Month: December 2021

So, yeah, I knew the plot here already; I’ve seen Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys, a full-length film based on this earlier short. And if you’ve seen that film – or any of the TV series that followed – you know what happens. So watching this film was more of an experiment in studying technique for me.

It’s not a total mirror image. In La Jetée, humanity now lives underground because of the aftermath of a nuclear war as opposed to 12 Monkeys’ eco-terrorism event. Our main character (Davos Hainich) is a prisoner of war recruited into a time-travel experiment to conduct a salvage operation, or maybe even go into the future. But as with 12 Monkeys, our lead has been haunted by something he saw as a boy at an airport – a beautiful woman (Hélène Châtelain) looking on as a man raced towards her and then was suddenly shot. This event had happened shortly before the war, and it was such a clear image that his superiors felt it a strong enough tie to the past that it rendered him a good candidate for time travel. And sure enough, on his first trip back in time he meets the woman. Each time he travels back he meets her, gradually building a relationship with her that leads to him wanting to escape and live in the past with her….

The biggest difference between director Chris Marker’s original and Terry Gilliam’s remake is that Marker uses a bit of an unusual film technique – the whole story is told through a narrator telling the story over a series of still photographs. The only other sounds are some occasional music, and some moments during the various “experiments” where we hear urgent whispering in German. The only movement comes about two-thirds into the film, when after watching a series of still photos of the sleeping woman, we get a shot of her waking up and looking into the camera.

Marker filmed things this way largely because he was on such an extreme budget that he could only afford to rent a movie camera for a single afternoon. But it’s actually really effective – he edits the still photos together with the sound so cleverly that it tells the story just as well. It’s especially effective with the transitions from “the past” back to “the present”, heralded here by a crossfade from whatever image of the woman we happen to be looking at to an image of one of our lead’s captors looking down on us, and the sound of German whispering fading back in. (I really started to hate that guy.)

Because the film was so short (only a half hour) I also indulged in the DVD extras – and learned a surprising quirk that Terry Gilliam also worked into his own film. Marker was a huge fan of the film Vertigo, to the point that he threw in a couple of shout-outs – the first time our lead meets The Woman in real time, we see a shot of her in profile which bears a close resemblance to the first time we see “Madeline” in Vertigo.

Another scene shows The Traveler and The Woman studying a cross-section of a tree – much as Kim Novak and James Stewart also do in Vertigo.

One of the DVD extras was a breathless piece from a French cinema studies site which speculated that this meant Chris Marker was really talking not about time travel, but about stepping inside the world of films instead. Personally I thought that was a bit of a stretch, and found it much more likely it was a simple homage. And even if you don’t catch those shout-outs, it was surprisingly effective.

Another film from Luis Buñuel here, which shows me up for thinking he was all surrealistic and weird and that’s it. However – I still didn’t quite come to grips with how things ended.

Viridiana (Silvia Pinal) is an almost-nun, about to take her holy orders. But her estranged uncle Don Jaime (Fernando Rey) writes to the convent, asking if Viridiana can please come for a visit before she cloisters herself forever. Viridiana is reluctant – she and Don Jaime barely know each other, and he’d never reached out before this – but since he’s apparently supported her financially all this time, her Mother Superior persuades her to go.

Things seem okay, if a bit odd, at first; Don Jaime has been living as a near-recluse on the family farm, in a Miss-Havisham-esque state of mourning after his wife died on their wedding day. At least there’s a few servants – chief among them Ramona (Margarita Lozano), a housekeeper grateful Don Jaime has been looking after her and her daughter Rita (Teresa Rabal). Ramona and the others give Viridiana a warm enough welcome, but Don Jaime and Viridiana both quickly agree that they don’t know each other very well and are near-strangers. Don Jaime apologizes, but Viridiana waves him off; the past can’t be heled. But it’s okay. She’s grateful for his support and will pray for him in the convent.

However, Don Jaime can’t quite let things go – because Viridiana looks exactly like his late wife. And the longer she stays, the more Don Jaime becomes convinced he’d like her to extend her stay – and become the wife he’d wanted all those years ago. He appeals to her on her final night there; and when that fails, he drugs her, in an effort to at least get the wedding night he never got. Fortunately he comes to his senses before going through with raping Viridiana – but the shame drives him to kill himself, leaving the farm to Viridiana, and one or two other people.

