THE NIGHTS OF CABIRIA (Federico Fellini, 1956)

A work of great stylistic flexibility, The Nights of Cabiria (Le notti di Cabiria) is one of Federico Fellini’s finest achievements. Fellini first introduced its protagonist, a Roman prostitute, in his glorious comedy The White Sheik (1952), whose screen story Michelangelo Antonioni wrote—Fellini and Antonioni’s one collaboration. There, Cabiria is worldly-wise, her professional experience the prism through which she views the foibles and vulnerability of humanity. For years I thought inside a box, deciding that the Cabiria who appears in one film cannot be the same character as appears in the later film, where Cabiria herself seems so vulnerable. As I grew older, though, I grew wiser, like Cabiria; I realized that the chronology of the two films reverses the chronology of the character. In The White Sheik we see the same woman after the experiences that the later film recounts. We may say, then, that The Nights of Cabiria is an unannounced prequel. At home, it won both major prizes as best film: the David di Donatello Award; the prize of the Italian National Syndicate of Film Journalists, which also named Fellini best director. The Nights of Cabiria also won best foreign film prizes in Spain and the United States (the Oscar).

Fellini has acknowledged the influence on this film of Charles Chaplin’s City Lights (1930), the most essential American film of the Great Depression and among the most hauntingly, ambiguously open-ended films. We shall see that The Nights of Cabiria ends in a similarly “open” fashion. In the meantime, we can point to Chaplin’s influence elsewhere: Fellini’s blend of comedy and pathos; the film’s satirical social canvas; Cabiria herself, whose dogged persistence in an inhospitable, humiliating universe recalls that of Charlie the Tramp in City Lights and other Chaplin films. It cannot be seriously argued that Fellini’s film is the artistic match of Chaplin’s, but there is no such vast and deep shortfall here as is the case with Roberto Benigni’s Life Is Beautiful (1998) vis-à-vis its inspiration, Chaplin’s devastating The Great Dictator (1940).

Fellini’s film opens near a slum in the hilly outskirts of Rome. A couple, in long shot, silently run to the ocean’s edge. These are Cabiria and her boyfriend, Giorgio. Both seem intent on the view rather than on each other, as though they are utterly secure in one another’s company. Cabiria is twirling her purse; it is a confident gesture. All of a sudden Giorgio grabs the purse, pushes Cabiria into the water, and flees. Only Cabiria’s hands are visible poking through the water’s surface. Children at play rescue her, dragging her onto land. Adults who were loath to get wet, even to save someone’s life, now take charge. As in the earlier image of her desperate hands, Cabiria, out cold, can exert no control over herself or her environment. Someone is pushing and pulling her slack arms; when this fails to free water from her lungs, she is turned upside down. She is missing a shoe. She comes back to life, angry, scornful of those helping her, humiliated. Once she has regained sufficient strength, she runs to her shack; Giorgio is not there. Later, she asks Wanda, her friend, disbelievingly, “Who would drown someone for 40,000 lira?” Wanda responds, “Nowadays they would do it for 5,000”—about fifty bucks. This is the film’s first reference to those who are left behind or marginalized in Italy’s difficult postwar recovery.

It’s a surprise that this initial reference to poverty applies specifically to Giorgio, the “victimizer” rather than the victim, Cabiria. Later, when another man, one whom Cabiria is presumably engaged to marry, similarly robs her, Fellini’s earlier compassion regarding Giorgio will reverberate. What these men do is horrible, but socioeconomic humiliation has pushed them to the brink, and beyond. The gaggle of prostitutes to which Cabiria belongs, each contentious with the others for her bit of urban turf, are no bevy of beauties making money hand over fist. Like Ellie May’s mother in Primrose Path (Gregory La Cava, 1940), they eke out what existence they can. Cabiria remains independent, refusing the overtures of another prostitute’s pimp to join his stable, but her autonomy is illusory. Hers is hardly the image of a successful prostitute; she wears socks and sandals to work, along with an abbreviated pony-tail, and her perpetually painted-on eyebrows make her look like a clown. It is by sheer accident that she turns the one trick that we witness. Cabiria happens to be standing near when a quarrel in the street causes a woman to walk out on her man. Cabiria gets to dance a little in a nightclub (Cabiria loves to dance), and the man, a movie celebrity, even invites her to his palatial residence, but they never do have sex, and the man and his girlfriend reconcile that night, with Cabiria, locked outside the bedroom, espying the couple kissing—a lovely keyhole shot that underscores Cabiria’s being left out of life. Even what seems to go right in her life ends up going wrong.

