Month: October 2021

This film clocks in at over three hours, so I was initially reluctant to watch on a weeknight. “It moves pretty fast,” Roommate Russ reassured me; that wasn’t exactly the reason I was uneasy at the length, but it proved true, and I ended up pleased after all.

Spartacus was in fact a real person – a former gladiator who became co-leader of a massive slave rebellion during Rome’s Republican era. This film was based on a 1950s novel about Spartacus – one which takes a few small liberties with the story, but otherwise is fairly straightforward, covering his origins in Thrace and his training as a gladiator, his strategic prowess, his defeat of several Roman legions, his growing popularity among other Roman slaves, and his eventual defeat. For yes, Spartacus and his men are eventually defeated – but it takes nearly the full strength of Rome to do it, and there’s a sort of Gladiator-meets-Braveheart tone to the end about how Rome has defeated Spartacus but not the idea he represented, and so forth.

To be fair, some of the details about Spartacus’ life are a little vague – it’s not clear whether he was always a slave, or was captured as a soldier, or was once loyal to Rome but then was imprisoned, or what happened. This left screenwriter Dalton Trumbo free to embellish things a bit – giving Spartacus (Kirk Douglas) a “born-into-slavery” origin story, playing up the foppish cruelty of the Romans, giving Spartacus a girlfriend named Varinia (Jean Simmons). The historic record says Spartacus started their rebellion by arming himself with kitchen tools at his training center and leading the other gladiators in a fight for escape in Trumbo’s account, the incident which touches the rebellion off is Spartacus discovering that Varinia, a kitchen maid (and sometimes prostitute for the gladiators), has just been sold off to the Roman statesman Marcus Crassus (Sir Laurence Olivier).

The film points out Rome’s decadence and ill regard for slaves fairly quickly. Early on, Crassus brings himself and a small entourage to the school where Spartacus trains, ordering the trainer Batiatus (Peter Ustinov) to entertain them with two fights to the death. When Batiatus desperately says that they don’t fight to the death there because, well, it’s a school, Crassus basically pulls rank and orders him. But Crassus ends up paying so little attention to the fights that later on, when Crassus is trying to defeat the rebellion, he summons Batiatus again to ask him what Spartacus looks like. “But…you saw him, in the ring,” a baffled Batiatus points out, reminding Crassus of his earlier visit. And even here, even though Crassus remembers the fight itself, he still doesn’t remember anything of what Spartacus looked like. He was just a generic slave.

Trumbo and Olivier also give us a scene hinting at Rome’s sexual decadence; an infamous bathhouse scene which was cut from the film for a while, in which Crassus’ manservant, Antonius (Tony Curtis), is tending to him, and Crassus coyly asks him if he likes eating either oysters or snails. Antonius likes one, he says, but not the other. “It is all a matter of taste, isn’t it?” Crassus muses, “and taste is not the same as appetite, and therefore not a question of morals…my taste,” he finishes, glancing significantly at Antonius, “includes both snails and oysters.”

Wisely, though, the script doesn’t suggest that Rome’s entire problem was its decadence and foppishness. Crassus could have been made even more of a camp power-hungry villain; instead, they simply underestimate Spartacus and his army of shepherds, stable boys, cooks, wet nurses, and other low-lifes. The Roman Senate sees Spartacus’ rebellion as a minor internal police matter, dispatching only a couple of legions to put him down at first; the real Roman army was off mopping up a couple of border wars. Only after Spartacus’ army beats the pants off those legions, and three more sent later, does the Roman Senate start taking things seriously – Crassus included, possibly because Antonius has also escaped and is said to be fighting amid Spartacus’ gang.

