Review: LES ENFANTS DU PARADIS

by Lucy Johns, Art and Film mentor

“Les Enfants du Paradis” is a sprawling 19th century novel of a film. it creates a familiar world in meticulous physical detail, develops a few paradigm characters an audience wants to know more about at every turn of their cosmopolitan lives, shimmers with cultural references for the educated commentator. It even lodges in the great European tradition of political subversion so veiled that censors beguiled by the story should not notice the challenge. It is, in short, an irresistible, unforgettable and timeless cinematic achievement.

Through what must have been heroic maneuvers to secure financing and space for his vision, director Marcel Carné built an immense Boulevard to frame his story of a woman so beautiful that men’s entire lives warp around their desire for her. The Boulevard signifies the era when such public spaces were new in Paris, circa 1830, exploding with street life reminiscent of but much bigger than its medieval antecedents. Great crowds, a constant flow of coaches and horsemen, blocks of sideshows throng the scene. One of the attractions is a completely naked woman to be viewed for only a few centimes. That she is immersed in a barrel of water, showing only her face, neck and sculptural shoulders, is unknown until the gullible are inside the peep show. A handsome aspiring actor makes the rounds of little theaters, pushing for a place with operatic flair and unflagging ambition. A sinister gangster plies his trade in theft, fencing, perhaps a murder here and there. A mime, so disrespected he performs on stage outside, not meriting the price of admission, slumps in his shapeless white garments, observing the surges of people through heavily painted eyes. These are the characters we will follow for the rest of the film. The woman, now clothed in a fetching dress, attracts the actor, who woes her with poetry and unmistakable lust. She brushes him off with magnetic charm, then enters the gangster’s storefront, apparently familiar, where he bores her with philosophical tirades explaining his misanthropic life and proclaiming indifference to love. She leaves, he follows, they pause to listen to a barker promoting a play. A fat gentleman sidles up to her, the stereotype distraction, while the gangster picks his pocket. He bawls accusations at the woman, attracting a gendarme who shouts for a witness. The mime awakens. His pantomime of the woman, the victim, the pickpocket and the crime entrances the crowd and relieves the woman of suspicion. She tosses him a rose. His fate is sealed.

The mime Baptiste is Jean-Louis Barrault, one of the greatest of the 20th century and surely the best such performance ever in film. The beauty Garance is Arletty, whose affair with a German officer during the Nazi occupation of Paris must’ve been a factor in Carne’s ability to get this film made in the middle of World War II. (It also earned her a prison term for collaboration after the War.)

Garance’s lovers - respectively the menacing crook, the histrionic actor and later an insufferable Count of the realm - play their roles to perfection. None is able to capture her love although sex is readily available.

This predicament of unrequited love is a pervasive theme of French films, the female object of desire whose body is compliant but whose heart is closely guarded. “Les Enfants” has deeper reverberations, however. Baptiste, who tells Garance of constant beatings by his father during childhood, escapes incessant pain in dreams and then in the wordless anguish his art projects. Art saves lives seemingly doomed to helpless failure. Did this theme influence Ingmar Bergman, whose Alexander in “Fanny and Alexander” is also going to be saved by artistic pursuit? Garance, beautiful, free-spirited, radiating joie de vivre, seems to be France itself, acquiescent but not conquered by German rule. Jeanne Moreau’s Catherine in Francois Truffaut’s “Jules and Jim” reprises this French archetype, acquiescent but not conquered by her German husband.

“Les Enfants du Paradis” is classical film-making, The camera is still nearly always, filming activity and conversation from a respectful distance. No hovering countable seconds over faces here, so annoyingly prevalent in contemporary movies. It also makes clever use of an ancient dramatic strategy, the play within the play, wherein to catch the conscience of the king. Many scenes occur on stages of theaters full of rapt patrons, an homage to theater as a social force. Garance’s aspiring actor rises to play Othello, where he can strangle the beloved he thinks he’s lost as a foil for the beloved he can’t lose because he never had her. Baptiste, too frightened to embrace Garance in real life when she waits patiently, rises to murder in a play to get some clothes that will let him follow his beloved into a ball. The crowds that began the film, so full of possibilities, end it by overwhelming any lovers who thought they might beat the odds.

Life, not love, is the paradise that “Les Enfants” must embrace. The film is not so much romantic as defiant for a time when no one could know the outcome of Nazi conquest of most of Europe. Such defiance keeps civilization going when power seems out of reach. This message resonates as deeply 70 years later, here in the United States, as it must have in France when “Les Enfants du Paradis” was made.

Review: THE WORLD OF APU

By Lucy Johns, Art and Film mentor

When Apu wakes long after his new bride is up from their humble bed in Calcutta – a couple of tables spread with a thin pad - his hand emerges from under the pillow holding a hairpin. With this featherweight image held on screen for several seconds, the viewer knows Apu has cleaved to his beautiful wife as tightly as her voluminous hair is bound with filamentous pins.

The viewer also knows a master is at work with the film The World of Apu. Satyajit Ray’s last in his trilogy on the early life of an Indian orphan seeking freedom and artistic fulfillment barely hints that this quest mirrors the struggle of the entire country to throw off British rule. The story focuses entirely on Apu’s confrontation with the small events that define and shatter and rejuvenate the soul of every individual life. He pawns precious books to pay his rent because he would rather starve and write than work the menial jobs from which he recoils. Exhilarated by a little food and companionship, he shouts poetry into the night and expounds, in the middle of train tracks, his vision of a novel. He’s going somewhere. The promise of arrival is signaled by his first success: a short story accepted.

His first stop on the road of life is utterly unplanned. Apu accompanies his friend to a wedding in the country where he is drafted to become the groom after the promised one appears insane. Overwhelmed by his new responsibilities, he is soon overwhelmed by love and then by grief when the exquisite Arana dies in childbirth. Refusing any contact with the living baby, he wanders in spiritual and geographic wilderness for five years, scattering the fragile pages of his neglected novel and working only to save money to leave the country. When his friend finds and berates him for abandoning his son, Apu responds as he did when the same friend begged him to marry the girl who will otherwise be cursed by the stigma of aborted marriage. He is not that conventional person, he will not be a father any more than he thought he could be a husband. But he cannot resist the pull of an elemental human tie. His son is a killer of birds and caster of stones, furious at his own orphanhood. His pout bears a searing resemblance to his mother’s. The boy ultimately succumbs to the fantasy of reunion with his father in Calcutta, to whom his “friend” will take him on his shoulders. The film ends with Apu beaming for the first time in many years while the face above his slowly relaxes into its own journey, about to start.

