Month: March 2022

At the time of its release, a lot of the advertising for this film played up the titillation by asking a question: “How did they ever make a movie of Lolita?” As many viewers through they years have found out: they did it by editing out a loooooooooooooooooot of oogy parts.

To recap quick: the original novel Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov is presented as a confessional tale, written by a professor, “Humbert Humbert”, who is in prison for murder. But his was a crime of passion – passion for a twelve-year-old girl, Lolita. Humbert was secretly a pedophile and Lolita had been the daughter of a landlady; Humbert married her to stay close to Lolita, but his wife found out the truth one day and killed herself – prompting Humbert to sweep Lolita up on a whirlwind cross-country tour for a year or so, moving from place to place and skipping town just before anyone figured out that Humbert and Lolita were maybe a little too intimate to be father and daughter. Then one evening Lolita disappears, leaving Humbert heartbroken for three years – until she writes out of the blue, saying that she’s now married and pregnant (and about 16) and she and her husband need money. Humbert rushes to see her and learn the truth of how she disappeared, and her confession is what drives him to kill.

The film follows the basic plot, but makes some fairly important tweaks to make things more palatable. The biggest change is in Lolita’s age – here, she is fourteen instead of twelve, and played with some knowing sass by newcomer Sue Lyon. She’s still immature, but still not quite as immature; she’s the one who seems to instigate things with Humbert (James Mason), suggesting to him with a sly smirk that maybe the two of them could play a “game” she’d learned from a boy at her summer camp. Blessedly, another change is that we don’t see any sexual scenes between Humbert and Lolita – director Stanley Kubrik lets the audience’s imaginations and familiarity with the book carry the day, leaving the film to show nothing more than some slightly-too-fervent kisses or cuddles, with the camera cutting away when there’s a chance things could go further. The most intimate thing we see Humbert do to Lolita is paint her toenails.

Kubrik also seems to have made up for the lack of sex by adding in comedy. Shelley Winters is in the largely thankless role of Lolita’s mother Charlotte; she’s supposed to be bawdy and abrasive, the kind of overly-sexualized adult that Humbert usually shuns, but Winters manages to make her come across as funny instead of just crude as she puts poor Humbert through some painfully awkward seductions. Paradoxically this also makes Charlotte more sympathetic in the scene where she finds out what Humbert really feels about her.

The biggest surprise for me in the film, and also one of the biggest changes, concerned the role of the character Clare Quilty. In the novel, Quilty only turns up at the end – he’s the man Humbert kills – but Kubrik promotes him to a main supporting role, played by Peter Sellers. Kubrik also starts the movie with Quilty’s murder, and only then skips back in time to show Humbert and Lolita’s story. But Quilty is there too, as a smarmy playwright whom Charlotte has also (unsuccessfully) tried to seduce. He keeps turning up throughout Humbert and Lolita’s travels – puzzlingly disguising himself as everything from a police detective to a school psychologist to a poll taker – and knowing his ultimate fate, I kept trying to figure out how Quilty fit into the overall story. This also distracted me, fortunately (or maybe unfortunately), from Humbert’s obsession with Lolita, as well as giving Peter Sellers a chance to shine quite brightly.

Still, at the end of the day – this is a story about a middle-aged man who is sexually obsessed with an underage girl, and letting Peter Sellers flex in the service of that tale is pretty much akin to lipstick on a pig. Fortunately our society has made some big changes since the days this film was made – I should note that when you do a search for Lolita in Google right now, the very first thing you see is a toll-free number for an organization working to combat sexual abuse of minors.

So. Um.

So when I wrote my digression on experimental film, this was one of the reasons why. I’d actually tried to watch a bit of it prior, on an evening after work, but the imagery and technique was so opaque that I knew I wouldn’t be able to handle it and tried again later. It’s not something you can give a casual glance at all.

I could tell that I was supposed to be getting some kind of plot or message from this film. The whole thing is completely silent, and consists of a chaotic jumble of frequently-recurring shots – a man and a dog climbing a mountain in the snow, the moon over a woody landscape, lights from cars on a city street at night, astronomical footage of solar flares. Every so often we see a nude woman’s torso or a baby. Towards the end the man reaches a tree and gets to work chopping it down.

The problem is that filmmaker Stan Brakhage intentionally altered the physical film with scratches or holes, superimposes one image on another, or uses color washes or slow motion or weird super-high-focus closeups – so most of the time I could have spent puzzling a story out of the images I saw was spent squinting at the screen trying to see what the images even were. Was it dog’s fur I was looking at, or the man’s beard? Or the woman’s vulva? Or moss? Or just scratches in the film again, or – wait, now we’ve shifted to the city street, is this – and it’s gone, and we’re looking at the baby again. Or – are we? Is that a baby or the moon?

