Some Came Running

The Current Cinema 6/8/2018

A busy week. In Streaming, I write about Pride Month commemorative programming on different platforms, providing an opportunity to think on Derek Jarman and Chery Dunye. In reviews, for Ebert there's the pretty extraordinary Nancy, and the atrocious 211. For the Times, three diverting movies that aren't QUITE outstanding, and such is life, and art: Bernard and Huey, The Quest of Alain Ducasse, and Hotel Artemis. 

The Current Cinema, 5/25/2018

For RogerEbert.com: The Misandrists, In Darkness, and Feral. Feral was the movie that actually inspired me to say out loud "Why am I doing this?" about halfway through. The feeling did pass.

For The New York Times, the involving Who We Are Now, the indelible Les Parents Terribles, and the ineffable Future World (pictured left). 

 

The Ten Best Films of 2017, and other Films

The ten are in preferential order, although you could interpret a four-way tie for first therein. The honorables are in alphabetical order. Links to reviews and essays are there when they exist. 

 

Personal Shopper (Assayas)

Taipei Story (Yang [1985 film; first US release 2017])

Phantom Thread (Anderson)

Dawson City: Frozen Time (Morrison)

A Quiet Passion (Davies)

The Death of Louis XIV (Serra)

Baby Driver (Wright)

A seemingly widely misunderstood tour-de-force of cinematic contrivance. 

mother! (Aronofsky)

The Bad Batch (Aminpour)

The Florida Project (Baker)

 

First Tier Honorable Mentions

 

After the Storm (Koreda)

Afterimage (Wajda)

The Beguiled (Coppola) 

Pretty good, albeit slightly familiar, Southern Gothic. 

Behemoth (Zhao Liang)

The B Side (Morris)

Brawl in Cell Block 99 (Zahler)

Colossal (Vigalando)

Good sci-fi fantasy of modest social import.

Columbus (Kogonada)

Good first feature with a forgivable first-feature-flaw in that it's constantly letting you know what it's doing. 

The Death of Stalin (Ianucci)

Not as harrowing as Khrustalyov, My Car! But almost as funny as Khrustalyov, My Car!

Dunkirk (Nolan)

First-rate execution.

Endless Poetry (Jodorowsky)

Jodorowsky is a very wobbly filmmaker as great artists go. 

Faces Places (Varda and J.R.)

Félicité (Gomis) 

Gerald’s Game (Flanagan)

Get Out (Peele)

Pretty good horror movie of substantial social import. Also, un vrai horror movie, which I was not necessarily expecting.

Glory (Grozeva and Valchanov)

God’s Own Country (O'Connor) 

Happy End (Haneke)

I Am Not Your Negro (Peck)

I'm sorry James Baldwin isn't around today, although for James Baldwin's own sake I'm also not sorry. 

I, Olga Hepnarova (Kazda and Weinreb)

Kedi (Torun)

Porto (Klinger)

My friend Gabe's fiction-feature debut is insinuating, formally tricky, sensuous, and thoughtful. 

Last Men in Aleppo (Abeed et. alia)

Logan (Mangold)

There were stretches nearly twenty minutes long in which I completely forgot this was a movie about a superhero. 

Long Strange Trip (Bar-Lev)

The Lost City of Z (Gray)

Lean in the visuals, anti-Lean in the ideological bent. 

The Lovers (Jacobs)

Manifesto (Rosefeldt)

Marjorie Prime (Almereyda)

The Meyerowitz Stories (Baumbach)

Moka (Mermoud)

The Other Side of Hope (Kaurismaki)

The Post (Spielberg) 

Pretty good newspaper picture of substantial social import. The shot of Streep going down the Supreme Court steps is so unforgivable it's almost admirable. 

Son of Joseph (Green)

Suntan (Papadimitropoulos)

The Unknown Girl (Dardenne)

Pretty good Dardenne picture. 

Valerian (Besson)

Not The Fifth Element, and yet somehow less...stressful. Fun!

Wind River (Sheridan)

 

 

Second Tier Honorable Mentions

 

Alien Covenant (Scott)

Pretty good Alien picture.

Bang! The Bert Berns Story (Berns and Sarles) 

The Big Sick (Showalter)

Pretty good indie romcom. 

Blade Runner 2049 (Villeneuve)

Pretty good Blade Runner picture. 

BPM (Campillo)

Free Fire (Wheatley)

The Glass Castle (Creton)

Pretty good picture with a Woody Harrelson performance that's way more interesting than the good stuff he does in the other movie that got all the awards buzz. 

The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Maki (Kuosmanen) 

Hermia and Helena (Piñiero) 

Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold (Dunne)

Maudie (Walsh)

The Ornithologist (Rodrigues)

Slack Bay (Dumont)

Wonder (Chbosky)

 

Conflicts of Interest

 

The Disaster Artist (Franco)

Logan Lucky (Soderbergh)

 

 

The Sentimental Journeys Of "Call Me By Your Name" and "Lady Bird"

“The great irony of Belle de Jour is that a sixty-seven year old Spanish surrealist has set out to liberate humanity of its bourgeois sentimentality only to collide with the most sentimental generation of flowery feelings in human history,” Andrew Sarris wrote in the Village Voice in the early May 1968. His filing deadline was probably right before the events in France of, you know, May 1968, but even so you could say his overall grasp of the zeitgeist as he wrote those words was likely too inflected by some kind of Summer of Love hangover. All that notwithstanding, I have been reminded of Sarris’ observation by the elaborate praise bestowed upon two recent film releases, Lady Bird, an early-2000s coming of age story with autobiographical elements, written and directed by Greta Gerwig, and Call Me By Your Name, an early-1980s coming of age story scripted by James Ivory from a novel by André Aciman, and directed by Luca Guadagnino.

They are the most critically beloved movies of the year, and while they encompass a certain amount of heartbreak and loss, they each hand the viewer a gratitude list—for family, to be precise—to ponder as the closing credits scroll up. They are relentlessly nice movies. They are sentimental.