It is not easy to explain how the nobility of the central character and the profoundly sustaining simplicity of Indian culture are indelibly imprinted by this film. The physical beauty of the young couple is an element. Minor characters, each captured in only a few words and seconds on screen, look at Apu and murmur about gods. The crowd in the Calcutta apartment complex reaches to touch Arana. The aural beauty of Ravi Shankar’s sitar in the background, punctuated by the simplest noises – train whistles, village songs, babies crying – casts it own spell. The acting is so eloquent it may overlie some native capacity to project deep emotion unbidden by a script. Eye-watering scenes abound: the friend pronounces Apu’s manuscript “wonderful, just wonderful”; Arana’s mother affirms a lifetime knowledge of Apu after a few minutes of contact; a man in thrall to appalling drudgery silently appraises Apu as unfit for that work, perhaps for this life. The camera sweeps over Indian landscapes and pathways and water courses and work objects and household furnishings with no color to distract from their elemental forms. The film tells a universal story in completely mundane settings with a beauty that elevates it to a realm of pure enchantment.
It is odd that doing so virtually denatures the film’s locale. There is nothing particularly “Indian” in its imagery or symbols…nothing a Western viewer hasn’t seen before except perhaps the painted face of a Brahmin bride. Ray has so absorbed – perhaps the India of his time had so absorbed - European notions of beauty that he presents his native land only in their terms. The World of Apu dazzles with a classical European aesthetic.

It honors the assumption that frames 2,000 years of artistic endeavor:

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” – that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

—John Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn

Review: FANNY AND ALEXANDER

by Lucy Johns, Art and Film mentor

“Fanny and Alexander,” Ingmar Bergman’s final film, delights not only for its artistry but also for its revelations about the great director’s frame of mind. The consummate explorer of angst affirms here that evil can be punished and fears vanquished. The result is a film more affectionate than analytical, more hopeful than tormented. In the context of Bergman’s body of work, marked by ever more inventive agonizing over the human condition, this shift is an unexpected joy.

The transformation means a new theme, a new dramatic focus, and a new directness. Rather than transmuting his doubts and questions into characters, Bergman delves behind character to explore its origins in the family. In “Fanny and Alexander,” family is the lead and family dynamics is the story. The film conjures scenes of goodness and evil notable for the director’s lack of ironic distance. It radiates a reconciliation with women, typically portrayed by Bergman as the force behind most of man’s anxieties. These explorations wrap around a traditional Bergman assumption: that salvation lies in the creation of illusion. Theater, puppets, magic, even deranged people who see and feel more than normal ones do, can save the most wounded victim. All this in three hours structured almost as a play that echoes “Hamlet” at many points.

“Fanny and Alexander” divides into two long acts. The first follows a boisterous Swedish family celebrating Christmas a century ago in the sumptuous home of grandmother Helena (Gunn Wållgren, one of Sweden’s greatest actors). Helena is beautiful, rich, and empathetic, unencumbered by class snobbery (the servants eat and play with the family) or ethnic prejudice (an elderly Jew is Helena’s treasured companion in her widowhood). Her three sons embody familiar Bergman crises beneath the brilliant surface. Their financial, sexual, and existential dilemmas are presented, however, with some welcome warmth and humor. Each son is sustained by a much younger wife who shares his anguish and tolerates his avoidance strategy – alcohol, sex, theater - with old-world feminine grace. Fanny and Alexander are energetic siblings in the swirl of humanity filling the house. When their father collapses while playing Hamlet’s ghost, the stage is set for the next act. A life of color and glamour darkened only by typical existential conflicts descends into a hell created by their mother’s remarriage to the local bishop.

Alexander detests this cleric from the first moment. The boy intuits a polished hypocrite, played to perfection by Jan Malmsjö. Alexander and Fanny shrink from his unctuous voice, controlling hand, and barely concealed malice. Alexander spins tales of escape and felonies that are heard by his stepfather as lies, a transgression subject to severe discipline. He gets a horrific beating. The scene evokes inspired film-making. Only female faces are shown: the bishop’s mother, complacent; his sister, complicit; the tattle-tale servant, fearful; and Fanny, powerless. Only the wallops of a willow wand are heard. Alexander is not shown and makes no sound. His repentance, coerced by torture, is smugly accepted as evidence that violence can teach morality. The conflict between these males goes beyond Oedipal. The young Alexander doesn’t so much challenge his father’s usurper as he embodies an innocence that evil, camouflaged in religious rectitude, is determined to destroy.

 The use of sound during the beating is one of several scenes where fortissimo noise nails emotional identification to the visuals. A village creek roars, portending catastrophe. Four great draft horses thunder to the rescue over cobbled streets – not quite the Lone Ranger and Silver, but suited for the purpose and time. Screams resound through a silent house, blasting children out of bed to witness uninhibited grief. The crack of elastic branch on bare flesh signifies fearsome brutality. Sound imbues imagery with a power that marks a master at work.

The resolution of the central drama between a boy and his male nemesis is not the only struggle overcome in “Fanny and Alexander.” Several women in the film suggest that Bergman has surmounted some primal male phobias patent in his previous work. An independent grandmother, a redeemed mother, a devoted sister, a ribald servant who yearns to control her life all transcend the patriarchal stereotypes that haunt his films. Grandmother Helena presides over a household whose tolerance and rituals are represented as the only reliable solace there is. Alexander’s uncle affirms this in a long monologue that veers towards maudlin but still seems heartfelt. Alexander’s grandmother and mother murmur happily, “It looks like we’re in charge now.” These scenes convey a peace that feels real for their author. No longer a threat, the women in “Fanny and Alexander” are merely fascinating. The Alexander who grew up and brought so many unhappy females to life on the screen here presents women as beneficent as they are complex. If they signal an evolution of Bergman’s consciousness, they may explain how he produced this masterpiece of indelible, and not at all predictable, humanity.

Review: SONGS FROM THE SECOND FLOOR

by Lucy Johns, SF Art and Film mentor

Scandinavia has a proud artistic and philosophical tradition accentuating the negative. Kierkegaard (Denmark) published “The Concept of Dread” in 1844, introducing “angst” (existential dread) into philosophical discourse. Ibsen’s plays (Norway), Munch’s paintings (Norway), Lagerkvist’s parables (Sweden), Bergman’s films (Sweden) – all grapple with the meaning of life, the nature of sin, how account for suffering if god exists, or if he doesn’t *then* what. Swedish director Roy Andersson’s “Songs from the Second Story” is a worthy addition to this creative exploitation of irremediable melancholy. “Songs” is unique, however, for its mordant wit. Andersson exhibits a talent for scenes where you don’t know whether to laugh or cry. He sustains this unsettling duality for an entire arresting film.

