BEYOND HATRED (Olivier Meyrou, 2005)

Winner as best documentary at Berlin, Olivier Meyrou’s 16mm-shot Au delà de la haine details the aftermath of a heinous hate crime in Léo-Lagrange Park in Rheims, France. The incident occurred on the evening of September 13, 2002. Three neo-Nazi skinheads, one a minor in his teens, the others 22 and 20, decide to find an Arab to beat up but, finding none, target instead François Chenu, a 29-year-old white gay, whom they beat unconscious, savaging his face, before dumping him in a river to drown. This outburst of violence beyond what the attackers intended was triggered by Chenu’s calling them “cowards.”
     Meyrou doesn’t show the crime. He doesn’t show the victim, even in photographs, even predating the deadly assault. He shows none of the killers. There is no filmmaker voiceover. There isn’t an ounce of sentimentality. This is a harrowing film of legal process and reactions from the devastated parents, Jean-Paul and Marie-Cecile Chenu, and François’s three siblings, and others; Meyrou records scenes of conversations in court building corridors, in a bar, in offices, and so forth. Among the matters discussed are parenting—it turns out that the attackers, Michael Regnier, Fabien Lavenus and Franck Billette, suffered brutal childhoods—and justice versus revenge. We watch the victim’s family prepare for court and learn the sentences that the defendants incur: 20 years; 15 years, in the case of the boy who was a minor when he participated in the crime. The film concludes with François’s parents reading aloud a condescending, even vicious letter to the imprisoned trio, part of which is aimed at stirring their consciences and (at least ostensibly) urging rehabilitation. Reviewers typically emphasize how the Chenus work through their grief, but when I heard the letter I recalled Marie-Cecile’s earlier remark concerning her self-discovery; as a result of the crime and her loss, she has found violence in herself she never knew existed. In the film’s most brilliant passage, surely indebted to Alain Resnais’s Nuit et brouillard (1955), although Meyrou’s camera is (typically) static throughout, we see at dusk the tree-cloaked winding path down which François was slaughtered and hear his sister’s voiceover as she relates the event’s impact on her, including her identification of her brother’s body. The elegant verdant appearance with its sad irony, the quietude, the mockery—the continuation of anonymous, inconsiderate life as joggers emerge into sight: reminiscent also of Chabrol, this is haunting stuff.

TOKYO! (Bong Joon-ho, Léos Carax, Michel Gondry, 2008)

A disappointing three-part film about contemporary Tokyo, unified by the theme of the transformative impression made by urban alienation and loneliness, Tokyo! fails to do for Japan’s biggest city what Paris, je t’aime (2007) did for Paris. The love, perhaps, is missing.
     Each segment was written and directed by someone else: French filmmakers Michel Gondry and Léos Carax, and South Korea’s Bong Joon-ho. Gondry’s “Interior Design” derives its deft resolution from Gabrielle Bell’s graphic novel Cecil and Jordan in New York. A young couple, newly moved to Tokyo, crowd the apartment and desire for privacy of a put-upon host. The man, a budding filmmaker, reimagines the city, while the city more or less reimagines the woman, reducing her to a purely practical existence either to complete or offset the marginalization that her boyfriend’s artistic self-involvement incurs. Visually, there is a wonderful aspect to the woman’s transformation.
     Carax’s stark “Merde” (as in Shit) satirizes the considerably moderated xenophobia and sense of racial superiority of the Japanese. Denis Lavant plays Merde, a white sewer rat with one eyeball turned around who creates as much mischief and mayhem as Mr. Hyde did in Victorian London; he accosts pedestrians, grabs whatever he wants out of their hands, and hurls grenades left over from the Sino-Japanese War. He is arrested and put on trial, where he needs to be interpreted because he speaks French. In short, the shirtless, barefooted oddball disrupts Tokyo’s modesty and tranquility. Hey, man, he’s a terrorist and needs, as Dick Cheney might put it, a little hanging.
     Bong’s “Hikikomoris” revolves around a hikikomori, someone who has withdrawn from society and stays secluded at home—an actual Japanese phenomenon, perhaps a response to urban overcrowding. In Bong’s filmlet, this man’s one connection to the outside world that so discombobulates him is his pizza delivery girl. Unfortunately, he contaminates her, turning her also into a hikikomori, thus requiring him to venture out in order to find her and correct his own psychic imbalance. The Tokyo into which he releases himself is wittily vacant of people, suggesting a Land of the Hikikomoris, until an earthquake—hence the alternative title “Shaking Tokyo”—brings people out into the streets.
     I liked Bong’s bit the best.

SAVE THE TIGER (John G. Avildsen, 1973)

Jack Lemmon won an Oscar for his middling portrayal of Harry Stoner, partner in a Los Angeles dress-manufacturing firm who is at loose ends as he desperately tries to keep the business from going under, in Save the Tiger, a drama that’s occasionally rich but more often as frayed as Harry’s hopes and dreams. Partner Phil Greene’s “ballet with the books” has kept the firm afloat, but an I.R.S. audit is a constant threat, and now Harry is arranging for a warehouse arson to collect the needed insurance money. “The government has a word for survival,” he snaps at Phil. “It’s called fraud.”
     The film covers less than two days, but Harry’s head drifts back in time as Harry keenly feels he is being left behind. This is Richard Nixon’s America, and the current Southeast Asian war revives memories of World War II. Nothing seems to be going right for this endangered tiger; a major client, the day of the firm’s important show, is close to death after a session with a prostitute that Harry arranged for him goes horribly awry. The red paint involved is another reminder of war.
     Steve Shagan’s script, despite a few good lines, and John G. Avildsen’s clumsy, clueless direction are both at the TV-level. But two good performances matter: Jack Gilford as Phil, who is always prepared to let Harry do what he (Phil) says he doesn’t want Harry to do; Patricia Smith as Harry’s much concerned wife, Janet.
     His Oscar was largely the result of something that Lemmon did that his fellow actors admired—guiltily, since few would be caught doing this themselves: believing in the material, Lemmon performed for scale ($165 a week), to keep down production costs, thereby helping to get the project greenlighted.