In her essay “The Miseducation of Lady Bird” in The Baffler, Lauren Oyler circles around this point a bit. After expressing befuddlement over the fact that she has encountered “old white men,” one “middle aged man” and three young women “sporting leather backpacks and elaborate Nikes,” who were more moved by the film than she was, Oyner homes in on the finale of the movie, during which its lead character Christine goes to church, then calls her mother. While both actions as depicted are, I think, given sufficient dramatic buttressing for them to make both narrative and (for some) emotional sense, Oyner is not wrong to call the speech “unapologetically corny” and “exactly what a mother would want to happen.”

Lady Bird is about reconciliation, and in its world view reconciliation involves recognizing who your blood is. It means finally understanding that it’s a shitty thing to tell your mother that you will pay her back all the money she spent on your upbringing just so that you yourself may have the privilege of never having to speak to her again. Agains, I think the movie sells this point very well. Directorially, Gerwig never puts a foot wrong. Lady Bird is very assured and very much believes in the effects it wants to achieve. One thing it never does—and I understand that on a not insignificant level it is because it’s not this kind of movie’s function to do so anyway, maybe—is question why it is salutary to be a movie that makes you want to call your mother after you get out of the theater.

It’s as if this is a given, just the way everything ought to turn out. And this is not, for instance, what we get from the work of Maurice Pialat, whose ruthlessly unsentimental views of the family lives of children and teens are among the greatest highlights of French cinema. And as soft as Truffaut’s portraits of Antoine Doinel in his adulthood could get, one thing they never featured was any kind of rapprochement with the parents of The 400 Blows.

There is never anything too ugly in Lady Bird; there is almost nothing at all ugly in Call Me By Your Name. When its 17-year-old protagonist, Elio, is confounded by his erotic feelings toward Oliver, the spectacularly hunky academic assistant to his professor father, he is at first barely aware of the support system that’s devoted to helping him figure it out. An American academic seasonally situated in a most idyllic and sleepy corner of Italy in summer, Elio’s dad, Lyle, observes Elio and Oliver’s dance at a benign not-quite remove. Annella, the mother (played by Amira Casar, best known in the U.S. for her work in, um, Catherine Breillat’s 2004 Anatomy of Hell) evinces a concern that’s perhaps disingenuous but deliberately never anything like effectual. The situations and circumscribed worlds of these movies are elaborate demonstrations of the mantra of John Lennon’s anti-revolutionary song “Revolution:” “Don’t you know it’s gonna be/all right.”

Of course all of this speaks, indirectly perhaps, to problems of depiction. Lots of people, I suppose, have movies in their heads about their childhoods. But the worse the things recollected, the harder it is to construct the movie version, in your head or on a movie set. When I was in my final year of grade school I had a growth spurt, and my dad gave me this beautiful fringed suede jacket that he had bought in Spain when he lived there as a teenager. One day I wore it to school, and by the end of the day, about two-thirds of its fringes were gone, picked off by classmates who were not terribly fond of me. I can see how that would play in a movie scene. A few years later, right after turning 14, I went to a CYO dance in my town and there were two women in their early 20s there, who thought I was cute. They were sharing from a flask, and they offered me a few swigs from it, and a bit later on one of them was making out with me, much to the disapprobation of one of the dance chaperones, who was the father of a guy who liked to give me a mild pummeling every now and then. We (the woman and I, not that dude's father) left the dance and went a few blocks down to the house where she lived and she backed me up against the oak tree in front of it and showed me that she was carrying a condom. At the time I had very little idea of what a condom actually looked like, and I knew my parents were gonna be hella pissed off if I came home too late, so I went home. I know what that would look like as a movie scene—pretty funny, possibly. Around the same time another classmate bullied me into a series of not un-violent transactions that I had no real way of processing, which I’m still on occasion anguished by, and which I won’t go into detail about only in part because I don’t…want…to. (When this fellow, who seems not to have thrived in adulthood, got in touch with me again a few years ago, for the first time that I can remember, my stomach seemed to literally sink.) I couldn’t make a movie out of that. Neither Gerwig nor Guadagnino would want to, I suspect. Maurice Pialat, not to flatter my adolescence, would eat it right up.

Lady Bird and Call Me By Your Name want nothing to do with this kind of discomfort. Lady Bird is commendably discreet, but perhaps unrealistic, in depicting Christine’s first serious sexual encounter within that time-honored cinematic convention of bra sex. Although the central sexual relationship in Call Me By Your Name is between two men, the only full-frontal nudity in the movie is female. While usurped original director James Ivory has expressed disappointment at the relatively chaste depictions in Guadagnino’s film (and the director himself has offered the craven defense that the “market” wouldn’t bear anything more explicit), most people who’ve written about the movie are pretty cool about it not being, you know, too gay. Jeffrey Wells is hardly alone in his consideration of what the movie is “really” about: “What counts is that the mood and drift of this film isn’t really about straight or gay or anything in between. It’s about 'being there' in every possible comprehension of that term — about sensual samplings, summer aromas, warm sunshine, fresh water and that swoony, lifty feeling, etc,” he wrote in January of this year. Other writers with more investment in being perceived as sensitive to certain cultural drifts have tempered that Universal Vibration take. One straight cis-male critic proclaimed that this picture could take an automatic place in the “Queer Cinema Canon,” which pronouncement has received some pushback from writers who, in some respects understandably, believe the Queer Cinema Canon be decided by the queer. From where I sat, the story as realized by Guadagnino, with its attendant extreme care not to depict the sex explicitly, could be said to iron the queerness out of the situation altogether. The movie opts instead for a soft counterculture “it’s all love and it’s all good” perspective, articulated in the much-praised speech that Michael Stuhlbarg, as Lyle, does deliver with spectacular care near the movie’s end. Even Marzia, the French teenager whom Elio uses then throws away like an old dishrag (Esther Garrel, the aforementioned female nude), is full of not just forgiveness but congratulatory fellow-feeling with respect to Elio’s self-actualization via heartbreak.

In a sense, then, this is the furthest thing from a “queer movie;” its whole project is to de-queer Elio’s mode of being. That’s the point of the film’s final shot. Yes, he’s heartbroken and crying, but there’s “beautiful” music, he’s literally crouching in front of a fireplace (the hearth!), and behind him his family, while giving him his space, is preparing a sumptuous holiday meal.