“Songs” covers a range of mundane human predicaments through a string of short stories where numerous characters suffer personal catastrophes. It opens with a desperate businessman pleading with a partner visible only as a pair of feet black against a phosphorescent tanning bed. Their firm has to close, whatever tragedies might result. The first casualty is a weeping employee clutching at the businessman as he marches down an endless hallway lined with doors open a crack to witness the misery, then closing one after the other on the hapless clerk out of a job. A foreign worker can’t find a contact in the firm’s building. When he exits in confusion, he is assaulted by thugs who mock his Swedish and beat him senseless as a line of white-collar workers watches from a bus stop across the street. Next up: a distraught storekeeper who has set fire to his own shop argues with impassive insurance inspectors about valuables he can’t document and they can’t see. This bathetic scene introduces a cinematic flourish that recurs throughout the film: a busy background tableau. The merchant whines while a crowd of office workers struggles down the street flagellating themselves like their medieval ancestors. Is his despair comparable to the Black Death? Don’t be ridiculous, the director suggests. [Bergman also showed flagellants (“The Seventh Seal”). A strong cultural reference in Sweden, it seems. You think you have problems? Just remember *that*.] Further stories ensue. Some end abruptly, some continue later. All share the endemic despair and tragi-comic directorial commentary so marked in this film.

“Songs” disposes mercilessly of patriotism, superstition, and religion as strategies to keep fear at bay. A famous general sits on a bedpan in a nursing home while visiting military brass  celebrate his 100th birthday. “My regards to Goëring,” he barks, raising a brisk Nazi salute. This is Andersson’s response to a character stuck in a grid-locked taxi who invokes history and tradition as lifelines to sustain sanity. Uh-huh, grunts the director: Here’s our history. (The Swedes pursued “neutrality” with Germany during WWII, one reason they were not attacked or occupied, as Norway and Denmark were.) An august Economic Council meets to pronounce on the country’s future. While an aging expert fumbles through his papers for an answer, his colleagues pass a crystal ball from hand to hand. When the group storms out of the room in a panic while the Chairman intones how important it is not to panic, a gypsy fortune teller remains at the table, lace tablecloth spread on the table before her. The most provocative symbolism mocks religion. A gum-chewing bishop sought for spiritual comfort discourses on housing prices. A replica of Christ in an exhibition hall of commercial crucifixes swings rhythmically from its cross by one hand while a salesman fumbles for a nail to attach the other. Andersson doesn’t stop at Christianity. A huge zoom out depicts a human sacrifice of “the bloom of youth” as dozens of church and state leaders officiate. Religion, invented by man for solace and explanation, revels in murder. 

Sex, a more fashionable source of respite for modern man, is in this film yet another occasion for torment.  Only women are eager for it. The available men are preoccupied or totally passive. This treatment is reminiscent of early Bergman: woman as temptress, beyond the comprehension of mere males who need and annoy females in equal measure.

“Songs” shows only a moment of redemption from the incessant disasters that can be hilarious to onlookers: a man already sympathetic from other scenes cradles his lover blowing into a recorder while he plays the keys. The image is sweet, the flute’s music a moment of calm in the cascade of imbroglios so inventively mined for commingled dread and ridicule by the director. (Andersson also wrote the script.)

“Songs” might well have degenerated into farce à la Monty Python were it not for Andersson’s remarkable cinematic skill. Almost all the film’s stories were shot in a warehouse meticulously transformed for every change of scene. This knack for design verges on genius when we see a vast airport corridor lined with immobile ticket agents who watch a dozen doors pour forth panting passengers straining to get away from it all while hauling towering piles of baggage they can’t leave behind. Many scenes repeat compositional touches introduced early on: the long receding perspective, the background action. The film’s color palette is drained and bleak: light in Scandinavia is pale at best and anyway absent half the year. A static camera films the few outdoor vignettes to stress the enormity of space compared to the puny actors in it. Every shot proclaims the absurdity of existence and the futility of protest.

Andersson’s sensibility and eye produce a film so rife with images and references that a review is bound to neglect important features (e.g. the role of the sick and the dead as they interact with the living). In this he recalls Bergman and Fellini. That he has failed to find their fame with American audiences may be a mark of his unremitting pessimism. If there isn’t any sex to relieve it, we don’t want to know.

Review: Fritz Lang's M

by Lucy Johns, SF Art & Film mentor

It’s still early in the history of cinema. Of the basic technological elements of the new medium – movement, sound, color, the artifice of imagery – only movement is firmly in place. Sound has just appeared. Where is precedent for blending sound and movement? Opera. In Fritz Lang’s “M,” one of the first films out of Germany with sound track, sound is on show, along with a sensational story.

A city of four million is gripped by the horror of a serial child killer. Music introduces the specter in the opening frame as a child sings a lilting threat of kidnapping by a man in black. A mother carrying laundry shouts for her to stop. She doesn’t. When the little singer becomes the next victim, the stage is set for conflict between society and a monstrous outcast who looks, unfortunately, just like everyone else. The police proceed with huge sweeps and household intrusions. The criminal underworld, maddened by the excessive attention, organizes its own troops, including a union of beggars, to find the killer before business is shut down completely. All are stymied until a sound proves the trap that catches the killer.

Building on Wagner’s invention of the musical theme that symbolizes a particular character - the “leitmotif” – “M” introduces the killer with a snatch of “Peer Gynt” whistled as only his hand, writing a taunt to the police, is visible. While the director explores the dramatic potential of tiny sounds (the tap tap tap of a knife hammering a nail) and of long silences overlying strong movement (dozens of men fanning out, soundlessly, through city streets), the killer’s leitmotif pulls the story to its fitting end. It is a masterful irony for film as a visual medium that the killer is caught by a man who cannot see but who recognizes that leitmotif and follows it.

“M” also remains gripping after 80 years thanks to its imagery of the chase and the intellectual challenge of its penultimate scene. As the criminal gang closes in on a vast building, the killer hides amidst dark storage rooms whose open-bar front grills make looking out easy while foiling looking in with shadows and clutter. This complicated interior that connives with bad guys to obstruct good guys became a staple of crime and horror films to come. The people’s court that finally grapples with the killer’s anguished confession might as well be a contemporary jury confronting the alleged etiology of a similar heinous crime. Peter Lorre’s operatic monologue pleads the case for sickness vs. depravity as vividly as one could wish, to as little avail then as now. “M” is an artistic milestone presenting an ageless morality play.

Review: Winter's Bone

by Lucy Johns
July 10, 2010

Layer the brutality of the drug trade on the grinding poverty, endemic lawlessness, and pervasive violence of rural America and you get a vision of American culture foreign to most in an urban audience. "Winter's Bone" is unsparing in its depiction of life in the Ozark Mountains on the brink of heartbreak most of the time. Unsentimental in approach and aesthetics, Debra Granik’s film avoids the romanticization of life among the lower classes that Hollywood often exploits.

The opening scenes establish that a teenager takes brusque but loving care of two very young children. Hers? She gets them up from their mangy couches, feeds them in a wreck of a kitchen, tests them on spelling and addition as they walk to school, watches the youngest draw happily in class. The school shows what they can look forward to as adolescents: parenting and soldiering. Back at the weather-beaten homestead, a pickup arrives. The driver tells Ree - Jennifer Lawrence, not yet 20 when the film was made - that her father has used the home as collateral for bail. If he misses his court date, the family will be evicted within the week. Ree doesn't have much but she has no intention of losing the roof. She sets out to find her dad. She gets no help. She discovers the limits of family and friendship when people have so little. She evokes deception, threats, and violence. When the children return that first day, she teaches the boy, perhaps nine, and the girl, maybe five, how to shoot a double-barreled shotgun, how to skin and eviscerate a squirrel, how to cook venison stew. When the boy asks whether they will eat the squirrel’s entrails, Ree answers, “Not yet.” Her world provides no middle-class choices but she can still protect her charges from barbarism. She is 17.

