Enrique Irazoqui as Christ in Il vangelo secondo Matteo, Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1964
Screen capture from the standard-def disc of the invaluable Eureka!/Masters of Cinema dual-format edition of the film.
For The Anchoress, with a hearty "Up yours, whatever in hell 'yours' actually is." Hat tip to Roy Edroso and his also invaluable albeit infuriating alicublog.
Kim Novak, Bell, Book And Candle, Richard Quine, 1958
Herewith, my humble contribution to a wonderful cinephilia-friendly cause, the third For The Love Of Film Blogathon, proceeds from which will help finance a restoration of a worthy film in which the maestro had an early-career involvement. Please see the bloggers cited in the logo below, and/or look at today's piece by my friend Self Styled Siren. And click here to make what will be a much appreciated and worthwhile donation.
I cannot find the exact citation, unfortunately, but I recall reading back in the '90s a magazine story chronicling the making of director Gus Van Sant's ostensibly shot-by-shot recreation of Psycho, and said piece containing many quotes from the participating actors in which they justified/rationalized their participation in the project, which, depending on who you were talking to was either a senseless kockamamie scheme or some kind of conceptual coup. And I remember William H. Macy, who was playing the part of Arbogast that had been originated by Martin Balsam, opining that one good reason, for him, to get on board with what many might consider a desecration was to get some kind of payback with respect to Hitchcock, because Macy didn't like that thing Hitchcock said about actors, that they were "cattle." And I read this, and I sighed. Because Macy is a soulful and not unintelligent man, and his misbegotten notion that Hitchcock was somehow the enemy of actors is unfortunate. And, I guess, very hard to kill.
The Hitchcock of 1939, anticipating a trip from Great Britain to Hollywood, in an interview in Film Weekly (reprinted in the invaluable Sidney Gottlieb-edited compilation Hitchcock on Hitchcock), revealed not just a great enthusiasm for American stars, but (and this shouldn't really come as a surprise) an acute sensitivity with respect to both particular abilities and potential. On Gary Cooper: "[He] has that rare faculty of being able to rivet the attention of an audience while he does nothing." Andre De Toth saw this in Cooper too, although he did not articulate it in quite the same way. On Carole Lombard: "I should like to cast [her] not in the type of superficial comedy which she so often plays but in a much more meaty comedy-drama,giving her plenty of scope for characterization." Once in Hollywood, Hitchcock and Lombard became friends. And they collaborated, on Mr. And Mrs. Smith, a 1941 divorce comedy that Hitchcock, in one of his legendary interviews with François Truffaut, kind of pooh-poohed: "That picture was done as a friendly gesture to [...] Lombard...I didn't really understand the type of people portrayed in the film, all I did was photograph the scenes as written." It was on the set of this picture that Lombard played the famous practical joke in which she built a mini-corral on the set and stocked it with three pieces of livestock tagged with the names of the film's three principal players.
Hitchcock's retrospective disconnection from Mr. And Mrs. Smith, juxtaposed with his previously stated eagerness to push Carole Lombard's performance envelope, suggests several questions, the most obvious being "What happened?" Well, it's entirely possible that nothing happened. That while Hitchcock's observations concerning the various actors were sharp and truly meant, his stated desire to remold them in certain ways was little more than public-relations bluster/diplomacy.On the other hand, the fact is that Hitchcock did approach Gary Cooper for the lead in Foreign Correspondent, and Cooper turned it down, which he (Cooper) later regretted. But whether or not Hitchcock's creative struggles with David O. Selznick during the making of Rebecca made the director subsequently dig in his heels harder with respect to hermetically sealing his creative process in the future, it's difficult to argue against the notion that the actor had a very specific and kind of immovable secondary place in Hitchcock's creative process. But it's also incorrect to translate this into an attitude of actual hostility. In his autobiography, Elia Kazan goes over the ways that different directors handle/respond to actors. His view: "Hitchcock told his screen stories as much as possible without help from his actors' performances. When Cary Grant, going into a film, asked him how he should play his part, Hitchcock answered, 'Just do what you always do.' Hitchcock relied on his camera angles and his montage [...] to do what on stage we relied on the actors for." Note the neutrality of Kazan's description; recall also Hitchcock's observation on Gary Cooper's ability to resonate while doing "nothing;" juxtapose with the theory behind the Kuleshov effect; and there's all the more reason to regret that Cooper and Hitchcock never got together.
