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.

Don't Look Now

DON’T LOOK NOW        A-         
Great Britain  Italy  (110 mi)  1973  d:  Nicolas Roeg

A film that thrives on what’s happening under the surface, a mood of disaffected emotions, a series of endless searches, missed connections, various mediums, overlapping dialogue that sometimes fades out altogether, and deteriorating ancient relics that need restoration that may as well stand for the declining morals and deteriorating importance of the Catholic Church.  Adapted from a Daphne du Maurier short story from her book Not After Midnight, 1971, who interestingly wrote a letter to Roeg congratulating him on making such a strong adaptation of her story, this film was released in the same year as THE EXORCIST (1973), received some notoriety as an art film, for the sex scenes between Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie who were offscreen lovers at the time, and remains downright gloomy to watch, with its icy disconnected emotions captured in the back alleys and canals and dark shadows under the bridges of Venice during winter.  The surface detail shot by Anthony Richmond as well as the director, also the over-the-top musical score by Pino Donnagio accentuates the unsettled psychological mood that only grows more macabre by the film’s end.  

Nicolas Roeg trained for twenty-three years in the British Film Industry before getting a shot as a director, starting out as an editing apprentice and camera operator for twelve years before getting the chance to work under infamous British director David Lean on the second unit photography for LAWRENCE OF ARABIA (1962), eventually becoming the lead cinematographer on Roger Corman’s THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH (1964), François Truffaut’s FAHRENHEIT 451 (1966), John Schlesinger’s FAR FROM THE MADDENING CROWD (1967), and Richard Lester’s PETULIA (1968), before co-directing his first film at age 42, the legendary PERFORMANCE (1970) starring Mick Jagger in his film debut, amusingly voted best performance by a musician in a film by Film Comment in the September/October 2009 edition.  Roeg brought his own camerawork into Walkabout (1971), his first solo effort, a uniquely visualized, magnificently beautiful film.  Roeg’s films characteristically are beautifully filmed, where each shot displays a mastery of composition, framing, focus, and color qualities, breaking free from conventional film narration, exhibiting an experimental use of editing, creating an impressionistic film mosaic told out of time, challenging the viewer to understand the work as a whole, even as the fragmented parts may be puzzling to comprehend, heavily influencing modern era directors such as Christopher Nolan, Francois Ozon, Danny Boyle, and Steven Soderbergh.   

Innocently enough, the film begins with raindrops on a lake, showing the reflection of Christine (Sharon Williams), a little girl wearing a bright red raincoat playing around the water’s edge on a giant estate while her parents, art restorer John Baxter (Donald Sutherland) and his wife Laura (Julie Christie), sit in the warm comfort of their home oblivious to what’s happening outside, until suddenly and unexpectedly John races outside without any warning and discovers Christine’s body too late, as she has already drowned.  The scene shifts to Venice where the couple hopes a change of scenery will lift their grief-stricken spirits, where John is working on restoring a church, to the complete indifference of the Bishop.  Venice with its waterways is certainly an interesting choice to recover from the shock of a drowning, where it’s used as a location of eroticism and violence, while another is Sutherland’s impeccable unsubtitled Italian, which is prominently featured throughout, a subtle yet effective device to keep the audience in the dark.  Adding to this curious mixture, Laura meets two inseparable sisters, one of whom is a blind psychic that communicates with the dead, claiming their child is trying to contact them and warn them of imminent danger, a complete stranger accurately describing her physical appearance, which sends Laura in a swoon. 

