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.

Versailles '73: American Runway Revolution

VERSAILLES ’73:  AMERICAN RUNWAY REVOLUTION      B 
USA  France  (91 mi)  2012  d:  Deborah Riley Draper                         Official site

While this is a film that clearly describes a moment in history when the American fashion industry went toe to toe with the French, and surprisingly it was the Americans that came out on top, something altogether unthinkable until that most surprising moment.  Since the date was 40 years ago, there’s been plenty of time for fashion minds to ruminate over the subject, and the conclusion is this was one of those miracle moments, like the American amateur hockey team beating a veteran Soviet professional team for the Gold Medal at the Winter Olympics in 1980.  These are such career defining moments that the world is never the same afterwards.  The American fashion industry, up to that point in time, always emulated the French, considered the top of the line in world fashion, where even American fashion critics themselves set the tone for this view, always deferring to the French, who universally were considered the model for high fashion.  But in 1973, a unique event was planned to raise money for the crumbling Palace of Versailles which was in dire need of renovation, when American fashion publicist Eleanor Lambert and Versailles curator Gerald Van der Kemp suggested a fundraiser, organizing a fashion face-off inside the luxurious opulence of the palace itself, Le Grand Divertissement à Versailles, inviting an audience of American celebrities and European royalty, where there were 650 millionaires in the room, including Princess Grace of Monaco, Christina Onassis, Andy Warhol, and all the titled dukes and princesses.  But what upped the ante was a planned showdown between the high fashion industries of New York and Paris going head to head, pitting 5 designers from each continent displaying their latest fashion designs on the runway.  From France, the crème of couture, five legendary Parisian designers:  Pierre Cardin, Christian Dior, Hubert de Givenchy, Yves Saint Laurent, and Emanuel Ungaro, while New York was represented by 5 American sportswear designers:  Bill Blass, Stephen Burrows, Anne Klein, Oscar de la Renta and Halston.  The only surprise in the mix was Stephen Burrows, a black designer who was not exactly an international name.      

What’s unique about this film is the delicious language used to describe the event itself, including an eloquent narration by vintage retailer and Bravo Reality TV star Cameron Silver, where people in the fashion industry express themselves with such vividly distinctive language, spoken with perfect diction, revealing a colorful flair for description, where just hearing them describe the event is an experience in itself.  Using an array of participants in the show, designer Stephen Burrows, fashion photographers, many of the performing models, including the now legendary (but unheard of then) Pat Cleveland, Marisa Berenson, Alva Chinn, Bethann Hardison and China Machado, former U.S. Vogue editor-in-chief Grace Mirabella, socialite Simone Leavitt, and several fashion historians, they recount their recollections of the event, starting with the cool reception the Americans received upon arrival.  Since the French arranged the rehearsal time on the palace stage, they scheduled themselves first and rather routinely ran over their allotted time each day, leaving the Americans to stand around the rather drafty palace doing nothing, where there was no food, no heat, and even no toilet paper in the rest rooms.  As they were chaperoned by bus to and from the hotel, they were stuck there until the French were good and ready, so by the time the Americans got to practice in the evening, many of the French electricians went home, claiming union rules.  This less than equitable arrangement made many furious, creating a certain amount of infighting among the American designers, convinced they were being sabotaged, where the choreographer hired exclusively for the American models abruptly quit and went home.  Despite these setbacks, the show must go on.  What is indisputable is how magnificent the evening was, where literally hundreds of hand-lit lamps, each one held aloft, created an unforgettably stunning entrance to the palace, and once inside, no one had ever seen such a glamorous setting, before or since.      
When the French took the stage first, they had magnificently designed sets, creating a luxurious and intoxicating environment for their models to display their wares, including Jane Birkin in white underwear, with the nude dancers from the infamous Crazy Horse Saloon wearing glamorous furs, and nothing underneath, occasionally flashing for the audience.  For sheer star power entertainment, Rudolf Nureyev performed while a 67-year old Josephine Baker in a skin-tight sequin designed catsuit brought the house down.  The Americans countered with Liza Minnelli singing “Bonjours Paris.” which set an upbeat tone for what followed, which was a minimalist review with no stage design or props, just 12 fabulously designed black models strutting their stuff on the runway, where the audience went crazy, throwing their programs in the air and cheering excitably, as in that era black models were a rarity both in France and in America.  The women projected strength with a fiercely positive attitude that just filled the air with a force to be reckoned with, something fashion houses had never seen.  With names like Pat Cleveland (soon to become a famous Halston model), Alva Chinn (the face of Valentino for a decade, who spotted her that night), Bethann Hardison, Billie Blair, Norma Jean Darden, Barbara Jackson, Jennifer Brice, Charlene Dash, China Machado, Romana Saunders and Amina Warsuma, they strutted and twirled and sashayed their way into international prominence, putting American designers on the map, where New York didn't really become a fashion capital until the mid-1970’s.  They literally stole the show in a breathtaking 35-minutes compared to the languorous-paced French spectacle, requiring lengthy set changes between each of the 5 designers, a program that lingered on for two and a half hours.  The Americans were such an instant success, the models were invited upstairs for a luxurious dinner in the Hall of Mirrors, where they playfully paraded in front of the mirrors drinking the world’s finest champagne.  Not only did they make a statement about fashion, where the American designs could be worn by everyday ordinary people, as opposed to the French which were created exclusively for millionaires, they made a statement about race as well.  This was a turning point for black models, something historical, where the following year Beverly Johnson became the first black model to appear on the cover of American Vogue and Givenchy hired an all-black modeling review.  Harold Korda, the Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute Curator summed it up this way, “When you have a black woman sashaying and then throwing her train, it becomes something that is different than the more polite expression of standard fashion runway style of that period.”  Interestingly, when all is said and done, little was mentioned about the amount of money raised for the event, which after all was a fund raiser, as the talk would forever be about the event itself.