The key to Cabiria’s personality, here as in The White Sheik, is her unselfpitying nature. When sister prostitutes are organizing a religious pilgrimage, Cabiria questions whether she should go. For what would she ask the Madonna? “I’ve got everything I want,” she notes; “Even my mortgage is nearly paid.” Given the disappointments we have seen befalling her, we may find her attitude heroic; as the Victorian British writer Thomas Carlyle might say, Cabiria has decreased her denominator rather than increasing her numerator. An intelligent capacity for amnesia adds to one’s resilience; Cabiria is not one to brood about either yesterday or the string of yesterdays, and so her spirit is resurgent. Fellini’s concept of the character is vastly different from the one in the Broadway musical version, Sweet Charity, if Bob Fosse’s film (1969) is any indicator. There, Charity is endlessly self-pitying, rendering even her pluck garishly sentimental.

Cabiria’s personality is deeply rooted in her participation in the human community. She tells her friends and co-workers she might not go on the religious pilgrimage because she feels no need to have a prayer answered, but immediately after saying this, when a procession of singing pilgrims passes through the scene, moved by the example of their hopefulness, she follows. When she gets lost along the way, her path crosses that of “the man with the sack,” the anonymous stranger who ministers to the poor who live in caves. This, the most moving passage in the film, and a passage that deepens the complexion of the entire film, was recently restored; the Roman Catholic Church pressed for its deletion at the time of the film’s original release owing to the sharp contrast that the film delivers between this individual’s mission of mercy that profoundly affects people’s lives and the nonsensical religious pilgrimage, a moneymaking operation that exploits the hopes and fears of its participants, brings them to a pitch of hysteria in a packed, poorly ventilated church, and, as Cabiria herself points out afterwards, changes nothing and nobody. The Church succeeded in having the pulsating heart of the film cut out, and Fellini’s courting of its condemnation in his next film, La dolce vita (1959), is most fully appreciated in this context. The complete version of The Nights of Cabiria now available to us demonstrates a compassion for the poor that the cut version only hints at, and with that, an outrage and an anger at the Church’s exploitation of the sick and the poor that the film plainly regards as nothing short of institutionalized criminality. Now it is clearer, for example, that the stage hypnosis of Cabiria, which leaves her enraged and humiliated, is a metaphor for the corrupt pilgrimage and the Church’s manipulation of the masses.

While accompanying the man with a sack at night, Cabiria discovers that one of the homeless occupants of a cave is a sister prostitute, once wealthy, now too old to work and impoverished. (Cabiria also will be homeless by the end of the film.) Cabiria greets the woman by her professional name; the man with a sack greets her using the woman’s real name. Later, when he drives her back to Rome, Cabiria tells the stranger her real name: Maria. The stage hypnotist also draws this revelation from her, but because it is done against Cabiria’s will the moment is inexpressibly obscene. Without the contrast provided by her earlier willing disclosure of her name, and most especially the sharpened context of comparison between the stage hypnosis and religious manipulation, the moment of name disclosure onstage falls flat. It is robbed of its import. Everything in the film, in fact, takes on fresh or clearer meaning through the restoration of the film’s most remarkable passage.

