Recollections of the Yellow House (Recordações da Casa Amarela)

 

Erich von Stroheim from Blind Husbands (1919)

Count Orlak from Nosferatu (1922)

Director João César Monteiro

 

 

RECOLLECTIONS OF THE YELLOW HOUSE (Recordações da Casa Amarela)       B            Portugal  (122 mi)  1989  d: João César Monteiro

Back home they called the prison “the yellow house.”  Sometimes when we kids played in the streets, we used to take a look at the dark and silent bars on the high windows.  Full of awe we’d say: “Poor buggers!...”  Here we are on our own once again.  This is all so slow, so heavy, so sad…I shall be old soon.  Then it will all be over.  So many people have come into this bedroom.  They said things that didn’t mean much to me.  They left.  They grew old.  Became slow and miserable, each one in his own corner of the world.                                       —opening intertitle

Portugal’s João César Monteiro is one of the more controversial filmmakers, directing only 12 features in his lifetime, writing and starring in all of them.  With an affiliation for poetry, painting, theater, literature, and music, his films are known for their literary components, given a painterly look, typically concerned with matters of the spirit as much as those of the body, where his films are seen as an extension of all the other artforms.  In the early 1970’s, the Carnation Revolution ended more than four decades of fascism in Portugal, spawning a new generation of filmmakers with a distinctively literary mindset, all in the shadow of its modern national poet, Fernando Pessoa, creating a fusion of artistic, cinematic, and literary inspirations.  Part of Portuguese New Cinema, there’s a poetic melancholy, even sadness, in its overall tone in how it portrays a certain lingering “malaise,” which is captured in the shootings of the narrow Lisbon streets.  This sixth feature and breakthrough work had a brief run in America, but like all of his films, never found a distributor.  According to Paulo Branco, Monteiro’s producer and longtime friend, “If there was ever someone who lived completely free, where life and creativity always intertwined, it was João César Monteiro.  He never conformed to any rules and always brought a sense of ‘madness’ to his work— something he proudly embraced.  That’s why his films are so essential and unique in world cinema.”  A profoundly eccentric actor-director, his films are long, deadpan black comedies, minimally plotted and slow moving, where many consider this morbidly perverse film his masterpiece, often described as a visual poem.  Focused on a solitary character of Monteiro himself, this film introduces us to the alter-ego character of João de Deus (John of God), named after the Portuguese-born patron saint of the destitute, an aged, slim and balding man wearing spectacles, a comic everyman and misfit, or Holy Fool, spending his days wandering between an old boarding house and Lisbon’s historic, decadent neighborhoods.  Verging from a sophisticated artist and European gentleman whispering poetry to a lecherous old man, with an unorthodox and obsessively perverse sexual imagination, his lonely life is peppered with degenerate sexual fantasies that when acted upon produce disastrous results.  João is an incorrigible womanizer, as his erotic fetishes border on depravity, like his leering almost predatory attraction to beautiful young women and his mad obsession with collecting pubic hair, becoming such a controversial and polarizing figure that it’s difficult to feel sympathy. Subtitled “A Portuguese Comedy,” Monteiro explores the idea of whether or not his lecherous protagonist is crazy, or whether he’s being stifled by an insane world, choosing a life of great austerity, living an ascetic life, most of the time feeling imprisoned by the world around him, remaining aloof and isolated, like a stranger in his own country.  Stately and elegant, and often hilarious, Monteiro’s films exhibit a refined satire and social commentary, heavily influenced by the Catholic Church, where he is Portugal’s answer to Spain’s Luis Buñuel, yet less well known and more difficult to appreciate, with plenty of Buñuelian pokes at fascism and religion. 

