Le Rayon Vert (Summer)

LE RAYON VERT (Summer)    B                  

France  (98 mi)  1986  d:  Éric Rohmer

Winner of the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1986, and the fifth of Éric Rohmer's six-film cycle of Comédies et Proverbes, this plays out like an interior road movie, something of a travelogue to various summer vacation destinations in France, as expressed through the existential ambivalence of the weary traveler, Marie Rivière as Delphine, a girl who gets dumped over the phone in the opening moments of the film, where what’s really troubling her is not the failed relationship or losing the guy, but her two week summer vacation is coming up and she’ll have no one to spend it with.  This sends her into a tailspin of despair continually questioning her failing self-esteem.  Using a diary-like progression, where the passing days are listed on the screen, Rohmer reveals sketchy little episodes from her life, which could, over time, reveal the complexities of her character as it becomes more and more exposed, but instead she remains stifled in an emotional standstill with a petrifying fear of intimacy.  Delphine feels particularly delicate and fragile, where it’s easy to feel sorry for herself, refusing the positive overtures expressed from her Parisian friends, suggesting this is an opportunity to meet someone new, all of whom seem to have friends or relatives with empty summer homes that are available in August, when nearly the entire country takes their vacations. While Delphine herself is a secretary, not at all a high paying position, there is no explanation for the sudden display of wealth except to suggest they all may come from wealthy families, so her problems reflect the income range and social status of those who have the luxury to perpetually dwell on themselves for days on end.  Unable to spend her vacation alone, she initially discovers the port city of Cherbourg, which she visits with a friend and her family that openly welcome her, but she returns to Paris almost immediately, feeling out of place and uncomfortable, as she can’t really explain what she’s doing there, and every feeble attempt only makes her feel worse, where she’s constantly on the defensive having to justify being alone.            

One of the beauties of this film is the cinéma vérité style, using natural sound and a camera that follows Delphine for the entire duration of the film, shot on 16 mm, then blown up to 35 mm, using a 4:3 box aspect ratio that continually focuses the attention on the central figure.  In this manner, despite her visits to colorful outdoor locations, she remains confined in this box, unable to escape the trap she has seemingly set for herself.  Now resigned to accept the inevitable, having to spend the rest of her vacation alone, she travels instead to the mountains where a friend is holding a key, but after a hike to a superlative panoramic view of the Alps, she returns back to Paris the same day, worn out and defeated, but mostly disgusted with herself.  Her constant return to her own misery does become annoying after awhile, a cyclical broken record playing again and again, yet that is the central premise of the film, self-disgust, which ironically takes place at some of the most stunningly beautiful locations in France.  When she hits the sunny beaches of Biarritz, a beautiful coastal city lined with hotels, where the beaches are filled with playful activities and everyone seems happy, it’s like a drearily realistic counterpunch to Jacques Tati’s MR. HULOT’S HOLIDAY (1953), which continually pokes fun at the stress people endure in the pretense of convincing others that they’re actually having fun.  Delphine is under no such illusion.  When a beautiful young topless Swedish blond (Carita, one has to wonder how could she have never made another film?) struts her way through the teeming throng at the beach, her cheerful, liberated body language the exact opposite of Delphine’s dour repression, finding her towel next to Delphine’s, she strikes up an instant friendship, convinced she knows how to overcome her defeatist mood, immediately picking up a couple of guys.  But this kind of obnoxiously forced intimacy makes Delphine flee in disgust, unable to endure another moment. 

While this style of endurance test narrative may even be somewhat conventional by now, much like the Biblical struggles of Job, where one must be put to the ultimate test before discovering what really matters in life, Marie Rivière apparently improvised a great deal of her extensive role, where Rohmer actually names her as a collaborative screenwriter.  While she plays a relatively young character, her complete mistrust of being alone may puzzle some people, as one doesn’t always play out their interior psychological dramas in full public view, as she does here, never opting for alone time.  Delphine carries a book with her in public, Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, but despite the gorgeous locales, we never see her reading alone, where many find this an excellent way to nourish scarred or damaged souls.  Instead she openly parades her melancholia, doing little on her own to rebuild her shattered confidence.  Purely by chance, she overhears an avid discussion about the Jules Verne novel Le Rayon Vert, something of a fairy tale love story that hints at a rare magical moment just after a perfectly clear sundown, nearly impossible to see, where legend has it that in the last instant, just after the sun sets, a flash of green is the last thing seen by the human eye, where if you’re fortunate enough to see it, you can read your own feelings and those of others as well, where your perceptions are greatly illuminated at that moment.  In the book, the young lovers who have been searching for the green light become fixated on the love in each other’s eyes, never bothering to look on the horizon.  With this in mind, Rohmer gives himself some leeway, as after a meticulous exposé of blistering honesty, where basically Rivière just won’t shut up about her problems, an uncomfortable human drama that leaves many in the audience disillusioned by her building distrust for the entire human race, the director builds himself a pathway to the horizon, where real or imagined, fate may ultimately have the upper hand. 