As for Lady Bird, the movie comes with its own feel-good sequel, in the current person of Gerwig. In interviews and on television shows we have access to her story. Not just of her life on her own, but of the making of the movie: the winsome letters she wrote to musicians explaining how much her otherwise–perhaps-much-costlier-to-license song selections were so important to her. The way she was able to hire a cinematographer and merely instruct him to make the film “look like a memory,” which certainly beats having to learn how to do that oneself. How she wore a prom dress while filming the prom scenes. When Matthew Maher turns up near the movie’s end, playing a character who gives Christine a crucial bit of information, I thought of the very particular brand of clout that allows a filmmaker to hire one of the best actors on the New York stage for the express purpose of having him say one word.

These are movies where everything’s going to work out, because “at the end of the day” everybody shares the same values. A rather more tough-minded movie about family was made in America in 1937. There are no real villains in Leo McCarey’s Make Way For Tomorrow, but the tragedy that ultimately befalls its central couple, a pair of seniors who are forced to separate forever, comes from their having raised their now-adult children  in an American values system that all but obliges those children to forsake them. Lady Bird posits a family dynamic that’s fraught, but eventually all falls on the same side of provisional ideology, while Call Me By Your Name posits a paradise in European remove where romantic loss is ameliorated in that spectacularly nurturing hearth. That these cozy fantasies are animating so much enthusiasm is, as they say, very telling about the current cultural moment.

The Strong Simplicity Of "Silence"

In the interview book Scorsese on Scorsese, discussing his 1984 film The King of Comedy, Martin Scorsese talked about his reaction to people telling him Raging Bull was so visually beautiful: “I decided my next picture was going to be 1903 style, more like Edwin S. Porter’s The Life of an American Fireman, with no close-ups.” An eccentric decision, arguably, but one that it takes someone who is both a cinephile and a cineaste to make. Scorsese then recounts Sergio Leone telling him at Cannes that The King of Comedy was Scorsese’s most “mature” film. “I don’t know if this was his way of saying he didn’t like it,” Scorsese muses. He continues: “[O]ver the years my friends and I have had a running joke about slow movies, where the camera doesn’t move, as being ‘mature.’ I read in the Village Voice that Jim Jarmusch , who made Stranger Than Paradise and Down By Law, said something like ‘I’m not interested in taking people by the hair and telling them where to look.’ Well, I do want them to see the way I see. Walking down the street, looking quickly about, tracking, panning, zooming, cutting and all that sort of thing. I like it when two images go together and they move. I guess it might not be considered ‘mature,’ but I enjoy it.”

It’s worth remembering that this portion of the book was recorded in the late 1980s, around the time that Scorsese was making Goodfellas. He has made almost twenty features since them, some fiction films, some documentaries. He has also aged, of course. So maybe he’s “matured” in ways of which that he’s not aware. I still believe he’s committed, as a filmmaker, to sharing his vision, the way he sees things, with the viewer. In his new film Silence he does so in a way that seems, at first viewing, rather different from his customary method. In terms of cinema style, it’s a movie whose story seems rather simply told. And that’s true. But the simplicity of the telling is the result of a remarkable distillation. Everything that Scorsese knows about filmmaking is in this movie. Nothing that is unnecessary to his vision of both the narrative and the questions that inform it—no, that fuel it, with a consistent restless passion—is included here.

The opening title, with its sounds of nature followed by absence of sound, constitutes an arguably almost literal-minded demonstration of the movie’s theme, but that plainness is purposeful. The movie opens with a tense conversation—more than torture and depredation, this movie is about verbal exchanges, what they can achieve and what they cannot—and after it conclude in an interior setting, goes outside, where a quiet but meticulous eye-of-some-kind-of-God high angle shot of three priests descending sets of outdoor steps contextualizes the place of this exchange in their immediate settings.

Yes, there is moving camera in this movie—see the following scene, when Fathers Rodrigues and Garupe are led through the marketplaces and into a bustling inn to meet their constant-sinner guide to Japan, Kichijiro. The camera snakes with them though dank alleyways. But there are cuts also; this camera movement is not of the sort that immediately awes with its virtuosity, like the celebrated Copacabana tracking shot in Goodfellas. (It’s important to remember that as much as critics and analysts and armchair film buffs get caught up in reacting directly to that sort of style, Scorsese himself is not a style-for-its-own sake filmmaker. As he stated, he puts his films together to reflect how he sees things, and the Copacabana shot has the dramatic effect of impressing on the viewer just the kind of high life young Henry Hill was treating himself to on a fluid and constant basis.

For all its attention to detail in depicting the trappings of 17^th century life in is settings, Silence is shot and edited with a directness and immediacy of the sort that Scorsese has not brought to bear on his prior period films. The Age of Innocence, from its narration outward, applies a cinematic equivalent of high literary irony to its approach. Kundun has a detachment, a sense of the filmmaker trying to find his way into the story, which yielded a kind of magic-lantern magic realism. With The Last Temptation of Christ Scorsese has explicitly stated he was trying to immerse himself in a timeless feeling of antiquity, which led to the liberal use of ultra-slow motion in some of its desert scenes. There is almost no slow-motion in Silence. One shot, another overheard view that bobbles into an almost 360 degree view resolving with a gorgeous skyscape, of the boat to Japan making its way over the sea, is the only such shot I discerned on a second viewing of the movie. [UPDATE: It was pointed out to me after I posted that OF COURSE there's another, very prominent use of slow-motion, in one of the film's most crucial scenes. Weirdly, it did not register for me as such both times I watched the movie, so had Scorsese built my willful suspension of disbelief; it felt as if my eyes and ears were genuinely registering it at the slower speed because that's the speed at which it was actually occurring, not that the filmmaker had manipulated those factors. Another exhibit in favor of the film's mastery, I reckon.] (And of course the film is quite a bit different tonally from Scorsese’s prior fiction feature, The Wolf of Wall Street, whose high energy made it a little easy to ignore/miss its near-Swiftian rage, which Scorsese, who as an artist has always distrusted the perspective of the moralist—Travis Bickle was something of a moralist as we recall—casts in the mode of sardonicism.) The directness brings home the movie’s ideas in a terrifically full-bodied way.