Or is the brilliant finale still the film’s most wonderful passage? Indeed, its lead-in—Cabiria’s and her fiancé Oscar’s trip through the woods, ending on the cliff above the sea, where Cabiria begs Oscar to kill her once she realizes that the whole plan for them to go off and marry was a ploy to rob her of her life’s savings—is fetching and heartrending. (Who can forget the pale, luminous sky—a light so beautiful that Cabiria comments on it?) Earlier, she had told Oscar, “I guess there’s some justice in the world,” now that she was happily in love; but the remark implies its opposite, that there is no such justice, now that Oscar takes her purse, with the money, and abandons her. Cabiria must get on with the rest of her life. The high camera, aiming at her back, follows as she walks back, alone, through the dark woods. Suddenly there are young revelers surrounding her, children playing musical instruments, and we see Cabiria’s tear-stained face. These children have thus crashed the barrier between objectivity and subjectivity, between reality and film, for the music (by Nino Rota) that we have been listening to on the soundtrack now has a visible, realistic origin. Weaving around her, the children are smiling; one wishes her a good evening. Cabiria also smiles, and for a quick instant finds us, anonymous humanity, by looking directly into the camera. We know we are complicit in Cabiria’s ambiguous fate. We know we have a job to do, perhaps along the lines of what is being done by the man with a sack, and perhaps Cabiria will join us in this endeavor. The world is unjust, and people are in need of our help and kindness. Perhaps we will be luckier than Cabiria and not have to start over.

Giulietta Masina, Fellini’s astoundingly gifted wife, plays Cabiria. Hers is certainly one of the greatest performances in all of cinema. Masina was named best actress at both Cannes and San Sebastián and by the Italian National Syndicate of Film Journalists.

The script is by Fellini, Ennio Flaiano, Tullio Pinelli and Pier Paolo Pasolini.

APOCALYPSE NOW (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979; 2001)

One of the most brilliant pieces of short fiction in the English language, albeit in an unsmooth version of the language, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness was first published in 1902, sixteen years after the Ukrainian-born author, born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, became a British subject. A mariner, Conrad often wrote about the sea, his appointment to the command of a Congo River steamboat providing the basis for his celebrated novella. The central character in Heart of Darkness, Marlow, had already appeared in Conrad’s short story “Youth” (1898) and the staggering novel Lord Jim (1900), part of which he narrates. Marlow, though, is an unreliable, unself-critically subjective narrator; one can’t trust a word he says. The reasons for such a narrative approach are many and exceedingly complex, but one of the motives is to question authority and its accuracy—in this case, the shibboleth of “firsthand experience.” In Heart of Darkness Marlow works for an ivory company, in which capacity he travels the Congo River, showering us generously with his racist language and chauvinistic orientation. He is, at heart, a colonialist, and another aim of his narration, from the point of view of the author, is that we should question Marlow’s mindset and the power structures that shaped and project it, imposing it on a part of the world misperceived as “inferior.” Marlow’s mission is to locate and assume command of a stranded company cargo ship. In the process of doing this, he meets a company representative who has established his own domain, his own world, really, in the African wilds, which he rules as a bloody tyrant. This man is Kurtz, who embodies—this is truly one of the most terrifying characters in world literature—colonialism stripped of its civilized veneer. Human heads, spiked by standing poles, announce Kurtz’s bloodthirstiness, the terror of his rule. Kurtz now is dying, and Marlow’s journey downriver, during which Kurtz rationalizes what he has done, what he has become, suggests that he is, somehow, the most dire projection of Marlow’s own desire for African conquest, which, on a different level, the company’s hunt for ivory, and the slaughter this entails, similarly project. Kurtz’s dying utterance is famous: “The horror! The horror!” What “horror” we can never know. The horror of colonialism and Kurtz’s own foul deeds? The horror of death? The horror of what Kurtz sees on the other side of death, awaiting him? The horror that Marlow is blind to the kinship among these horrors? All these horrors, and more?

In 1979, Francis Ford Coppola’s transmuted film version of the Conrad story, stupidly and pointlessly retitled Apocalypse Now (to justify the unconscionable: that the credits don’t even acknowledge the Conrad source), premiered at Cannes, where, oddly mistaken for an antiwar film and one critical of America’s recently ended military involvement in Southeast Asia, it took the top prize. Coppola called the film “a work in progress.” In 2001, again at Cannes, he premiered an expanded version of the same film, to which he gave an even dumber and more pointless title: Apocalypse Now Redux. The film is at such cross-purposes—adoring violence and hating violence; in raptures over war and detesting war; sorrowful over America’s failure to “win” the war and angry that we ever got mired in the war in the first place—that it’s, finally, silly. Much of the film’s contradictory nature comes from a script authored by Coppola and John Milius—two persons impossible to imagine on the same page. Racist and chauvinistic in the extreme, presumably as a result of Milius’s fascistic contribution, the film quite undoes Conrad’s nobler intentions. Now a renegade Army captain who has become a tribal leader in Cambodia, Kurtz is the object of a brass-ordered “hit” by Marlow, who has been rechristened Willard for the occasion, and who executes his assignment savagely, even though, as in the novella, Kurtz would be dead shortly anyhow. If Coppola’s aim was to turn Heart of Darkness into jungle farce, bull’s-eye. Nothing so underscores the reduction of Conrad’s fiercely beautiful piece of work as the fact that Coppola and Milius give their Kurtz the same dying utterance—only now, rather than enigmatic and haunting, it’s meaningless. If these two jerks had had the slightest sense of humor, they would have had Kurtz say with his last breath, “Rosebud.”