Nothing Bad Can Happen (Tore Tantz)

Katrin Gebbe on the set with Julius Feldmeier

 Katrin Gebbe

Katrin Gebbe

NOTHING BAD CAN HAPPEN (Tore Tantz)      B         
Germany  (110 mi)  2013  d:  Katrin Gebbe                  Official site

Punk fascism disguised as a religious parable, where Gebbe’s film is the German answer to Austrian filmmaker Ulrich Seidl’s miserablist Paradise Trilogy, Paradise: Love (Paradies: Liebe), Paradise: Faith (Paradies: Glaube), and Paradise: Hope (Paradies: Hoffnung) (2012), with both films divided into three chapters, Faith, Love, and Hope, not necessarily in that order, where it seems the Austrian version was not hard corps enough for this director, who inflicts sadistic brutality with a surgical precision that recalls the punishing treatment of Michael Haneke’s Funny Games (1997), where the inflicting punishers go by the Biblical names of Peter (Frank Giering) and Paul (Arno Frisch).  Reaching into her trick bag of mercilessly inflicted brutality, which is all in vogue today with torture porn, Gebbe’s film was invited to Cannes this year in the Un Certain Regard category, largely for its tortuous provocation, as instead of plumbing the depths of her nation’s ills, she’s instead made a graphic exposé of human debasement, which is a well-crafted, but somewhat knee-jerk reaction to these other stylistically powerful films.  Perhaps the one film that may have spawned this degree of anti-humanist miserablism is Seidl’s DOG DAYS (2001), a darkly satiric stab at the banality of evil, as it shows what depths of depravity seemingly ordinary people are capable of, where humiliating others for sport is viewed as foreplay.  While DOG DAYS is all-in when it comes to holding nothing back, forcing the audience to endure unending tales of sadism and misery revealing the dark side of Austrian suburbia, including unsimulated sex that turns to rape, extended torture scenes, acts of extreme humiliation accompanied by threats of murder, where it’s a provocatively vile film that emphasizes all manner of grotesque human behavior, made all the more powerful by the documentary realist style and the unrelentingly depressing tone.  While Haneke was questioning the audience’s implicit involvement in desiring a violent revenge to the insufferable outrage they were witnessing onscreen, he made sure to show viewers that this was only a movie, so the violence witnessed was fictionalized arthouse movie violence.  Gebbe’s film makes no such distinction, but instead places her characters into a mainstream of German society, paralleling the increasingly disturbing behavior shown onscreen with the belligerence of extreme fascist behavior, suggesting a Darwinian “might makes right” form of domination where powerful interests seeking out weaker adversaries to attack and bully is a natural part of human development and not something that can be eliminated from society, even after extensive post-war education efforts.   

Supposedly inspired by an actual event, this has to resonate even more deeply in Germany, home of Hitler’s Third Reich and his extermination plan, perhaps the ultimate example of the strong brutalizing the weak with a blitzkrieg of assaults intended to annihilate one group off the face of the earth.  While the religious aspect is overemphasized, a simplistic exercise in the manner of Mel Gibson’s THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST (2004) painfully graphic Jesus-like suffering is on full display for ardent believers, with various references to the passive teachings of Christ heard throughout, the central character Tore (Julius Feldmeier) may as well be a cult follower, as the problem isn’t the repetitive use of religious text, which has multiple layers of meaning, but his slavishly obsessive robotic adherence to it.  Seen as part of a budding Jesus Freak movement in Hamburg, we know nothing about the background of any of these participants, seen as young street kids with no home to speak of, who seem to be part of a beleaguered underground Christian punk movement obsessed by Biblical catch phrases which they obediently repeat, like Red Book quotations from Chairman Mao, as if this gives their otherwise worthless lives meaning and purpose.  Walking through the streets, imposing their scripture upon others, they’re seen as little more than an annoying nuisance, like Hare Krishna cult followers, instead of a serious fabric of society.  Nonetheless, Tore can be heard praying and asking for divine intervention throughout, as if this is the cure for all ailments.  When his praying miraculously seems to get one man’s stalled car engine started, of course giving all praise to Christ, Tore hands out cards to onlookers for their next musical gathering, making a public spectacle praising the power of Christ.  When we see his followers jumping around to angry punk music with a Christian message targeted specifically to those who have been abused and left destitute, Tone has joined the throng, flailing his arms around, but drops to the floor, seemingly in an epileptic fit where he is ignored until the same man seen earlier in the car cradles him in his arms and places him in his van, supposedly on his way to the hospital when he comes to, but Benno (Sascha Alexander Gersak) instead decides to bring him home to his wife Astrid (Annika Kuhl), teenage daughter Sanny (Swantje Kohlhof), who is Tone’s same age, and young son Dennis.  Benno’s friendship and hospitality seems met by empty stares from his family, apparently resigned to doing what they’re told, setting up a tent for him in the back yard while also sharing regular meals. 