What Spartacus and his gang have on their side is determination and fanatical devotion to the idea of freedom. But fortunately, there aren’t any Big Dramatic Speeches to emphasize this; instead, director Stanley Kubrick does this quietly, by following a handful of different extras and showing them in little wordless cameos throughout. I started noticing them more often as the film went on – one white-haired old couple in particular, turning up in one early scene where he was polishing a battered shield while she washed his clothes or something, and then in a later scene they put up a tent in a camp together, and in another scene they danced together to a piper. There was also a young girl who kept on turning up in scenes with an even younger little brother in her care; and a whole family who dressed entirely in rags except for two men who wore bearskin cloaks, complete with the ears; or a young couple with a sickly baby, who sadly have to bury it during one vignette. The same extras turn up over and over, to the point that we start recognizing them, making them “real people” instead of the anonymous nobodies the Romans believed them to be. The night before one of their big final battles with Rome, Spartacus walks through the camp, and we visit each and every one of these now-familiar slaves, each group of them pausing to nod their hello’s to Spartacus as he passes. Spartacus returns their nods; they are free people, worthy of his respect. And later, when we see the battle’s aftermath, we see some of their bodies lying among the dead – and it gives us a start.

The rest of the film has much to recommend it – Roommate Russ was right about the quick pace, the writing is all quite fine, the performances as well. But I was most struck by how instead of bombast, Spartacus used quiet example to get its points across, and for me that was one of the finest bits of the film.

I admit it, right up front here, that I am an uneducated philistine sometimes; I don’t always “get” the more experimental or unconventional stuff, and that sometimes keeps me from recognizing some of the more groundbreaking cinematic techniques as I see them. Like with Breathless, for instance – this film is regarded a founding film in the French New Wave, a pioneering example of Jean-Luc Goddard playing with conventions of filmmaking. But for me, all I could think as I watched was “oh my god can something please happen.”

In my defense, I only caught myself thinking that during a lengthy scene in the middle, where our two leads are holed up in an apartment and having a meandering conversation. Those two leads are Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo), a French car thief who accidentally shoots a cop early on and goes on the run, and Patricia (Jean Seberg), an American expat working in the New York Herald-Tribune’s Paris office as she saves up for tuition for the Sorbonne. Michel over-identifies with American gangster movie culture a little – in one scene, when he sees a photo of Humphrey Bogart, he spends several seconds trying to mimic Bogart’s pose and facial expression. Having a nubile femme américaine as his main squeeze is mostly part of the image – the fact that she’s also unfussy about things like fidelity and sexual purity is a bonus. As for Patricia, part of the appeal is no doubt because Michel is a bit of a “bad boy” – but he knows how to talk pretty, and gets her nice stuff on occasion, so it’s okay. She might be pregnant with him – but it’s not a big deal. Rather, the big deal is that Michel wants the two of them to run off to Italy together to escape the police – and she’s torn between loyalty to Michel and staying put in Paris.

My biggest challenge was that one scene in the middle – Michel comes to Patricia about 20 minutes into the film, seeking first a place to hide. Patricia’s willing to cover for him; and since they’re now both stuck there, Michel starts gunning for Patricia to either come to Italy with him, or just loan him the money to go by himself. Plus, while he’s there in her apartment, maybe they could hook up. But he doesn’t just jump in with his list of demands – he’s playing it cool, starting a lengthy conversation with Patricia about this and that. And Patricia plays things just as cool – asking him how to say different things in French, trying to discuss William Faulkner’s writing, basically anything that comes into her head.

As a slice-of-life depiction it’s spot-on – this kind of roundabout conversation is the kind of conversation you have with a significant other when you’re both feeling flirty, but one’s feeling a little more libidinous than the other. You draw out the suspense and tease and flirt, but you’re also still into each other so you are curious about what the other person might think about things you’re interested in. But those kinds of conversations are only interesting to the people having them, I fear; for an outsider, they aren’t necessarily as interesting. Especially when they go on for a long time. And this scene does indeed go on for a long time – even Goddard, when the studio demanded he cut the film down by 30 minutes, made most of his cuts in this scene by “cutting out anything he thought boring”. Even with what was left in, I found myself glancing at the clock now and then during that bit, and it was a little bit of a challenge to find my way back into the film when that scene finally ended.

When I was discussing the film with Roommate Russ later, he said that Goddard and all the other French New Wave directors were really trying to monkey with film’s conventions – how things were shot, how the script was paced, how things ended. Which is intellectually interesting – but sometimes some of those conventions are there for a reason, like “this is how you can avoid boring your audience to the point that they don’t care what happens any more”. My interest did pick back up a bit towards the end, but that lengthy scene came very, very close to losing me.