Of course, Hitchcock made no bones or apologies for the fact that he considered shooting to be the most boring part of making a film. His pre-production work was the process by which he developed the movie in his head and assembled the means by which it could be materialized. So the actual shooting became a mechanical process, not unlike stuffing sausage casings. You could understand why an actor who was savvy to this attitude might build a resentment toward this. You can also understand how one actor might take "Just do what you always do" as a compliment and sign of respect, or as an insult. Until the period when he was getting all weird with his leading ladies, Hitchcock's expectation of a performer was that he or she would bring their best abilities and have whatever homework they felt they needed to do, done. Various acting methods and the work of directors like, well, Kazan, brought a notion of a more active collaboration between actor and director to the fore. The actor would not be playing a role in someone else's motion picture but creating a character/characterization, and hence the actor's notion of what was proper for the picture was to be taken rather seriously. This kind of idea, I don't think it's an exaggeration to say, was anathema to Hitchcock, who was only concerned with filming what HE saw. Here's how he describes (to Truffaut) his difficulty with Paul Newman during the filming of 1966's Torn Curtain, discussing a scene that was ultimately cut from the film: "As you know, he's a 'method' actor, and he found it hard to just give me one of those neutral looks I needed to cut from his point of view. Instead of looking toward Gromek's brother, toward the knife or the sausage, he played the scene in the 'method' style, with emotion, and he was always turning away." If we look at the camera as a pen, then here we can see Newman as runny ink. Martin Scorsese can be seen as having, in some ways, synthesizing Kazan's sympathy for actors with Hitchcock's plastic storytelling style. Talking about working with Newman some twenty years after Hitchcock's Torn Curtain, for 1986's The Color of Money, he recalls (in the Faber and Faber book Scorsese on Scorsese): "Paul [is the] kind of actor who doesn't like to improvise that much on the set, so [...] everything was rehearsed beforehand. We did it the way he suggested, which was to take two complete weeks and just work out with the actors in a loft. I was really nervous, because it was like the theater [...] So when he said, 'What you do is take a tape and mark out an area for a chair; then you tape out an area for a bed,' I could foresee those terrible theater things when people pretend a door is there, which I hate. I said, 'What if we use a real chair?' 'A chair is good,' he said, to my relief."
While we cannot imagine Hitchcock in such a situation getting anywhere near to, let alone beyond "just work out with the actors in a loft," we shouldn't, by the same token, beat his ghost or his films over the head with some conception that he, and they, are anti-human-performer. That's a rap more applicable to, say, Michael Bay.
Some rate Orson Welles' 1965 Shakespeare compression/adaptation Chimes At Midnight as a) the greatest Shakespeare film ever, or at least close, and/or b) one of Welles' greatest cinematic achievements period. You want testimonials? Chimes is the subject of one of Pauline Kael's most rhapsodic critical swoons, one written not for The New Yorker but The New Republic. Here is one of my favorite passages from the long piece: "He [Welles] has directed a sequence, the battle of Shrewsbury, which is unlike anything he has ever done, indeed, unlike any battle ever done on screen before. It ranks with the best of Griffith, John Ford, Eisenstein, Kurosawa—that is, with the best ever done." Go read it, it's in both For Keeps and the recent Library of America selection of her work. Ron Rosenbaum, author of The Shakespeare Wars, therein calls Chimes an "amazing and, to me, so-far-bottomless [...] film fusion of the Henry IV plays."
Yes: the film is not even two hours long, but it feels like an entire world, an inexhaustible environment of artistic and emotional richness And I've only ever seen the damn thing on television. And in largely not very good versions. One hears not infrequently of screenings of "restored" versions and whatnot. But so far, no doubt at least in part because of legal questions pertaining to both the film's actual producers and the rights of verious individuals and parties claiming to have a claim in the Welles estate, a completely confidence-inspiring steward of the work has yet to emerge.