Apocalypse Now is an impossible film for me to like, as it cleverly bumps from moment to moment, each one presenting a point that audience members are free to interpret however they like—pro-war, antiwar: what difference does it make to Coppola, who professed surprise that his wretched The Godfather (1972) was widely viewed (correctly) as being pro-mob, to overturn which troubling impression he made the blatantly anti-mob sequel, The Godfather Part II (1974)? How on earth could Coppola be so blind, the tone of his film so far out of his control, that he couldn’t “see” the Godfather that he was making—or, until the world pointed this out to him, that he had made? The answer is simple: Coppola doesn’t care or think about a film’s intelligent or intellectual disposition. All he cares about are effects and in combining them in what he considers an aesthetic fashion. Thus Apocalypse Now straddles a fence, soliciting diverse core “understandings” from filmgoers. “I love the smell of napalm in the morning,” Lieutenant Kilgore exults in the field before encouraging cheer in a young soldier under his command and patting his shoulder. Is Kilgore’s utterance admirable or insane? Take your pick, based on whatever your particular stance happens to be regarding America’s Southeast Asian adventure. That’s the maddening kind of film this is. Because Coppola hasn’t a thought in his head, anything can mean anything you want. Thematic unity isn’t his concern. I know: Consider Kilgore’s name. But isn’t that a bit of having your cake and eating it, too, when (apart from the name) everything we see involving Kilgore adheres to the film’s Rorschach nature and schizophrenia?

The writing, elsewhere, is rhetorical. This film may hold the all-time record for lines of dialogue that no one would speak and only in fact do so because the script requires them to do so, to make some point—some point that other lines of dialogue, usually in the same scene, negate or take back. In a passage involving a French family that wines and dines him while his boat is being repaired (this passage is new to the 2001 version), one of the Frenchmen shouts at Willard at the dinner table, “Why don’t you Americans learn from our mistakes!” I’m not making this up; the character really says this. The long passage, overall, is fascinating, as the head of the house, Hubert de Marais (Christian Marquand, in the film’s best performance), presents a heartfelt explanation of why he is at “home” where he is and will not be returning to France ever (Willard remarks later that he will not be returning to the U.S. after the war), a history of French involvement in Indo-China preceding America’s taking up the mantle against communistic inroads in the region, and even an account of how the U.S. itself brought the Viet Cong into being right after the close of World War II. I wish I didn’t have such difficulty deciphering the French-accented English because this is, without doubt, despite lapses into rhetoric, the finest part of the film, and I can’t imagine why it was deleted back in 1979, except, of course, it does interrupt the continuity of the river journey in search of Kurtz. But, as with Kilgore, how you “receive” the filmmaker’s intent is largely up to you.

Good as it is, this passage includes a hopelessly silly line applied to both de Marais and Willard, by a family member—I’m not sure who she is—named Roxanne Sarrault (Aurore Clément, Aurore Clémenting about), to the effect that each is “two men, one who kills and one who loves.” After telling him this, Roxanne allows Willard to feel up her naked breasts through a filmy curtain surrounding his bed—an arty touch, to say the least.

This film took a heavy toll. Coppola, if we are to believe his wife in a journal she kept and had published, nearly had a mental breakdown, and Martin Sheen, who plays Captain Willard (with little depth but many pensive looks), suffered a heart attack. Filming in the Phillippines wasn’t easy, especially during the rainy season; Coppola, apparently, involved no one in whatever logistical research might have kept production costs down and people’s health intact.