The film makes no concessions in its depiction of the grim housing, the gritty lives, the hair- trigger tempers, the implacable outside forces that know little and care less about their effects on family life. Since Ree has no transportation – she had to give away her horse because of the price of hay - she walks a lot through trackless woods, repetitive action that slows the film’s momentum at times but that also signifies her resolve despite lack of resources. The filters darkening the landscape to implacable gray-blue underline the unforgiving bleakness of the world she inhabits and confronts. Tight shots and swift editing bring physical attacks close and frightening but never linger. Bodily harm is a way of life in this film, not a titillating technique for audience involvement.

"Winter's Bone" has another story to tell. The focus throughout is on the women of this benighted country, what they learn, know, live with, cope with (or not), how finally they are capable of helping each other if persuaded of the need. They don't persuade easily and they can be as implacable as their men. They know, though, when a task should not be done by a woman and they do their best to dissuade each other from risking their lives. "Don't you have a man to do this?" asks the matriarch at a remote cabin who knows Ree is wrong for the quest she's on. Dale Dickey plays this harridan with such skill one would think she was a local, as many of the characters seem to be. The production credits also feature more women in more varied roles than in the typical commercial film. Written, directed, and produced by women, “Winter’s Bone” projects a sensibility about American life at once respectful and realistic. Not until the very last scene is there a hint that there might be the occasional moment of surcease from sorrow.

This reviewer couldn't help, drenched in the limits of these lives, wondering: how will health insurance reform affect these people? Individual mandate? They will no more abide by this rule than most of the other conventions that prosperous America takes for granted. The only government that touches this culture is the sheriff (who is pretty careful) and the military recruiter (who knows that what he offers is way superior to what he's getting). “Winter’s Bone” reminds that barriers to the pursuit of happiness will persist, perhaps forever, even in the rich, smart, adventurous society America considers itself to be.

©Lucy Johns 2010

Review of "I Am Not A Witch"

by Lucy Johns, mentor

“I am Not a Witch” is unspeakably sad and strange. Sad because the inevitability of abuse of the child increases with every scene. Strange because the film overlays the modern apparatus of tourism and government on a society that runs entirely on superstition, on blaming someone nearby for every failure, every disappointment, every loss. 

The film begins with an incredibly unsettling scene of tourists, both black and white, exiting a bus in the middle of nowhere to ogle two rows of women sitting immobile and silent on the ground, legs out, faces painted with white clay. The tourists chat, take pictures, ask questions of a guide as though looking at animals in a game reserve. A bank of white ribbons flutter behind the women. Their meaning will be revealed later. 

The film switches abruptly to a child observing a woman carrying a pot of water on her head. Seeing the child, the woman falters, the pot slips, the water spills. The woman shouts that the child is a witch. A courtroom scene ensues, presided over by a woman in uniform hearing testimony that the child is a witch. She is carefully neutral but it’s clear she’s concerned for the girl, who observes all but says nothing. When the child refuses to speak to deny that she’s a witch, the officer appears resigned. She confers with a higher official who takes the call in his bathtub where he’s being soaped and scrubbed by a well dressed woman. The girl’s fate is sealed, she is delivered to the witches’ compound. 

An extraordinary image of long poles topped by spools of white ribbon moving through a desolate landscape pulls back to reveal the witches riding on a flat-bed truck to a field where they will labor, obviously unpaid. They are each tethered at their back by a white ribbon that unspools as they move but that ultimately determines how far they can go. The child witch is also tethered in this manner. While she is removed from the field work to serve other purposes by the local leader who consigned her to her status, including being asked to pick the criminal from a line-up and serving as the source for white eggs promoted on TV, the ribbon is never removed. When he orders her to make rain come to the parched land, the logic of dependence on the supernatural for survival of an entire community works to its devastating end. 

“I Am Not a Witch,” written and directed by Rungano Nyoni, native of Zambia in southern Africa, reared in the UK, is a tale of scapegoating and helplessness before both earthly and natural powers. The locale is unfamiliar but the tendencies she deftly portrays are readily recognized, if often deeply sublimated, 

in modern societies. This may be part of the film’s widespread success, in addition to its excellent cinematography and unexpected music (18th century European). 

The emotional and visual impact of “I Am Not a Witch” lingers long after it ends. As its themes resonate, it becomes not so strange after all. Does anyone picking from a lineup in a police station know better than little Shula who the perpetrator really is? Does anyone dealing with petty officialdom not understand the need to placate with a little magic – or lies anyway - if disaster is to be averted? Does anyone who knows the risks of abuse suffered by foster children not see what must become of a child lacking any parental protection at all? Does anyone else who sees this film recall the master manipulator blaming all the evils of the world on a single woman about whom believers chanted “Lock her up, lock her up”?

© Lucy Johns (2020)

Review of "McCabe and Mrs. Miller"

Review of “McCabe and Mrs. Miller” (American; 1971)

By Lucy Johns, mentor

Heroic acts amidst monumental scenery provide the conventional cinematic formula to visualize the conquest of the American west. Defying 50 years of film tradition, Robert Altman conjures the grueling grind and filthy conditions and random savagery of daily life in a forest mining village deep in pioneer Washington, where sheer survival was the only battle most people fought. "McCabe and Mrs. Miller" asserts this alternative memory of settlement to dramatize the brutality of early American capitalism and the powerlessness of its workers and the occasional rebellious visionary. Projects and plans and dreams. will be strangled by a force these people barely understand and cannot counter, the greed that imposed  capitalist order on untamed wilderness by force when guile failed.

The first hint of individual enterprise in the forbiddingly dark and wet terrain arrives with John McCabe, a small-time card shark who understands the power of personal style over people deadened by work and weather. Before entering a mining camp for the first time, Warren Beatty sheds his shapeless greatcoat, dons a fashionable bowler, and clamps a cigar between a full set of teeth set off by a silver cap. He conquers by force of image and the hint of a notorious past. Seeing no women about, he procures three "chippies" and sets them up in tents to be visited for a nickel. These unattractive women, whom the director individualizes despite their stereotypical task, are even more powerless than the townsmen who rejoice at their arrival. Their presence, however, inspires one man to send away for a young wife. She comes to town in the same wagon as the beautiful Mrs. Miller, who berates McCabe for his narrow vision and persuades him to invest in a bathhouse, a brothel, and some rules of cleanliness that become the talk of the region. Julie Christie creates a house of light and music and pleasure and a community of women who care for each other and provide respite - for a fee - from the grim reality outside. McCabe himself succumbs to the expensive - $5! - Mrs. Miller. Her aspirations exasperate him - she reads slowly as a finger traces the lines in books and has a head for figures - but her beauty and flashes of sweetness enchant him. She rouses "poetry" in his soul, a longing for a life he has never experienced but soon dreams of. If only, he mutters once as he prepares to visit her, she would allow him into her bed just once without paying first. 