John thinks these women with their séances are a bit daft and refuses to take them seriously, even after they are issued a warning that something terrible is about to happen to them, while simultaneously there are reports of recent serial killings in Venice, which doesn’t stop them from having a passionate sexual experience, a curious mingling of sex and violence.  The psychic mentions that John is a seer himself, though he may not yet understand his gift.  A call in the middle of the morning conveys the news that their son has had an accident in his school in England.  Laura takes the first flight back to England, but later that same morning, John sees her with the two sisters in a barge on the canals in what appears to be a funeral procession, but can’t understand why he hasn’t heard from her.  With news of a serial killer on the loose and his wife missing, he makes a police report implicating the sisters.  But just as baffling, he later receives a call from his wife in England reporting that their son is fine, which leaves John in a state of flux, as he could have sworn what he saw was real, yet what he mistakenly thought was the present may have been a vision of the future, a premonition of events yet to come, opening the floodgates for strange and mysterious occurrences that resemble the occult.    

From that point on, things appear out of a different supernatural dimension, where red deliriously begins to overwhelm the color palette, as John catches glimpses of a young child running around wearing his daughter’s red raincoat.  He politely walks the blind seer home from the police station where she was being interrogated, at John’s request, inexplicably abandoned by her other sister, setting in motion an investigation of an event that apparently never took place.  When the seer gets agitated, telling John he must leave Venice immediately, John leaves, but the psychic screams for him to come back as he disappears into the shadows outdoors, out of which Laura appears instead.  John catches a glimpse of the red raincoat, believing now this is the ghost of his missing child, and follows the trail up and down the dark walkways which remain otherwise eerily empty.  Oddly resembling a hallucination dream sequence drenched in a wafting fog, the murky atmosphere matches the deteriorating stability of John’s state of mind.  What happens next is shocking, one of cinema’s most terrifying climaxes, like the increasing waves of dread and anxiety in Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), suddenly reaching a level of surreal visual hysteria that predates David Lynch, ending the film with a “life flashing before your eyes” sequence, as the brilliantly edited, disconnected pieces finally start to make sense in this collapsing world of psychological terror. 

Pieta (2012)

PIETA             D+                  

South Korea  (104 mi)  2012  d:  Kim Ki-duk

Senselessly appalling and repugnant throughout, this pathetically dreary film features overly brutal, utterly despicable human behavior from start to finish, yet it stupefying won the Venice Film Festival, which makes one wonder what else was in competition?  Actually, this was not the initial choice, as while the speakers were at the podium announcing their awards, they initially awarded Best Film to Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master (2012).  However, the festivities were interrupted from a live telecast when a festival official whispered something into the ear of the speaker, where Venice rules only allow any given film a maximum of two major awards, and The Master had already been issued Best Director and Best Actor, awarded jointly to Philip Seymour Hoffman and Joaquin Phoenix.  So after a brief but embarrassing delay, the Jury, headed by American director Michael Mann, handed out the Golden Lion Best Film to Kim Ki-duk’s PIETA ("Venice Film Festival Jury Yanks Top Prize from 'The Master' (Exclusive)").  Other overlooked films at the fest included the latest from Harmony Korine, Takeshi Kitano, Brilliante Mendoza, also Marco Bellochio’s equally dreadful Dormant Beauty (Bella addormentata) (2012), Ulrich Seidl’s downbeat Paradise: Faith (Paradies: Glaube) (2012), Terrence Malick’s To the Wonder (2012), which had the critics thoroughly confused ("Terrence Malick's To The Wonder confounds Venice press"), but also the near brilliant 2012 Top Ten List #7 Something in the Air (Après mai), Olivier Assayas’s autobiographical account of the political slide after May ’68.  Apparently the Italians held little interest in the French student movement, although in March of ’68 Italian students shut down the University of Rome for 12 days during an anti-war protest.  Kim Ki-duk is one of the few directors to receive more praise abroad on the festival circuit than he does at home, as he’s never been embraced by Korean critics or audiences, and was attacked ferociously in the press by film critic Tony Rayns in a November/December 2004 Film Comment article entitled Sexual Terrorism: The Strange Case of Kim Ki-duk, claiming, among other assertions, that he’s a purveyor of gratuitous violence and misogyny purely for shock and that he “shamelessly plagiarizes,” something Western filmmakers quite commonly do.  Largely self-taught, from a lower class background with no formal training in film, Kim usually focuses on marginalized characters leading morally questionable lives that seem to exist in a universe all their own. 