Benno quickly starts ridiculing Tone’s naïve religious views, literally punching him in the face at one point, where Tone offers no resistance, becoming his punching bag on a regular basis after that, where Benno seems to enjoy bullying the young kid for pleasure.  Sanny is drawn to Tone’s helpless fragility, showing the bruises on her body as well, where it seems Benno is brutalizing the entire family, making unwanted sexual advances on his stepdaughter Sanny, where her mother simply ignores Bruno’s behavior.  Tone takes this as a sign from God that he must stand up to this outrageous force of evil, believing God is testing him, where he must learn to love his enemy, even as he gets pulverized in the process.  When Benno sees Tone as a rival for the desires of his stepdaughter, he shuts him out of the family, forbidding him from having food, forcing him to pilfer through the garbage for scraps to eat, where he’s eventually caught stealing from the garbage.  Even though the meat is rotting, it’s Astrid who suddenly gets in on the game by insisting he eat an entire maggot-infested chicken while she and Benno watch, initially force feeding him until he obediently follows their demands.  The film escalates into further psychopathic behavior that Tone is humiliatingly forced to endure, throwing scraps of religious sayings in his face as they continue to torment him, where he becomes their sadistic play toy. Refusing to walk away, as he’s zealously following the fanatically passive interpretation (as opposed to a violent example where Jesus overturns tables and throws all the money lenders out of the temple) of “being like Christ,” much like the character of Prince Myshkin (also an epileptic) in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, a walking saint on earth who was considered “an idiot” by the respectable society of the times, whose endlessly naïve and compassionate outlook was constantly at odds with the dark forces of evil, moral corruption, and all-consuming earthly desires.  In Tone’s deranged eyes that means submitting to any test of barbaric humiliation, where the film takes us into wretchedly uncomfortable territory where the graphic display of monstrous human behavior seems to be Gebbe’s real interest, where the film becomes a disturbingly cruel metaphor for the evils of fascism on display, where the director meticulously documents how this slowly building process is part of the human condition.  While she only really emphasizes the raw and excruciatingly distressing surface realities, captured by the fluid handheld camera movements of Moritz Schultheiss, the rest is for the audience to consider, where one of the spectacular underlying elements of the film is the quietly haunting musical score by Peter Folk and Johannes Lehniger which only accentuates the creepy effects of something unbalanced and off kilter happening.  Not for the faint of heart.      

Jerichow

JERICHOW                B+                  

Germany  (93 mi)  2008  d:  Christian Petzold 

A German film that’s so German it feels like it’s Austrian, as it’s a surgically precise psychological thriller, a remake of The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946) that features an overly detached, icy cold emotional world.  Benno Fürmann is brilliant from the outset without even uttering a word, as that piercing glare in his eyes could immediately disarm anyone’s hostile intentions.  Yet in the opening sequence, the director completely breaks from the mold as the hyper aggression directed toward him defies belief, as does his perceived passivity, which hides his real intentions.  Immediately we’re lured into what’s underneath the surface.  Petzold’s last film Yella (2007) was another standout in cleverly creating multiple layers of suspense, which included the added twist of interchangeable psychological worlds, where a dreamlike Antonioni reverie would replace the meticulous minutiae of drab or dreary reality, teasing the audience with completely indistinguishable states of mind.  The same actress Nina Hoss returns here as the object of two men’s desires, all three hiding behind dark and mysterious pasts.  Her Turkish husband is Ali, Hilmi Sözer, an enterprising foreigner in Germany who runs a string of successful food huts, but has a pathological distrust of those that work for him, as he suspects everyone of cheating on him.  Over time, he uncovers several clever schemes to rob him of his profits.  He runs into Fürmann completely by accident in a scene that borders on the absurd, yet the believability factor is completely authentic, especially Fürmann’s character, a former soldier in Afghanistan, now a moody silent type who lives alone rebuilding his deceased mother’s house.  Ali hires him to be his driver after he loses his license for drunken driving, but he becomes his most trusted employee, more like a bodyguard, as he saves Ali’s life from irate or distraught employees on more than one occasion.  In friendship, he introduces him to his German wife, the beguiling Hoss, who effortlessly combines multiple levels of emotions all at once, which seems to be the inspirational emotional source of the film, that we are all things simultaneously, quite capable of wisdom along with disastrous blunders, at times not able to distinguish between the two. 

We’ve seen this before in Polanski’s initial feature film KNIFE IN THE WATER (1962), a tantalizing battle of wills between two men vying for a sultry lady, or the scandalous noir thriller The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946) featuring iconic performances from John Garfield and Lana Turner, or the loveless and amoral murder mystery of Double Indemnity (1944), all of which exaggerate the hidden intentions of the characters.  Much like Douglas Sirk clouds the emotional surface with a flamboyant color scheme that hides his character’s repressed inner worlds, noir films are drenched in darkness and doom, a fatal combination when love is in the air.  Petzold carefully crafts his own world of suspicion where Ali is surreptitiously spying on his own employees as well as his wife, supposedly trusting Fürmann, which feels out of character, allowing him access into the inner sanctum of his business and his personal life that includes his wife, the two most successful ventures of his life, which from his own poisonous behavior seems capable of precariously unraveling at any moment.  Ali can be amusing, but is subject to drinking binges, which leaves an opening for Fürmann who is initially rejected, but then pounced on by Ali’s sensuous wife.  When Ali pretends to take a business trip abroad for a few days, leaving Fürmann in charge, the audience sees that he doesn’t actually leave, something the character’s themselves don’t suspect.  Everything after that is veiled in a lurid mystery of misguided emotions, all subject to the creepy idea that Ali will jump out of the bushes at any moment and surprise our budding young lovers who are dangerously crossing the line and breaking the limits of moral acceptability.  This creates an added level of suspense and an exposed emotional vulnerability that otherwise would not be there.  Within this scenario, things usually spin out of control, even from the perfectly controlled world of Fürmann, as their behavior only grows more dangerously suspicious, where ironically Fürmann was offered a choice earlier whether or not to rescue Ali as he was dangling precariously off the edge of a cliff, an act that sealed the deal for Hoss who immediately fell madly in love with him, her knight in shining armor that might come to her own rescue. 

