Month: February 2022

I discovered Monty Python’s Flying Circus when I was about eleven. I was still a little young and unaware of some parts of British culture, so a lot of the sketches went over my head at first; instead, my favorite bits were Terry Gilliam’s cut-out collage-style animations. They were short, looney, and often looked like they were driven by random chance – a sort of visual free-association game based on clip art from vintage catalogs and classic paintings. In truth they were planned out to serve as the transitions between one live sketch and the next, but I didn’t realize that yet – I was too busy giggling about how an image of a Tudor nobleman ran off down a road, only to have a “killer car” chase after him for a while until the car got killed by a giant cat – only for the cat to end up in a clip-art meat grinder, with the resulting ground meat leading to tendrils of Boticelli’s Venus, who did a can-can before freezing back in place in time for the next sketch. They were completely silly and went in some unexpected directions, but still felt like they had a goofy logic all their own.

The typical Gilliam animation was only a couple minutes long, and took their cues from the preceding sketch before cuing the next one. Heaven and Earth Magic uses the same kind of cut-out style – but felt like what would have happened if the rest of the Pythons told Terry – “you’ve got a whole hour and we have no cues to give you, so go nuts.”

Apparently there is a plot – animator Harry Smith stated that the film was about a woman suffering from a toothache “consequent to the loss of a very valuable watermelon”, and consults with a dentist prior to a sudden tour of Heaven – with the heroine’s return to Earth prompted by “being eaten by Max Muller on the day Edward the Seventh dedicated the Great Sewer of London.” However, the actual images are a surrealist hodgepodge, with eggs hatching into horse skeletons or a corkscrew sprouting an eyedropper for a head. A skeleton and a dentist chair play keepaway with a baby. A small dog chases the aforementioned watermelon throughout the film. A Victorian lady with stilts for legs looks on as a spoon judges a boxing match.

I had no idea what kind of plot or overall story those images were trying to tell while I was watching – but I didn’t quite care, since it was the same kind of freewheeling, improvised mayhem Gilliam would do with the Pythons. It’s entirely likely Gilliam saw this himself and was inspired. My biggest complaint, though, was that an hour of this kind of mayhem ran a bit long – about 40 minutes in I started feeling unmoored and my attention started to flag. But there still was enough there to tempt me back into focusing.

Smith wasn’t just a filmmaker, and he didn’t stay in film for long. He was a bit of a renaissance man fascinate by folk art and ethnography, but he didn’t fit into a traditional academic path and instead started a self-devised course of study, visiting different cultural groups or communities and watching various rituals or folk dances. He felt that the worlds’ disparate cultures had a lot in common, and strove to capture evidence of his theories. He was introduced to the Beats’ counterculture via a Woody Guthrie concert in San Francisco, and lingered to explore the art scene there – and try his own hand in film. But at the time he was better known for having amassed a huge collection of folk music recordings – so much so that when he tried to sell them to the Smithsonian to make some cash, they instead hired him to produce an anthology album of his own. Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music was released a few years before Heaven and Earth Magic, and the liner notes included the same kind of clip-art vintage photos used in this film. Smith only kept at film for a few years before returning to painting and music collection.

Well, this is more like it. Like other French “New Wave” films, this does play with the conventions of filmmaking a bit, but it does so in ways that don’t bore the pants off me.

Actress Anna Karina stars as “Nana”, a very young French woman who gets bored with her marriage and leaves her husband with vague plans to become a movie star, but ultimately ends up a prostitute instead, with tragic results. A more straightforward Hollywood approach would likely have been heavy-handed with the moralizing and would have presented Nana’s downfall in lurid detail. But here, director Jean-Luc Godard tells the story through a series of twelve short vignettes – Nana’s initial breakup conversation with her husband, a dull day at the record store where Nana first gets work, Nana’s first conversation with Raoul (Sady Rebbot) who ends up as her pimp, a “typical” day in the brothel, Nana getting moved to tears watching a silent film.

Godard sets up his shots in an unusual way as well – during Nana’s entire breakup conversation with her husband, both are sitting at the counter in a bar – and with their backs to us. We only see their faces reflected in the mirror opposite them, sort of. It feels as if we’re eavesdropping on the whole thing – and much of the rest of the film is shot this way, with cameras sometimes panning away from Nana to take in the rest of the room, lingering on other people if they start doing something interesting before finding Nana again. In one sequence, what we hear is Raoul and Nana having a nuts-and-bolts talk about how her new job works – and what we see is a parade of shots of Nana with different men – buttoning up their pants, handing her money, or nervously following her into rooms as Nana closes drapes or lights cigarettes for them, or in one shot, lets them kiss her neck as she smokes herself, looking bored out of her mind. We are only shown glimpses of Nana’s life – but they’re so vivid, glimpses are all we really need.