Is there anything of value here, apart from the historical background that the newly restored “French passage” provides? Well, there’s little in the acting, especially since the expanded version adds little, if anything, to Robert Duvall’s energetic Kilgore. Even with additions, Brando’s Kurtz remains murky and unsearched. On the other hand, Vittorio Storaro’s color cinematography, which won an Oscar, is mesmerizingly beautiful, especially during the long river journey. Indeed, a number of images are beautifully crafted by Coppola, although not early on, when his overreliance on closeups is tedious and unhelpful.

Coppola’s Vietnam epic is chiefly an exercise in directorial self-indulgence. It’s heavy-handed and almost obscene in its gleeful penchant for violence. At times, it verges on “borrowing” from Werner Herzog’s masterpiece, Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), much as Coppola’s Conversation (1974) “borrows” from Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blowup (1966). Nevertheless, Apocalypse Now is many times better than Platoon (1986), which, only because Coppola’s film headed into Heart of Darkness, clumsily grafted onto its crass Vietnam melodrama Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. Coppola has enough problems to prohibit his being mistaken for an artist, but he towers over the whining, self-pitying likes of an Oliver Stone.

OLIVIER, OLIVIER (Agnieszka Holland, 1992)

From France, the beguiling, haunting Olivier, Olivier is Polish filmmaker Agnieszka Holland’s companion-piece to her Europa Europa from the year before. Both, fact-based, center on an adolescent boy whose life is unimaginably rough—in Salomon’s case, in Europa Europa, because he is a German Jew impersonating a Nazi to elude imprisonment and death; in Olivier’s case, because, a runaway from home where he was sexually abused, he ekes out a perilous existence as a prostitute. Olivier, also, leads a “double life,” once he expediently slips into the role of Elizabeth and Serge Duval’s son, who disappeared, at age nine, six years earlier. And, like Salomon, he gets away with it, convincing even the parents. Indeed, some of his behavior argues that he must be little Olivier six years hence, even though, eventually, the child’s remains are discovered in a neighbor’s basement. We have, then, a mystery of time and identity, of the kind of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s The Double Life of Veronique (1991). And we have one film mirror-imaging the other; for, if Europa, Europa is the story of a boy with two identities, then Olivier, Olivier is the story of two boys with the same identity. How different their fates, though. Salomon Perel’s impersonation—his double being—rescues him, reuniting him with the one other family member of his to survive the Holocaust; but, bound by guilt, Olivier sacrifices his search for his own mother in order to adopt permanently the role of the Duvals’ lost son.

Informing the film is Charles Perrault’s “Little Red Riding Hood.” When nine-year-old Olivier takes off from his parents’ country home, on his sister’s bicycle, he is wearing his red 49ers cap and is headed to his ailing grandmother’s house with a basket of food that his mother prepared; en route, he is lured off the path by a “wolf”—Marcel, whose sexual overtures precipitate the child’s death down a flight of stairs. (For an even more bizarre and terrifying updating of the story, consult Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, 1973, from Daphne du Maurier.) In a silly, later version of the tale, the child, ripped from the wolf’s belly, survives. Holland’s film, then, encompasses both versions; by impersonating, or replacing, the dead boy, Olivier is—to apply Elizabeth’s phrase describing her son’s miraculous recovery from his almost fatal premature birth—“born twice.”

Little Red Riding Hood’s vulnerability is encapsulated by her namelessness; her only “protection,” symbolized by the cloak her grandmother made for her, is the family identity that contests her right to an identity of her own. This child exists solely as a family extension; the family permits her none of the individuality or independence that might save her. In Holland’s splendid film, both Oliviers are likewise victims of “family”: the nine-year-old, whose dependence on her his mother, almost hysterically fearful of losing him, has fostered, whose neglected, jealous sister, Nadine, terrorizes him, and whose surrogate father, Marcel, tries molesting him, causing his death; the fifteen-year-old, whose mother, ignorant of what was happening under her own roof, failed to protect him from the stepfather who raped him. Moreover, the latter boy ends up appropriated by the Duvals, with whom he remains in order to console them and keep them on an even keel and to assuage his guilt for having pretended to be their son in the first place. In perhaps the most radical reading possible, the film implies that the pressure that family members feel to flesh out the form and features of a myth makes any family, in effect, “surrogate,” the non-surrogate “reality” becoming the fantasy ideal every family must fail to realize. In the meantime, Olivier’s life is destroyed. It misses the point completely to suggest that, since “Olivier” has found the Duvals and the Duvals have found him, everyone benefits from the arrangement because none of them will ever be lonely again. Like Little Red Riding Hood, “Olivier” ends up having no name or identity except what “the family”—here, the Duvals—self-servingly confers on him. His life is over before it hardly began.