If I’m being honest, this should have been called “Rocco And His One Deadbeat Brother”, but hey.

Rocco (Alain Delon) is one of the Parondi brothers, all of whom once lived on a farm in the south of Italy. Eldest brother Vincenzo (Spiros Focás) has already given up farm life and moved to the city of Milan, so when the family patriarch dies, mother Rosaria (Katina Paxinou) decides they need to pack in farm life, rounds up the kids and follows him, expecting that Vincenzo will do right by the family and get everyone jobs. However, she didn’t exactly tell Vincenzo she was coming – but Vincenzo has a surprise of his own for the family, having literally just gotten engaged that same day. At least, that’s what he tells Mama when she and the family turn up right bang in the middle of his engagement party. A scandalized Mama picks a fight with the future bride’s family, Vincenzo and his fiancée start fighting as well, and Vincenzo is tossed back in with his clan.

For the first few months, the family can only afford a two-room apartment in a flophouse, with the brothers all working odd jobs where they can find them. The family more or less keeps to themselves, save for one eventful evening when an upstairs neighbor, Nadia (Annie Giradot) is thrown out of her father’s house for “sleeping around”; Vincenzo chivalrously takes her in, persuading Mama to give her some old clothes and food before she hits the road. But in short order, Vincenzo’s girl takes him back and he moves out; brother Ciro (Max Cartier) gets a mechanic job at a car factory; and little Luca (Rocco Vidolazzi) gets into a good school. That leaves Rocco and Simone (Renato Salvatori) – both of whom had some small fame as boxers back in their old town. Rocco was the better boxer, but wasn’t all that interested in continuing that path; as for Simone, he had the potential to be good, if he could keep his temper under control. A second chance meeting with Nadia, during which she gushes about how cool it’d be if he were a boxer, is enough to convince him to give things a go, and he embarks on a volatile boxing career – and an equally volatile relationship with Nadia, as Rocco finally joins the army.

We then jump ahead a couple years to find Rocco in Turin, wrapping up his tour of duty – where he is surprised to bump into Nadia one day. She’s just been let out of jail, she says, where she’d been doing time for prostitution. She tells him that Simone’s career went into a tailspin at about the same time; he never visited her in prison, either, and as far as she was concerned they were never really a “thing” anyway. But as they catch up, Nadia realizes she’s quite attracted to the quiet, decent Rocco, and he in turn is moved by her sad fate and her determination to go straight; and soon, they become a couple. Unfortunately, Simone does not take this news very well at all, ganging up with friends to attack Nadia and Rocco one night. Rocco is spooked enough that he tries to persuade Nadia to go back to Simone – something which she is not the slightest bit interested in – but when even that doesn’t stop Simone from snapping out of his destructive path, Rocco resorts to more and more desperate attempts to help him.

It’s something of a soapy plot, and I’ll admit it took me a little while to figure out who everyone was; I wasn’t even sure which brother was Rocco until about a half hour into the film. In the print I saw, a lot of the earlier scenes were dimly lit, so it was a little difficult to tell who was talking anyway. But I’ll admit I was also distracted by the fact that the version I saw was the English-dubbed print, rather than a version with subtitles; some of the voice actors held double-roles, and that also made it a little difficult to follow who was speaking for a bit.

I also wasn’t all that satisfied with how Rocco and Nadia handled Simone’s jealousy, and what Nadia did with Rocco’s suggestion that she go back to Simone. However, it’s probably telling that I bought this plot thread during the movie – and it wasn’t until a day later that I thought more about it and realized that wait, that was kinda stupid. In fact, it wasn’t until after watching that any of the film’s warts occurred to me – Paxinou falls back on hand-wringing melodrama a little too often, Ciro and Luca and Vincenzo all but disappear from the plot for most of the film, and Rocco’s self-sacrifice is supposed to look noble but sometimes veers close to “enabling”. And yet, none of that occurred to me while I was watching the film – I was going along with the ride wherever it happened to go.

Roommate Russ was having a videocall in another room when I was watching this. When the film finished, my overwhelmed cry of “Holy rat-fork” was so loud it interrupted his call. (Also…er, “holy rat-fork” were not my exact words.)