New York, New York

NEW YORK, NEW YORK                A-                   

USA  (155 mi)  1977  d:  Martin Scorsese        (163 mi)  1981 re-issue

A lavish tribute to Hollywood musicals, much maligned when it was released, largely due to such a downbeat relationship at the center, where the wretched miserablism in the middle of what is otherwise a largely modernistic and experimental musical just didn’t sit right with the general public.  The producers cut the final musical sequence and released the film about two struggling artists whose love cannot endure with an even more depressing finale, sending customers and critics out of the theater shaking their hands in disgust, as so much of this film feels exquisitely photographed by Lászlo Kóvács.  From the opening slo-motion crane shot that swoops down on a triumphant street scene caught up in the confetti-strewn frenzy of V-J Day, the jam packed crowds stream into the big band dance floors in a celebratory mood, where the extended introductory sequence of the two protagonists is one of the longest in any movie.  What immediately stands out is the naturalistic behavior in such an artificially stylized film, where it's the unexpected realism that makes the film so uniquely appealing.  Jimmy Doyle, the annoyingly obnoxious Robert De Niro in a Hawaiian shirt, over-aggressively pursuing the ladies, even when they’re already with someone, tries his typically tired pick-up lines with Francine Evans, Liza Minnelli, a returning WAC still dressed in uniform, but has such disastrous luck that the scene is ultimately memorable.  Rarely has a woman been so offended, and a man so thoroughly rejected, for a scene to continue uninterrupted, which breaks the mold of stereotypes of boy meets girl stories, but it sets the tone for two incredibly stubborn and highly individualistic personalities who both refuse to give into the other.  After this unconventional sequence, there’s a beautifully contrasting shot of Doyle looking down at two lovers dancing under the subway tracks in perfect time, a spotlight dance which continues suddenly with no music, a reverie moment of beauty and perfection.  What works so well for the first hour or more is the unstoppable sound of music throughout, which is wildly upbeat and becomes the unseen character of the film, perhaps best represented in what begins as a failed audition for Doyle, where his aggressively modernistic saxophone solos are not what they’re looking for, but in something of a surprise, literally out of the blue, Francine starts singing A new kind of love (New York, New York, 1977)  YouTube (4:15), which lands them both a job together as a duet. 