Petzold’s stories take their own path where the question remains whether or not any crime has been committed, and if so, to what degree does it effect one’s life?  This is a Crime and Punishment story that explores the extent of one’s guilt even before any wrongful action has been committed.  Can just the mere thought of an illicit action put one in the same moral abyss as committing the act?  Does skimming from the profits compare with spousal abuse or murder?  How far can one cross the line before it’s clear they’ve passed the point of no return?  In this film, the audience sees the various developmental stages, including the measures of protection taken to protect both business and privacy.  What can stop a crime of passion?  The three main characters are particularly strong here, smart, compelling, yet psychologically cautious and mistrustful, where emotions are seen as a weakness, something to be taken advantage of by others, where Hoss declares at one point that without money, love is never even an option.  In an economically depressed region where jobs are scarce, money is as much a fictitious object of desire as passion, where in a unique role reversal, the moneymaker is a Turkish immigrant, usually the object of racial scorn in German films, given considerable poignancy by Sözer’s performance, while his penniless, down on his luck “guest worker” driver is a German citizen.  In a film that’s hazy about true character, what’s especially compelling about both Hoss and Fürmann is coming out of the emotional void of an extended loveless state, where they are suddenly stripped of all protection as they are ensnared in the intrigue of love.  Petzold tightens the noose around each one of the characters until they nearly suffocate on their own delusions, with their paths so meticulously carved out ahead of time but never quite taking into consideration the unknown factor that is present in each and every crime.  Stripped of all pretension, souls are finally bared, but at what cost?  Everybody loses a piece of themselves until there’s finally nothing left in the end but the illusion.  While not nearly as off-the-edge and experimentally risqué as Yella, this is every bit as well crafted, balanced, and deliciously entertaining.  

A City of Sadness (Bei qing cheng shi)

A CITY OF SADNESS (Bei qing cheng shi)      A                    

Taiwan  (158 mi)  1989  d:  Hou Hsiao-hsien

Jonathan Rosenbaum:

It’s also worth remarking that City of Sadness, one of Hou’s more difficult films for Westerners in terms of plot, was his biggest hit in Taiwan; by broaching historical and cultural issues that couldn’t be discussed when the island was under martial law—that is, for the entire century until 1987—it caused a major sensation.

A devastating, densely constructed, and complicated film that unravels very much like a novel, set in 1945 with the surrender of the Japanese after 51 years of colonial rule in Taiwan, while at the same time a child is being born into the Lin family, a name that means “light,” and the film follows the travails of that family, which coincides with true references to historical events.  While the Taiwanese celebrated their liberation from Japan, there was a national upheaval when it became clear that the Mainlanders intended to continue the colonial structures of exploitation, only with Chiang Kai-Shek's Nationalist Chinese as the sole party in control.  When the Taiwanese rebelled against the Nationalist's implementation of martial law in 1947, effectively turning the country into a police state in what is known as The February 28 Incident, anywhere from 18 – 28,000 or more Taiwanese were massacred by Nationalist troops, the same party currently ruling the country, which effectively banned any reference to this subject until martial law was revoked in 1987, allowing, for the first time, a film like this to be made.  So this is considered a highly significant nationalist work, using an exceedingly complex plot reconstructing the nation’s history as a backdrop for following the daily routines, personal dramas, and eventual destruction of a single family, something resembling The Brothers Karamazov.  Much of the film’s power comes from placing so much of the violence off in the distance, or even off-screen, heightening the internal experience of the viewer.  The film ends in 1949 when the Chiang Kai-Shek Nationalist’s attempt to regain the Mainland fails and the Kuomintang retreat to the island of Taiwan. 