Two vignettes towards the end hint at Nana’s gradual disillusionment with her life; one scene in a bar when she puts a record on a juke box and starts dancing to catch the eye of a potential john, but gradually starts dancing for its own sake, losing herself in a taste of fun that’s probably become all too rare for her. She also starts off the second vignette trying to lure a john – in this case an older man reading in a cafe – but ends up in a deeply introspective conversation with him about how imperfectly language handles nebulous concepts like “love” and “happiness” and understanding one’s own self. It’s a bit of a throwback to her first conversation with her husband, where Nana struggles to find the right words to explain just why she is so unhappy with him.

The ending is really abrupt – very similar to Godard’s earlier work, Breathless, in that both films end seconds after a person is shot in the street. But with Breathless I was left cold – while here, I was invested enough to blurt out a shocked “what?”

Well, I suppose I ought to see this before seeing the current Oscar-nominated remake…

Dispensing with my usual plot recap here, since I would be very surprised indeed if there are those unfamiliar. But just in case: West Side Story is Romeo and Juliet set among 1950s New York street gangs – the Puerto Rican “Sharks” and the Anglo “Jets” – with songs by Stephen Sondheim and Leonard Bernstein. And overall, it’s good – the script and songs manage to avoid the kind of Musical Theater cheese I tend to dislike, the dancing is worked into the flow of things well and it even works as a Shakespearean adaptation (those usually have their own pitfalls).

So, I liked it. I liked it more than I thought I would. But I didn’t looooove it – at least, I didn’t love the whole thing. And it sounds like I’m not alone – during its original release, it got a lot of popular acclaim, but it also got a lot of lukewarm shrugs; some people loved Jerome Robbins’ dancing but didn’t by Natalie Wood as Maria, some people thought she and Richard Beymer excelled as the two leads but thought the dancing was a little much. Some thought the plot was trite but really loved the music, others thought vice-versa.

There’s one thing that nearly everyone agrees on, though – myself included. And that is that Rita Moreno is spectacular in this. I’m of the age that grew up with Moreno as a regular on the kids’ show Electric Company, and that was my biggest association with her – usually dressed as an silent-film-era director and giving a trademark holler of “HEY YOU GUYYYYYYYYYYS!” This was the first time I’d seen her in anything else – and her role as Anita (Maria’s best friend, and girlfriend to Maria’s brother Bernardo) came as something of a surprise.

Moreno was already a seasoned singer and dancer at the time West Side Story was made, with stage and screen roles under her belt – she had a small role in Singin’ In The Rain and a supporting role in the screen adaptation of The King And I, but had actually begun on Broadway at the age of 13. So while our leads sometimes seem a little challenged by their roles (Natalie Wood in particular doesn’t do much dancing, and I’ve read that that’s…on purpose), Moreno sings, dances, and acts the absolute pants off her role. She even arguably gets a juicier dramatic moment than does Maria – in one scene, Maria enlists her to take a message to Tony, but Anita is stopped by the other Jets, whose taunting and harassments come very near to descending into a gang rape.

It’s an amazing scene, and I’m convinced that this is why Rita Moreno won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor.

Rita Moreno should have gone straight from this to so much more. She even thought that this would finally be an end to the stereotypical “Conchitas and Lolitas in westerns […] humiliating, embarrassing stuff.” But despite a performance like this she got more of the same stereotypical Latina roles, all of which she refused. She stuck to Broadway and TV for a while, and that’s how she ended up on Electric Company instead until Hollywood came to its damn senses.

So, for a while we had a run of reviews where I would list a lot of things that were wrong about the film and then say that I still liked it. I’m afraid we’re on the flip side here – where there’s a lot of things that put this film above what I usually expect of a Western, but….I still wasn’t a fan.

“Kid Rio” (Marlon Brando) and “Dad Longworth” (Karl Malden) start us off with a literal bang – we meet them robbing a bank in Sonora, Mexico in 1880. Mexican police surprise them celebrating at a cantina, and the pair barely manage to escape, both riding on a single aging horse Longworth steals on the way. When police corner them atop a high ridge, Rio realizes they’re close by another ranch and suggests one of them ride their exhausted horse over and trade it in for two better ones. Dad ends up making the trip – but balks at returning to the ridge, and instead rides further on to safety, abandoning Rio to the police and to a Mexican prison. So when Rio finally escapes after five years, he’s worked up a very healthy grudge, and is bound and determined to exact his revenge.