The film opens with what, in retrospect, is bleak irony. The screen is black. We hear a plaintive tune. Marcel, the young man whistling it, bicycles through a field; it is the tune he later plays as a trumpeted lament the fateful morning Olivier bicycles by his place on the way to Grandmother’s. For now, though, the camera slowly picks up Olivier safely playing with sister Nadine elsewhere in the field. Leading the play, Nadine, who is older, conjures a fantasy of alien intrusion that she and her brother must guard against. Of course, the real danger to them both is much closer to home. Nadine crushes a beetle—a show of force, invincibility. As Marcel pedals through, she raises to her eye a tube and makes a noise that magically translates into a beebee that knocks Marcel onto the grass. Undetected, the children giggle over his tumble. But it is Marcel who will decisively end their childhoods. Their power over him is illusory. It is adults who hold final power over children. Later, “Olivier” relishes manipulating the Duvals, all the while unaware that it is he who is helpless in their tightening grip.

Olivier’s disappearance clarifies the painfulness of the Duvals’ lives. Their “powers,” mental or imaginative, always come up short. Initially, Nadine believes that she herself wished Olivier out of the family for being their mother’s favorite; yet she cannot wish him back, even to relieve her own enormous pain. All she can do with her “mind” is perform parlor tricks: topple things; extinguish light bulbs. True, her initial guilt over Olivier’s disappearance gives way to gladness over having her mother, now, to herself; but her depth of love for her brother, which Holland is careful to show, becomes a retroactive index of her pain over his loss. Her mother can do even less to alter reality. Holding herself responsible for Olivier’s leaving home, because she failed to provide him with a “normal” environment, she is haunted by his image. After the boy’s “return,” when Nadine abruptly exits while she and Elizabeth are quarreling, through the outside door, flung open, Elizabeth “sees” her nine-year-old happily at play on a backyard swing, and she “hears” his giggling. But the visitation charts their non-negotiable separation; Olivier occupies a child’s world-of-his-own which his mother can “look at” but not enter. Even forging a continuity of identity between the two Oliviers cannot restore her cherished child to her aching arms.

But Elizabeth’s desire for this, plainly, is what leads her to accept this other boy as her lost son, despite the fact that he is missing Olivier’s round face, long eyelashes, freckles. Each point of similarity she can find, such as the “new” Olivier’s appendectomy scar, she clings to in defiance of the more considerable evidence of dissimilarity. Serge joins her in this, but for another reason as well; for this “return” of their son has meant the restoration of their marriage following a separation caused by Elizabeth’s appropriation of their loss as entirely her own—much as, previously, she had nurtured a closeness with the child that effectively had shut this father out. And why does Inspector Druot accept “Olivier” as Olivier, despite the physical dissimilarities between the two boys, despite the fact that the correct answers to his questions that “Olivier” provides—mostly, family names—the teenager could have gleaned from the case folder lying open on the policeman’s desk? Guilt. The boy’s disappearance had been his first case, which in the absence of productive leads he had had to close—but only after promising Elizabeth and Nadine that he would find their son and brother. Having failed to do this, he must come up with “Olivier” no matter what. Also, Druot’s career has stagnated under the stigma of this beginning failure of his—a situation he is motivated to reverse.