Beginning as a poet and film critic, arguably the most brilliant and acutely intellectual critic in Portugal, writing several years for the newspaper Público before transitioning to a filmmaker, like most of the French Nouvelle Vague filmmakers, studying at the London Film School, then known as the London School of Film Technique, where this recalls the subliminal messaging and existentialist mindset of Antoine Roquentin, the melancholic and socially isolated intellectual protagonist of Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1938 psychological novel, Nausea.  Monteiro has claimed that all his films are essentially remakes of THE WIZARD OF OZ (1939), explaining there are two possibilities of cinema, the real and the imaginary.  “Dorothy lives in the countryside in Kansas: she’s bored with her daily life and she dreams about another place — and that place is cinema in Technicolor.  In a way, every film I’ve made deals with this kind of feeling — let’s see what Kansas can bring to Oz and what Oz can change in Kansas.”  Winner of the Silver Lion (3rd Place) at the Venice Film Festival, with cinematography by José António Loureiro, shot on 35mm in natural, realistic settings, such as streets, buildings, and interior rooms, where the long opening shot from the water overlooking the city shows us Lisbon in a way we’ve never seen before.  With an introductory acknowledgment of the music of both Schubert and Vivaldi, each adds a degree of cultural refinement, starting with the familiar refrains of a theme so prominently featured in Kubrick’s BARRY LYNDON (1975), Barry Lyndon, Trio op 100 (Schubert) YouTube (4:16), branching out to the delicately ethereal, Schubert - Notturno in E flat major, Op. 148, D. 897 YouTube (9:45), before reaching for the religious sublime, Vivaldi: Stabat Mater YouTube (19:01).  Living in a cheap room in a family boarding house in the old section of the city’s waterfront, the film starts out in a state of miserablism and discomfort, as João is besieged by bedbugs in the middle of the night, growing contemptuous of their mere existence, disappearing from view at the first sign of light, like blood-sucking vampires, a reference that comes into play later in the film, yet taking a certain amount of pleasure in bringing the problem to his tyrannical landlady Violeta (Manuela de Freitas), an insufferable woman who offers a speech about the rich history of the building, once home to prominent dignitaries, yet the last thing she needs is an infestation, so immediate action is necessary.  João takes great satisfaction in hearing the crackling sound of the mattress burning, as the tiny little critters meet their demise.  While it’s also clear this is a seedy establishment, João is a Quixotic sensualist, a grizzled, depressive man living a solitary life, where his misadventures suggest an isolated Dostoyevskian outcast, with his bitter, internalized rants playing out like Notes from Underground, finding humor and eroticism in a way that no one else could imitate.  Bleakly absurdist, our unlikely protagonist ruminates on illness and the prospect of death.  As if to stave off the inevitable, he develops a Peeping Tom fixation on the landlady’s virtuous, clarinet-playing daughter Julieta (Teresa Calado), who is thirty years younger, stealing peeks though her door at night or while taking a bath, and then afterwards he inhales and drinks her soapy bath water, taking extreme pleasure at finding a single pubic hair, enamored by the intimacy it represents. 

Having no visible means of support, João shows no signs of remorse with taking money from his 70-year old mother (Maria Ângela Violeta), who still works as a cleaning lady, while he’s not above earning money by nefarious means, like blackmail, suggesting he’s a thoroughly unethical character, developing a healthy contempt for those around him, even stealing money from Mimi (Sabina Sacchi), the neighboring prostitute who has just died, taking money hidden away to pay for her daughter’s upbringing.  Suddenly feeling invincible with his newfound wealth, he initially flatters Julieta with promises before turning into a seduction/rape scene, cutting to an abrupt image of a Beethoven bust, shot from João’s point of view, while Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony ferociously erupts on the soundtrack as he literally pounces on her just as her mother walks in, throwing all his money at her half-naked body, quickly running away in disgrace.  In one of the more hilarious showstopper scenes of the film, all the women of the neighborhood can be heard opening their window shutters to communally share salacious gossip on the incident while offering obscenities about what a raging pervert he is, unsparing in their graphic detail.  Suddenly confronted by the harshness of the city, things go off the rails after that, as João becomes a homeless tramp, sleeping on garden benches and lining up for soup kitchens, which gives Monteiro the opportunity to document the lives of the homeless elderly in Lisbon.  But when he inexplicably starts strutting around in a stolen military uniform, he is arrested and sent to a psychiatric sanitarium.  Of note, Monteiro was locked up in a psychiatric institution for a brief period of time in his youth.  The mood of the film shifts substantially, as he’s suddenly surrounded by mental instability, making him seem more level-headed and sane than they are, but of dubious moral character.  The boarding house and the asylum can be read as metaphoric extensions of the nation, both ruled by eccentric yet strong-willed authoritarians.  One of the more remarkable cinematic references comes into play as Monteiro reaches back into cinema history, specifically Murnau’s NOSFERATU (1922), where Count Orlok’s physical resemblance to João is striking, suggesting those with exquisitely fine aristocratic manners can carry out despicable criminal acts, becoming, in effect, monsters that walk amongst us.  Equally as tantalizing is a moment when he and Mimi have a sexual encounter, but the camera moves away from them and shifts to a slow pan of the giant figure of a man in a sleek white uniform, who is none other than Erich von Stroheim in BLIND HUSBANDS (1919), a Chevalier and dapperly dressed ladies man who comes to personify his suddenly inflated ego.  After escaping from the asylum, we’re left with the German Expressionist image of João rising from the sewer ducts in a cloud of smoke, as if rising from a coffin, resembling the shadowy image of Murnau’s creepy monster, with the past effectively merging into the present, with the early morning sound of blackbirds heard singing over the end credits.      