The flow of funds stimulated by this most basic of businesses  (presented by director Altman as benign, even beneficial, to both the proprietors and the customers)  attracts the notice of the mining company. As any large capitalist enterprise will, it seeks to capture any expenditure made for any purpose. Two minions arrive in a phaeton drawn by a pair-in-hand, an elegant carriage available only to the powerful, to offer a buyout. McCabe treats the prospect as a poker game. He bluffs to force them to raise. Mrs. Miller's eager reaction to the news and her storm of protest at McCabe's feints brim with the powerlessness of women and portend the helplessness of anyone in the way of monopolist expansion. She knows what men are capable of when riches are there to be grabbed. McCabe, reaching the limits of his mental capacity with this particular deal, pays no attention. He naively seeks the help of a lawyer in the nearest city to protect him. In a moment of exaltation at the problem presented, William Devane lectures McCabe about the rule of law and the role of government. Both will shield the little man against rapacious monopoly force. The attorney's name, Clemens Samuel in gold letters on his store front, evokes a subtle reference to the greatest democratic artist of the era, Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain). The audience for the first time gets to place this drama in the late 19th-early 20th century, only 70 years - a single lifetime - before Altman recreates the lawless western territories. 

The utter futility of resistance to this force plays out in the village. A strapping, tender, harmless cowboy who delights the brothel prostitutes is gunned down for no reason by a hired killer with little Dutch boy haircut. His two accomplices, a bear of a man and a genuine Indian who embody the raw indifference of frontier freelancers to higher human aspirations, taunt McCabe and then start to track him. They will carry out a faraway decision to eliminate a barrier who didn't understand that the first offer was final. The tragedy of McCabe's fate is poignantly postponed for a brief scene. He sits on Mrs. Miller's bed, apologizing and crying over losing his best and her only chance to grab a better future. She takes him into her arms and onto her breast without payment. When she leaves the room in the dawn of silent, snow-bound streets, the viewer knows McCabe is doomed. She would not have yielded to feeling, would not betray her own relentless pursuit of self-protection, were there the least chance he could reappear to disappoint her again. 

McCabe is killed but not before he shoots all three of his assassins, two by hiding and one by playing his last poker hand, seeming to die in a snow drift but poised to deliver a final bullet to the forehead of the bear hunter. In a slightly incongruous parallel scene, the town turns out to save its unused church that catches fire during the hunt. This glimpse of community and redemption to come feels unpersuasive to an audience tense from all the killing and suddenly confronted with Mrs. Miller's morning destination, an opium den in the Chinese ghetto at the edge of the town. She is an addict seeking her only respite from an unkind and unjust fate. 

Altman's vision of how the west was actually won initiated his unique film chronicle of American life at its less glorious. Yet the artistry of this early film belies its sordid content. The soundtrack of "McCabe..." features nothing but songs of Leonard Cohen, howling winds, incessant downpours of rain and snow, the lonesome  whistle of a train, gunshots, the plink of a violin missing its bow. No background muzac lures the viewer into this dismal place. Cohen's lyrics are so beautiful and tunes so haunting they can distract from the unhappy story: 

"Like any dealer he was watching for the card
That is so high and wild he'll never need
To deal another
He was some Joseph looking for a manger...

And then leaning on your window sill
He'll say one day you caused his will
To weaken with your love and warmth and shelter..."

("The Stranger Song" ©1966)

"Oh the Sisters of Mercy they are not
Departed or gone,
They were waiting for me when I thought
That I just can't go on...

Yes, you who must leave everything
That you can not control; 
It begins with your family, 
But soon it comes round to your soul..."

("Sisters of Mercy" ©1967)

Unfortunately, the reconstruction of the film on video flattens the original storm blues, forest greens, and snowy, rainy grays that were the colors of life of this continent at the edge of civilization. 

It must be noted that the injustice that suffuses "McCabe..." misses a crucial element in the history of that time and place. Sex and drugs and death were not the only escapes. Thousands of mine and lumber workers in Washington were organizing as the Industrial Workers of the World, the legendary "Wobblies." They could be as violent as the capitalists but their vision was generous. McCabe's town would have swarmed with them. 

Does their absence signify Altman's preference for rebellion over revolution? Rebellion is individual, is endemic to adolescence, and often takes artistic forms. It is easily dissipated, co-opted, even commercially exploited. It does not challenge power directly, as revolution intends. Altman's affinity for rebels, starting with the iconic James Dean, is echoed in this and subsequent films. Dropping out, as Mrs. Miller and her customers do,  was not the only option available at the time. Viewers in mid-20th century America who were rebelling against the crushing conformism of the American Century would recognize the appeal of this course of action. Others would love Altman's challenge to the myth of the west and the uncompromising realism of his subject, dialogue, and production. But they might also miss a more accurate portrayal of the political passions evoked by untrammeled capitalism not so long ago.

©Lucy Johns December 13, 2003

Review of LADY MACBETH

by Lucy Johns, mentor

Before there was film noir, there was Lady Macbeth. The woman whose passion overwhelms and thereby corrupts men is a timeless force that undermines patriarchal order. Whether she grasps without reserve for sex, power, or knowledge (Eve!) she must, in the end, be punished.

The new film “Lady Macbeth” from the little known British director William Oldroyd adds a disturbing enhancement to this timeless parable. Not only is she not punished, the lady uses her power to reach into and destroy within a segment of society that truly has no recourse, the black underclass, even more helpless against patriarchy than a woman whose wiles may save her. A white woman is oppressed, no question. A black person, woman or man, is ever a handy surrogate to suffer the wrath of the oppressor. A white woman knows this, exploiting white supremacy to avoid or at least postpone her own reckoning.

The film opens on an image of a bridal veil on a head of dark hair. The veil has intricate detail: this is not a poor person. While the congregation sings a benediction, she turns her head slightly to the black-clad shoulder looming next to her. Florence Pugh’s eyes, the angle of the camera on her face, unmistakably convey that she doesn’t know this person. In fact she was sold, along with some land, for marriage to the son of a local Scottish tyrant. Her new husband treats her with icy contempt, her father-in-law, living in the same house, with implacable hostility. The black maid servant Anna, taking her cue from her masters, shows no sign of potential for female bonding. She wakes her new mistress every morning with a clatter of immense wooden shutters. She tightens the corset strings with expert strength. She does as she’s told but intuits that she can take her anger out against another woman helpless against the family males. Catherine is utterly alone, utterly powerless in this house of strangers.