    

Headed by the humorously candid, always-wonderful father, Li Tien-Lu, so extraordinary in The Puppetmaster (Xi meng ren sheng) (1993), he was an acknowledged gangster who spent much time during the war in and out of the Japanese jails attempting to sabotage the Japanese rule.  His family consists of 4 sons, 1st brother is another low-life gangster who turns his Japanese-style bar into a restaurant called “Little Shanghai,” largely a front for his own proclivity for gambling, while 2nd brother has disappeared in the Philippines fighting the Japanese, 3rd brother (Jack Kao) returns from the war mentally unstable, yet collaborates on the black market with drug smugglers, requiring the rescuing intervention by the 1st brother that nearly leads to the entire family’s demise, while the 4th brother, a photographer played by Tony Leung, is deaf.  Nearly everyone in the family is either arrested or attacked in this film, as after defeating the Japanese, Taiwan becomes a brutal police state that coincides with the corrupt rule of the gangsters, so after fighting the Japanese as well as the Mainland Chinese, they still have to fend off wave after wave of more Taiwanese Chinese.  There is a beautiful extended sequence early in the film where a happy group of friends and brothers drunkenly sing “A Song of Exile” out the window, which seems to represent an obvious theme of displacement.  

Xin Shufen, who played the young girl friend in DUST IN THE WIND (1986), is nothing short of heartbreaking in this film as Hinomi, the quiet, beguiling sister to the 4th brother’s best friend, Hinoe (Fang Wou Yi), a girl who works tirelessly as a nurse at the hospital.  She actually narrates the film and can frequently be seen writing her thoughts in her diary.  She is the closest companion to and secretly loves the deaf 4th brother, played with complete understatement by Tony Leung, whose character was changed to a mute as he didn’t speak Mandarin, so the couple communicate by handing each other written notes.  Their quiet sensitivity is stunningly contrasted against the violence of the gangsters and the soldiers.  And if anything, that is the heart of this film, intermingling the deeply personal interior world with the deeply disturbing exterior political world.  Hinoe is repeatedly arrested for secretly spreading his Socialist beliefs on the island, a belief shared by the 4th brother, believing that is the best way to repel outside colonialist forces.  The deafness of the youngest brother becomes a metaphor for the muted voices of opposition.  In one of the most shocking scenes, he is jailed, awaiting his name to be called, but he hears nothing, while off-screen, execution shots can be heard.

Of note, Hou seems to be more comfortable with his film style, which uses poetic innertitles to reflect appropriate philosophical thought and also several repeated static shots from a distance, each with moving objects or people in the foreground while something entirely different is happening in the rear.  One is at the local hospital, as patients or family members arrive, others are seated waiting, someone is mopping the floors, something is happening outside on the street, but everything is choreographed into this small, restricted space.  Also, there are multiple table shots at the restaurant, so much so that this familiar scene actually becomes a symbol for the family, as people are eating in the foreground while others are in a room in the back, and people move easily in and out of the scene.  There is an interesting use of still photographs, 4th brother’s profession, each of which places the story of the events being shown in a deeper historical context.  As usual, the music is carefully interwoven into the emotional fabric of the film.  Probably the most stunning sequence comes at the end, the last 15 minutes of the film, where the sadness of the family becomes the mourning of the nation, and where the life cycles of death-rebirth and death again are so poetically rendered.

Elena

ELENA            B                    

Russia  (109 mi)  2011  ‘Scope  d:  Andrei Zvyagintsev

Somewhat slight compared to his earlier efforts, THE RETURN (2003) and THE BANISHMENT (2007), this is a subtle film that delves into the heart of the Russian conscience, where a wordless ten–minute opening into the empty expanse of a meticulously clean, thoroughly modern and luxurious yet seemingly cold and sterile Moscow condominium sets the scene for an unsparing examination of class consciousness.  Something of a generational morality tale where the future looks hopeless and overly bleak, this is a slow moving character exposé, almost a theater piece, where what’s most significant is the developing interior worlds of the characters, given a very novelesque structure of what turns out to be a modern day variation on Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment.  Centered around two main characters, a retired couple, Elena (Nadezhda Markina) and Vladimir (Andrey Smirnov) live in separate bedrooms, each with their own television sets, where every morning she opens the curtains and wakes him up, where her role is carefully defined around the subordinate position of serving him, like a nursemaid, where it’s a portrait of two entirely separate worlds.  Extending further is the world of their children, each through previous marriages, where Vladimir’s mostly unseen and distant daughter, Katerina (Elena Lyadova), seems to live a hedonistic and carefree existence, accustomed to being taken care of all her life by the support of her father, while Elena’s aloof teenage son lives in a state of abject poverty with his perpetually idle father and nagging mother in a tenement housing project sitting adjacent to 3 nuclear power smokestacks.  The dismal picture of their blighted lives says it all, where Elena is constantly hounded for money, but Vladimir is unyielding when it comes to offering help, wondering why he should support a family whose own father won’t get off his unemployed ass and get a job to help support his own family?  When Elena tries to compare her son’s situation with his daughter, Vladimir refuses to hear any more on the subject, claiming even though his sarcastically hostile daughter is no great prize, he’s at least fulfilling his fatherly obligation.  What to do about their future is the subject of the film’s moral center, told through alternating characters, one living under the protection of supreme comfort, while the other can be seen traipsing through the graffiti-laden slums to visit her son and grandson. 

