Fool for Love

FOOL FOR LOVE       A                    

USA  (106 mi)  1985  d:  Robert Altman 

If you ain't a cowboy, you ain't shit.               —Eddie (Sam Shepard)

Having written award winning plays for nearly two decades, receiving the Pulitzer Prize for Buried Child in 1978, Sam Shepard never directed any of his own plays until Fool for Love in 1983, when he directed Ed Harris and Kathy Baker in the lead roles of a small production in San Francisco before opening off Broadway in New York a few months later.  Robert Altman spent the first half of the decade working in smaller budget movies outside the Hollywood studios, choosing to film a series of modern theatrical works in a naturalistic setting, where often the entire shoot consisted of a single set in a solitary room.  The director’s focus in these works is more restrained due to the cramped space, where the dramatic power of the performers unleashes itself with a flood of emotions that can barely be contained by such a restrictive environment, giving the impression that the characters feel straightjacketed.  Shepard seems to share this sense of confinement in his own life, as just two years earlier on the set of FRANCES (1982) he met lead actress Jessica Lange, effectively ending his own fifteen year marriage for this new lifelong companion.  His play Fool for Love seems to contain elements of this double life, starring lead characters who feel both smitten and star crossed, who are desperate for one another when absent, but miserable in each other’s company.  It was Shepard who wanted his play filmed and also chose to star as Eddie in the lead role, a lonesome cowboy at the end of an era, somehow out of place and out of time.  Much of the movie does take place in a single room, a seedy 1950’s roadside motel set on a lonely highway in New Mexico’s Mojave Desert where Kim Basinger as May is hiding out trying to find her bearings.  Unlike his earlier works, however, Altman opens up this claustrophobic confinement, allowing his characters to inhabit the real world outside, though it’s about as desolate and isolated as you could find filled with collectible articles of junk strewn around.  While the play focuses on the explosive energy of the tortured couple, the fools in love, as if the world could not contain their feelings, Altman creates a more dreamlike effect, complete with long drawn out flashback sequences narrated by intensely personal monologues, where confoundingly the narration does not match the images we see onscreen, causing a deeply unsettling confusion about what to believe.  Some in the audience may never regain that alienated disconnection with the material, but oddly enough neither do the characters onscreen.  Much of this movie is simply a bewilderment.                   

Once Eddie finds May, carrying a horse trailer and a few horses behind his truck, he wants her to join him, most likely dreaming of living in the open plains near the mountains somewhere, but May is reluctant, mindful of their cyclical pattern of self-destructive behavior.  Though she’s obviously attracted to Eddie, who’s a natural on a horse, he’s also a disturbing sexual presence, causing May to feel mistrustful, though mostly it seems of herself.  While Eddie is desperate to get her back, he tries to charm his way through her defenses, where amusing humor and sarcasm are eventually replaced by drunken rage, where through flashbacks we soon learn the real mystery behind their dysfunctional relationship, which strangely involves Harry Dean Stanton as the Old Man who led a double life when he was younger, moving back and forth between families, each one not knowing about the other, where these two are a product of his duplicity.  Eddie seems to accept the fact that they are doomed lovers, forever connected, where nobody and nothing can come in between, as if it’s their only destiny, while May wants to make a new start, which has Eddie disgusted at the thought, thinking she’s only deluding herself.  While the two go at it, tearing each other apart, making up, continually opening up even deeper wounds, May has a surprise, as she needs to get ready for a date who will be arriving soon, which has Eddie relishing the opportunity to demean and embarrass the poor slob.  If ever there was theater of the uncomfortable, this is it, as the emotional discoveries of love and abandonment veer into the world of horror and the macabre.  The Old Man is also hanging around the periphery of the motel, living in his trailer parked behind the motel, sitting around on chairs watching and drinking, as if he hasn’t inflicted enough damage, yet he may be their “safe” place, a shelter in the storm, someone they have in common, whose initial narration feels like a wayward Greek chorus, a man who set out on a journey, got lost and distracted, and never found his way back home, leaving it up to these two to find their way on their own.  This remote outpost in the middle of nowhere seems to be their exile into purgatory.    