Viridiana’s already been so shaken up by the experience that she was going to drop out of the convent anyway. The inheritance is the perfect chance to still Serve God, in a different way; she opens up the servant quarters as a shelter for the homeless and indigent in the main village, rounding them up and moving them all into the servant quarters, where she lives with them, dining with them communally and giving them odd jobs around the farm. Any plans she might have had to expand into the main house get dashed when Don Jaime’s other heir shows up – an illegitimate son, Jorge (Francisco Rabal), no one knew about. Jorge accepts Viridiana’s shelter, on the condition that the main house would be his – Don Jaime also ignored him the way he ignored Viridiana, and he’s a little bitter. So he plans to fully enjoy the finery Don Jaime left behind, restoring the house to its former glory and enjoying his new life of luxury. The pair just need to cement the arrangement with Don Jaime’s lawyer, and head into town for an overnight visit, leaving Viridiana’s charges behind. And their curiosity about what’s in The Big House tempts them to break in and explore…

So the very ending got to me. A good part of what came before seems to be about how Viridiana’s idealism and naivete about the world gets stripped away – she’s pretty innocent at the start of the film, to the point that even touching the cow’s teat in the barn squicks her out. She is so thrown by Don Jaime’s suicide that she considers herself no longer worthy of holy orders. She thinks that the villagers will be so grateful for her food and care and moral example that they’ll all immediately turn nice and pious. She is perfectly ready to live the rest of her life alongside Jorge, both of them staying perfectly chaste neighbors. And gradually each of these notions gets stripped away, as the villagers stay just as crude and corrupt as ever, and as Jorge starts flirting with her on top of everything too – she’s been completely wrong about nearly everything.

There’s a really interesting sequence about midway through the film, where Viridiana is working with the villagers in a field while Jorge oversees some contractors working on the house. She rallies the villagers around her, announcing that it’s time for them to pray the Angelus . Buñuel cuts back and forth between shots of Viridiana and the villagers reciting the prayer, and shots of the contractors doing grunt work on the house – plastering walls, unloading lumber, mixing cement. Viridiana thinks she’s doing the real work, but on some level she really isn’t getting her hands dirty yet. And much later when she is forced to confront the real ugliness of the world, she has a hard time handling it.

And that’s what lead to my questions about the ending. She’s still living on the farm, and there’s a definite implication Jorge may start fooling around with her somewhere down the line, but Pinal plays Viridiana with a near catatonic blankness during the last few shots and I found myself wondering whether Viridiana had actually lost her mind. The gradual and utter disillusionment her character experienced would have certainly been enough to prompt it – and that made the final scene, where Jorge invites her in to “play cards” with himself and Ramona, a bit ickier for me than audiences already thought it was.

The last scene was a last-minute addition, however – the film originally was supposed to end with Jorge inviting Viridiana into his room alone, and she was supposed to agree, willingly and with intent. Early audiences didn’t like that, so Buñuel threw in a new ending, where Viridiana dazedly walks in on Jorge making out with Ramona, and the pair cover by saying they’re playing cards – and invite her to join them. Buñuel gleefully thought this made the ending even dirtier, by implying Viridiana was now entering into a menage a trois. But Viridiana is in such a daze throughout the scene that I couldn’t shake the thought that she was being forced into it, making things all the more disturbing. I agreed that Viridiana needed to learn some hard truths about human nature – but somehow this seemed much too harsh.

Sorry for the delay, all! Between holiday mayhem and extra work at work, I was overwhelmed by life a while. Fittingly enough – since our leads in this film both suffer from being overwhelmed, although in their case it’s by the double-standard and by parental expectations.

(That was not the most graceful of segues, I’ll admit.)