I wanted to understand this film. I really did. I saw enough of it to get tantalized with the idea that it might be a poetic metaphor of sorts – that maybe the man was struggling up the mountain in search of firewood, and the repeated shots of the woman and baby were his thoughts about his family and the repeated city streets were maybe a life of comfort he’d abandoned for this starker one. Or maybe this was a post-apocalyptic tale. The problem was that I felt I was missing parts of the story, simply because I couldn’t see them – and I was left frustrated and confused.

This apparently was Brakhage’s style, though. Or at least it became his style. I did something a bit unusual and looked up an earlier film of his, one not on the list – Window Water Baby Moving, a short experimental film about the home birth of his daughter Myrrena. That film is short, and has similarly disjointed images – but those images are on the whole much clearer: his wife Jane’s pregnant belly in the birthing pool, her face as she cries out in pain, his hands entwined comfortingly in hers, Myrrena’s head crowning. And poignantly, at the end, there are several shots of Brakhage laughing into the camera, dazed and wonderstruck. There’s a bit of scratching on the film in some places, but you can still see what the hell it is you’re looking at.

By contrast – sometime after that film, and after Dog Star Man, Brakhage made another film, Thigh Line Lyre Triangular, about the birth of his third child. He felt that Window Water Baby Moving somehow didn’t capture his emotional response accurately enough, and considered Thigh Line Lyre Triangular to be closer to the mark. But from the reviews I’ve read, Brakhage piles on even more of the kind of scratching and film altering that caused me so much frustration with Dog Star Man – to the point that you can’t see anything at all except for abstract patterns.

Somehow it feels like Brakhage wanted to have things both ways – that he didn’t want me to see the very thing he was showing me. Ultimately I was left frustrated and dissatisfied, and wondering why he’d bothered.

Well, this is a new first – this is the first time a film has left me feeling personally insulted.

I can explain.

Chishū Ryū stars as “Shūhei Hirayama”, a widower in early 1960s Japan. He’s a war vet working a middle-management office job in Tokyo. He has three kids; eldest son Kōichi (Kenji Sada) is married and lives nearby, while the baby of the family – another son, Kazuo (Shin’ichirō Mikami) – just got out of college. Daughter Michiko (Shima Iwashita) handles the cooking and housekeeping for himself and Kazuo. He regularly meets up with a cluster of high school buddies to drink and shoot the breeze. It’s a quiet, simple life.

Then one evening Hirayama and his buddies invite one of their old teachers, Mr. Sakuma, out to join them (Eijirō Tōno). Mr. Sakuma has a bit too much to drink and Hirayama helps him get home – and finds that Mr. Sakuma, also a widower, now runs a cheap ramen shop, and also lives alone with an unmarried daughter to look after him. Hirayama visits the shop once during the day to help Mr. Sakuma out a little, and notices Mr. Sakuma’s daughter is perpetually grumpy.

Mr. Sakuma says that it’s likely because he kept his daughter around to take care of him when she was younger, and now she’s too old to find a husband of her own and has been bitter about that. Hirayama starts to fear he’s doing the same thing to Michiko; he asks her about it later that night, but she insists no, she’s fine, and besides what would he and Kazuo do without her? But Hirayama isn’t so sure. Neither is Kōichi, who says that he thinks Michiko has a crush on a friend of his. Hirayama sends Kōichi to check things out there, and looks into another prospect on his own – or at least means to, because Michiko’s right, what would he do without her?….

…So, we have a lot of guys fretting about Michiko’s unmarried status, and taking it into their hands to find her a husband. We have many scenes about how Hirayama would handle living without her. We even get some feedback from Kōichi’s wife about things, and from Hirayama’s buddies.

But – do we ever hear from Michiko herself about the situation?

No. Incredibly, no, we do not.

The whole engine of the plot is “Michiko is single and Something Must Be Done”, and her wedding is the goal everyone is working towards – but Michiko is a minor character in this story. She gets that one mild protestation when her father asks if she wants to get married, and she gets a very brief moment where she wipes away a tear at some bad news, and – that’s it. Towards the end we se her in a wedding dress heading out to go get married, but we don’t even see the wedding or even learn the name of the guy she’s marrying. That reduces her to a mere plot device – and speaking as another unmarried daughter of a father, that is leaving out one hell of a perspective in this story. I mean – who is she marrying, first of all? Her crush? The guy her father picked? Some other guy? Does she even want to marry? Is she a lesbian, maybe? Who knows? And – the film implies – who cares?