Scorsese the director lets the dialogue of the screenplay, by himself and Jay Cocks, really breathe, and gives his wonderful actors all kinds of room. One of the most crucial sequences is the conversation between the frustrated, but still possessed-of-his-wits, Rodrigues, and the inquisitor Inouye (a really magnificent performance by Issei Ogata), in which the two bat around metaphoric terms—“concubine,” “ugly woman,” “barren woman”—in an argument over whether Japan needs, or can even bear, the Church. In its staging and shooting, it rather resembles a scene in Scorsese’s Casino in which a Western good-old-boy played by L.Q. Jones expresses some complaint to Robert De Niro’s casino boss Rothstein. Differences in camera placement aside, both scenes are simple shot/reverse shot exchanges in which Scorsese lets the verbal stresses determine the cutting. In Casino, Jones’ character tells Rothstein, “You people will never understand the way it works out here.” (!!!!) while in Silence Ogata pulls off a truly inspired and comic bit of acting by seeming to literally deflate with disappointment at Rodrigues’ intransigence. People who insist on skepticism concerning the director’s role might argue that in both cases Scorsese was merely letting the actors do their jobs, but in these movies the viewer feels the judgment inherent in both the blocking and the cutting that’s not present in the work of less inspired/conscientious filmmakers. So too is there added value in the way Scorsese breaks up his frame with wooden beams, in the quick cuts in close up of Rodrigues as he begins to go mad (I ought to mention that second time around I appreciated Andrew Garfield’s layered performance a good deal more than the first), in the judicious use of dissolves in the movie’s epilogue. And of course the most virtuoso filmmaking of the piece, the scene where Rodrigues comes to his most crucial decision. It’s just crushing, not least for the way it’s set up. Liam Neeson’s Ferreira, speaking to his former student of “a suffering only you can end,” tells Rodrigues his sacrifice will be “the greatest act of love ever performed,” and Rodrigues’ Japanese interpreter (Tadanobu Asano, great) tells the priest, “It’s just a formality.” Which is it, for God’s sake? And then the soundtrack drops out for the second time.

There are stray scenes and shots in Silence that overtly recall those of Scorsese’s influences, mentors, friends. (Scorsese has always been resourceful in the way he uses his influences; the close-up of Travis’ diary reading “they cannot touch her” is so perfectly and aptly executed that one would never have thought it was inspired by a similar—albeit very fleeting—shot in Contempt had Scorsese himself not pointed it out.) The lighting and color in the scenes in which the priests land in Japan have traces of Powell and Pressburger, specifically of course Black Narcissus. The lessons of Scorsese’s friend and collaborator Paul Schrader’s Big Three of “transcendental style,” Ozu, Bresson, and Dreyer, are all shown to have been fully absorbed here, but not always in expected ways. The fog during the boat trip to Goto brought to mind Dreyer’s Vampyr, not an explicitly religious film in terms of theme but a strangely spiritual one nonetheless. Some of the dual close-ups have a definite touch of Bergman. And the film’s final shot struck me as a macro-to-micro reverse of the last shot in Tarkovsky’s Solaris, but of course it hearkens back to Citizen Kane as well. In the end Silence is remarkably only itself, and a great film in a great film tradition.

White Saviors: The Micro And The Macro

Ryan Gosling's "Seb" meets John Legend's "Rockit"-era Herbie Hancock as jazz convert Emma Stone looks on.

The largely buoyant movie La La Land was enjoyable enough that I wasn't compelled to go all Jazz Police on it, as I was for writer-director Damien Chazelle's prior effort, the ridiculous Whiplash. But this disinclination is not shared by many in The Discourse, as my friend Tom Carson addresses here, and others address elsewhere that I'm too lazy to search and link to. But a lot of the complaint I've come across really make me nostalgic for the days of "it's only a movie." 

To wit: Ryan Gosling's character Sebastian doesn't "save jazz" at the end of the movie. He opens a fucking club. This maybe HELPS save jazz, but does not save jazz in and of itself. But wait there's more, he's a White Man Who Saves Jazz. Having dispensed slightly with the notion that the mere opening of a club does not itself suffice to Save Jazz, well, it is simply a fact that lots of white folks, from Leo Gordon to those three wacky former schoolteachers who had a go at Sweet Basil (well do I remember one night in the early 90s when some German tourists talked loudly through a Jimmy Giuffre Trio set, thus killing jazz) have opened jazz clubs. But wait, Ryan Gosling as a white man should not be portraying a player of jazz at all, because cultural appropriation and all. Well. It's true that jazz is an African American creation, but it's also true that, much more so than with rhythm and blues or rock and roll, that whites, from Mezz Mezzrow to Bix Beiderbecke to the Boswell Sisters, were Present At Its Various Creations. It's kind of funny to read writers who wouldn't be able to make it through Side A of Monkey Pockie Boo get haughty about this. Not even Amiri Baraka was this doctrinaire; he didn't ask Roswell Rudd to leave the bandstand before getting up with the New York Art Quartet to read "Black Dada Nihilismus." 

This state of affairs becomes even more befuddling when one remembers the infamous Buzzfeed "What's The Deal With Jazz" listicle, in which all the visual examples of jazz practitioners were white people, the writer cannily saving her desire to puke at Miles Davis and Charles Mingus for her prose-only coda. 

In any event, as somebody once said to somebody else, "Lighten up. Smoke a joint." 

Some of my critical colleagues have been expressing dismay in social media that some prominent commentators have blinded themselves to Martin Scorsese's magnificent Silence on the grounds of "Meh, religion," or, more strongly put, "Religion sucks," or, "Both sides do it so why doesn't the movie show the depredations of the Catholic Church." This is unfortunate but I think actually more unavoidable than the La La Land nonsense. The La La Land detractors ridiculously blow up the movie's "chase your dreams" metaphors; the anti-Silence folks pick nits that are either non-existent or entirely beside the point, conveniently skirting the fact that this is an adaptation of a Japanese novel. My opinion on this may be suspect because I was raised Catholic but for me the specifics of the apostasy took second place to larger and even more moving themes. That is, I eventually intuited something beyond Catholicism versus the shogunate and vice-versa. Past faith, I felt Silence addressing issues of will, free will, and whether there really is such a thing as human freedom. The questions it presents, I thought, were more moving and unsettling for the cinematic form in which they were presented. If you're looking at it and going down a list of the things you think it should be showing you because of the cultural baggage you want it to carry (and I'm not saying that the movie is inconsiderate of that cultural baggage—it's not), then you're not going to get it, and too bad. 