When her husband leaves for an indeterminate time to take care of business, Catherine takes to the moors, which she has been forbidden to do. Exultant from fresh air and momentary freedom, she happens upon a gathering of farmhands tormenting Anna. Her manner betrays no diffidence as she orders them to stop. Something about the ring leader makes her hesitate. He rushes her. His temerity, followed by invasion of her bedroom, evokes passion rather than rage. They fall into tumultuous sexual bliss.

Of course this cannot end well. Murders, betrayals, extraordinary complications emanating from the dead, follow. Yet this lady Macbeth, asserting agency that violates the limits of her time, models what women have to do to gain any freedom of action whatsoever. That she ends as she began, utterly alone, is not the price normally exacted for such transgression.

Oldroyd’s filming shows great skill in shaping the medium and the messengers to the story. Catherine is posed, motionless, for longer periods than actors normally sit or lie still in a movie. There is little music to distract from the visual bleakness of life in that time and place. The house is almost as soundless as its denizens are constricted in movement and expression. Oppression conveyed through lengthy and repeated minutes of stillness ensures the eventual explosions are all the more emotionally powerful. The actors - Naomi Ackie as Anna the servant (slave? This is never clarified.), Christopher Fairbank as the presiding tyrant, Cosmo Jarvis as the irresistible force of illicit sex and especially Pugh as a maid mad to test her and others’ limits - are thrilling to watch. This is a Macbeth expertly fitted, 400 years later and filtered through Nicolai Leskov’s 19th century short story “Lady Macbeth of Mzensk,” to a modern sensibility alert to the misogyny and racism that pervade western societies to this day.

© Lucy Johns, 2017

Review of THE RETURN

By Lucy Johns, mentor

The Return is a film archetypically Russian in its enigmatic story and elemental imagery. It’s possible that ambiguity became so inbred in the Soviet arts during the 20th century that unadorned realism simply disappeared as an approach to film. It’s also possible that the theme of The Return is too painful to confront directly. Regardless, the film sustains interest and suspense with its masterful symbolism and continual small surprises.

Two young brothers living with their mother and grandmother arrive home one day to discover that their father, absent for 12 years – probably the entire life of the younger brother Ivan – has returned. He sleeps a bit (perhaps after having sex with his wife, perhaps not) and insists on giving wine to his sons, a gesture disapproved but not prevented by the women. He announces that he and the boys are going on a trip, ostensibly to fish. The boys are overjoyed.

They are also completely unprepared for the lack of care they receive and the lack of information about destination, location, or duration encompassed by the announcement of a “trip.” Andrei, more adventurous due to his age and elder status, takes pictures and goes with the flow of his father’s terse manner. Ivan, apprehensive with unspoken and if spoken, unanswered, questions, is defiant. They drive through desolate landscapes to desolate places. The father behaves mysteriously. The boys stumble along, arguing about compliance with this stranger’s orders and only occasionally agreeing about how to cope with their situation.

Finally they arrive by boat at an island, uninhabited and unmarked except for a tower. The father takes off on foot for undisclosed reasons and without a word as to how they will subsist in this place. He digs up a trunk, extracts a box, and secretes the box in the boat, all unobserved by his sons, who have moved out to find worms for their fishing rods. Eventually, a violent conflict erupts. Distraught, Ivan runs to the tower and threatens to jump. His father attempts a rescue but fails. Death alters the terms of the trip, which ends, as it began: destination unknown.

This minimal story derives its force from the challenges faced by the two boys, in particular continual abandonment. Abandonment of family defines the father. The elder brother abandons the younger constantly. The father abandons both periodically even as he has them in his charge. On one level, the film is presenting the primeval dares that presumably force boy children to become men by risking their own and threatening others’ lives. On a deeper level, the film grips with the terror of being left alone to fend for oneself without preparation, warning, or obvious means. The unremitting tension among the family males conveys the pitiless theme: no one can count on anyone for anything and growing up means confronting and surmounting this ineluctable fact. The pain of this reality is barely mitigated by the character of the mother, an undemonstrative but loving parent. She’s absent however, for most of the film, during which the males enact ancient rituals of dare, risk, order around, fight, figure it out, or die.

The film’s imagery and tone reinforce the foreboding and dread of the story. Water – placid, drenching, brooding, dangerous – dominates. The first scene occurs at a shoreline that invites death-defying dives into unknown depths. Failure to conquer the fright that wells up from this prospect is punished with abandonment in a torrential downpour, a vision of absolute misery that will recur. Water is the source of food, but only after major effort. Water is the moat between life at least somewhat familiar and complete break with civilization. This prevalence of water is not typical of Russian fables, pictured more commonly in dense forests or on endless steppes.

Although the film is in color, the chiaroscuro lighting creates an impression of blackness and a landscape of stark outlines that symbolize the bleakness and danger of the human activity in the foreground. This director has studied his Bergman and Russian predecessors. His artistic skill occasionally breaks through the surface of the film, with scenes whose elegant composition is stronger than the simple action taking place. The father’s darkly seductive, yet almost expressionless face, is an element the director places and watches with a painter’s care.

In fact, the film concentrates on faces with singular intensity. The human face can be a source of meaning and explanation and comfort. Not here. Only the children reveal their emotions in smiles, scowls, grimaces, tears. The adults move their eyes but transmit almost nothing a child could comprehend. They are a mystery when viewed through a child’s eyes, the vantage point of this film. It bodes well for the director that the sentimentality and self-pity that lurk in this perspective are completely absent in this work.

Has the father survived a gulag and returns to teach his sons to do the same? Or perhaps the military, once guarding a god-forsaken outpost where something life-preserving was buried and must now be retrieved and bequeathed? Did this director experience the treatment by parents so eloquently portrayed? Whatever its intellectual origin, this film exemplifies the paradox at the heart of successful art. It melds light and shape and color that grasp with irresistible emotion in order to create a vision of life whose only triumph is having survived to tell the tale.

© Lucy Johns 2004

Review of LES ENFANTS DU PARADIS

by Lucy Johns, mentor

“Les Enfants du Paradis” is a sprawling 19th century novel of a film. it creates a familiar world in meticulous physical detail, develops a few paradigm characters an audience wants to know more about at every turn of their cosmopolitan lives, shimmers with cultural references for the educated commentator. It even lodges in the great European tradition of political subversion so veiled that censors beguiled by the story should not notice the challenge. It is, in short, an irresistible, unforgettable and timeless cinematic achievement.