Recordações da Casa Amarela (João César Monteiro, 1989) entire film may be seen here with English subtitles, YouTube (1:57:20)

About Endlessness (Om det oändliga)

 

Writer/director Roy Andersson

ABOUT ENDLESSNESS (Om det oändliga)           B                                                        Sweden, Germany, Norway, France  (78 mi)  2019  d: Roy Andersson

With a melancholic tone of black humor and Kafkaesque absurdism, Roy Andersson has come to represent a tragicomic view of living in the modern world, which often makes little sense, plaguing those of us living in it with all kinds of misfortunes, dashed dreams, and unending despair about why there isn’t more justice in the world, as life never seems to be fair, yet his touches of magical realism allow viewers to soar, as if on a cloud, at least for a moment, allowing thoughts to drift off into the horizon, perhaps content with the idea that we can at least imagine things could be better.  Similar to Kiarostami’s 24 Frames (2017), the artist recreates the experience of visiting an art museum, giving viewers a chance to observe a cinematic exhibit, offering a series of photographs or vignettes as fixed framed, single-shot set-up scenes offering a wry commentary on the human condition, allowing viewers to contemplate their significance, moving slowly from one to the next, with the gentle voiceover of a young woman making the observation that always starts with “I saw…”  Like Dylan’s repeating first-person refrain in Bob Dylan A Hard Rain's A Gonna Fall - YouTube (5:59), this quiet voice similarly observes, “I saw a man who had lost his way,” or “I saw a boy who had not yet found love,” or “I saw a woman who thought no one was waiting for her.”  This is his first use of voiceover, coming at the beginning, end, or even the middle of the sketches, yet the gentle quality of the voice has an appealing aspect, emulating the voiceover of Emmanuelle Riva in the first Alain Resnais feature HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR (1959), sounding like cut-outs from bits of conversations, with no real beginning or end, offering an alluring sense of the unexpected.  Using an ultra minimalist style, shot by cinematographer Gergely Pálos, the Andersson aesthetic offers deadpan parody to the extreme, contributing an absurdist existential commentary on loneliness, mortality, and regret, often poking fun at the passiveness of Swedish society, as onlookers watch with horror, embarrassment, or a befuddled amusement, but never once interfere.  Filmed in deliberately muted colors, with painted white faces, the element of exaggeration is a key comic device, as is repetition and deadpan to express his concerns.  Winner of the Silver Lion for Best Director at the 2019 Venice Film Festival, the director is best known for SONGS FROM THE SECOND FLOOR (2000) and YOU, THE LIVING (2007), while his more recent film, A Pigeon Sat On a Branch Reflecting On Existence (En duva satt på en gren och funderade på tillvaron) (2014), completes his “Living Trilogy.”  In the 2012 BFI Sight and Sound poll, Analysis: The Greatest Films of All Time 2012 | BFI, Andersson’s picks (Roy Andersson | BFI) reveal him to be something of a humanist in the great tradition of Renoir, claiming in interviews that his absolute favorite film is de Sica’s BICYCLE THIEVES (1948), yet his own subversive style is closer to the Nordic tradition of Kaurismäki, as both are deadpan humorists exhibiting a strong social consciousness, even fading to black more often here after many sequences, in the manner of the Finnish director, though the abstraction and surrealist quality of his work sets him apart.  Andersson likes to observe the cracks in capitalism, with people leading ordinary, mundane lives, drowning in the horrors of being stuck in a perpetual state of ennui and emptiness, seemingly unable to snap out of it, resorting to morbid or grotesque humor to convey the absurdity and cruelty of modern life. 