A lot of people on my side of the fence insist that the concept of "virtue-signaling" is entirely reactionary but I'm not so sure.

Sartre, Kafka, Welles

"I'm The Jewish Question, by Jean-Paul Sartre. Delighted to meet you." Yvonne Blake (who was also the assistant art director on the film) in François Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451, 1966

In October of 1944, a few months after the liberation of France, Jean-Paul Sartre wrote short book called Réflexions sur la Question Juive. Its first English translations were titled The Jewish Question—it is one of the living books that announce themselves at the end of Truffaut’s 1966 adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. The currently available English translation has been retitled Anti-Semite and Jew: An Exploration of the Etiology of Hate.

Like much of Sartre, this work is noticeably imperfect, but what flashes of genius it contains are brilliant indeed, and remain pertinent. One passage that struck me is this: “Today these Jews whom the Germans did not deport or murder are coming back to their homes. Many were among the first members of the Resistance; others had sons or cousins in Leclerc’s army. Now all France rejoices and fraternizes in the streets; social conflict seems temporarily forgotten; the newspapers devote whole columns to stories of prisoners of war and deportees. Do we say anything about the Jews? Do we give a thought to those who died in the gas chambers at Lublin? Not a word. Not a line in the newspapers. That is because we must not irritate the anti-Semites; more than ever we need unity. Well-meaning journalists will tell you: ‘In the interest of the Jews themselves, it would not do to talk too much about them just now.’ For four years French society has lived without them; it is just as well not to emphasize too vigorously the fact that they have reappeared.”

As I said, Sartre wrote this in October of 1944. At that point in time Lublin was the only death camp the Allies had found. By the time Orson Welles began work on The Stranger, in the fall of 1945, the other camps had become known to the world. Welles had been cast in the film in the role of Hans Kindler, a fleeing Nazi war criminal (by the movie’s lights, a kind of wunderkind of genocide, a slightly ironic position in which to place Welles in a Hollywood picture) and was eventually persuaded to direct it as well. In the second volume of his protean Welles biography, Simon Callow writes “[t]he degree of [Welles’] input into the script has never been clearly determined, though it seems almost certain that he must have been responsible for the speeches in which Rankin/Kindler analyzes the nature of the Nazi quest, so familiar are they in theme and cadence to Welles’ own speeches, articles and columns.” “Rankin” is the alias Kindler has taken in America; another way this true believer goes undercover is to pretend to be not just thoroughly anti-Nazi, but anti-German. One of his speeches occurs at a dinner scene; Edward G. Robinson’s secret agent, posing as an antiques maven, is dining with Rankin/Kindler, Kindler’s new bride, played by Loretta Young, and her father and teen brother. The scene has many pleasures, one of them being Loretta Young pronouncing the word “Carthaginian,” it is most notable for the way the real Kindler reveals himself to Robinson’s character. Growing increasingly heated in anti-Teutonic fervor (and Callow is right; the words and the way Welles pronounces them are kind of like an inverted, zealous variant of Harry Lime’s “cuckoo clock” speech in The Third Man), Kindler says: “The basic principles of equality and freedom never have and never will take root in Germany. The will to freedom has been voiced in every other tongue. ‘All men are created equal,’ ‘Liberté egalité fraternité,’ but, in German…”

Kindler’s eager young brother-in-law, played by a very appealing Richard Long, butts in:

“There’s Marx. The proletarians unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains…”

“But Marx wasn’t a German. Marx was a Jew,” Kindler responds, almost instantaneously, calm but definite. This differentiation is what gives away Kindler to Robinson’s character. It is also a staggering dramatic manifestation of anti-Semitic thought, which Sartre dissects with incredible vigor in his own book: You’re not THIS, you are THAT, a Jew.

Elsewhere in Sartre, he writes, of the frustrations the Jew experiences in French society: “…it seems to him at one and the same time that his efforts are always crowned with success—for he knows the astonishing successes of his race—and that a curse has made them empty, for he will never acquire the security enjoyed by the most humble Christian.” Sartre continues; “This is perhaps one of the meanings of The Trial by the Jew, Kafka. Like the hero of that novel, the Jew is engaged in a long trial. He does not know his judges, scarcely even his lawyers; he does not know what he is charged with, yet he knows he is considered guilty; judgment is continually put off—for a week, two weeks—he takes advantage of these to prove his position in a thousand ways, but every precaution taken at random pushes him a little deeper into guilt. His external situation may appear brilliant, but the interminable trial invisibly wastes him away, and it happens sometimes, as in the novel, that men seize him, carry him off on the pretense that he has lost his case, and murder him in some vague area of the suburbs.”

Anthony Perkins, Orson Welles, and Max Haufler in The Trial, Welles, 1963

Orson Welles made a film of Kafka’s The Trial in the early ‘60s. Like The Stranger, it was not a project of his own conception. The picture was brought to him by the producer Alexander Salkind, and while the project was plagued by intense money problems it turned out to be one of the very few productions up until that point on which Welles enjoyed complete artistic autonomy right down to the release cut. Setting the story in a stark, black-and-white, completely commerce-and-media-free version of then-contemporary Europe, Welles deracinates the story in particular by casting Anthony Perkins in the role of Josef K. I have not been able to dig up anything in my Welles library to suggest that Welles located a particular kind of otherness in Perkins’ being a thoroughly closeted gay man. Callow addresses the situation thusly: “Perkins’ performance—inherently neurotic, though not notably anxious—does indeed suggest a man with a secret (not much acting called for there).” Perkins’ all-American mode of nervousness suggests Edgar Allan Poe more than Kafka and of course it also suggests Alfred Hitchcock. One thing it never suggests is Jewishness.

And yet Welles, in interviews years after making the film, discusses The Trial in terms of Kafka’s Jewishness. In an interview with Peter Bogdanovich, explaining why he tampered with the ending of the book, Welles extrapolates: “In the end of the book he lies down there and they kill him. I don’t think Kafka could have stood for that after the deaths of six million Jews. That terrible fact occurred after the writing of The Trial and I think it made Kafka’s ending impossible. If you conceive of K as a Jew, as I did. I don’t mean as a Jewish Jew, but as a non-Christian. It just made it morally impossible for me to see a man who might even possibly be taken by the audience for a Jew lying down and allowing himself to be killed that way.”

