A Matter of Time

 

Director Vincente Minnelli

Father and daughter on the set

Liza Minnelli with her father, and mother, Judy Garland

Ingrid Bergman with her daughters Ingrid and Isabella

A MATTER OF TIME       D+                                                                                                     USA  (97 mi)  1976  d: Vincente Minnelli

No one dies unless we wish them to.                                                                              —Contessa Sanziani (Ingrid Bergman)

Something of a train wreck of a film, a really perplexing example of a project being stolen from the director, as Samuel Z. Arkoff, head of American International Pictures, known mainly for low-budget exploitation B-movies of the 50’s and 60’s, took the final cut out of the hands of Minnelli very early in the post-production process, before the director was able to supervise the dubbing and musical scoring, both of which are utterly atrocious in the final version, while also reducing the length of the film, yet inexplicably adding a prologue and epilogue, where all that’s left are the ruined remains of what could have been.  Based on the 1955 Maurice Druon novella Film of Memory, the film is loosely based on the real life exploits of the infamous Italian eccentric Marchesa Casati, with Druon striking up a relationship with her during her declining years in London while he was stationed there during World War II, becoming a staged version in 1965 with Vivian Leigh entitled La Contessa.  The film went through various changes in title, starting with the book title, then Search for Beauty, then Carmella, then Nina, before finally settling on the current title, which is the name of a song that can be heard in the introduction sung by Liza Minnelli, now a fabulous film star named Nina, but the film is a flashback to when she was an impressionable hotel chambermaid and finds herself living her life through the memories of an aging Contessa (Ingrid Bergman) at the once splendid, now run-down hotel.  Utterly devoted to the impoverished Contessa, who is on the verge of being evicted for nonpayment, her vivid memories serve as an inspiration for Nina to reach for a better life.  Made in Italy, shot on location in Rome and Venice, mostly taking place in a single hotel, though there are fleeting shots of an entirely different world outside (mostly stock travelogue footage of Rome), which we rarely get a chance to see, with Bergman stuck in what is arguably the worst make-up job of her career, looking more like a ghoulish vampire from Transylvania.  The claustrophobic confines of the Contessa’s room is where most of the film takes place, as we get caught up in the psychological mindset of a myriad of memories that intermingle with the present, often becoming indistinguishable, where Nina can be seen taking the place of the Contessa in her own memories, adding a surrealistic flourish of mixed identity that seems to accentuate and embellish the fractured aspects in the aging process.  Liza grew up on the MGM sets with her father, where Hollywood stars and friendly crew members comprised her extended family and helped celebrate her birthdays, so she grew up longing to work with her father, who she describes as “the gentlest, funniest, most charming man I ever met,” but he was 73 when he made what ended up being his final picture, receiving little in the way of career honors during his lifetime.  The film was badly edited, mutilated might be the better word, as Arkoff gutted the picture, described by Pauline Kael as “chopped-up shambles,” opening to terrible reviews, quickly disappearing from theaters, and never released in Britain or France.  Both ended up disowning this film, signing their names to an ad taken out in the trade papers, along with 33 other directors, protesting that their vision had been violated, “The film is a reedited, revised, altered, and distorted form that has nothing to do with the original content.  We are concerned here with principles and ethics.  An artist must be allowed his view, and those who back him must support that view after the fact, as well as before it.”  The names of support included Robert Aldrich, Woody Allen, Robert Altman, Hal Ashby, Peter Bogdanovich, Clarence Brown, Frank Capra, John Cassavetes, Brian De Palma, Allan Dwan, Blake Edwards, Milos Foreman, Bob Fosse, Samuel Fuller, John Hancock, Elia Kazan, Gene Kelly, Irving Lerner, George Lucas, Sidney Lumet, Alan Pakula, Arthur Penn, Otto Preminger, Jean Renoir, Martin Ritt, Herbert Ross, Mark Rydell, Martin Scorsese, Joan Mickland Silver, Steven Spielberg, Billy Wilder, Gene Wilder, and Robert Wise.