Having met late in life, their lives were already structured, as Elena was the nurse in the hospital several years ago when they met, and has continued serving that same role in marriage.  Something of a control freak, Vladimir is particular about having things exactly his way, where there isn’t an ounce of recognition or awareness of how he’s treating his wife, while she dutifully submits to each and every one of his commands, never expressing any sign of resentment.  Under the surface, however, she is boiling at her husband’s refusal to take her family seriously.  For all practical purposes, this is the set up, with no other background information provided other than the acute visual detail captured by cinematographer Mikhail Krichman, who worked on the director’s earlier films as well, and the splendid intermittent use of the 3rd Movement of Phillip Glass’s Symphony #3, a tense and pulsating use of throbbing strings that effectively becomes the voice of the subconscious.  Vladimir’s sense of control can be see in this wordless car driving sequence that expresses a rather sophisticated sense of choice, Elena (2011) - Car driving scene - YouTube (2:46), where the haunting Glass music comes in at the end.  Shortly afterwards, he suffers a heart attack at the gym, literally forcing him to confront his mortality.  One of the best scenes in the film is the hospital visit by his daughter, the simply brilliant Elena Lyadova, who is haughty and cynical, just like her father, but surprisingly eloquent, Elena 2011 - YouTube  (5:16), where the cameraman can’t take his gaze off her fascinating performance.  This visit seems to solidify his view that he needs to write a will, informing Elena that she will receive a generous monthly stipend, but his daughter will inherit everything else.  This sends Elena into a state of flux, her hopes for her son dashed, as she sees Katerina as a spoiled and ungrateful child, someone who couldn’t be less appreciative of her father, only using him for money.  With few spoken words between the two of them, Elena has to wordlessly convey the plaguing guilt of the young Raskolnikov, as she wonders if righting a wrong by committing an unthinkable mortal sin is permissible if it’s in pursuit of a higher purpose, where her transformation is chilling.   

Like the novel, the film barely touches upon the crime, but lingers instead on the unintended interior consequences of the punishment, where Elena skillfully covers up the tracks of her foul deed, where earlier in the film Katrina understood her well, claiming she played the part well of a mournful and grieving wife, where in the hospital her words to her father haunt the final moments of the film, like a Macbethian witch’s prophecy: “It’s irresponsible to produce offspring that you know are going to be sick and doomed, since the parents are just as sick and doomed.”  If Zvyaguintsev films produce anything, they brilliantly foreshadow a bleak future, where Elena struggles with a Mephistophelian choice to prevent a gloomy future for her grandson Sasha, where his parents are elated when she suddenly has available cash to bribe his way into college, rescuing her grandson from the inevitable fate of being forced to join the army, seen as a fate worse than prison.  He barely acknowledges her actions however, much like Elena feared Katerina would react, when the director then shows us the real face of the Russian future.  As the electricity goes out in the tenement housing projects turning the apartment dark, Sasha goes outside and joins a gang of others waiting for him that get liquored up, and in an exquisite example of the best uses of a hand-held camera, follow the group as they hastily approach a clearing in front of the nuclear power smokestacks with the precision of a military strike, where in a riveting sequence they attack a group of outsiders huddling next to a fire, savagely kicking and beating them all to within an inch of their lives, a senseless act of ultraviolence that’s right out of Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971), a stormtrooping, boot-kicking, neo-Nazi vision of disillusioned youth that’s becoming all too common an occurrence these days, almost always alcohol fueled.  Like the wordless emptiness of the opening sequence, the final sequence is eerily similar, with the tenement dwellers now inhabiting the luxurious condo, bringing with them their learned habits of drunken idleness and shirking responsibility, soulless creatures who are literally pretenders to the human race.   

An Encounter With Simone Weil

AN ENCOUNTER WITH SIMONE WEIL               B+                       

USA  Italy  Sweden  (85 mi)  2010  d:  Julia Haslett                  Official site

Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.                  —Simone Weil

This is perhaps the quietest film you’ll see all year, as it’s intentionally made with such low volume that it actually forces the viewer to listen more intently to what is a profoundly sad but deeply moving experience, an introduction into the life of a prolific writer, teacher, social activist and French philosopher, Simone Weil, a woman Albert Camus described as “the only great spirit of our times,” who died at age 34 while trying to help liberate France from the Nazi’s during World War II.  Most likely little known except for college theology students, where she might be heralded as something of a rebel in Catholic circles, and perhaps a mystic by others.  Her obscurity is part of the beauty of this film, as the entire tone of the film is literary and quietly respectful, where the audience can expect to engage with the mind of what is likely a previously unknown historical figure, where her life story parallels that of the person telling the story, the filmmaker Julia Haslett, who also writes, edits, narrates, and produces her first film.  Early on we discover the narrator was confounded at a young age when her father committed suicide when she was just 17, where she felt a terrible responsibility for his loss, also her brother’s life-long mental health issues, plagued by the torment of unending headaches.  “My father's death taught me that if I don't pay attention, someone might die.”  But her outlook changed when she ran across a quote, “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity,” which she eventually attributed to Simone Weil.  These few words seemed to answer what was missing in her own personal turmoil with her family’s suffering, urging her, literally, to become more empathetic and a better listener, where sometimes just being present offers a kind of hope that would otherwise be missing if she weren’t there.  Learning more about Weil, she discovered a near saintly life, one zealously dedicated to improving the human condition, exhibiting a near incomprehensible compassion for the suffering of others, where she similarly led such an austere and frugal existence, all of which she felt was necessary in order to truly understand the needs of others.  