So Welles enthusiasts—although I should dare say that the category "Welles enthusiast" should encompass the entirety of cinema enthusiasts, but I imagine that "the Internet" or some creation of it might contradict me on that point—who desire to enjoy Chimes At Midnight, also called Falstaff, on video have had to rely on what might be considered bootlegs. But can an object that is for all intents and purposes an orphan actually be bootlegged? It's a question that I, a person who tends to eschew bootlegs for personal ethical reasons that I won't bore you with, don't get much joy out of grappling with. In the case of Chimes, though, I want it in my life, I want it in my library, and I want to be able to enjoy it once or twice a year at least, because it's not just great Shakespeare, a great Shakespeare adaptation, etc.; it's a genuinely magical film, as spellbinding and strange and funny and poignant and inventive as any damne thing Welles attached his name to. As a result of this desire, I now have three DVDs of the movie at my right hand at the moment. We begin with bad news, and end with pretty good news.
1) Campanadas a medianoche, Suevia Films, circa 2007.
My then-Premiere colleague Andy Webster paid through the nose for a copy of this Spain-issued Region B PAL disc back in the day when researching a Welles DVD Filmography for the magazine. These days, you can get a used copy for anywhere between fifty bucks and...what's this? Two hundred bucks? Yup. I wouldn't go for it now, particularly as I can't expense it, and neither should you. The transfer preserves the film's 1.66 aspect ratio...albeit within a 4:3 box that is not enhanced for widescreen displays. The transfer also looks interlaced as opposed to progressive, and while largely clean, is very gray and largely dull. Detail is shaky, unremarkable. The sound is advertised as Dolby Stereo and is reasonably clear. As with his prior The Trial, Mr. Arkadin, and other films, Welles made this with no direct sound, and often the actors speaking on screen are not who we hear on the soundtrack (Marina Vlady and Fernando Rey are pertinent examples). Contemporary technology could have helped Welles' DIY approach yield smoother results but, you know. —C-
2) Chimes At Midnight, Nostalgia Family Video, version copyrighted 2008.
Bargain hunters (I see a used copy floating around for about twenty-five bucks at Amazon right now; new versions pop up now and again for even less) and those who are senselessly deprived of region-free players will see the value of this version, but it's no great shakes. At all. Again, a 1.66 picture in an unenhanced 4:3 box, and what's worse, when not viewing in zoom mode, there's a wavering blue horizontal line in the lower right corner of the 4:3 box (not visible in the screen capture above). The materials seem a trifle newer than those used for the Suevia version, but again, they are gray, gray, gray. The look is often more like that of a well-preserved '50s kinetoscope than that of a film. The sound is clear. Docked a notch from the Suevia for the blue line. —D+
3) Falstaff (Chimes at Midnight), Films Sans Frontieres, 2011
This strange label with its odd practices: sometimes going region-free, as befits its name...and sometimes not. This is an all-region disc in theory but as it's in the PAL broadcast format you need an all-region player to watch it. I'm sure glad I do. For one thing, this is the first disc version I've seen that is enhanced for widescreen displays. While I don't have the tools to make a precise determination, I discern that the image presented is close to 1.66 if not exactly there; maybe a hair or so wider than it ought be. Not entirely sure, as I said. But what's really crucial is that the image itself is worthy of nearly filling a whole display. The black-and-white is very definite, and gorgeous; there's a magnificent boost of clarity and detail and very little, if any at all, visible digital artifacts: no obvious edge-enhancement or noise reduction. But again, a great deal of detail. Check out the dialogue between Keith Baxter's Prince Hal and John Gielgud's Henry IV about 37 minutes in; the abysses of black that frame the characters in the chilly isolation of the castle throne room. Magnificent.