Much of Andersson’s work is influenced by the youth-inspired rebelliousness of the Czech New Wave, like Miloš Forman’s Loves of a Blonde (Lásky jedné plavovlásky) (1965) or Věra Chytilová’s DAISIES (1966), pitting the free-wheeling style of young people against the formalist rigidity of authority figures, where the gulf between generations led to absurd misunderstandings.  Another important influence is Krzysztof Kieslowski’s The Decalogue (Dekalog) (1988-89), similarly exploring the moral obligations of humanity in despair, with Andersson organizing a gallery exhibit in 2006 entitled “Sweden and the Holocaust” that attempted to comprehend the incomprehensible, heavily influenced by Swedish neutrality during WWII, standing by and taking no action while witnessing genocide and barbaric cruelties.  Andersson owns his own sound studio which he uses to shoot his films, Studio 24 in Stockholm, allowing him total control over every aspect of filmmaking, where even the outdoor sequences are shot indoors, meticulously constructing streets, storefronts, cafeterias, bars, offices, bedrooms, and train stations (even a battlefront) while filling the background with painted backdrops that convey a colorless, gray austerity, occasionally dabbling in digital effects, where his films are rigidly controlled.  In the Andersson universe, passivity is perhaps the greatest human tragedy, as people stand and stare at horrifying situations, yet their inaction is equally horrifying, with the director slyly suggesting it’s also inhuman to do nothing.  For instance, in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, the situation is tragic, as any hope of a promised salvation never arrives, yet their reaction to it is comic, with aimless conversation going nowhere.  Accordingly, this film is an onslaught of miserablism, described by the director as “a collection of short, short poems about existence,” told in 33 chapters, each just a few minutes in length, as the overall screen time is just 78-minutes.  Often basing his art on visual compositions, like famous paintings, Andersson adds his own subversive twist of bleakness, with the film opening in what resembles a Marc Chagall painting, as a couple is floating in the sky above the bombed out ruins of a destroyed city, (Over the Town by Marc Chagall - History, Analysis, Facts).  Chagall soars over Vitebsk holding his wife, a city recalled from his childhood, but Andersson shifts the scene to the city of Cologne, ravaged by wartime bombing, accentuated by washed-out colors and a dark palette of gray.  Bleakness pervades through much of this picture, where loss of faith becomes a central theme.  Among the more striking images is a recreation of Christ’s Passion taking place on an ordinary street in front of a typical small café, as a priest wearing a crown of thorns is ordered to carry a giant wooden crucifix through town, occasionally stumbling under the heavy weight, yet derided by hateful slurs, whipped and kicked along with way, with onlookers passively observing while a jeering mob repeatedly yells “Crucify! Crucify!”  At one point the priest incredulously asks, “What have I done wrong?”  This transitions to a bedside scene where it appears the priest is dreaming, awakening from a nightmare, unable to distinguish between reality and a dream, still haunted by what he’s experienced.  This same priest appears later in a sterile doctor’s office, recounting this recurring dream, associating it with his loss of faith, overrun by the feeling that God has abandoned him.  The doctor, of course, offers no assistance whatsoever, clearly more interested in receiving payment than offering help of any kind.  This blasé attitude is at the heart of human suffering, as neither religion nor the medical profession offer any meaningful consolation, overrun, instead, by avarice and greed.  This same priest reappears several times in the picture, always exuding a loss of faith, echoing the comment about a man who has lost his way.  Andersson’s films are filled with unanswered questions, leaving viewers in a quandary.    