Wilma Deane “Deanie” Loomis (Natalie Wood) and Bud Stamper (Warren Beatty) are high school sweethearts in rural Kansas, back in 1928. Deanie’s parents are pleased by the match – the Stampers are the richest folks in town, thanks to the oil wells managed by patriarch Ace (Pat Hingle). But Deanie’s mother (Audrey Christie) is also a bit concerned with her daughter’s virginal virtue, repeatedly reminding her of the things that nice girls don’t do with boys. Bud’s got his own problems, with Ace pushing him towards a degree from Yale so he can properly take his place at the head of the family business someday. Bud’s not exactly keen on the idea, but Ace reminds him that Bud is their best family hope – after all, his older sister Ginny (Barbara Loden) has run off and become a flapper and an art student. Quelle horreur!

With all that pressure put on Bud, he naturally turns to Deanie for consolation and support – but Bud is also a teenage boy, so he’d very much like some of that consolation to be physical. Except Deanie keeps shutting him down because she feels she has to (even though Ginny tells the both of them that they can both fool around, for pity’s sake). But one sad night, Bud breaks things off with Deanie, knowing he can’t keep himself under control forever, and Deanie reacts badly – starting with a clumsy attempt to seduce Bud during a school dance, and ending with her trying to drown herself in a lake near town. Deanie’s parents send her to a sanitarium for treatment, while Bud gets packed off to Yale…will our lovers ever reunite?

Reviews at the time focused on the sexual-ethics double-standard angle of the plot – how Deanie was being pressured to save her virginity for her wedding night, while Bud was given a free pass to screw around as long as it was with “the other kind of girl”. The whole virgin/whore double standard for women gets a lot of criticism here – Deanie blows up at her mother at one point for meekly asking whether Deanie is upset because “did Bud…spoil you?” Ginny also gets her say, letting loose a drunken rant at the guests at the Stampers’ New Years’ Eve party about how most of the men in town won’t speak to her in public “but in the dark, oh, they’re very familiar then!” Sadly, rather than feeling shame at this call-out, the single guys at the party use this as an excuse to try to gang-rape Ginny later.

I’d known about this angle before the film; however, the whole plot seems to be not so much about teenagers coming to grips with sexuality as it is about flawed parents royally messing up their kids. Deanie’s mother is horrified by Deanie’s breakdown – to the point of denial, insisting for a long while that “there’s nothing wrong with her” and “she’s perfectly fine”. She hides Deanie’s breakdown from most of the town, she sweeps Deanie’s woes under the rug. She tries to lie to Deanie about where Bud is when Deanie finally arrives home. Only in one quiet moment does the denial slip, when Deanie is unpacking after her return home and her mother meekly asks whether the psychiatrist told Deanie to blame her for her troubles. “…You know I raised you the best I knew how, right? You’re not mad at me, are you?”

But at least Mrs. Loomis listens to Deanie on occasion. Ace doesn’t even do that much – he forever talks over Bud and Ginny and even his own wife, insisting that he knows what’s right for everyone. Even when Bud is flunking out of Yale, and desperately begs the dean to talk to his father and get him to understand he doesn’t even want a degree, Ace talks over the dean as well, insisting that Bud doesn’t know what he’s talking about and that someone just needs to shake some sense into the boy. He drags Bud off for a weekend in New York where he hopes to do precisely that – with some unforeseen results.

I was honestly more impressed with this aspect of the plot than anything else – at the clear-eyed way it handled how thoroughly the parents had messed things up for their kids. Ace is clearly a narcissist and isn’t cut any slack for it; but Mrs. Loomis is clearly just ill-equipped to raise Deanie in a changing world. She does cause Deanie no end of trouble, but she’s only doing things the way she has been taught to do them. The new world and its changing rules is scaring her, and she doesn’t know how to handle it – but somehow still has to raise a daughter, and falls back on doing that the only way she knows how, even if it doesn’t entirely fit. She ends up a sympathetic character despite the trouble she’s put Deanie through.

The title is taken from a poem of Wordsworth’s, which gets quoted in a pivotal scene in Bud and Deanie’s high school English class:

“Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower,
We will grieve not; rather find
Strength in what remains behind.”

Both Bud and Deanie end up sadder but wiser by the end, and we’re clearly meant to feel that they were Supposed To Be Together But Fate Tore Them Apart. But I’m not so sure they both feel that way; and I actually find myself holding out a lot of hope for Deanie at the end, as she thinks back on those lines. She gets that nothing can bring back that splendor in the grass – but also seems to get that it’s not supposed to come back either. In an earlier scene Deanie observes that the poem is about losing one’s childish idealism when one grows up; but the Deanie I see at the end seems to get that that’s okay sometimes, and what lies ahead can still be full of promise.

