still” screen capture of an empty location from the film.