Weil grew up a Marxist Jew from the 30’s, a teacher who frowned upon the use of textbooks, preferring to translate the texts herself from the original ancient Greek, Latin, German and English, quitting her job once she began to idealize the automation of the working class, where machinery and assembly lines increased productivity and maximized human potential, taking a job working the line in a Renault car factory in France, thinking this would enlighten her understanding of working class consciousness.  However, she was forced to conclude that rather than incite the proletariat to revolution, oppressive working conditions instead drove workers into submission, creating a working force of capitulating slaves.  Weil eventually renounced Marxism and Communism and became a pacifist, yet also started leaning toward the transcension of religious faith, becoming a devout follower of the Catholic church, visiting the Benedictine Abbey of Solesmes in France, yet still joined the fight against the Fascists in the Spanish Civil War, believing freedom empowered people against oppressive forces, but she accidentally injured herself early in the campaign.  When Fascism spread across Europe, her Jewish family had to flee to the safety of United States when Hitler occupied the nation, but Weil returned to London to help organize the French resistance.  During the First World War, she refused to eat sugar at age 6, as soldiers had to go without, and during the Second World War she would not heat her home so she could experience the cold that soldiers suffered while sleeping on the battlefield, while also refusing to eat anything more than minimal war rations, attempting to subsist on onions and tomatoes, even after contracting tuberculosis, eventually perishing from malnutrition, suggesting extreme fatalism in her beliefs.  Her approach to human goodness resembles that of the country priest in Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest (Journal d'un curé de ca... (1951), who tried to subsist on a diet of stale bread and wine, continually struggling against the weakness of his own human limitations, where both seem inclined to ask the moral question posed by this film:  “What response does seeing human suffering demand of us?”  Weil and the priest associate God’s love in their own actions, which are not so much moral choices as human necessities, believing faith is passed to others in the highly committed way we choose to lead our lives. 

Haslett not only respects the social commitment of Weil, but her literary acumen, which is explored throughout the film, though the filmmaker has difficulties accepting a religious conversion, not being religious herself.  However she expressed her admiration for Susan Sontag, who unfortunately died before the filmmaker could meet her, herself a professor of philosophy and theology, in a 1963 book review, Simone Weil by Susan Sontag | The New York Review of Books, “such writers as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Genet—and Simone Weil—have their authority with us because of their air of unhealthiness. Their unhealthiness is their soundness, and is what carries conviction.”  When De Gaulle heard about Weil’s proposal to send nurses to the front lines along with the soldiers, believing they could develop a form of shared mental communion, bordering on spirituality, he considered her a “madwoman.”  Sontag acknowledges as much, where Weil’s insistence upon self-denial and “her contempt for pleasure and for happiness” would not be an example for anyone else to emulate (as her family in France readily acknowledges), where her martyrdom is what places her outside all human understanding, much like Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, where the unnatural endurance of so much pain and suffering is Christ-like, continually bearing the sins of others.  Lest anyone think this film is an excursion into the formulation of religious doctrine, it’s not, but it carefully takes us through Weil’s own personal transformation and the impact her life had on the development of a human conscious, as the director evolves in her own life through her intimate understanding of Weil.  None of this feels like a documentary, more like a personal revelation, where the tenderness exhibited is reverential, yet the intensity displayed in the director’s need to know and understand through Weil is startling, exhibiting an experimental, personal essay style approach, not through any inventive camera techniques or montages, but simply through a thoughtful invocation of her language.  Haslett uses a look-alike actress to assume the part of Weil and asks questions she might have wanted to ask, but this simulation all feels like part of the director’s imagination.  When most of the leftists of the era were toying with atheism, Weil embraced religious views of transcendance, bordering on a kind of mysticism, perhaps similar to that of Russian film director Andrei Tarkovsky, where ascending above the misery and suffering imposed by war was the only option.    

Recommended Reading:

Waiting for God, a collection of letters and essays that reveal Weil's spiritual autobiography, and her essay The Love of God and Affliction

The Idiot (Hakuchi)

Setsuko Hara

THE IDIOT (Hakuchi)              B                    

Japan  (166 mi)  1951  d:  Akira Kurosawa
Opening version (180 mi)  Extended cut (265 mi) 

I can't ruin the innocent life of a child like you.        