So you will remember back when I first saw Psycho I was trying to decide between it and another film; this was that other film. And the two films may have ultimately made for a good double-feature, because the psychological suspense I was missing from having Psycho spoiled for me was here, in this film.

Mark Lewis (Carl Boehm) is a camera operator at a London film studio, living in genteel poverty in the top of his father’s old house and renting out other rooms to strangers. He makes a little extra money on the side taking racy pin-up photos, and spends all of his free time working on a documentary of his own – at least that’s what he says. Something about fear, he says it is. One night one of his tenants, Helen Stephens (Anna Massey), spontaneously invites him in to the apartment she shares with her mother, where they are celebrating her 21st Birthday. Mark is a little too shy to join in, but Helen is so good-natured and friendly that he invites her up to his room instead for a quick visit. She wants to see one of his films, she says.

That poses a problem – since most of Mark’s films are snuff films he’s made while killing other people.

Unusually – and thankfully, I must say – Mark’s motivation isn’t sexual. It’s a little more basic, and strangely even sadder – Mark’s father was a psychologist driven to study the effects of fear on childhood development, and used his own son as his test subject. So poor little Mark grew up with a father who would do things like throw lizards in his bed or push him off stone walls or subject him to other torments, filming everything and studying how Mark responded. Mark’s father got a whole book series out of it, but Mark was left with an enormous psychological problem. And while he does share some of the stories about his childhood with Helen, he tries to keep his current filmmaking habits under wraps – something that becomes harder and harder as the police start investigating an uptick in murders in their neighborhood – the most recent of which is in the film studio where Mark works…

Peeping Tom was released only a month or two before Psycho, which quickly overshadowed this earlier film. And I understand why Psycho has the greater reputation of the two – Hitchcock’s attention to detail is slightly superior, and he gets better performances out of his leads than Boehm and Massey give us here. But only just barely so – Peeping Tom is still a good film, with an equally-good director at its helm (Michael Powell, who’s previously given us The Red Shoes and Black Narcissus, among others). There are some throwaway moments of comedy, there’s a good deal of nuance in what makes Mark tick; there’s even some suspense in the audience gradually learning exactly how Mark kills his victims. We never see him actually committing the act – he has rigged up his camera to capture his victims in their death throes, and so instead we see the camera-eye view of their terror-stricken faces and their screams just before Mark strikes, with the camera cutting out before the final blows. Only towards the end do we see exactly how Mark does the deed.

One thing that may have hobbled Peeping Tom, though, is Mark’s x-rated photography side gig. It’s obvious that he’s only chosen this job to scout for potential victims – the kind of girl who would pose for a topless photo probably is down on her luck and mightn’t be missed if she were to vanish one day. So Mark isn’t getting any sexual thrills out of things. But Powell still saw fit to show the audience exactly how topless these topless photos were, resulting in the first instance of full-frontal nudity in an English film. This gave British censors quite a shock, and the film also suffered from censorship in the US, Italy, Finland and a handful of other countries.

British censors were already uneasy about the subject matter as it was; British film critics were similarly shocked, one of them claiming that this film would “kill” Powell’s career. Another review compared Powell to the Marquis de Sade, and still another said that “the only really satisfactory way to dispose of Peeping Tom would be to shovel it up and flush it swiftly down the nearest sewer.” All of which seems unnecessarily harsh – at least, to someone like me who grew up in the era of Friday the 13th or other slasher films. But the vilification actually backfired, making Peeping Tom a bit of a clandestine taboo cult film among the younger film students of the early 1960s – Martin Scorcese, for instance -who sought out chances to see this film with the scandalous reputation. Fortunately they saw what the earlier critics hadn’t, and urged later critics to give the film a re-appraisal. Powell later noted in his memoirs: “I [made] a film that nobody [wanted] to see and then, thirty years later, everybody has either seen it or wants to see it!”

I’m going to get the cheap joke out of the way first here. ….When I finished watching this, my initial reaction was to joke to Roommate Russ: “This can’t have been a Buñuel film, I understood it!” But that reaction does a dis-service to what was a surprisingly nuanced film.