In a somewhat unorthodox move, Francine cuts out on him unexpectedly and hits the road as the lead singer for the touring Frankie Harte band, and disappears in a continuing series of one nighters.  Interestingly, Harte is played by Georgie Auld, who performs all the sax solos in the film.  There’s a beautiful scene of Doyle lost in thought playing sax under a lone street lamp, a lead-in to his eventual reunion on the road with Francine  Liza Minnelli - Once in a While  YouTube (1:51) or Liza Minnelli - You Are My Lucky Star - YouTube (1:44), as it’s the music that drives the story and the relationships.  So long as they have music, they have each other.  While traveling on a tour bus with the entire orchestra, we hear the first refrains of the titled musical theme that Doyle invents, still figuring out how it goes.  This long crescendo of musical set pieces, one after another, feature typical bandstands with dance floors, where Doyle reigns in his solos to fit the more sedate Tommy Dorsey or Artie Shaw style, but his fierce energy becomes an attractive feature, where the two are finally in synch with one another, where Doyle eventually takes over the band, where their harmonization is uniquely blended together in this powerful rendition of Gershwin’s “The Man I Love” Liza Minnelli - The Man I Love (New York, New York)  YouTube (3:18), which is the climactic epitome of their artistic partnership.  Soon afterwards, however, she announces she’s pregnant and heading back to New York, a turning point where Doyle begins an interior meltdown that persists throughout, where his domineering behavior becomes abusively problematic, expressed in terrifying outbursts that couldn’t be more unpleasant, especially when the music stops and they discover an inability to communicate with each other, where their interior emptiness fills the screen for the eternity that is her pregnancy. 

There’s a gorgeous interlude of Doyle sitting under a Palisades Park billboard blowing his horn, again contrasted with extraordinary nightclub sequences, one in a dazzling Valentine’s Day red neon lit color scheme, where Doyle gets himself thrown out, kicking through a doorway lit on both sides by hundreds of flashing lights, or later in a Harlem nightclub that features the sultry singer Diahnne Abbott - Honeysuckle Rose YouTube (3:00), where a still pregnant Francine is offered a lucrative record deal, but instead of celebrating, Doyle ignores her, taking the stand and blowing the audience away with the most frenetic, likely cocaine inspired solos, all but ostracizing her.  The void between them grows too immense, leading each their separate ways, where Francine’s career soon takes off.  In the latter sequences, Minnelli eerily emulates the ghost of her mother, Judy Garland from A Star Is Born (1954), when she belts out a live performance on camera  Liza Minnelli - But The World Goes 'Round (New York, New Yor YouTube (4:20), and performs the dizzyingly theatrical, extended rags to riches “Happy Endings” sequence, sarcastically called “Sappy Endings” by Doyle, which is intended by Scorsese to be a riff on her mother’s magisterial “Born in a Trunk” sequence, perhaps the greatest musical sequence ever filmed, seen here:  Judy YouTube, which moves automatically from Pt 1 (6:48) to Pt II (7:21) before continuing through 14 segments of Garland moments from other films.  Minnelli even uses her mother's old dressing room for the scenes shot on the MGM Studio lot, while Scorsese designs equally surreal and expressionist sets, giving the film a suddenly modernist air, which may explain why it was initially cut, but it also gives the film an ambiguous yet more optimistic finale, which would not be complete without the film’s signature song New York, New York (Theme song, 1977) YouTube (4:02).  Despite some bad lip-synching, a struggling relationship that never sizzles, and a De Niro character who is largely a manipulative, self-centered jerk, they are amazingly true to their characters, where the performances and musical sequences are always amazing.  During the filming, Scorsese was having a coke-fueled affair with Liza Minnelli, though both were married to others, while De Niro was in the final stages of his marriage to Diahnne Abbott.  When the film flopped, Scorsese went into a drug-riddled depression, where De Niro brought him a book to read while in the hospital recovering, called “Raging Bull” by boxer Jake LaMatta, which eventually became one of Scorsese’s most acclaimed films—a real life happy ending.