But all the introductory emotional fireworks is just a prelude to the main event, which is the evening arrival of the gentleman caller, Randy Quaid, just an ordinary guy genuinely concerned about May who becomes a silent witness, like the role of a Holy Fool.  After a little physical altercation, he is quickly offered a drink to settle things down, and over drinks at a lonely motel bar illuminated by the neon lights shining through the window and reflected in the mirror above the bar, each of these doomed lovers tells their sad tale of woe to a perfect stranger, embellished with hypnotic pacing as they backtrack into the sordid details of their tortured pasts.  These eloquent monologues are fiercely intense and highly disturbing, yet they couldn’t be told with more quiet, purposeful understatement. Both Shepard and Basinger, initially defined by how much she fears and is both attracted and repelled by him, disappear from view, replaced by younger more innocent versions of themselves onscreen, where only their voices remain connected to who they really are.  The dreamlike quality of the flashback memories have a haunting effect, as if they’ve been replayed in their minds hundreds of times, and whatever actually happened has been replaced with countless variations and inventions until they barely recognize who they are anymore.  Their entire adult life has been one long struggle to rid their minds of these painful truths, but just seeing one another brings it all back where they’re forced to relive the heartbreaking tragedy all over again, where only in an alcoholic haze does the subject even surface before returning once more into the deep recesses of their damaged souls.  These flashback sequences near the end of the film are among the most uniquely original scenes Altman has ever filmed, and the way he continually disconnects the visual memory from the descriptive monologues is sublimely poetic, where the film itself becomes a surrealistic plateau of mental anguish and existential dread, sure to repeat itself hundreds of more times, like an infected virus spreading through the bloodstream.  Shepard literally inhabits the role he wrote, a character where every nuance matters, while Basinger’s smoldering sexuality and pitch perfect Southern twang may be her best performance over her entire career, rivaled only by LA CONFIDENTIAL (1997).  Also a steady stream of soulful country music marks the first half of the film, a combination of Waylon Jennings and Sandy Rogers, who is Shepard’s sister, who can be heard on YouTube (4:52) here: Sandy Rogers - Go Rosa.  Altman’s stream-of-consciousness theme of tortured and damaged souls was never more poetically realized than this film, where an early scene that wordlessly expresses Basinger’s relationship to a small girl locked out of her motel room is simply heart wrenching.     

Stalker

Tarkovsky on the set

Tarkovsky on the set with Aleksandr Kaidanovsky as The Stalker

STALKER  (Сталкер)                                     A                    

Russia  Germany (163 mi)  1979  d:  Andrei Tarkovsky

Here we are at the threshold. This is the most important moment of your lives. You have to know that here your most cherished wish will come true. The most sincere one. The one reached through suffering.       —Stalker (Aleksandr Kaidanovsky) from STALKER (1979)

“It is about the existence of God in man, and about the death of spirituality as a result of our possessing false knowledge.”    —Andrei Tarkovsky

Now the summer has passed.

It might never have been.

It is warm in the sun,

But it isn’t enough.

All that might’ve occurred

Like a five-fingered leaf

Fluttered into my hands,

But it isn’t enough.

Neither evil nor good

Has yet vanished in vain,

It all burned and was light,

But it isn’t enough.

Life has been as a shield,

And has offered protection.

I have been most fortunate,

But it isn’t enough.

The leaves were not burned.

The boughs were not broken,

The day clear as glass,

But it isn’t enough.