What apparently captured the attention of the festival was the completely uncompromising aspect of the film, where at least on the surface, the film presents an artificially exaggerated view of a descent into a mercilessly brutal world that only exists in the world of movies, displaying a sadistically crude human quality that has come to be known as torture porn, where the audience is treated to endlessly repetitive sequences of sad and pathetic humans at the bottom of the food chain who are subjected to ruthless cruelty, where Lee Kang-do (Lee Jung-jin) is a collector for underworld loan sharks, and if the money is not there he savagely breaks bones, feeding arms and limbs into industrial machines, or cracking them himself, turning his victims into cripples in order to collect the insurance money needed to repay their debt, subjecting each individual to excruciating pain and a lifetime of dependency on others.  This is shown in such a dispassionate manner, including all the desperate pleading followed by endless screams, that one quickly grows disgusted with having to sit through this nonsense.  The picture of Lee Kang-do is a pathetic wretch of a man, someone with no scruples whatsoever, that trolls the bottom of this Hellish existence by terrorizing weak and thoroughly moronic creatures who would idiotically stoop to borrow money from such an inhumane brute that prowls the neighborhood inflicting nothing but pain.  Out of nowhere, an older woman, Cho Min-soo, arrives at his door claiming to be his long-lost mother, apologizing profusely for abandoning him in childhood.  At first he finds it ridiculous and throws her out, calling her an “Evil bitch!”  But when she persists, he treats her with the same callous disregard he shows everybody else, viciously raping her on the spot.  Despite her prolonged agonizing moans of despair, she doesn’t leave him. 

Somehow this new mother in his life becomes an Angel of Forgiveness, pathetically sobbing her apologies, absolving him of all crimes, cleaning his house, buying him food, and regularly cooking for him.  Her presence suddenly alters his mindset, where he worries about her and begins to depend upon her kindness.  But she is more of an Avenging Angel, a kind of Satan in disguise complete with her own agenda, which sets him in an existential turmoil.  Due to the relentless monotony of neverending brutality, the film bears a similarity to Mel Gibson’s dreadful THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST (2004), as both are mindless and nauseating films that are little more than sadistic displays of human torture.  The problem here is the exaggerated tone, where every emotion is so over the top, where characters yell and scream at one another all the time, constantly bickering, calling each other names, making threats, carrying out their threats, screaming in pain, where the film is one long, continuously procrastinated revenge saga, ugly, grotesque, and mercilessly brutal.  Lee Kang-do comes to personify the lowest form of human existence, evil incarnate.  Some have suggested he’s supposed to represent the ruthlessness of capitalism, a heartless economic system that doesn’t care who it destroys, that hears no sympathetic pleas, but simply bulldozes and lays waste to people’s lives in a momentary frenzy of violent, catastrophic destruction, and then moves on to the next person.  Others find meaning in the title, where the Pietà is a masterpiece of Renaissance sculpture by Michelangelo, a subject in Christian art depicting an all-forgiving Virgin Mary cradling the dead body of Jesus, the first of a number of Michelangelo sculptures with the same theme.  Anyone who’s seen Kim’s SPRING, SUMMER, FALL, WINTER…AND SPRING (2003), where the director himself plays the part of a monk, knows his familiarity with Buddhism and reincarnation, where this overly simplistic parable of evil incarnate seems to suggest that even the lowliest, most despised and hateful creatures on earth have redeeming qualities, where their lives can earn redemption, if not in this life, then the next, much of it underscored by the Kyrie eliason (Lord, have mercy) section of a Catholic mass.  The quietly poetic qualities expressed in the final few moments of the film offer a peaceful visual transcendence, completely at odds with the gruesome violence that comes before, where death chants in a state of perpetual darkness bring the film to a close.