Through what must have been heroic maneuvers to secure financing and space for his vision, director Marcel Carné built an immense Boulevard to frame his story of a woman so beautiful that men’s entire lives warp around their desire for her. The Boulevard signifies the era when such public spaces were new in Paris, circa 1830, exploding with street life reminiscent of but much bigger than its medieval antecedents. Great crowds, a constant flow of coaches and horsemen, blocks of sideshows throng the scene. One of the attractions is a completely naked woman to be viewed for only a few centimes. That she is immersed in a barrel of water, showing only her face, neck and sculptural shoulders, is unknown until the gullible are inside the peep show. A handsome aspiring actor makes the rounds of little theaters, pushing for a place with operatic flair and unflagging ambition. A sinister gangster plies his trade in theft, fencing, perhaps a murder here and there. A mime, so disrespected he performs on stage outside, not meriting the price of admission, slumps in his shapeless white garments, observing the surges of people through heavily painted eyes. These are the characters we will follow for the rest of the film. The woman, now clothed in a fetching dress, attracts the actor, who woes her with poetry and unmistakable lust. She brushes him off with magnetic charm, then enters the gangster’s storefront, apparently familiar, where he bores her with philosophical tirades explaining his misanthropic life and proclaiming indifference to love. She leaves, he follows, they pause to listen to a barker promoting a play. A fat gentleman sidles up to her, the stereotype distraction, while the gangster picks his pocket. He bawls accusations at the woman, attracting a gendarme who shouts for a witness. The mime awakens. His pantomime of the woman, the victim, the pickpocket and the crime entrances the crowd and relieves the woman of suspicion. She tosses him a rose. His fate is sealed.

The mime Baptiste is Jean-Louis Barrault, one of the greatest of the 20th century and surely the best such performance ever in film. The beauty Garance is Arletty, whose affair with a German officer during the Nazi occupation of Paris must’ve been a factor in Carne’s ability to get this film made in the middle of World War II. (It also earned her a prison term for collaboration after the War.)

Garance’s lovers - respectively the menacing crook, the histrionic actor and later an insufferable Count of the realm - play their roles to perfection. None is able to capture her love although sex is readily available.

This predicament of unrequited love is a pervasive theme of French films, the female object of desire whose body is compliant but whose heart is closely guarded. “Les Enfants” has deeper reverberations, however. Baptiste, who tells Garance of constant beatings by his father during childhood, escapes incessant pain in dreams and then in the wordless anguish his art projects. Art saves lives seemingly doomed to helpless failure. Did this theme influence Ingmar Bergman, whose Alexander in “Fanny and Alexander” is also going to be saved by artistic pursuit? Garance, beautiful, free-spirited, radiating joie de vivre, seems to be France itself, acquiescent but not conquered by German rule. Jeanne Moreau’s Catherine in Francois Truffaut’s “Jules and Jim” reprises this French archetype, acquiescent but not conquered by her German husband.

“Les Enfants du Paradis” is classical film-making, The camera is still nearly always, filming activity and conversation from a respectful distance. No hovering countable seconds over faces here, so annoyingly prevalent in contemporary movies. It also makes clever use of an ancient dramatic strategy, the play within the play, wherein to catch the conscience of the king. Many scenes occur on stages of theaters full of rapt patrons, an homage to theater as a social force. Garance’s aspiring actor rises to play Othello, where he can strangle the beloved he thinks he’s lost as a foil for the beloved he can’t lose because he never had her. Baptiste, too frightened to embrace Garance in real life when she waits patiently, rises to murder in a play to get some clothes that will let him follow his beloved into a ball. The crowds that began the film, so full of possibilities, end it by overwhelming any lovers who thought they might beat the odds.

Life, not love, is the paradise that “Les Enfants” must embrace. The film is not so much romantic as defiant for a time when no one could know the outcome of Nazi conquest of most of Europe. Such defiance keeps civilization going when power seems out of reach. This message resonates as deeply 70 years later, here in the United States, as it must have in France when “Les Enfants du Paradis” was made.

© Lucy Johns

Review of "Jules et Jim" (1962) by Lucy Johns

Review of "Jules et Jim" (1962)
A film review inspired by "Film: A Guide for Teens" by Ronald Chase

©Lucy Johns November 7, 2003
 

     The vicissitudes of life and love swirl and roil and confound in "Jules et Jim," a paean to a rather French view of the human condition personified in the artistic intelligentsia of early 20th century Paris. The film is reminiscent of "La Bohème," with an enchanting musical motif but a complete reversal of the classical story of who suffers for love.

     Jim, a French writer, and Jules, a German (Austrian?) poet and free spirit, become soulmates whose friendship is the only certainty in this tale of two men and the woman whose beauty and mystery become the center of their lives. Jeanne Moreau, in the role that defined her career, is magnetic and maddening as the unpredictable Catherine. She resembles a prehistoric sculpture "on an Adriatic isle" that Jules and Jim fly to visit after seeing a photograph in a friend's atelier. Supported in this "folie" by invisible financial resources, they wear the same clothes and vow that if a woman with the features of the stone head is ever met, they will follow her forever. Soon after, Moreau appears. Jules claims her instantly. He makes no protest when she asks to include Jim in a cross-dressing lark through working class Paris. All he asks of his friend is a quick "Not this one, Jim." Even after saving Catherine's life when her dress catches fire from burning a batch of "lies" on the floor of her studio, Jim is fascinated but respectful. The bouncing, hand-held camera captures the elfin mischief of Catherine's transgressions of clothes and behavior: she wears pants, smokes, races, and beats her copains because she sprints early off the starting line. That her whims can veer suddenly to the dangerous is apparent in a remarkable scene along the Seine one night after theater. The threesome has been to see an unnamed new Swedish play that each interprets differently. (Surely Ibsen's "The Dollhouse.") The men disparage the heroin for different reasons; Catherine "gets" the play's theme, which her friend and lover completely miss. When they ignore her analysis and fall into their comfortable disputations, she recaptures their attention by jumping into the river in her tight long dress and hat. No harm done but the point is made: she is an uncontrollable force. The three of them then whirl through an idyllic holiday in the south - again the means are invisible but adequate for the pretty villa and days frolicking on meadows and beach. Finally, Catherine consents to marry Jules, shortly after which they are all separated by W.W.I. Jules and Jim don opposing uniforms. Both write their beloveds - Jim has his archtypically devoted Gilberte – and their fear of hurting the other in the chaos.

     Here "Jules et Jim" dips below the surface tumult of bohemian affairs and creativity for a long sequence of original footage of real tumult, that hideous, incomprehensible war. Truffaut spends more time in this era than the viewer might expect, since a mere visual hint would evoke in the audience of his own time memories of W.W.II and its horrors. Scene after scene of violence and noise unfold, with the occasional glimpse of Jules or Jim in their wartime roles. In a way unrealized until the end of the film, Truffaut is preparing for the sadness and violence that will visit the trio when they reunite after the war.

     Reunite they do, now in Jule's villa on the Rhine where the couple and their daughter lead superficially tranquil but emotionally raw lives. Jim comes to visit. He intuits and is then told by both Jules and Catherine of their estrangement and of Catherine's periodic disappearances for respite from wife and motherhood. These conversations almost shock with their intimacy and honesty, surely unprecedented in film. Inevitably, Catherine determines to seduce Jim at last. With Jules' full acquiescence, she installs Jim in their house. Jules' motives are conveyed with a delicacy and understanding also surely unprecedented in a film script: at least he knows where she is, even though his lifelong chum is now in his beloved's bed. Her mere presence, he tells Jim with a candor rare for men but, the audience now knows, not for this pair, is both sufficient for him and essential for life. Oscar Werner masterfully conveys Jules' pain and devotion. His unconditional acceptance of his wife's increasingly profound transgressions signals a patient integrity associated more with the Mimi's of the world than with men of means and experience. Catherine knows this. She relies on Jules' fidelity as the anchor in the storms she creates to sustain her own vision of life. A scene where the camera never leaves their tearful faces as they voice the terms of their indissoluble union is both merciless and incomparably tender. She will always leave him but she will always come back because he will never leave her. 