A bizarre father/daughter musical with Liza Minnelli, though it’s not really a musical at all, instead Liza sings these existential songs about making something of her life, a kind of rags to riches fantasy about becoming a huge star, where the entire story is told through the vantage point of another aging star whose memories become mixed with her own, like a Proustian reflection on time and memory, at one point pleading with her, “Please don’t give up your memories… I feel like I’m a part of them now,” Liza Minnelli and Ingrid Bergman in A Matter Of Time 1976 TikTok (52 seconds).  It’s incredible to believe this comes “after” CABARET (1972), shot by the same cinematographer, Geoffrey Unsworth, yet doesn’t have the look of any other Minnelli film, as this is a misfire on all cylinders, jinxed by labor strikes, which extended the length of the shoot, expanded from fourteen weeks to twenty, yet there’s something essentially captivating about the fact it was made at all, as it obviously had meaning for the people involved, including Ingrid Bergman and her daughter Isabella Rossellini making her first film appearance in just a bit part at the end, much more captivating in the barely seen Taviani brother’s movie IL PRATO (The Meadow) (1979), which is genuinely affecting, another film about realizing, with a sense of urgency, just how important it is to be alive.  While this is also the only time Ingrid Bergman and her daughter worked together, it is also the final film of Charles Boyer, who was in an extraordinary amount of pain for his brief appearance as the Contessa’s long estranged husband of forty years, Count Sanziani.  The shoot in Italy came at the height of a series of high-profile kidnappings known as the Years of Lead (Italy), including the kidnapping and killing of former Prime Minister Aldo Moro in 1978, and several threats were made against Liza Minnelli, but she kept this information from her father and simply increased her personal security team.  It was also the first time Ingrid Bergman returned to Italy for a film since making films together with Roberto Rossellini in the early 50’s (3 Films by Roberto Rossellini Starring Ingrid Bergman).  While the film has a Cinderella-like structure and fairy tale ending, Liza’s singing style resembles her mother, emphasizing the lyrics through dramatic pauses, “Fairy tales can come true…Into each life a magic moment comes,” the chambermaid Nina is actually discovered by a film director staying at the same hotel, Antonio Vicari, played by Gabriele Ferzetti, the star of Antonioni’s L’AVVENTURA (1960), who is roundly criticized by the thoroughly incensed room service maid after spontaneously pouncing on her while he’s busily attempting to construct a grand rape scene for his movie finale, which is causing him no end of frustrations, Watch “A Matter of Time” | The Front Row | The New Yorker YouTube (4:58).  But the storyline goes through the Countess, where her world unravels through a kind of memory time traveling, loaded with chaotic flashbacks and fantasies, living in the upper crust of society, where she is literally worshipped wherever she goes, usually in the company of fabulously wealthy men, as she’s wined and dined and swept through a world of casinos and châteaus, staying in only the finest hotels of Europe where she’s catered to like royalty, yet this world only exists in her mind, consumed by the passions of her past, where her entire raison d’être is to feel alive.  Years ago, the Contessa left her husband for another man, still fixated on this long gone affair, one of many treatments of adultery in Minnelli films, like a Madame Bovary obsession, showing the huge costs, as not only did it wreck the Contessa’s marriage, but it may have driven her to live in the past.

Nina is drawn into this cobwebbed imagination, fixated on her experiences, utterly spellbound by the seductive detail of her recollections, as she gradually begins to imagine herself inhabiting the Contessa’s past, often placing herself in the luxurious position of the Countess.  This structure actually resembles the previous Minnelli film, ON A CLEAR DAY YOU CAN SEE FOREVER (1970), where a woman’s memories are recreated under a hypnotic state by her treating psychiatrist, causing the doctor to fall in love, not with the woman he’s treating, but the woman she used to be, becoming increasingly interested in taking possession of her past.  A lamentable costume drama, the horrible dubbing and intrusive aspect of oversaturated music makes it difficult to take any of this seriously, confounded by its lack of narrative cohesion, as some of the dialogue seems to refer back to things we never see, while long minutes of screen time are eaten up with rambling subplots that go nowhere.  Heavily overstylized and at times unhinged, with exaggerated theatrics veering into camp, the look of the film makes it seem like it was filmed in a cave, as the colors are dull instead of vibrant, where the passage of time has not done this film any favors, as it’s only lost more of its luster.  The subject of aging and death are a central premise of the film, as the Contessa is an eccentric woman completely out of touch with the contemporary world, like The Madwoman of Chaillot, or Gloria Swanson’s aging Norma Desmond in SUNSET BLVD. (1950), finding herself detached from reality, verging on madness, where it’s hard not to connect this to the director’s own lingering obsessions.  In Mark Griffin’s biography of Vincente Minnelli, A Hundred or More Hidden Things, Liza’s half-sister Lorna Luft recalls that Minnelli was already in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease.  The postproduction problems only accentuate this element of disillusionment, as the film itself suffers from its own fractured existence.  Yet what Nina sees is someone who served as a muse for artists, and a source of inspiration for great minds, asking for little in return except to live her life free of tedium and banalities.  In lucid moments, she views Nina as her apprentice, offering teachable moments, as she hands out good advice, such as “be yourself—the world worships an original,” as nobody wants a copy, yet at the same time she is shown training Nina how to get jewelry from boyfriends.  What she’s really doing is transferring the largesse of her life into Nina’s suffocating existence, breathing new life into her, as if resuscitating her lost dreams, Liza Minnelli - The Me I Haven't Met Yet (VERY RARE SONG!) YouTube (2: 45).  Of course, as the opening song suggests, it only takes a moment, and that supposedly innocuous coincidence occurs without explanation, it just happens, and everything changes afterwards.  While lingering on issues of death, what this film really wants to convey is the essential nature of new beginnings, perhaps with the belief that the director’s films would live on in future generations, as if passing the torch, using his own daughter to emphasize how this works, as her film character is completely transformed overnight into a major star, which is how it often happens.  There is only one staggering sequence in this film, a memorable moment of Liza singing a smoky, jazz-tinged rendition of George Gershwin’s Do It Again, Liza Minnelli sings Do It Again YouTube (3:31), which is oddly fascinating, one of her mother’s most exquisite songs, but done quite differently, Judy Garland ' Do It Again' - YouTube (4:44), exquisitely shot in the opulence of Venice’s Palazzo Ca’ Rezzonico, like something right out of CABARET, literally pulsing with life and reverberating with an intoxicated feeling.