The versions of this film available on the U.S. Amazon site are rather confusingly categorized, and hence you can't necessarly be sure what you're getting. I never bought the Brazilian issue of this disc, nor the British disc from a few years back that is now fetching almost three hundred dollars on the site as I write this. To be assured of getting THIS version, I'd suggest ordering it directly from French Amazon, where it'll set you back about twelve Euros plus shipping. All I can tell you is while it's not an official or sanctioned restoration, it's the most consistently enjoyable presentation of the film I've seen, period. Until there's a Blu-ray (and I think the materials used here could support one) from some firm as well-regarded as Criterion and/or Masters of Cinema, this should be considered the home version of record. —A-
UPDATE: Damn. All the while I was working on this, and the much-bruited (by the company itself) Mr. Bongo version—a "definaitive [sic], restored version," yet—comes out in Britain, under my nose. (See the comment by Robert Sweeney below.) I shall seek it out and report on it as soon as possible. If it's a patch on the Films Sans Frontieres version, it should be very special indeed. We'll see, and report.
Fifty years after it was first screened, then banned, then largely and idiotically dismissed, the audacity of Shirley Clarke's 1962 film The Connection still packs a staggering wallop. The movie, in a wonderful restoration from Milestone Films in collaboration with the Film Foundation, opens again tomorrow at the IFC Center, and it's absolutely unmissable, an unassailable high-water mark for American cinema. Manohla Dargis has written about the film and its maker, passionately and eloquently, here; and Eric Kohn presided over a lively and informative exchange about the movie between David Sterritt, who knew Clarke a bit, and Ann Hornaday. I have a few notions about the picture I want to share, but the important thing is that you go if you can. If you can't, the movie will hopefully tour the country's art houses before getting the customarily excellent DVD (and hopefully Blu-ray) treatment that Milestone gives its pictures.
Clarke adapted the film from a play by Jack Gelber that was a sensation at the Living Theater. While it wasn't audience-participation theater on the Sleep No More level, The Connection's conceit was to put its audience more or less in the loft apartment where the arguably too-aptly-named junkie Leach and a cohort of fellow junk enthusiasts wait for the title character to show up.
In film, there's a more specific distance between the audience and the work, and Clarke and Gelber address that by making it something like a found-footage film. Something like, but not quite. The picture opens with a printed statement from one J.J. Burden, who announces that what the audience is about to see is the assembly of the footage he shot at the behest of a director who, for reasons unstated in the opening text, but which the viewer will infer by the movie's end, became unavailable to complete the film.
Aside from the human interest of the depicted junkies and their various "scenes," the strained cool of connection "Cowboy" (played by Carl Lee, to whom Clarke was married at the time; that's him above in the shades, with Leach portrayer Warren Finerty, an Ur-Steve-Buscemi if ever there was one), and the unforced demonstration of the soul-crushing power of addiction, The Connection's about something else, just as every Living Theater presentation was. The film's formal inventions and mutations bring up a lot of questions about both representation and appropriation that are all the more powerful and interesting for never being verbally stated. With the exception of one wizened Salvation Army type who accompanies Cowboy on his visit to the den of nodded-out iniquity, all the characters in The Connection are men, a mix of white and African American. The four members of the jazz quartet that "rehearses" and dozes intermittently throughout are black, and one of the other junkies is Ernie (Garry Goodrow), a white fellow who's also a player, and who's got his horn in hock (guess why), and who every now and then entreats saxist Jackie McLean to let him borrow his alto, which request Jackie kindly but firmly (and wisely) refuses. While would-be "director" of a documentary on junkiedom Jim Dunn (William Redfield) is an arty white dilettante, the aforementioned J.J. Burden, we see on those few occasions when he steps in front of the camera, is black. And given the way some of the subjects address J.J., it's clear he's hip, or has been hip, to their scene. He's played by Roscoe Lee Browne, who brings perfect insinuating not-quite-diffidence to the role. There are no discussions in the film about whether a white man can play the blues, or any such thing. This is part of its wisdom. Nick Tosches once observed: "Nothing can better bring together a black man and a white, a young man and an old, a country man and a city man, than a dollar placed between them." Replace "man" with "junkie" and "dollar" with "bag of heroin" and you've got the dynamic here, although one would be mistaken maybe in referring to such an unavoidably tension-fraught alliance as "togetherness."