  

—But There Has to be More, by Arseny Tarkovsky, the director’s father, recited by the Stalker outside The Room

One of the great achievements in cinema history, Tarkovsky unearths new grounds in this beautifully hypnotic, oddly ambiguous, near complete re-write of a Russian science fiction novel Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, where Tarkovsky eliminates all but the barest traces of science fiction, turning this instead into a philosophical parable on human existence.  Much like the journey of the three Wise Men seeking spiritual guidance, yet ironically a film requiring the tacit approval of the Communist Soviet State, this film incorporates several Scriptural references, including a strangely unbiblical Revelations dream sequence and a reference to Emmaus Road where two of Jesus' disciples failed to recognize the person who (in an atheistic, totalitarian controlled society) shall not be named— the resurrected Christ, not to mention a character wearing a crown of thorns, and features a similar quest for knowledge and insight, but it’s set in an unnamed future evidenced by train whistles and a corrosive post-industrial world of toxic waste, rot, and decay, where the interior human component comes to mirror that soulless reflection of destroyed, meaningless lives.  

Beset with difficulties from the outset, Tarkovsky initially shot nearly half the film before realizing the Kodak film stock, rare in Russia, was defective, where he immediately petitioned for additional funding, which was granted only on the condition he’d shoot a 2-part film, and money was forwarded for the 2^nd part.  In the second attempt at filming, the crew experienced equipment problems, also shutting down production. Tarkovsky actually suffered a heart attack after firing his original cinematographer Georgi Rerberg, who filmed MIRROR (1975), and also his production designer Aleksandr Bojm, claiming artistic differences, which allowed the director time to change the entire concept of a film that was initially conceived in 'Scope and ended up in a more tightly constricted, boxed 1:33 aspect ratio, and where the character of the Stalker evolved from an arrogantly confident smuggler to a man constantly at odds with his own fragile human limitations.  Cameraman Leonid Kalashnikov showed up on the set for a few weeks before being replaced by Aleksandr Knyazhinsky, while Tarkovsky himself assumed the set designer duties.  In addition, the shooting took place near an abandoned hydroelectric plant in Tallinn, Estonia, where the actors and film crew may have spent months exposed to chemical poisoning from the toxic white foam floating down the Jägala River, causing allergic reactions on the set and where Tarkovsky himself, his wife Larissa, and his favorite leading actor Anatoliy Solonitsyn all died within a decade from similar causes, pulmonary lung cancer.  Due to bureaucratic censor boards and ongoing feuds regarding artistic integrity and a continuing difficulty obtaining State funding, this is the final film Tarkovsky shot in Russia, shooting his final two films in Italy and Sweden.  

Opening in a Sepia-toned Black and White, Aleksandr Kaidanovsky plays the Stalker, a painstakingly conscientious guide with the mental capacity to illegally lead people successfully through a dangerous and forbidden, unpopulated area known as The Zone, "the quietest place in the world" where the faint sounds of birds can be heard, the result perhaps of alien activity or an intelligence greater than our own, and of a meteorite falling several decades earlier, where in the center is a destination known as The Room, a place where one’s innermost desire can become true.  Soldiers initially entered the swampy region in tanks with weapons and never returned, now full of syringes, medical waste, contaminated standing water, and discarded human artifacts and debris, overgrown with vegetation over time, surrounded by gates and barbed wire and protected by military personnel.  Against the wishes of his distraught wife and physically deformed daughter, somehow the genetic result of his activities in The Zone, the Stalker agrees to guide two men into The Zone, Anatoliy Solonitsyn as the cynical Writer and Nikolai Grinko as the science Professor.

Their harrowing ride into the eerie stillness of The Zone leads to one of the most brilliantly constructed sequences, a seamlessly envisioned train ride where the edited images, seemingly captured in one shot (there are 5) perfectly match the haunting, anticipatory mood and psychology of the men with the quiet, rhythmic clacking of the train, where once they finally reach their destination the world around them quickly turns into color.  While the two are contemptibly suspicious of their guide's unerring caution, the Stalker is wary about proceeding too quickly, never taking a straight line, but zigs and zags in the direction where they’re going, where the mystery of The Zone changes with each visit, a maze of constantly shifting traps, where the rules of entry also seem to change, allowing the passage of some but denying entrance to others.  For the Stalker, he never knows the intentions of his passengers and can only hope for the best, proceeding as cautiously as possible.  Despite the apparent simplicity of the journey itself, Tarkovsky creates vivid suspense throughout the entire length of their quest, making this something of an edge of your seat thriller, as one never knows what to expect, not even the Stalker himself who recounts some of his earlier adventures, some not so successful.  Notable are the inclusion of unique dream sequences, some spectacular passageways, a gorgeous electronic soundtrack from composer Eduard Artemyev, Tarkovsky’s signature interior rain sequences, and the appearance of a black dog that grows attached to the Stalker.      