Is that true? We have no way of knowing. People on social media today frequently cite a quote from Kafka about there being an infinite amount of hope—but not for us. The quote’s source is a statement he made to his friend and biographer Max Brod, translated in 1947 as “Plenty of hope—for God—no end of hope—but not for us.” More reliable, perhaps, is the aphorism: “In the struggle between yourself and the world, back the world.” Welles’ argument with Kafka is summed up by Callow thusly: “man is guilty but mankind is not doomed.” Welles’ confusion concerning Kafka has theological roots, as well: “K is not metaphysically guilty at birth as conceived by Kafka, since Kafka was a Jew. The idea of guilt at birth is Christian,” he said to Bogdanovich.

Sartre insists: “The disquietude of the Jew is not metaphysical, it is social.” In Welles’ film, the anxiety is not social as such, it’s free-floating, often hovering between the stools of the metaphysical and the erotic, as Perkins’ Josef K is befuddled in turn by Jeanne Moreau, Romy Schneider, and Elsa Martinelli. Andrew Sarris called The Trial “the most hateful, the most repellent, and the most perverted film ever made,” but the movie’s particular feel comes from Welles’ specifically American form of optimism abrading Kafka’s pessimism. Which, as Sartre teaches us, was far less abstract than we sometimes like to make it. And as visually beautiful and thrilling and unsettling as Welles’ movie is, one constantly senses that it is a work that is tortuously uncertain of what it wants to mean. This is never in doubt, I think, when reading Kafka.

In the prologue to the film proper, Welles observes of Kafka’s novel: “It has been said that the logic of this story is the logic of a dream. Of a nightmare.” Welles’ film is best seen as the filmmaker’s own dream/nightmare of Kafka. While I would not go so far as to say that a work of art palpably changes with the times, the times compel us to see works of art differently. Today’s circumstance does not compel a new reading of Welles’ Trial, but it does demand that we adopt Sartre’s reading of Kafka.

Hollywood To Tehran To Tokyo: The Journey Of "Like Someone In Love"

Tadashi Okuno and Rin Takanishi (in mirror), Like Someone In Love, 2014, directed by Abbas Kiarostami

Songs are a form of storytelling, so it stands to reason that most great or even good songs have at-least-good stories attached to them. One of the most popular songs by composer Jimmy Van Heusen and lyricist Johnny Burke, was, for instance, inspired by an argument that the songwriting team overheard their friend and collaborator Bing Crosby having with his first son Gary.

According to Van Heusen biographer Christopher Coppula, Burke and Van Heusen were dining at Crosby’s home; Gary, who was about ten at the time, was expressing dissatisfaction with having to go to school. The elder Crosby upbraided him, saying, “So you want to be a mule, be a mule.” Burke was thunderstruck. He and Van Heusen had been stuck for quite a while on their latest assignment, writing songs for an upcoming Crosby picture, Going My Way, directed by Leo McCarey. McCarey had instructed the duo to concoct a pop song version of the Ten Commandments, wisdom that Crosby’s priest character could infectiously impart to his young charges at the church’s school. “So you want to be a mule, be a mule” was not exactly “thou shalt not,” but it flipped a switch for Burke, and “Swinging On A Star” was born.

There’s no such lore surrounding “Like Someone In Love,” the beautiful ballad by Van Heusen and Burke that debuted in 1944, the same year as “Swinging On A Star.” In the midst of one of their busiest years, the team composed it, and a couple of other songs, for an RKO period comedy called Belle of the Yukon. An amiable trifle directed by veteran William Seiler, Belle stars Randolph Scott and Gypsy Rose Lee as a couple of quasi-grifters in the late-19^th-century Great White North. The juvenile romantic leads are William Marshall as Steve, a new-in-town piano player, and radio discovery Dinah Shore as Lettie, daughter of a saloon owner. About 22 minutes into the picture, Steve is tinkering with a tune at the piano and Lettie comes down the stairs; Steve says he’s been working on a song, and he plays the head of “Like Someone In Love.” Lettie says “It’s lovely,” and Steve says “Why don’t you try it?” She picks up the sheet music and starts singing. Two verses and two refrains later, you have a new addition to The Great American Songbook.

A confection in appealing Technicolor, Belle is one of those movies whose narrative evanesces even as you’re watching it; it must have been something of a tonic to U.S. audiences in the waning but still uncertain days of late World War II. It says nothing dishonorable about the great Randolph Scott to note that he more or less sleepwalks through his role; the part of “Honest John Calhoun” demands nothing more. If you’ve ever wondered why burlesque great Gypsy Rose Lee never had the film career of her sister June Havoc, Belle will answer all your questions in that department. Shore is the most engaging presence in the film. Her features are not those of what was considered a classic beauty at the time, but she’s terrifically attractive and projects a personality both earnest and sly. And she sings like a bird; as the performer who gave birth to “Like Someone In Love,” she delivers something absolutely beautiful. Oddly enough, though, the Van Heusen/Burke song from Belle that made a bigger splash, initially, was the now largely forgotten (but still delightful) “Sleigh Ride In July,” which earned the duo an Oscar nomination for 1945. (Belle was released on December 27, 1944, which apparently pushed it ahead for Academy consideration at the time.) “Like Someone In Love” became a hit in spring of 1945 via its recording by Bing Crosby.

Burke and Van Heusen were among Crosby’s favorite songwriters; they of course wrote the tunes for Crosby and Bob Hope’s Road pictures. In the final Road picture, The Road To Hong Kong, made in 1962, after the Burke/Van Heusen team dissolved, Hope’s character was named Chester Babcock—which had been Van Heusen’s birth name. (The one-time bordello piano player was known for, among many other things, making elaborately hilarious ribald sport of that birth name.) For his stage name, the composer “chose Van Heusen, the name of a famous line of men's shirts, because he felt it was a name associated with old money, elegance and class,” David Lehman notes in his book A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs. “What he didn't realize was that the Van Heusen line was the creation of a German-Jewish peddler named Israel Phillips."