— Taeko Nasu (Setsuko Hara)

Kurosawa always enjoyed the challenge of filming great literary works, but certainly a Dostoevsky novel, The Idiot, presented immense challenges simply in length alone.  Transporting 19th century events from Saint Petersburg, Russia to the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido following WW II, the Christ-like protagonist Kameda is returning after being falsely charged with war crimes, initially sentenced to death which drove him into a mental breakdown where he continues to have harrowing dreams of his death, leaving him frail and susceptible to epileptic seizures, recovering in an American POW camp.  There’s an early scene in this film where Kameda, whose innocence and blunt honesty causes social awkwardness that leaves him known as the Idiot (Masayuki Mori, the slain husband from Kurosawa’s previous 1950 film ROSHÔMON), is walking through a snowy, tree-lined landscape with Yoshiko Kuga as Ayako, where one is immediately reminded of similar post card images from Orson Welles and The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), two films that suffered similar fates, as they were both mutilated beyond recognition by the studio brass who felt the director’s four-hour version was unwatchable.  Kurosawa’s original cut was 100 minutes longer than the only surviving print and an hour longer than his highly successful later work SEVEN SAMURAI (1954), which suggests nearly 40 % of the original film is missing.  Nestled between two masterworks, there’s every reason to believe this was an epic adaptation, including an array of activities and developments that befit an entire host of novelesque characters, where Kurosawa turns this into a wrenching melodrama, but all we’re left with are fragments, which at times feel underdeveloped, perhaps resembling the tone and structure of one of Kameda’s fever-pitched dreams. 

Kameda meets Akama (Toshirô Mifune) on a train back home, two men who are exact opposites, as Kameda is penniless while Akama is wealthy beyond his means, a man who lets no one stand in his way and is as physically aggressive as Kameda is passive.  At the train station, they see a picture in a photography studio of Taeko, Setsuko Hara, who worked with Kurosawa previously in NO REGRETS FOR OUR YOUTH (1946), also several Ozu films including TOKYO STORY (1953), where the snowy mood on the streets is beautifully captured in a sequence here, even if it includes Russian dubbed dialogue 'The Idiot' (Akira Kurosawa) ("Однозвучно гремит  YouTube (3:33).  Kameda mysteriously breaks into tears as he sees the sadness in her eyes, as she’s been a kept women, the mistress of a wealthy businessman since the age of 14, and has obviously been visited by more men than she cares to remember.  She’s being sold into marriage for 600,000 yen at a dinner party when Kameda and Akama arrive in a blizzard of snow, where Akama offers a rival bid of one million yen on the spot.  This extended sequence runs the gamut in expressing tumultuous emotions, given a backdrop of insidious male behavior, female subjugation, and town gossip, as the deal is brokered by Ayako’s father, Takashi Shimura, who plays something of a slimeball in this picture, a rarity for him as he’s usually the noblest character onscreen.  But that part belongs to Kameda, who in a brilliant masterstroke after Taeko has melodramatically rejected all offers, drowning in her own sorrows, penniless and humiliated, claiming no one would want her now, quietly indicates he would accept her as she is, asserting that in his eyes, she remains a pure and faithful woman, which leads to a real contradiction of morals, as Taeko is stunned by this admission and truly touched at hearing it, as men have only wanted to dominate and control her.  Akama is stunned as well, wondering what business it is of Kameda to butt in on his offer, which he feels is just as genuine, amazed that his frail friend has suddenly become his biggest rival.  This masterful party sequence beautifully interweaves the lead characters and their relationship to one another, while also establishing the town’s inclination to ridicule Kameda.    

 

While offscreen, the two men attempt to win Taeko’s hand, but she regrets it can’t be Kameda, fearing her disgraced lifestyle would ruin him.  Meanwhile, Kameda has found a defender from Ayako, whose family is the picture of gossip and convention, whose father (Kameda’s uncle) is forced to admit he swindled Kameda out of his inheritance.  Liko Ozu, the master of intimate chamber works, Kurosawa uses signature shots which he repeats throughout the picture, that include shots of Kameda pacing out front of Akama’s immense home that is covered in snow hoping he’ll let him in, or a shot of Ayako sitting at the piano in front of a window in her home with snow pelting the glass pane.  Snow figures prominently in this version, beautifully capturing the architectural landscape of Hokkaido buried under layers of snow, where much of the narrative takes place in a blizzard, using a Godard-like interior and exterior expression, where a tracking camera captures documentary style street scenes in the snow, also reflected from interior shots looking out large windows, and where inside Akama’s dark, cavernous mansion are rooms filled with snow and ice, resembling images from DOCTOR ZHIVAGO (1965).  But the most outrageous of all is a wonderfully expressive outdoor ice carnival (can’t say there’s anything else like it), skaters wearing masks while carrying sparklers, all set to the frenetic music from Mussorgsky’s “Night on Bald Mountain,”  Mussorgsky-Stokowski "A Night on Bare Mountain" YouTube (9:47), at least partially captured in a short trailer sequence here The Idiot 1951 YouTube (1:03).  The finale pits both the two women and the two men against one another, where their fate seems to rest in each other’s arms, each a shadow figure of the other, where Setsuko Hara pulls off her best Joan Crawford imitation while Ayako, something of a caged bird, attempts to find her own wings, but it’s the haunting quiet of the men losing their grip in the darkness of Akama’s frozen mansion, turned into a living tomb, that is the most unsettling, reminiscent of the final apocalyptic father and son scene in DODES’KA-DEN (1970), where the presence of doom is everpresent, yet here its silence is unusually poetic, the gravity broken only by a brief and altogether unnecessary final coda.