The whole film takes place on one of North Carolina’s barrier islands, where we first meet Traver (Bernie Hamilton), an African-American musician fleeing from a lynch mob. He’s stolen a boat to make his escape, and paddles to the island after running out of gas and springing a leak; it seems a good place to lay low, since it’s a private hunting park, largely unpopulated save for the groundskeeper Miller (Zachary Scott), and Evie (Key Meersman), the naive granddaughter of a beekeeper who also lives on the premises. Or, rather, lived there – since he has just died. Miller now has to set out for the mainland to get a coroner and to see who should take care of Evie now – but before he leaves, he notices that Evie’s blossomed into quite the attractive teen and starts thinking that maybe keeping her around after all would be kind of fun. Fetching the coroner can’t be helped, though, so he leaves Evie behind with some vague promises of getting her a pretty dress and “a talk when I get back”.

Evie may be past her childhood, but she’s still incredibly naive, and thinks nothing of it when Traver turns up asking for tools and some gas for his boat. She even gives Traver a gun and tags along to help him carry everything back, befriending Traver with idle chatter as he patches the leak. Traver intends to be gone by sunup – but oversleeps, and Miller finds him when he returns (innocently helped by Evie, who tells him everything). Miller gives chase, losing him in the swamps after shooting a hole in Traver’s boat. But Traver surprises him back at his cabin later, gun in hand, demanding more tools and the freedom to fix up his boat and leave in peace. It’s no skin off Miller’s nose, he decides – the coroner will be by tomorrow with a preacher to see to Evie’s grandfather’s burial, and if Traver oversleeps again, maybe they’ll capture him and spare Miller the trouble. And – hey, maybe he could even offer Traver Evie’s cabin for the night, which would be the perfect excuse to move Evie in with him so they can spend the night “talking”.

Yeah, that “talking” is in quotes for exactly the reason you think it is. It’s fortunately not depicted (save for some icky kissing), but it is strongly implied that Miller rapes Evie that night, taking advantage of an innocence so profound that she literally doesn’t think anything of it and is nearly matter-of-fact when she speaks to the minister (Claudio Brook) the next day. But while she’s talking to him, Miller is talking with Jackson (Crahan Denton), the boat driver who ferried the minister over; Jackson tells Miller that back in town they’re all looking for a black musician who supposedly raped a wealthy white woman. Miller knows exactly who he means, and as he and Jackson conduct a manhunt for Traver, the minister brainstorms about how to rescue Evie…

There are a lot of moments throughout where a lesser film would have done things very differently – Traver might have taken advantage of Evie, Miller might have tried killing Traver sooner. Evie might have suddenly realized what Miller had done to her and had a tantrum. The minister might have made a dramatic exit where he swept up Evie to bring her to a convent. But instead, we get Traver and Miller talking about both being veterans over dinner; or Jackson also figuring out what Miller’s doing to Evie and teasing him about it; and we even get the minister and Miller discussing whether Miller could possibly marry Evie someday. No one is all good or all evil here; the minister is a bit one-dimensional and a lot of his lines sound more like caricature, but the scene where he confronts Miller is surprisingly nuanced.

Buñuel also leans into Evie’s innocence pretty hard sometimes; when Miller and Traver are having a tense dinner in his cabin, Evie asks in wide-eyed innocence why Traver isn’t sitting at the table with them. “Don’t you like him?” she asks. “Why not be friends with him?” Key Meersman wasn’t an actress, and it looks like she only appeared in one other film after this before dropping back into obscurity; she maybe only had this one performance in her, and it’s practically a non-performance. I’ve found an article which mentions that Buñuel had so much trouble trying to direct her that he nearly packed in the whole movie in frustration. But Meersman’s nonchalant and flat line deliveries actually work here; she’s so naive that she doesn’t even know that her own rape is something she’s supposed to be upset about, so her mild bafflement is actually spot-on.

On the whole, the future is pretty unclear for all of our characters by the end – no one is completely punished, rescued, or vindicated. But everyone’s tale comes to an ending that ultimately seems right for their specific situation – and honestly, when’s the last time you saw that in a film?