And it’s not even like there wasn’t time for it. There’s a whole drawn-out subplot about Kōichi and his wife having a spat about money management, and there’s a whole weird scene with Hirayama getting dragged to a bar by someone who remembers him from the War and meeting a barmaid who looks like his late wife, and then bringing Kōichi to see her and they get into a debate about that. I mean, those scenes are cute and subtle and add color – but they add color to Kōichi and Hirayama, and meanwhile poor Michiko is given short shrift. But hey, she gets married at the end so it’s okay!….Doesn’t matter who she marries, she’s married and that’s all that matters, right?….And what a sacrifice Hirayama made letting her go, alas…

Come on. Now you get what I mean about feeling insulted by this film. And even taking into account that this was likely a very different time and a different culture and Japan was at a point where it was modernizing more – at least we can present Michiko’s opinion on the matter for just five minutes, instead of dwelling yet again on “how lonely Hirayama’s gonna be”.

Feh.

Like Vivre Sa Vie, this is another French New Wave film that plays with time a bit – only going the other direction. Instead of dispassionate series of spaced-apart vignettes, we follow Cléo (Corinne Marchand) during a very specific window of time, almost in real time. But this is no random slice-of-life – this specific “5 to 7” window is time Cléo is anxiously wanting to pass before she calls the hospital to learn the results of a medical test for possible cancer.

And Cléo is not really the sort to do something productive to keep her mind off things. She visits a psychic hoping for a sneak peek at her future; she goes hat shopping with her maid Angèle (Dominique Davray); she has a desultory meeting with her sort-of-boyfriend José (José Luis de Villalonga) and then her accompanist for her night club act (Michel Legrand, who also composed the film’s music). She wants to be with friends, she wants to be alone. She wants to stay home, she wants to go out. She’s antsy because she wants to do something, but there is literally nothing to do but wait for time to elapse.

That’s a weird mindset, and one I know well. When I did theater, there was always a 15 or 20 minute interval before each show started, between the moment when we opened the doors to the audience and the moment we began the show; and it always drove me slowly bats because there was a whole host of things to be done, but only once the show started; and before that appointed time there was nothing I could do but wait for time to pass. I usually paced a lot, making repeated strolls across the stage to “check it was set properly” or jaunts down to the box office to “check if anyone was running late”, but really I was trying to burn off nervous energy (and quickly learned to tell the poor volunteers in our box office as such). You have a whole plan in place ready to launch, and you know it’s going to be a beast of a thing so you want to just get going already – but you can’t, you need to wait for the appointed hour. And it’s too much of a beast to let you fully distract yourself while you wait, so you end up pacing and antsy and following any whim you get for lack of not knowing what else to do with yourself.

As it turns out, you probably can learn a lot about a person from seeing what whims they tend to get in that state, so director Agnes Varda’s choice to give us these two hours from Cléo’s life still gives us a window into her character. She’s superstitious; she and her maid have a lot of shared beliefs in things like tarot and lucky numbers (they pass up a taxi at one point because it’s number 13), they are afraid of breaking mirrors, they don’t believe in carrying or wearing new clothes on a Tuesday. She’s a little vain; Cléo keeps checking herself out in mirrors throughout the day, and at one point tells herself that “as long as I’m beautiful I’m still alive” and while shopping she muses that “everything in here looks good on me”. She loves attention; José’s visit is ill-timed and perfunctory, but she still seems miffed that he’s leaving after only a few minutes. She plays up her “illness” to her accompanist so he fusses over her. While visiting a cafe, she studies the jukebox and selects one of her own records, subtly checking out the crowd when it starts playing – and is disappointed no one notices.

She’s a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, basically, but every so often she remembers what she’s waiting for and her mood darkens. She tries rehearsing a plaintive ballad with her accompanist, but the lyrics are unusually dour and it just reminds her of her mortality and she stops. She tries to distract herself with a walk and runs into what looks like a funeral procession.

Only towards the end, when she runs into a soldier on leave from the Algerian War (Antoine Bourseillier), does she seem to find some peace. The soldier is at similarly loose ends, trying to kill time before he has to catch his train back to his base; he starts flirting with Cléo, but gradually realizes she’s Going Through Some Stuff and extends more of a sympathetic ear. He even offers to accompany her to the hospital if she’ll in turn see him off at the station. It’s enough to start snapping Cléo out of her self-obsession, and just before the final scene she even suggests they blow off the hospital and get coffee. “I’ll just call the doctor tomorrow, it’s fine,” she assures him. We still do get a resolution for Cléo before the end anyway – but we also get to see her find some peace for that restlessness, and I’m not sure which is the better outcome.