I am afraid this was not a cry of admiration. It wasn’t terrible, mind you – there are some good performances and some fine camerawork, and the script ratchets up the tension in the developing plot at a fine and relentless pace. It also makes some comments about class differences that reminded me of Parasite (and it does not surprise me to learn that Bong Joon Ho was inspired by this film, or perhaps by its 2010 remake, when writing his own work). However, it’s not so much about class as it is a twisted love-triangle story, heavy on the melodrama, and director Kim Ki-Young throws in a coda at the end that cancels out nearly all of the film preceding it.

Our main characters in this instance are the Kim family – father Dong-Sik (Kim Jin-kyu) is a musician and composer who has a “day job” giving music lessons at a nearby factory, while his wife (Ju Jeung-ryu) warks at home as a seamstress to help pay for their fancy new house and for medical bills for daughter Ae-soon (Lee Yoo-ri) and the various school expenses for son Chang-soon (Ahn Sung-ki). But Mrs. Kim is also pregnant, and the house is a little too big for her to manage in her condition, so Mr. Kim hires a live-in maid, Myung-sook (Lee Eun-shim).

But Myung-sook….well, to put it kindly, she might have some issues with impulse control – she picks on the kids by “joking” that the food she makes for the family has rat poison in it, she regularly pokes around everyone’s things, and she is attracted to Mr. Kim. A lot. …. A lot. And one night, after a steady campaign of seduction, Mr. Kim gives into her during a weak moment – and before long, Myung-sook is pregnant as well. But when the family tries to dismiss her, Myung-sook plays her trump card – she knows that another girl at the factory killed herself because of an unrequited crush on Mr. Kim, and the staff already has their eye on him. And if she were to go public about their affair, well, surely it would cost his job…Mrs. Kim decides that she can fight dirty as well, and talks Myung-sook into inducing a miscarriage by throwing herself down the stairs. But after the deed is done, Myung-sook doubles down on her erotomania and her blackmail threats, attacking the kids and even the family pets, and trapping the Kims in a domestic nightmare from which there is very little chance of any kind of escape.

…Now, if that was all that would already be bat-crap crazy enough, but the performances are credible enough that I would cheerfully have gone along with it. Lee Eun-shim plays Myung-sook as an uncomplicated sort at first – the person referring her to the Kims describes her as “not very smart, but a hard worker”. On her first day at the Kims she raises eyebrows by chainsmoking (and stealing Mr. Kim’s cigarettes to do so) and by catching a rat with her bare hands and smacking it with her shoe. The crazy doesn’t come in until later, with her regularly popping up in doorways to glare menacingly at the kids or at Mrs. Kim, or to leer seductively at Mr. Kim. For his part, Mr. Kim is a mercurial sort who swings between being a loving father and a stern disciplinarian towards his kids (although he only lectures them, there’s no abuse here). One minute he is also gushing over his wife, and the other he is lecturing her about the bills. So it makes sense that his attitude towards Myung-sook could be carnal one moment and violently repulsed the next.

The staging of the “seduction scenes” also manages to stay squarely safe-for-work visually – we only see Myung-sook bare her shoulders instead of any other more salacious body part, and all we see of the “sex” is her slithering her hands around Mr. Kim’s clothed back in one scene, or a closeup of her feet twining around his as he sits in a chair in another. It’s a dodge, but somehow still manages to feel seductive.

But the script also piles one or two other little details on that pushed things just over the line for me to the point I was rolling my eyes, like the fact that there’s yet another factory girl who has a crush on Mr. Kim and also tries to seduce him. Or the fact that three people all have the same kind of accident in the house, for wholly different reasons. Or how daughter Ae-soon is partially disabled, just enough to make her just slow enough so that she can’t escape one of Myung-soon’s attacks in time…or the very ending, which I will not spoil with details – I will only say that there’s a twist in the final scene which suggests that everything in the preceding movie might not have actually happened anyway. I don’t dislike melodrama – but even with melodrama there’s a point at which things are just too baroque for me to buy, and this film stepped just over that line. But then it made things worse by jumping back with a cheeky grin and a “never mind!” and I felt cheated.