Crosby’s rendition relocated the song at the crossroads of pop and jazz, as the crooner’s singing tended to do. About a dozen years later—on August 16, 1957, to be exact—the young tenor saxophonist John Coltrane, with bassist Earl May and drummer Art Taylor, recorded a version of the tune at Rudy Van Gelder’s studio in Hackensack, New Jersey. There’s a peculiar notion among some younger folks about jazz musicians like Coltrane and Miles Davis—that they made their recordings of pop and musical theater songs out of some mission to apply a veneer of “hipness” to white bread or just plain white music. At its most extreme, this presumption posits that Coltrane cut his revolutionary version of “My Favorite Things” mainly to troll Sound of Music fans. This is mistaken thinking. What attracted Davis, Coltrane, Charles Mingus (his playful retitling of “All the Things You Are” notwithstanding) and so many other great musicians to these songs was a musical deftness that intertwined beguiling melody with a harmonic complexity that opened up all manner of improvisational doors. Van Heusen biographer Coppula writes of “Like Someone In Love:” “This tune, like ‘Darn That Dream,’ has enjoyed broad pop/jazz crossover popularity, with recording by Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, John Coltrane, Stan Kenton, Coleman Hawkins, and Stan Getz (among many others). The appeal to jazz artists is explained in part by the linear structure of Van Heusen’s melody, permitting the artist to utilize all variety of harmonies in a chromatic bass line. It offers a suitable vehicle for the artist to express his creativity in fashioning harmonies while providing an interesting enough melody in its own right.” Indeed, Coltrane’s rendition of the song begins with the saxophonist playing alone, as if in mid-solo, extrapolating on a phrase from the verse in a near-keening cry, and fluttering in that register for a couple of bars before the bass and drums come in and Coltrane states the theme itself.

Ella Fitzgerald recorded her version two months later, October 15, 1957, in Los Angeles. She and/or producer Norman Granz also titled the attendant album Like Someone In Love. The LP was made after one of her grandest masterpieces, the still-amazing four-LP Ella Fitzgerald Sings The Duke Ellington Songbook. This album is less thematically ambitions, but Fitzgerald’s singing is no less exacting or elegant than it ever was in this period. Burke and Van Heusen appear throughout, albeit in differing permutations; “I Thought About You,” by Van Heusen with lyrics by Johnny Mercer is here, as is “What’s New,” lyrics by Burke, music by Bob Haggart. “Like Someone In Love” is the sole Burke/Van Heusen tune. The orchestral arrangement by Frank De Vol is more Hollywood sound stage than Cotton Club or any other swinging locale; the impeccably tasteful De Vol never had the swinging brashness of a Nelson Riddle or the Debussy leanings of early Gordon Jenkins but he gets the song…as Ella, of course, also does. She begins the song with a bit of a fake-out after the string intro, singing the opening word “Lately” as if to explicitly rhyme it with “stately.” But the very slight hiccup she makes at “myself” lets her completely melt into “out gazing at stars” and from that point on the whole thing’s like a beautiful dream. Her version is still, arguably, the definitive vocalization.

“Nowadays we don’t like watching an old man, especially an old man in love,” the Iranian film director Abba Kiarostami says in a making-of documentary included on the Criterion Collection edition of his 2012 feature Like Someone In Love, the picture that would be his last. It was the second that he shot outside of his native country, a French/Japanese co-production. It tells a necessarily incomplete story of an elderly academic, a young prostitute he awkwardly procures for an evening, and the disturbed, possessive boyfriend of the prostitute, who the professor meets even more awkwardly on the day following the night of his assignation. Kiarostami, as seen in photographs, exuded the kind of cool one associates with certain cinematic masters, aided in no small part by his ever-present sunglasses. But in interviews, it’s clear that the character with whom he most identified in this film is the decidedly not-chill Takeshi Watanabe (Tadashi Okuno, playing his first lead in his early eighties after, according to Kiarostami, a career of bit roles and extra work), the widowed professor who is, among many other things, hugely clueless about sex workers, even a sex worker as ingenuous as Rin Takanashi’s Akiko. “When I started searching for music for the moment the girl enters the old man’s apartment,” Kiarostami told Dennis Lim in an interview for the New York Times in 2012, “it came naturally that as someone from my generation, he would listen to jazz. The first album I took off my shelf was Ella Fitzgerald and I just bumped into this song, ‘Like Someone in Love,’” In pre-revolutionary Iran, Western music was widely known, and the artistic cognoscenti of Tehran was well-versed in jazz, as was the case in other cosmopolitan centers throughout the world. Kiarostami scored his first short film, 1970’s Bread and Alley, with a Paul Desmond version of the Beatles tune “Ob-la-di, Ob-la-da.”

Kiarostami (who presumably held on to his jazz record collection after the revolution, whose regime’s animus to all things Western very definitely extended to music) went on to explain to Lim that he also thought that song title would be a better title for the film itself; in script form the movie was called The End. “The phrase itself sounds good to me too,” the director continued in his conversation with Lim. “There is nothing determined and definitive about love. It’s better to say that we are like someone in love rather than asserting that we are in love. Death or birth are definitive; love is nothing but an illusion. We have in this film four people who are like some people in love.”

Akiko arrives at Takeshi’s apartment in a confused rush, and doesn’t even take off her coat after he invites her to have a seat in the living room of his cozy, book-lined apartment. After Takeshi tries to make small talk with Akiko—their conversation, while amiable, is also nearly mortifyingly awkward—she hops into his bedroom. A Duke Ellington & His Famous Orchestra rendition of “Solitude” plays softly on Takeshi’s stereo. Takeshi follows Akiko into the bedroom, seats himself on a chair facing the bed, and we see a soft-focus reflection of Akiko in the dresser mirror next to the chair. Takeshi tries to lure her out of bed…with the promise of a soup he’s cooked, a specialty of her region (he knows where she’s from because her pimp, a former student of his, told him). While we can’t see Akiko’s face, we can practically see her wrinkling her nose as she tells him, “I’ll hate that. My Gran made it all the time when we were little.”