Andersson even recreates that moment of realization when Hitler, in his bunker, realizes that he’s lost the war.  It’s absurdly told, of course, with underlings going through the “Heil Hitler!” salutes, but the half-hearted effort says it all, as they are no longer what they thought they would be.  A man is tied up to a wooden stump about to face a firing squad, helplessly crying out “No, no, no, no,” to no effect.  Grieving parents visit their son’s gravestone, having been lost at war, tending to it, tidying it up, even speaking to it, as if their son’s presence continued to emanate from beyond the grave.  Perhaps the most whimsical moment occurs at an outdoor café with three boys sitting at one table, two with sailor caps, and an older couple at another, with swing music playing on the radio, Tre Trallande Jäntor (Delta Rhythm Boys in swedish) - YouTube (2:46), as three girls approach on an adjoining sidewalk, stopping to listen, each breaking out into improvised dancing for an extended period, but the boys don’t join in and simply watch, offering them applause afterwards.  In another, to the music of Billie Holiday singing All of Me, Billie Holiday - All Of Me (OKeh Records 1941) YouTube (3:06), a couple sits in an indoor bar with champagne sitting in an ice bucket, with the woman taking a prolonged sip, prompting the voiceover “I saw a woman who loved champagne.”  In a darkened gloom, a father attempts to traverse through a muddy park in a pouring rainstorm, stopping to tie his young daughter’s shoelaces on their way to a birthday party, or in another sequence, a man simply enters the wrong, sparsely populated restaurant, looking embarrassed, leading to “I saw a man who had lost his way,” which not only refers to this particular man, but also the faithless priest, a despondent Hitler, and several others as well, while perhaps offering a larger commentary on the human condition.  A film about seeing, having time to reflect upon it all, Andersson recreates moments large and small that become universally significant.  Similar to Hitchcock’s REAR WINDOW (1954), retaining the mystery, but absent the thriller, what are we to make of what we see?  Unlike that film, however, no conclusions are drawn.  Some may simply find these vignettes pointless in their absurdity, yet the collection overall establishes a grim mood, as if feeling stuck in time, paralyzed by fear and anxiety, and the helplessness of our condition.  Viewers instead remain in a perpetual state of inert voyeurism, plagued by being unable to do anything about the multitude of problems that arise.  They simply happen, and we are drowning in their suffocating consequences, yet we must endure.  Appearing for a fifth time, obviously a beloved figure for the director, the priest returns back to the doctor’s office, bemoaning once again about his lost faith, but the secretary claims they are about to close, with the doctor informing him they have no time for him now, as he must catch his bus, with both forcing him back out the front door kicking and screaming, leaving the poor man in a wretched state.  Equally wretched is a dental patient with a toothache, but has a fear of needles, refusing anesthesia, but when work begins, he screams out in pain, with the dentist giving it a few more tries, each with the same result, eventually leaving the office altogether, as he’s had enough, appearing in a bar in the next segment, still wearing his white smock, with snow gently falling out the window.  One customer simply blurts out, “Isn’t it fantastic?  Everything is fantastic.”  Despite being surrounded by other patrons, no one else chimes in until he repeats himself several times, yet he appears to be alone in his assessment, as we hear the faint sounds of Silent Night playing in the background.  The snow continues to fall in the next segment as well, but it takes on a different context, as defeated soldiers whipped by the wind are marched through the empty desolation of wintry cold, surrounded by nothing but snow, heading for the prison camps in Siberia, where one could hardly imagine a worse fate.  In the final segment we see a car break down in the middle of nowhere (which is where this film appears to leave us, arguably more despairing than his other films), with no sign of life anywhere, as the man futilely tinkers under the hood, but then geese can be seen and heard flying overhead, bookending a repeated sequence that also happens at the beginning.  Andersson often relies upon the repetition motif, instilling themes of alienation, selfishness, and the overall emptiness of the human experience.  Barely audible choral music plays into the closing credit sequence, Benny Andersson & Helen Sjöholm "Kärlekens Tid" MADRID ... YouTube (2:37), a sublime rendering of both hope and faith.   

It's Not Easy Being Human – The Living Paintings of Roy ...  It’s Not Easy Being Human – The Living Paintings of Roy Andersson, video essay by Film Qualia, YouTube (13:04)