Holy rat-fork indeed.

So this was not the right film to watch on a lazy, sit-around-the-house Sunday. Not because it was disturbing – at least, not on a gut level – and not because it was gory or got me fired up. On the contrary – it’s a slower-paced, meandering film, and if you’re already in a bit of a drowsy haze you run the risk of falling asleep midway through. I am embarrassed to admit that I did just that.

In my defense, nothing really “happens”, and the characters all seem kind of “meh….” about things as well. L’Avventura is a tale about a group of Italy’s nouveau-riche – Anna (Lea Massari), daughter of a politician and boyfriend to Sandro (Gabriele Ferzeti), an architect who’s just rubber-stamping a diplomat’s ideas these days. Anna and Sandro, along with Anna’s friend Claudia (Monica Vitti), are setting out on a cruise on a private yacht with two other couples, poking around the Aeolian Islands just off Sicily. They drop anchor near one when Anna wants to have a swim and then explore a bit; at some point she slips away with Sandro for a bit of a relationship-status chat, since she’s frustrated with his habit of long business trips. He brushes off her complaints and suggests they have a nap together on the beach. Anna agrees – but when Sandro wakes up a bit later, Anna is gone.

Nor is she anywhere else on the island.

The party searches the island – Claudia and Sandro are concerned, but the others less so; one woman, Giulia (Dominique Blanchar), even seems more bothered by how her husband Corrado (James Addams) has been picking on her all day, and even interrupts Claudia’s sweep of a cave to ask her what she thinks about Corrado. After the friends come up empty, Sandro suggests that he and Corrado keep searching while the others sail back to get help. Claudia spontaneously says she will stay on the island as well. The police don’t show up until the next morning – and they strike out as well. Although, one officer lets slip that they caught a bunch of smugglers in another boat nearby the island the previous night; so Sandro insists on talking to them to see if they saw anything. Claudia insists that she will in turn search the neighboring islands as well.

As for the others…they actually seem more interested in getting back to the mainland, and a planned weekend at Corrado’s mansion in Palermo. And before Sandro and Claudia part ways, he suddenly tries to kiss her. He tries again when they run into each other on the mainland; Claudia is heading for Palermo to rejoin the others, and Sandro is checking out another lead in the hunt for Anna. But after making out with Claudia a bit, he finds himself suggesting they both give up the search and their weekend plans and run off together themselves. Claudia is torn, to say the least, and pushes him away – only to relent and rejoin Sandro a couple days later. And the longer they look for Anna, and the more time they spend together, the more Claudia is ashamed to realize she doesn’t want to find Anna….

So, it’s not a spoiler to say that we never find out what happens to Anna. Because the film isn’t really about that so much as it’s about everyone else’s reaction to her disappearance – or, in many cases, everyone else’s lack of reaction. Sandro and Claudia are alarmed at first, and committed to a search, but take up with each other pretty quickly, spending more time hooking up in various hotels where there’s been an “Anna sighting” than actually looking for her. The others act like the whole affair was just an inconvenience in their cruise and move on to the next party or the next reception or the next infidelity, and by the end of the movie, so have Sandro and Claudia, with Anna being almost completely forgotten by everyone.

This kind of aimless slow fade was part of what lead to L’Avventura getting panned by crowds at the 1960 Cannes Film Festival, where it was first screened. And I do mean panned – the audience started snickering, then moved on to outright laughter, and then on to boos and catcalls, prompting both Monica Vitti and director Michelangelo Antonioni to run out of the screening. Vitti was just embarrassed, but Antonioni was incensed – the audience’s major complaint was that he’d included a lot of lengthy sequences where “nothing really happened,” causing Antonioni to protest that number one, the characters being lazy passive schlubs was his whole point, and number two, there actually was a lot going on in those takes. This film was Antonioni’s first major picture in which he used this kind of style, with long takes and seemingly disconnected events instead of a more straightforward plot. It’s a fairly cerebral approach Antonioni used to play up the aimlessness and disconnectedness his characters felt, and the emptiness and pointlesness of their lives. Fortunately, a number of other established filmmakers figured out what he was doing, and sent Antonioni an open letter praising his work and urging the Cannes Jury to give L’Avventura a second chance. And while naysayers did still give the director the nickname “Antoni-ennui“, L’Avventura went on to win the Cannes Special Jury prize, for its innovative approach.