But what Clarke does in filtering the story through the lens of Dunn commanding Burden, and then Burden shooting alone and with Burden's "editing" (Clarke is here credited as both director and editor) demonstrates the way that as even "real" events are unfolding, the person controlling the narrative, or trying to, imparts a certain amount of responsibility to the viewer. Which is one of the things that makes The Connection such a thoroughly engrossing experience, in spite of its closed-off setting. What's more exciting is the way that Clarke ups the ante in the final section of the film. In the Sterritt/Hornaday exchange, Kohn asks "Is The Connection a satire of underground film and yet also an underground film itself?" This question represents one of the many things that get me so exasperated by certain film writers: their eagerness to ascribe their own glibness to the artist they're supposed to be examining. Hornaday and Sterritt indulge Kohn, being polite and all, and allow that Clarke was "mischievous" but there's a deeper dimension to the pointedness with which Dunn and the whole idea of "authenticity" is treated in the film.
There's a very funny shot during a junkie's monologue during which the distracted Dunn's handheld camera breaks its gaze off the man and decides to follow an insect crawling up a brick wall. It's not too long after this, though, that The Connection breaks free of its self-imposed constraint. The characters begin talking to the camera less. Burden stops getting in front of the camera. Dunn is in a sense absent. A crisis occurs for one of the characters, and the film's editing rhythms become more emphatic, the camerawork more stable. Having erected a frame of artifice within her own frame, Clarke pulls back all of the curtains only to put a completely new frame in place: she turns The Connection into something like a conventional narrative film, and that's where she leaves it until its conclusion. And the fact that she makes it into that thing, and does so with utter conviction and makes it stick, is a testament to the almost alchemical powers of cinema and an acknowledgement of her own participation in the process, one in which she finally deigns to fully take the reins and does so with admirable tact and compassion and no trace of condescension...while never abandoning a certain tough-mindedness. It's breathtaking.
And of course one of the not entirely incidental pleasures of the film is seeing and hearing the jazz quartet, led by pianist Freddie Redd and featuring the aformentioned Jackie McLean on alto, and Michael Mattos and Larry Ritchie on bass and drums respectively. All four are exceptionally natural-seeming actors, and when they're playing, you can see them sweat; the sullen McLean of the film is, as it happens, a far cry from the free-jazz enthusiast portrayed by A.B. Spellman in Four Lives In The Bebop Business, which contains a few of McLean's observations about working on both the theater piece and the film. As for Redd, I saw him lead a quintet a few months ago at New York's Small's, and he's still got it at 83 years of age.
UPDATE: Richard Brody, my fellow jazz enthusiast (interestingly enough, we were both reading Hampton Hawes' galvanic memoir Raise Up Off Me earlier in the week, total coincidence) has a lot more good stuff on the movie and McLean and more, here.
Just kidding. But then again, mark my words: when the new 35mm print of Jacques Rivette's 1974 Celine and Julie Go Boating hits Film Forum beginning May 4, some "relevance" trolling dipstick who actually believes that the cultural vegetable is an actual category will make the comparison in absolute earnest, and whichever dolt decides to do so, he or she won't, in fact, be bereft of supporting evidence. Because the relationship between the two title characters, who were not just portrayed but in fact conceived and written by Juliet Berto and Dominique Labourier (Celine and Julie respectively, and pictured thus from left to right, above) is a pretty bold if not quite unprecedented-in-cinema (or maybe it was, I'm hust not in a position to assert it as such) portrayal of feminist-and-counterculture-inflected female friendship. The meeting cute between the two characters, the erotic charge between them that never actually culminates in sexual exchange, the immediate frankness of their dialogue, the ease with which they swap roles the better to help each other, their easy cattiness; all these are aspects of a certain manifestation of Girl Power that's since been depicted/celebrated in all manner of cultural product. Susan Seidelman has cited this film as an influence on her own Desperately Seeking Susan, so it's not as if the connection is necessarily obscure.