     The highlight of this new permutation in these three lives is Catherine's performance of a song written for her by yet another lover. Its poignant theme of perpetual rondelet and its indelible tune, as familiar as "Frere Jacques" to those who first heard it in their own Bohemian youth, encapsulates this masterpiece and, perhaps, Truffaut's own philosophy of life.

     An entire essay could be written about the character of Catherine. She appears as a woman liberated from the stifling female roles of her era. Was she abused once and takes her revenge by being both irresistible and uncatchable? She has strong feelings on the subject of male perfidy: she burns letters of "lies" and empties a bottle of lye that she keeps handy for "lying eyes." Yet her willfulness and independence reek of childish impetuosity, as though the freedom she claims is authentic as an expression of human need but is also reckless. Unlike the two men, whose unconventional lives seem to grow through love, work, making war, and getting older, Catherine lacks the maturity throughout the movie - and perhaps the intelligence, Jules hints once - to use freedom wisely. She also trails a longing for motherhood that seems a little desperate on the part of the male filmmakers: yes she is ungovernable but she craves the irreducible essence of womanhood. Her disregard of conventional "morality" and escape from its punishments are not as unsettling as her arrested trajectory from seducer to recognizably modern autonomy. The director and his script writer would surely have read Simon de Beauvoir's "The Second Sex," published in 1949 and probably debated for years before that. But they do not present the woman that de Beauvoir envisioned. Were they ready for her?

     That is why this movie seems so "rather French." The character of Catherine - perceived by her creators and companions as quixotic, intriguing, mystifying - does not go so far that French men could be frightened or angered by her. Her embrace of freedom occurs only within a realm they well understand: the arena of "free love" they have taken for granted for themselves for centuries. Until the end of the film, when her life choices destroy as unpredictably as any war. Maybe liberated women are, ultimately, not a good thing – for men.

Review of “Days of Heaven” (1978) and “The New World” (2005) by Lucy Johns

Review of “Days of Heaven” (1978) and “The New World” (2005)
A film review inspired by Ronald Chase, "Film: A Guide for Teens"
©Lucy Johns April 22, 2006

Director and screen writer Terrance Malick is American cinema’s poet of love and land. The joy of the one and the beauty of the other make the heart ache, especially since both are doomed. This profound romanticism is sharpened by a keen understanding of the work required to tame wilderness. The combination of emotional longing, evocative landscape and exacting realism creates an elegiac mood rare in films. Malick’s historical settings provide fine cover for a sensibility probably not happy in the modern world.

“Days of Heaven” is a peon to the marvels and menace of the American west. It opens with scenes of urban, industrial squalor worthy of Blake’s “satanic mills.” A worker has problems taking orders. If Richard Gere were more than a pretty face, this confrontation with authority might have revealed a character unworthy of exploitation. Since his acting ability is minimal, the firing that results is merely a plot device. He collects his woman and her younger sister to head out west. In the first of many extraordinary images in this film, they travel on the rooftop of a train covered with unpaying passengers who brave weather and danger in search of a better life. A huge wheat farm in Texas is the destination. Brooding purple mountains in the distance, a gloomy gothic great house straight out of Winslow Homer or Edward Hopper, a raucous crew of immigrant and native workers toiling from dawn to dusk, cavalcades of clattering machinery, a plague of insects, uncontrollable fire – these elements suffuse the ensuing love story with a grandeur and pathos the three stock characters could easily lack. Sam Shepard is type-cast as the laconic Westerner presiding over a vast enterprise, lonely as a king and soon the victim of a plot by the working couple. The romantic triangle – beautiful woman, handsome but feckless lover, a husband whose social standing brings unimaginable opportunities that compensate, ultimately, for lost passion – may be a Malick theme, since it recurs in his latest work, “The New World.”

Now we are three hundred years earlier, in the magnificent wilderness of aboriginal Virginia. A band of Englishmen lands to found Jamestown. Colin Farrell, a prisoner on the ship for insubordination, effortlessly conveys what Gere couldn’t, that he is too valuable to let go. Reprieved, his Captain John Smith sets out to scout the land and the natives, wary but hovering like “curious deer.” He is ridiculous in his medieval armor slogging through mangrove swamps but he is clever and handsome enough to inspire the timeless fable of the princess who spares the warrior from the wrath of her father and tribe. Malick is better served by his actors here. In addition to Farrell and several reliable (although not always understandable) British supporting players, he found Q’Orianka Kilcher, only 14 when she won the role for her radiantly expressive face and body. The princess’s name, Pocahontas, is never spoken, as though her true self can hardly be captured by only her birth name. Eventually she will become Rebecca, wife of a nobleman and guest of King James of England. Her introduction to these new people symbolizes Malick’s poignant vision of the momentous encounter between the old and new worlds. He imagines invaders and invaded treating each other as new wonders to be explored. This is Malick at his romantic best. Of course it wasn’t that way and in the film can’t last.

Malick’s skill as a story-teller finds singular expression in “Days of Heaven” in the person of a young narrator. This devise of voice-over commentary or explication can be cloying. Perhaps because the girl, Linda Manz, is not pretty, has a Brooklyn accent automatically associated with sarcasm, and actually has interesting things to say, this commentator is reminiscent of a Greek chorus, wiser than the protagonists but not immune to their trials. She adds details that aren’t necessary to move the action but enlarge on its significance, reporting, for example, that a deranged preacher on the train prophesies disasters that soon come to pass.

The two films transcend their predictable stories thanks to Malick’s absorption with the earthly surroundings. His settings work almost magically to deepen the experiences of his characters. Texas wheat fields radiate heat and insects and prickly dust that blanket all human activity within them. A riverine wilderness looks as untamable as the homeless fugitives camped in it. The scrawny wooden buildings in snow-bound Jamestown are as ragged as its starving inhabitants. The rigid gridlines of an English country park reflect the evolved sensibility – elegant and perfectly controlled – of the new lady of the manor. Malick loves the outdoors in all its wonder, even the locusts chewing on grain in footage from some naturalist’s collection that must post-date the action in his film by half a century. His cinematography is calculated as carefully as his story and sometimes even detracts. Sadness and loss may overwhelm his characters while the viewer revels in the beauty of the scene.

This tension is one signifier of memorable art. The medium and the message are not the same. Malick is an artist in the grand tradition that insists on the permanence of beauty despite the prevalence of human failings. These two films show him at his most committed.