STALKER begins a pattern that continues in Tarkovsky’s final two films, expressing a self-destructive world of commerce or transitory concerns that has lost touch with its own existence and all connections with nature, a world where faith and spirituality have also been lost or discarded, featuring Stalkers, Holy Fools or lost souls who are treated with scorn and contempt by those they attempt to save.  Looked upon by others as weak, despised, and even a bit mad, Stalker recognizes his own limited human condition, a rugged but wounded soul most likely damaged from his exposure to some poisonous chemical or radioactive substance, grown weary from a world in constant decay, filled with a palpable fear for having to live with the potential damaging consequences of continuously exposing himself and his family to the unknown elements of The Zone.  Yet it is his awareness of his human weakness that is the source of a spiritual connection that others lack.  While plainly an attack on the spiritual emptiness of society, in STALKER, all the initial hopes expressed to alter man’s destiny are dashed by the complexity and near incomprehensibility of reaching the precipice of The Room, that moment when all potential solutions vanish from the minds of mortal beings, described by some as that “poverty of spirit,” perhaps struck by the all-knowing omniscience and enormity of it all, where at least in one of the earlier scripts (there were supposedly 10), Writer acknowledges “We haven’t matured to this place.”  One of the most emotionally compelling moments is when trifling personal motives are exposed and the painfully disappointed Stalker breaks down to reveal the extent of his own personal anguish and the heavy toll this journey takes on his wounded psyche, as he can lead others to the mysteries of The Room, hoping they can find wisdom and salvation, but cannot receive any personal benefit himself, claiming “It lets those pass who have lost all hope, not good or bad, but wretched people.”  In the end, The Zone is less a place than each man's individual reaction to it.       

In Sculpting in Time, Tarkovsky acknowledges a central theme of “human dignity (and) how a man suffers if he has no self-respect,” reflected in the Stalker’s draining faith in mankind, also the redemptive powers of love expressed by Stalker’s wife in her final monologue, calling it a “final miracle to set against the unbelief, cynicism, (and) moral vacuum poisoning the modern world…It is about the existence of God in man, and about the death of spirituality as a result of our possessing false knowledge.”  While the Writer and Professor are ultimately humbled and rendered human, as if challenged by passing through the rigors of Dante's Inferno, a kind of Vladimir and Estragon lost in the incomprehensibility of their banal existence in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, their arrogance and hubris are reflected in iconic Russian figures, Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor comes to mind from The Brothers Karamazov and the worshipping of false prophets, also the imposter, the Pretender Tsar from Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov, both works that also feature a similar witnessing Holy Fool character that was also present in ANDREI RUBLEV (1966).  The false Trinity of Stalker’s misguided faith, the Professor’s wrongful use of reason, and Writer’s art that ultimately is expressed in self doubt, fail to produce the expected miracle that instead appears in Stalker’s own family, combining his own spirituality and his wife’s steadfast devotion with his daughter’s unexplained mysticism that is nothing less than transcendence, especially considering the squalor and industrial ugliness that is everpresent in the polluted landscape of this world, where the muted sounds of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy can strangely and ironically be heard.  Tarkovsky certainly attempts to draw a distinction between what is human and what is eternal in his films, where this film shows a myopic tendency for humans to dwell on phantoms and incidental matter that is purely transitory, failing to recognize the distinguishing human element that defines our earthly existence—the selfless capacity to love.