Granted, it's not a connection that I find particularly interesting, and while I'm all for any kind of hype that will attract more viewers to this long and very unusual film, I also reserve the right to think of anyone who makes it in a particular kind of earnest as a particularly dull opportunist. The personal dynamic between Celine and Julie, which is extrapolated from both the actual friendship of Berto and Labourier and the imaginative discipline they applied to it, is demonstrably a by-product of the generous approach Rivette applied to the film's creation. This approach was an invention of necessity, in a sense; Berto and Rivette had been attached to a project for which financing wasn't happening, so this was conceived as a cheap, near-on-the-fly alternative. Narrative elements were grafted in, as it were; co-scenarist Eduardo de Gregorio tapped Henry James' novel The Other House, which he only knew from a stage adaptation, for the "haunted" house narrative, and of course Lewis Carroll was an inspiration...
The miracle of the film is that all of its disparate elements are mixed into the final cut that the film achieves that rarest of qualities: it creates a world of its own, a world in which everything on screen represents an opening for the viewer. The black ruffled shirt that Barbet Schroeder's Olivier wears throughout is not just ridiculous on the face of it, but is arguably "wrong" for the period in which the "other house" action is repeated, day after day (until Celine and Julie magically intervene for the film's delightful climax). And yet it is not wrong at all under the particular circumstance the film conjures.
Similarly, in a late reiteration of Bulle Ogier's Camille injuring her hand on a broken champagne flute and being attended to by the nursemaid (who, depending on who's having the vision, is a version of either Celine of Julie), the shots of her "bleeding" hand very clearly reveal the tube around her forearm from which the fake-blood feed gushes.
In any other film this would be a "gaffe." Here, I aver, it absolutely does not. Rather, it constitutes another layer of the onion of this movie's reality and inspection of reality/"reality." There is similar devilment at work in portions of Rivette's epic Out: One, but Celine and Julie represents a thoroughly concentrated/distilled declaration of aesthetic principle, a principle as playful as it is profound.
But back to Girls: here's my pitch. Celine and Julie In Brooklyn, starring Ry Russo-Young as Celine and Dunham as Julie. They write their own parts but John Ashbery constructs the "plot," using the Wikipedia entry for James' The Sacred Fount as a crib for the haunted-house story. Alex Karpovsky can play Ford Obert. We shoot in the Heights—I know a guy with a brownstone—and Williamsburg, and Brooklyn Bridge Park for the "meet cute" scene. I think I can lease a RED camera relatively cheap if I play my cards right. LET'S DO THIS PEOPLE.
Busby Berkeley's immortal 1943 The Gang's All Here comes to New York's Film Forum in a really lovely new 35mm restoration starting April 20. You should totally go see it. It's an absolutely staggering piece of work, filled with amazing imagery (of which the above "ordinary" shot is but one example), and contains what's probably my favorite single shot in all of Hollywood cinema, the incredibly graceful crane shot starting with the view of a nude statue in the Greek style and ending with Benny Goodman finishing a verse of "Paducah." The restoration, I repeat, is a honey, and its existence suggests a future Blu-ray, a very devoutly-to-be-wished condition for a film that was once so difficult to see in ANY kind of format. But it's a fun picture to see with a crowd, in a real celluloid projection, so do catch it this way if you can.
I was thinking about writing at length about it, despite having done so a couple of years back for what was once The Auteur's Notebook. My good friend Keith Uhlich actually linked to that piece from his Twitter feed today, which compelled me to have a look at it, and I was happy to see that what I wanted to say this time, I had already said then, and not too badly at that, if I say so myself. So here is THAT piece. I'm glad that age has not withered nor custom staled my receptivity to Alice Faye's sometimes melancholy allure.