YOUNG MAN WITH A HORN (Michael Curtiz, 1950)

Semi-sensational in the dark style of his Mildred Pierce five years earlier, Michael Curtiz’s Young Man with a Horn, allegedly based on the life of jazz musician Bix Beiderbecke, slides bumpily from individual story into moral fable. This is one film that gets thinner and thinner, and more and more ridiculous, as it hums along. The same can be said for the performance of its star, Kirk Douglas, which is at its best early on, when the actor is given something to play, but gets more and more ridiculous as jazz trumpeter Rick Martin comes to exemplify more and more blatantly the false adage that a great artist must be a great human being first. This aspect of the material may have been lifted from The Citadel (King Vidor, 1938), from A.J. Cronin’s medical novel.
     One may therefore wish to give Curtiz a pass and blame instead the authors of the script, Carl Foreman and Edmund H. North, and Dorothy Baker, whose novel they adapted; only, one finds strengthened the argument that Curtiz pursued just such a moral fable in the case of Mildred Pierce, to wit, one which warns that fate will slap down a woman who attempts to succeed in in the “male world” of business. This, though, is an interpretation, possibly wrong, possibly right, but even if right incomplete, while there isn’t much else to Young Man with a Horn.
     But the possibility that most interests me (until the slide) about this film suggests an alternative theme: the vexing conflict between those who have a certain talent and calling and those who feel at a loss as to which course to pursue in life. The embodiment of the latter disadvantage is Amy, Rick’s wife, played with ferocious complexity by a stunningly gorgeous Lauren Bacall. Rick’s name perhaps reminds us that the hero of Curtiz’s Casablanca (1942), also named Rick, seems at different times to belong in either camp.
     Given that Jo Jordan secretly loves Rick, why does she arrange to introduce friend Amy to him? Three possible explanations suggest themselves. One, Jo is testing Rick’s affection for her (Jo)—attempting to assign Rick’s feelings for her to the realm of certainty. (When we are struggling with self-doubt and in love, we sometimes do stupid things.) Or, two, Jo may be unconsciously trying to prove Rick’s lack of love for her and thereby give herself at least the impetus to move on. Three, if one prefers a more elusive reading of the material, Jo may unconsciously be testing Amy’s affection for her. Unfortunately, we will never have the faintest glimmer of Jo’s motivation because the character is ineptly, inscrutably played by slack-faced Doris Day, whose singing throughout—Jo is a band singer—also is monotonous beyond measure. There is punishing irony here, to wit, that former band singer Day makes no sense as band singer Jo.
     Hers is the worst acting in the film; who contributes the best? Juano Hernandez as Art Hazzard, the brilliant though humble jazz trumpeter who befriends Rick when Rick is an orphaned child, tutors him generously, and whose death in a street accident makes the grown Rick (we are assured) a better man.
     Harry James dubs Rick’s flights of art on the trumpet as Rick pursues—I’m not making this up; the film identifies this—the high note that the instrument cannot deliver; indeed, music is one of the film’s four alluring elements. Hernandez and Bacall are two others, while Ted McCord’s noirish black-and-white cinematography is the fourth.
     Early on, Curtiz and cutter Alan Crosland Jr. attempt a bit of visual simulation of jazz, but nothing comes of this. Hoagy Carmichael’s on-camera narration, as piano-playing “Smoke,” is florid and condescending. Trenchant (although more or less lifted from Billy Wilder’s 1945 The Lost Weekend) are scenes of Rick walking and walking city streets.

TROUBLE IN PARADISE (Ernst Lubitsch, 1932)

“Beginnings are always difficult.”

Think of Venice as a modern Eden—except that Ernst Lubitsch sullies the image of gleaming canals at night by showing the collection of garbage by gondola. The garbage collector, a jolly sort, sings an aria—to distract himself from the stench.
     In Trouble in Paradise, master thief Gaston Monesque falls for Lily Vautier on their dinner date in a posh hotel. “My little shoplifter, my sweet little pickpocket, my darling,” he coos. He is “The Baron”; she, “The Countess.” They were born with larceny in their hearts—this, their Original Sin. Their foreplay consists of little games of mutual pickpocketing; thus they show each other their mutual worthiness. Love doesn’t get more delightful than this.
     But there’s “trouble in Paradise”: temptations galore; and Gaston’s pretense at affection for high-toned Mme Mariette Colet, because of the shifting masks of the world to which he belongs (a metaphor for our own fallen world), brings his heart into proximity to the real thing, if there is any difference. Reviewers are fond of reporting that Lily, who finds herself, like Gaston, in Mariette’s employ (also under a false identity), is jealous. Well, yes; but jealousy is another, self-protective mask; above all, Lily is anxious that nothing is certain in her and Gaston’s world, that at any moment she might lose the love of her life.
     This comedy was Lubitsch’s favorite among his own films; the forty-year-old Berliner, transported to Hollywood, had pickpocketed fate that had ordained poverty for his Jewish existence. Fellow Jews Stroheim and Sternberg added “von” to their names as a kind of mask; Lubitsch’s mask was his Continental sophistication. The mask, poignantly, became his reality.
     Miriam Hopkins and Herbert Marshall, as Lily and Gaston, give the performances of their lives.