Another outlaw named Bob (Ben Johnson) soon seeks out Rio, offering him some intriguing information – Dad is now the sheriff of Monterey, California, which is exactly where Bob is heading for a bank robbery himself. So he suggests they team up – Bob will benefit from Rio’s expertise, and Rio would likely get the chance to kill Dad at some point. They plan to hang about Monterey a few days before making their hit – enough time for Rio to check in on Dad and give him one last chance to explain himself. Rio doesn’t by Dad’s story – however, he does get his head turned by Dad’s pretty stepdaughter Louisa (Pena Pellicer), spends most of the next few days with her and ultimately uses a town-wide fiesta (including a good deal of drunken carousing from Dad) to have a moonlit tryst with Louisa on the beach. Dad is infuriated when he discovers this, and when Rio gets into a scuffle with a local barfly Dad uses it as a pretext to whip Rio in the town square for “disturbing the peace”, finishing by breaking his fingers and exiling him from Monterey. The humiliation only makes Rio even more intent on revenge.

So I felt there was quite a bit that sets this film apart from other Westerns. The story is a little more complex – Rio doesn’t just ride into Monterey with guns blazing, he tries to give Dad the chance to redeem himself first. Dad’s story arc reminds me a bit of Jean Valjean in Les Miserables, but in a good way – he’s told his wife and stepdaughter some stories about the old days, but not all, and there’s still some secrets he’d prefer stay hidden.

Speaking of Louisa – the film’s treatment of its Mexican characters was another point I appreciated. Other Westerns I’ve seen keep their Mexican characters firmly in the background or treat them like caricatures (I’m looking at you especially, Rio Bravo), but here, Louisa and her mother are a good deal more fleshed-out than usual, and I actually buy their respective relationships with Dad. Other more minor characters also get treated with respect – they’re not caricatures, they’re not just background color, they are people, who just so happen to exist in the same space as a bunch of gringos do, and that’s just that.

But this film still didn’t really grab me completely. Part of it might be my own grudge against Westerns – but part of it may be because of the sheer weirdness of having a Method actor playing the lead in a melodramatic genre. This was the same issue I’d had with Brando in Guys and Dolls – Brando’s giving a good performance, but it’s a mismatch between his performance style and the genre he’s in, to the point that it got distracting. By the film’s final scenes, I was actually able to accept the other actors’ work more so than Brando’s – they were a little melodramatic, but melodrama is what the genre calls for, and Brando’s work started to look wooden by comparison.

Ultimately not a favorite, but I do acknowledge the good work all around.

When I was in high school, several of my classmates got through their various English classes using Cliffs’ Notes, those yellow-and-black pamphlets which give a summary of a given book, and suggest various “themes” and “meanings” addressed therein. I never did, however – I was a fast and avid reader, and even enjoyed lots of the things we’d been assigned in class, so I always looked down on the Cliffs’ Notes users.

Until now. Because I needed that kind of hand-holding with this film.

So, the Cliffs’ Notes version of Last Year at Marienbad is: a man and a woman meet up at an exclusive European resort. He keeps insisting that they’d met one year previously and had an affair, but she’d asked him to wait a year and then they’d run off together. She, however, keeps insisting that she doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

It’s pretty difficult to glean that from the film itself, though. There is a point about halfway through the film where the man (Giorgio Albertazzi) finally says those words, and also says them directly to the woman (Delphine Seyrig); up until that point, he’d been speaking, and so had she, but maybe not of that and maybe not to each other. We hear him in voiceover talking about their meeting, but watched another woman doing something else. We see the man and woman staring intently at each other as another group of people discuss something entirely different. We see our couple talking, but they discuss something entirely different – repeating, verbatim, another conversation entirely different people had been having earlier. We also occasionally see a second man (Sacha Pitoëff) lurking about the couple; he might be the woman’s husband, or a lover, or a chaperone. But he actually spends most of his time in the game room challenging people to games of Nim.

There’s a lot of loops and endless labyrinthine hallways throughout; both in conversations and monologues, with characters declaiming lengthy speeches which repeat themselves through twice, or in the visuals, with characters wandering aimlessly around an opulent mansion – there are few windows, but there are many doors and hallways, with a crowd of well-dressed people wandering about looking for either the game room or the ballroom or the chamber concert or the dining room, huddling around columns and discussing other guests. Even on the rare occasions when the man and woman meet outside, it’s in a hyper-manicured garden with statues and precisely-trimmed shrubs and endless paths leading back to the front of the hotel. And while you do sort of gather what the blue hell what has been happening by the end of the film, things are certainly not tied up in a neat bow.