French Cancan

Director Jean Renoir on the set

Jules Chéret posters

FRENCH CANCAN             A                                                                                             France  Italy  (102 mi)  1955  d: Jean Renoir

Yes, it’s true.  I’m his mistress and I’m proud of it.                                                                    —Nini (Françoise Arnoul)

Renoir’s first film made on his native soil since RULES OF THE GAME (1939), having fled to America during the Nazi occupation, this celebrates all the remarkable attributes of a “Renoir” film, becoming a loving tribute to Parisian bohemian life immersed in candy-colored images that border on French cliché.  While it’s a Technicolor extravaganza, the film revisits La Belle Époque of the 1890’s in all its cinematic glory, eliminating the filthy streets and squalor in order to invoke a more glamorous atmosphere of dreamy Paris, providing a kind of ho-hum storyline written by Renoir and screenwriter André-Paul Antoine, both getting their starts in the 1920’s, where the dance sequences add a needed shot of adrenaline, evoking the paintings of Degas and the Impressionists, including the director’s own father, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, with the screen literally exploding with music, dancing, and color, especially during the spectacular finale.  Based on the life of Charles Ziedler (changed to Danglard, played by Jean Gabin, Renoir’s star through much of the 30’s), the man who founded the Moulin Rouge on the site of the old Cabaret of the White Queen, it is a story going back to Renoir’s roots in Montmartre, the world of his childhood and of his father.  The film was extremely popular at the box office, praised as a tour de force success, even by the young guns at Cahiers du Cinéma, including François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, and Jean-Luc Godard, who otherwise delighted in scathing rebukes of French films in general, except those of Renoir, running several pieces, accompanied by a positive review from editor André Bazin, who described the director as having reached a level of maturity, and was at the pinnacle of his “classical style,” claiming he couldn’t “imagine a more perfect homage to Auguste Renoir.”  Released in America as ONLY THE FRENCH CAN, with supposedly inappropriate footage cut, Renoir’s American films were not highly regarded in France, with many still angered that he left the country during the war, and were inclined to believe that he was an artist in decline, though Éric Rohmer at Cahiers considered THE SOUTHERNER (1945) “the apex of Renoir’s work,” with some praising the pre-war Renoir “of the left” while others praised the post-war Renoir of “pure cinema.”  Danglard is the aging protagonist, a nightclub impresario who shrewdly thinks he can take a hopelessly outdated dance club in a disreputable working-class neighborhood and turn it into a popular new attraction, a French cabaret associated with a chorus line of female dancers doing the can-can in skirts and petticoats doing high kicks, splits, and cartwheels, as depicted in Toulouse-Lautrec’s La Troupe de Mademoiselle Eglantine, often exposing their undergarments, which was considered scandalous at the time, with societal attempts to suppress it.  Part biopic, part romance, and part backstage musical, this is the only Renoir film that features a director, with the irrepressible Danglard serving as his alter-ego, having his own way of handling performers, where balancing the various temperaments and eccentricities as well as their many talents while putting on a cabaret show parallels Renoir’s own working methods of making films, both dedicated only to their art.  For the most part, Danglard doesn’t do or say much, but simply observes, only occasionally intervening, acting as a medium between the stage and the world at large, taking extreme delight in passively allowing the creative process to develop into a cohesive vision.   