He’s a little crestfallen; he gets up and goes back into his study/dining room. He’s been getting vexing business-related phone calls all evening, so he unplugs his desk phone. He looks out his front window. Some interesting stuff happens with the sound mixing; the noise form the street outside, including a honking horn, is foregrounded, and the strains of Ella Fitzgerald singing “Like Someone In Love” almost seep in to the audio track, very nearly inaudible at first. As Takeshi putters around, the song gets louder, and more distinct, but it never reaches what one might call an aggressive or even definite volume. Nevertheless, Takeshi turns down the volume on his amplifier. And the phone rings again—the landline in the bedroom is still plugged in. Takeshi, concerned with letting Akiko sleep, goes into the bedroom and disables the phone. A clock on a shelf above the bed indicates that it’s 11:30 at night. Who’s calling at this hour?

Takeshi leaves the room after tucking Akiko in, so we can assume they did not sleep together, but he still looks pretty pleased with himself as he drives her around the next morning (taking her to her college, where she has an exam), smiling as he watches her put her grey leggings on. Soon enough Akiko’s sweaty, strung-out looking boyfriend Noriaki (Ryô Kase) enters the picture, and everybody acts with spectacularly bad judgment. “When you know you may be lied to, it’s best not to ask questions,” Takeshi says to Noriaki even as he sort-of masquerades as Akiko’s grandfather. The flimsy webs of deceit escalate a situation that ought never have come into being in the first place, and when Akiko expresses worry, Takeshi sings “Que Sera Sera” to her, in Japanese translation, and elicits one of her final (slight, tentative, and, hell yes, awkward) smiles in the movie.

The movie ends in Takeshi’s apartment, with a wounded, traumatized Akiko sitting in his living room and Takeshi scrambling around, with Noriaki raging outside, letting them know that he knows that they are (still) lying: “Don’t pretend you can’t hear me.” Things are going from bad to worse both on screen and on the soundtrack. As Noriaki yells, the microwave in which Takeshi was warming milk for Akiko beeps to signal the end of its heating cycle, and then continues its periodic reminder beep. A rock comes through the front window, and the shattering of glass is terribly disturbing, as is Takeshi’s disappearance from the frame. And at this time the Fitzgerald recording of “Like Someone In Love” comes on again, louder than it was the first time it was heard. “Lately I find myself,” Fitzgerald sings, as all three characters in the scene seem as lost as they’ve ever been. Is the music diegetic or extra-diegetic? While it’s not likely that the stereo has somehow turned itself back on, there’s so much madness going on that this is not entirely outside the realm of narrative probability. The credits begin to go up, and the screen goes black, and soon Fitzgerald sings “sometimes the things I do astound me.”

Kiarostami told Dennis Lim, “I’ve said before that fortunately or unfortunately, I’m unable to be a real storyteller. I’m sure that we can never be the witness of a story from its beginning to its end. I would say that this film doesn’t have an adequate opening and it doesn’t have a real ending either, but it also proves my idea that all films start before we get into them and they end after we leave them.” The filmmaker presses this point more insistently in Like Someone In Love than in any other film, including his previous feature, the spectacularly knotty and moving Certified Copy.

“Like Someone In Love” was conceived and written in Los Angeles, recorded there years later by Ella Fitzgerald, and then many years later than that, Abbas Kiarostami pulled that Ella Fitzgerald album off of his shelf at home in Tehran. And subsequently played its title song on the stereo of an imaginary elderly man in the vicinity of Tokyo/Yokohama, where American jazz is well-loved by substantial (albeit possibly quickly disappearing, these days) pockets of its population.

It is an incidental irony that the song’s composer Jimmy Van Heusen, an aviation enthusiast from the thirties on (despite the fact that he did quite well both professionally and personally in Hollywood, he never much liked the place, and would fly himself back to New York between movie assignments), safety-tested American fighter planes for Lockheed prior to and in the early days of World War II.

Thanks to James Kaplan (whose excellent Vanity Fair profile of Jimmy Van Heusen you might want to read next) and to Brook Babcock, keeper of the flame.

In memoriam Abbas Kiarostami, 1940-2016.

The Current Cinema, Apes-Ma Edition

My review of The Legend of Tarzan for RogerEbert.com has excited some folks. 

For the Times: The excellent Private Property, the not-excellent Marauders. 

The Current CInema, And Plenty Of It

"Roses? How trite. I prefer the gift of auteurist film." Elle Fanning in The Neon Demon.

"If you're an Andy Milligan fan there's no hope for you."—The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film, Michael Weldon, Ballantine, 1983

I can't say I was entirely surprised to be accused of Bosley Crowtherism for my pan of Nicolas Winding Refn's The Neon Demon in today's New York Times. The young people today, they want a David Lynch of their own soooo bad that they're willing to take this shallow spoiled brat retread who, as I note in my review, really WANTS the squares to find his work objectionable. My only defense—because really, what are you gonna do, say "I do SO love edgy stuff?"—is that The Neon Demon is really dogshit, a word I cannot use in the Times.

Almost twenty years ago I was having dinner with some friends, two of them screenwriters and one of them a musician and music industry executive, and one of the screenwriters was talking about the gangster film Belly, of which he'd recently seen a preview. He was making this-and-that complaints about its content, and saying that he was bothered by it in a way that he wasn't sure how to articulate, and the executive, who'd mentored the screenwriter for some time back in the day, said, pointedly, "Well, did you find it morally objectionable?" And the screenwriter, somewhat sheepishly, said, yeah, he did. Well, the executive concluded, and we concurred, if you find something morally objectionable there's no point in acting like you're too cool to admit it. Which point has always stuck with me. I don't require my art to be morally upstanding, and the aesthetic advantages of partaking in certain aspects of amorality are not lost on me. By the same token, dimwitted exploitation bullshit is dimwitted exploitation bullshit and risks liabilities both strictly aesthetic and, yep, moral. If noticing that makes me Bosley Crowther, c'est la vie. 

Also at the Times, my positions on Nuts!, The Shallows, and Johnnie To's Three. For Sunday's Arts & Leisure, a fun (I hope) piece about recurring characters in movies that are not sequels. 

For RogerEbert.com, reviews of the execrable Intruder, the good-intentioned (although maybe not entirely) Les Cowboys, and the very entertaining Eat That Question.

Have a delightful weekend. Hoping to have a Blu-ray Consumer Guide up for the Fourth of July holiday.