The fact remains that I did doze off during the film – but I think this has more to do with my own frame of mind, rather than Antonioni’s approach. There are some films that you really shouldn’t watch on a lazy Sunday, it seems.

Back when I reviewed A Man Escaped – a French prison escape film, much like Le Trou – I speculated that I might have enjoyed it more if the script had given me even just a tiny bit more character development alongside the lengthy MaGuyver-esque sequences showing what our hero was doing. Le Trou still has the nuts-and-bolts “how they do it” sequences – but it does give me the character development I was missing, and I’m pleased to report that yes, I did like it better.

The film is based on a real attempted escape from France’s La Santé prison, and even casts one of the original inmates involved – Jean Keraudy, who effectively plays himself (almost literally – “Jean Keraudy” is a stage name, and Keraudy’s character’s name of “Roland Darbant” is very similar to Keraudy’s real name of “Roland Barbat”). The film even opens with Keraudy giving a direct address to the camera, stating that “my friend Jacques Becker” has made this film based on his and his fellow inmates’ own story.

After that, Darbant/Keraudy/whoever takes a step back as the story follows another inmate, Claude Gaspard (Marc Michel). Gaspard has been in La Santé awaiting trial, and thus far his stint has been pretty uneventful – he’s polite to the guards and wardens, he gets regular care packages from a girlfriend, everything seems to be okay. He’s even apologizing to the warden when we first see him – the warden has caught him with a forbidden lighter, and he apologizes, stating that it’s not even working and he only had it for sentimental reasons. But he still surrenders it to the warden all the same. So when Gaspard’s cell needs repair work, the warden transfers him to another cell for his own comfort instead of forcing him to suffer through it.

Gaspard’s new roommates are a little miffed when he first shows up, but Gaspard’s a decent enough guy who tries to make nice. In addition to the quiet “Roland Darbant”, there is the jovial Vossellin (Raymond Meunier), the wisecracking Geo (Michel Constantin), and brooding Manu (Phillippe Leroy). All hold Gaspard at arms’ length at first, but Gaspard breaks the ice by sharing the contents of a food parcel recently sent him by a girlfriend on the outside. After treating themselves to Gaspard’s foie gras, and learning he’s been charged with attempted murder, the others decide to trust him – and tell him that he’s caught them in the midst of planning a prison break, and since he’s facing a tough sentence, they’ll bring him in if he wants in.

Much of the ensuing film shows their progress – Darbant hacking together various tools out of bed parts, Vossellin playing sick to steal some doo-dads to make an hourglass, Manu mapping out their path to the sewer system and thence to the outside world. And that kind of how-they-did-it stuff is indeed clever (I still want to try making the “periscope” Darbant fashions out of a shard of mirror and a toothbrush), but the real drama comes from the interpersonal stuff – Geo’s weird obsession with asking Gaspard about his sex life, Vossellin’s comic-relief instincts diffusing any tension in the ranks, and Gaspard’s growing hero-worship of Manu, cemented when the pair together discover the sewer tunnel that is guaranteed to bring the group to freedom. However, just as they’re about to make their escape, Gaspard learns that his charges have been dropped. So he no longer has anything to gain by escaping – but he could gain something by betraying his new chums…

Le Trou depicts the exact logistics of the escape plan in very thorough detail, and that still occasionally felt a bit tedious; when the inmates move aside some floorboards to uncover the hole they’re digging out of their cell, I don’t need to see each and every board they move aside, much less seeing that each and every time. But at least here the floorboard-shuffle was occasionally offset by Vossellin making a Dad Joke before shimmying down into the hole, or the digging sequences were offset by Geo taking a break from the digging to confess that he was having second thoughts about joining the others on the outside. In short, we learn more about who these people are – and so in the final sequence, when we see the nasty surprise Darbant sees in his periscope, we’re not only viscerally surprised – we also know the subtext for it, and it’s got more of an impact.