Danglard is overtly class-conscious, aware of the appeal to aristocrats and their thrill of “slumming” among the masses, sensing a bit of danger as they rub elbows with criminals, lowlifes, and the common man, enthusiastically describing the experience he envisions, “A taste of the low life for millionaires.  Adventure in comfort.  Garden tables, the best champagne, great numbers by the finest artistes.  The bourgeois will be thrilled to mix with our girls without fear of disease or getting knifed.”  With implications that art breaks down social barriers, a peek behind the scenes allows us to see a developing romance happening simultaneously with the concept of building a show.  For Renoir, film movement is an intrinsic element built into his craft, where the ever-flowing river is the essence of The River (Renoir) (1951), the structure upon which the entire film is based, while this film thrives on dance movement, with bodies perpetually in motion, where Michel Kelber’s camera is always searching for every conceivable camera angle to capture the swirl of motion, where the art of living is captured in that one fleeting moment, while also accentuating waves of color, mirrored in Pierre-Auguste’s painting Bal du moulin de la Galette, which his son actually expands upon in a continually developing relationship with a painting and his own cinematic aesthetic.  It’s the color where this most succeeds, adding details and textures that few other films have found, while perfectly capturing that same spontaneous sense of motion, as if the painting has suddenly come to life, described by Bazin, “Renoir is Impressionism multiplied by the cinema.”  By studying the romantic intrigues of the diverse group of people visiting the popular nightclub, Renoir offers a cross section of society, where we quickly learn that among Danglard’s many attributes is the discovery of new talent in a business he describes to the mother of a young girl he recruits to join his group of dancers as “the most wonderful profession in the world,” with Nini (Françoise Arnoul) infusing life into the story, eventually becoming his lover.  All the various relationships are established during an introductory sequence at a popular Montmartre bar and dancehall, The White Queen, where Danglard, his mistress Lola (Maria Félix), and various hangers-on go dancing as they meet Nini, the laundress, and her jealous, overly possessive, young baker boyfriend Paulo (Franco Pastorino), Michel Piccoli [Le Capitaine Valorgueil] dans ''French Cancan'' (1955) de Jean Renoir YouTube (1:44), a scene that evokes the arrival to Zerlina’s wedding in Mozart’s Don Giovanni, an artist who shares Renoir’s spirit of generosity and universality, where nobles and peasants, as well as masters and servants meet in one of the most gorgeous musical ensembles in opera.  From the outset, Danglard is beset with financial woes caused by financier Baron Walter (Jean-Roger Caussimon) in retaliation for his amorous exploits, crossing the line, so to speak, with Lola, the subject of his own amorous interest, using money as a weapon to drive him out of the picture, bankrupting his club while going after his possessions to cover the outstanding debts.  Nonetheless, Danglard shrugs it off with a casual air, always offering a monetary token of his appreciation to beggars on the street, as Renoir has always been fascinated by those living on the margins.  Among his many truisms spoken throughout the film, Danglard seems to be speaking for the entire profession when he says, “We artists are at the mercy of the men with money.”

The European morality on display might seem scandalous in America, with Danglard a serial womanizer balancing three different lovers, Lola, Nini, and a new love Esther Georges (Anna Amendola), initially seen in a neighboring apartment singing what amounts to the theme song heard throughout the film about destitute lovers, written by Renoir, actually sung by Cora Vaucaire, Extrait du film French Cancan (1954) 🎬 - La Complainte de la Butte - Moulin Rouge YouTube (2:59), yet Danglard is married only to his art, where the obvious age difference sets a precedent for the 70-year old Maurice Chevalier in GIGI (1958), as the grey-haired Gabin was 50 when the film was made, where his love tryst with Nini (Françoise Arnoul was 23-years-old at the time) might turn heads, with most believing him to be her father.  Nini quickly gives up her virginity to the baker, believing that’s what she’ll have to sacrifice anyway, thinking a sexual transaction between patron and protégée is all part of the business, but she is pleasantly surprised to discover that’s not a condition of employment, adding an underlying context that sex, money, and the theater are inexorably linked.  Renoir was equally unphased in these matters, having grown up in a household with a casually hedonistic view of women that seems pervasively French, with glaring signs of sexism, but then the same could be said of nearly all films made at the time.  Of note, Nini has her own suitors, rotating between Paolo, Danglard, and a wealthy young foreign Prince Alexandre, played by Giani Esposito, one of the featured stars in Rivette’s PARIS BELONGS TO US (1961), who promises to lavish her with jewels and opulence, with Lola veering between Danglard, Walter, and Captain Valorgueil (Michel Piccoli in one of his earliest roles).  There’s no moral denunciation of these multiple partners, though jealousy does rear its ugly head on multiple occasions, typically used to accentuate the drama, yet Renoir is open and honest about it, and does not hide behind any veiled hypocrisy.  When Nini arrives for the strenuous stretch exercises in Madame Guibole’s dance class, it not only reminds us of a Degas sketch, but it foreshadows what’s to come, as the show sequences are overwhelmingly female, where the women become the real stars of the film.  Nonetheless, the cancan dance itself is an erotic spectacle, with little left to the imagination, where it would be hard to deny the level of female objectification, perhaps a textbook example of the male gaze.  Brigitte Bardot and Jeanne Moreau were dressed as cancan dancers in the Mexican outback of Louis Malle’s VIVA MARIA! (1965), so there is a level of sexualized carry-over.  Shot entirely on studio sets (the original locations no longer existed), the streets in particular look artificial, lacking the effusive energy of any city street, giving this a very stylized look, lacking the social realism of the director’s earlier French films, causing some to lament a lowering of his standards.  In an interesting aside, Renoir filmed a cancan sequence in his earlier silent era film NANA (1926), Nana (Jean Renoir, 1926): Cancan YouTube (1:32), but he was frustrated by the lack of sound, vowing to make a musical, taking him nearly thirty years.  In a nod to that era, one of the hammiest onscreen performers, Casimir le Serpentin (Philippe Clay), can be seen breaking out into song to the accompaniment of an unseen orchestra.  