I first tried watching this after work on a weeknight, which was a huge mistake; this is a film you need to approach with full brain power just to keep up, and my second attempt (afternoon on a Saturday, with no one else at home) fared much better. At least, I was able to keep up with the film and gathered something of a narrative out of it.

I’m reluctant to figure out if my interpretation of the film was “right”, since I get the sense that that’s not even the point. The whole film seems to take place in some kind of stylized nowhere, where the normal rules of reality just don’t apply; time bends and loops back on itself, hallways double and twist and dump you somewhere you didn’t expect, conversations loop back around on themselves endlessly and people are stuck saying the same things again and again. The notion of this film being some kind of dream or afterlife isn’t all that new – one of the lines the man has suggests that this is what’s happening – but it’s at least an answer, and it’s one I came away with.

But now I wonder if I’m meant to come up with any interpretation at all. In an earlier review I mentioned attending the “immersive theater” show Sleep No More, which similarly has enough of a “Plot” for you to follow if that’s what you really want; ostensibly it’s based on the plot of MacBeth. But the appeal for audiences is the chance to explore the environment itself – poking around the various rooms, opening cupboards, flipping through papers. Following interesting-looking people who seemed to be deeply invested in a conversation you only joined halfway through. The one time I went, I spent most of the time exploring the various different rooms, sampling the contents of a “candy store”, and trying to remember how to play a Genesis song on a piano tucked into a corner behind a blanket fort, and only caught the “main action” in fleeting glimpses.

And honestly, that’s what the other patrons at the hotel would know about the drama playing out with our main characters – whatever they might happen to accidentally overhear or see out of the corner of their eyes as they were themselves looking for the game room or heading to dinner, or following their own scripts from their own narratives. They wouldn’t have known the whole story either, and maybe that’s why we don’t.

At least that’s what I’ve decided today.

Well, this is breaking the streak of “here’s what’s wrong, but I liked it” reviews.

This Ingmar Bergman film is a quiet, simple piece, taking place in only a day or so during a family’s vacation on a small Swedish island. We meet them frolicking in the surf first – Karin (Harriet Andersson), her devoted husband Martin (Max von Sydow), her teenage brother Minus (Lars Passgård) and novelist father David (Gunnar Björnstrand). There’s some playful arguing as they come ashore and negotiate the chores for that evening’s dinner – finally settling on Karin and Minus heading to fetch milk while David and Martin round up fish. Minus seems put out to have to tag along with his big sister, but she playfully changes his mind, and is laughing along with her as they go.

So the conversation Martin and David have alone comes as something of a shock – for we learn that Karin suffers from schizophrenia, and is fresh from the asylum after a recent psychotic break. Martin is determined to stay with his wife until the bitter end, helping her and protecting her as best he can – while David has been avoiding her, save for making notes on her illness’s progression in case he wants to write about it later. In fact, David has only joined the others on vacation at Martin and Minus’ urging as they want to keep things as happy and normal as possible for Karin.

But Karin is simply too far gone. She sneaks out of Martin’s arms in the middle of the night to lurk in an abandoned attic room, because she’s convinced there are people in the walls talking to her. A voice in her head urges her to snoop in her father’s things, and she finds his diary and reads the cold and clinical notes he’s been making on her symptoms. She flees the house during a moment of tension and, when Minus finds her, she hallucinates he’s a stranger and….let’s say she gets a bit more familiar than a sister should.

One thing that struck me is the very ordinariness of the film. There are few clichéd “mad scene” moments for Karin – she mostly just seems a little impulsive. Maybe she says something strange now and then, but soon just waves it off; it was the illness talking, she’s fine now. It lulls you into the same kind of hope the family is clinging to that maybe Karin is actually okay – until a scene towards the very end, when they come upon her having a one-sided conversation with invisible people and then reacts to a horrifying vision. We never see that vision, though; nor do we hear all the voices that Karin hears, save for some soft sounds in the attic that might be whispers and might just be wind.

The film is also sparse – there’s no soundtrack, there’s no other people in the cast. Martin and David have only two brief conversations about “What Do We Do About Karin”, and Passgård manages to somehow establish a subplot for himself as the Overlooked Younger Brother without saying much at all.

The film is instead stripped down to its essence – it’s a quiet, sparse tragedy about the family of someone with a mental illness trying to save her despite the odds.