It's an exceptional week in New York to explore the works of distinctive, uncategorizable filmmakers; the Brooklyn Academy of Music is hosting an exhaustive retrospective of Andrzej Zulawski (very much looking forward to seeing his mudmen-on-the-moon epic On The Silver Globe on Saturday!) while today the Film Society of Lincoln Center kicks off its brief look at the films of Russian director Aleksei German, or Guerman (for this post I'm gonna stick with the latter spelling) in a series called "War and Remembrance." The look is brief because there's no other choice: over the course of an over forty-year career, Guerman has completed only six films, and the first of those was a co-directing effort, 1967's The Seventh Companion, which he made with Grigori Aronov.
Guerman's first solo picture was 1971's Trial On The Road, which shows for the first time today at 6:15 p.m. Among other things, it once again proves the adage that I made up just now, which is that nobody makes a World War II film like a Russian. The movie begins with a stark depiction of Germans dousing a pit full of potatoes with kerosene, because that'll show those pesky partisans. It then features some narration from a young boy who we won't hear from again for the rest of the film, detailing back-in-the-day privation. And then it's trudge, trudge, trudge through densely packed snow, each footfall beautifully recorded, and being out of cigarettes, and deserted villages and stray gunshots and sudden views of a deadly platoon of goddamn Germans coming over a snow-white horizon to kill you all. Only the Russian World War II film gets this atmosphere so palpably, and if Trial doesn't reach the heights of pathos of Ivan's Childhood or the height of horror of Come And See, it takes a more than honorable place in the tension-and-tactics subcategory of war movie (a favorite of mine in this line is of course Mann's Men In War, and yeah, Trial would make a good double feature with it); from the atmosphere and anecdotes a very definite story emerges, in which a Red Army turncoat tries to make good with the partisans to whom he's surrendered. As much as the movie condemns war in a relatively conventional what-a-waste fashion, there is a certain exploitable heroism inherent in the protagonist's final sacrifice, and the up-and-at-'em, never-rest determination showed by the partisan's oft-besieged leader, played by Rolan Bykov, seen in the still above with Anatoly Solonitsin, a frequent Tarkovsky player here portraying a tightly-wound subordinate) seems a quality sure to please Soviet apparatchiks. Not so much, apparently; as Anton Dolin recounts in his excellent piece on Guerman in the current issue of Film Comment (in which he wryly asks, "how many other geniuses have managed to displease the Soviet censors, the post-Soviet commercial system, and the connoisseurs of Cannes?"), the movie was "denied release and nearly destroyed," and "finally screened in the Gorbachev era."
Possibly the most crucial of Guerman's films is the one he most recently completed (he's been working on his next picture, an adaptation of a sci-fi novel by the Strugatsky brothers, who also wrote the source material for Tarkovsky's Stalker, for decades), 1998's Khrustalyov, My Car!, which lives up to the oft-bruited idea of a fever-dream of a movie almost too well. A delirium of camera movement in which the lens takes in the exquisitely hoarded details of its settings with an addict's eagerness, it takes an extremely oblique narrative approach to a scenario inspired by the "Doctor's plot" affair in Soviet Russia directly prior to the death of Stalin, depicting in nightmarish detail the humiliation of its lead character, a rather magisterial physician. It makes no allowances for what the viewer may or may not know about the historical facts surrounding the story and of course that's not really the point: the point is the immersion, its awfulness, the specks of extremely mordant humor to be gleaned from it, all that. "Its characters aren't properly identified, its politics not elucidated, its geography vague," New York Times reviewer Stephen Holden complained when the picture played at the New York Film Festival. YES, EXACTLY. Nothing against Stephen, who's a smart fellow and a sharp writer, but relative to the ostensible institutional expectations of something such as The New York Times, yes, Khrustalyov, My Car! could be said to spit in the face of those expectations...although its resignation to its Otherness is such that spitting in the face may be too strong an action-image. It would be a perverse mistake to assert that Khrustalyov's greatness is acheived solely by way of its aesthetic querulousness, but its querulousness is certainly a part of its greatness. You hear rather too often of movies that take you down a rabbit hole, but this REALLY is one of those pictures. Put it this way: if you go check it out on my recommendation, I think you'll either want to hug me or break my nose upon leaving the theater. No middle ground.
With Cora Miao.
Recent Comments