Once the Prince enters the picture, and it’s clear Nini doesn’t love him, preferring the love of the theater, she agrees to spend a night on the town with him before he leaves, which allows Renoir to escalate his mythical image of Paris in a heavily romanticized pastiche, shown through a rapidly changing, sequential montage visiting all the nightclubs, which are cabaret acts with painted backgrounds, spending only a minute or so in each, using contemporary singers to impersonate Belle Époque stars, featuring Patachou as Yvette Guilbert, and the legendary Édith Piaf in a brief appearance dressed in her signature black attire as Eugénie Buffet, where the two are inevitably linked in the history of chanson réaliste, Piaf dans 'French Cancan' de Renoir 1954) HD 720p YouTube (42 seconds).  Also included is a montage of Jules Chéret posters for La Taverne Olympia, Les Folies Bergère, and Le Nouveau Cirque, some of which were seen in the opening credits, French Cancan (1955) title sequence YouTube (2:11).  While Nini and the Prince are part of an appreciative audience, their reactions couldn’t be more different, as she’s rapturously delighted, visibly moved by what she sees, while he only has eyes for her, as if lost in a dream that eventually has to come to an end.  That same sense of exaggerated cinematic intoxication drives the exhilarating extravagance of the finale, which essentially shows the birth of Nini as a performer, where a costume drama, a romantic film, and a musical comedy finally merge together in an all-out assault to the senses, where the return of the cancan onstage is associated with nothing less than the liberation of France after the war, where the patriotic delirium is the same, like an ode to joy, as if expressing the very soul of what is quintessentially French.  It’s here that the women are the real stars, bursting out of nowhere, jumping onto the tabletops in their colorful costumes before taking over the expansive floor space, becoming a dazzling and empowering spectacle, as the men simply take a back seat, overwhelmed by the glorious sensuality they see, almost as if they can’t believe their eyes.  This extraordinary visualization represents a return of the very heart of the country, something that had been missing for far too long, where the impact is nothing less than overwhelming, French Can Can dance scene part 1 YouTube (3:04), French Can Can dance scene part 2 YouTube (2:48), French Can Can dance scene part 3 YouTube (3:02).  Despite all the theatrical fireworks, one of the most poignant scenes is a quiet moment of Danglard sitting backstage alone, where we hear the bombastic music onstage, but he’s simply ecstatic with the realization of what he’s created.  The dance offers a striking motif, mirroring the vivid and dynamic women in the Chéret posters we see throughout the film, rhapsodic images of the joy of movement.  The cancan is the culmination and professionalization of earlier styles of dancing practiced throughout 19th century France, adding various international forms of “skirt dancing.”  Its origin is shrouded in mystery, becoming an erotic display of women’s legs, with the lifting of their skirts, the high kicks, and the splits, while also offering a carnivalesque view of their backsides, as the dancers literally embody irrepressible joy, energy, and movement, where the extreme physical pleasure it exudes is nothing less than spectacular, a feast for the eyes, mirroring the enduring legacy of Renoir’s illustrious return to France.              

Watch French Cancan Full Movie Online Free With English ...  entire film with subtitles may be seen on FshareTV (1:43:47)