Why, however, does the boy himself say he is Olivier? Well, he never really does, although he craftily says enough to let others believe what they want. When interrogated, the boy is defensively glib. (From his eye movements and body language, it’s clear he is afraid of a beating.) Of the mother he is in Paris in search of, he says: “She is a Baltic empress. She was dumped by the Emir of Kuwait. Now she’s a maid at the Swedish embassy. Her father’s Scandinavian.” This cocky mixture of fairy-tale romance and real-world degradation reminds us of the childhood this “toilet hustler” has been robbed of; its riches-to-rags reversal of a fairy tale, in fact, implies a longing for childhood in one too steeped in a sordid world to hold out much hope of regaining it. More: his search for his mother suggests a specific fantasy that the teenager may be holding close to him. Might he not dream of rescuing her from whatever brutal fate his sudden departure from home may have provoked? When asked for her name, the boy restores her to a pedestal by replying, “Greta Garbo.” His ambivalence regarding her is simple to fathom but very painful to take in; he wants to protect his mother, but he also wants her to have protected him and to continue to do so—a crisis of confusion as to whether he is, or should be, a grownup or a child. This is heartrending stuff.

The adolescent’s fierce independence, though, kicks in to curb his pretense at being someone other than he is. When he shifts tone to declare,

I’m telling you the truth. No kidding: My name is Sébastien Blanche[,]

there is no doubt he is being truthful. However, it isn’t the truth Druot is desirous of. When Sébastien asks what will happen to him now, Druot, instead of offering help to find the boy’s mother, presents three choices: being returned to his miserable, ugly life, being sent to reform school, or, if only he “admits” to being Olivier Druot, being sent home to an environment whose protective warmth and happiness Druot greatly exaggerates. In effect, Sébastien’s “choice” is made for him. Also, he “confesses” to being Sébastien because he aches to please, which he likely associates with not being hit or hurt. Later, he confesses (again) to being Sébastien; this comes after he exposes Marcel as a child molester, in order to protect a boy littler than himself, and offers a solution to the real Olivier’s disappearance. “Why did you pretend?” Druot asks. Sébastien replies: “It’s what you wanted. It suited everyone. To make you happy.”

By “becoming” Olivier, Sébastien makes Elizabeth happiest of all. But when she takes him “home” by train the scene is fraught with a sense of the emotional danger he is being drawn into. Elizabeth rushes into their compartment with enough sandwiches for a family picnic, all for “Olivier”—feeding as a form of consuming. Already the boy is asleep by the window, utterly passive, vulnerable. Elizabeth cannot resist; she sits beside him. Fearing forgiveness isn’t possible, she pleads, “You’ll forgive me?” (Later, she explains, “It isn’t blackmail—but if you disappear again, I won’t be able to survive it.”) She starts to caress the boy’s cheek. His nervous system revulses; asleep still, he throws up his hand at her. Holland sharply cuts to the landscape fleeing, as if in terror, past the train window. Sébastien’s fate seems sealed. He will not be permitted not to be “Olivier.”

The one Duval who doesn’t believe him, who isn’t willing to pretend that he is Olivier, is Nadine. Since her brother’s disappearance and her father’s departure, she has had her mother all to herself. Even if correct, then, her skepticism about “Olivier” is as self-serving as everyone else’s acceptance of him. Her waking dream-world is disintegrating, revealing the extent to which she also has been crippled by “family.” To be sure, Nadine is unusual (as a scene showing her, in bed, stroking her pet lizard drives home), but she isn’t “her own person” as much as she thinks she is, for she has been shaped by her mother’s obsessive attachment to Olivier. This is why, although she dearly loved her brother, she bullied him and wished him, literally, out of a family picture in the first place. Now Nadine unreasonably expects Elizabeth to decline to have sex with her husband for the sake of some unspoken pact of sisterhood between mother and daughter. Like “Olivier,” Nadine is caught up in a tangle of blurred family roles. Her making love with Sébastien adds to this—although, for us, this humanizes her. In the midst of his deception, it also exposes Sébastien’s essential honesty. When Nadine (oddly) notes she hadn’t expected such pleasure from sex with a man, Sébastien replies, “But I’m not a man—I’m a boy.” It would seem that their having sex should keep Nadine fortified against accepting Sébastien as her brother; but the incestuous implication doesn’t deter, or apparently even faze, her. Now she believes Sébastien is Olivier. It is as if “incest” has moved her to openness to the possibility, perhaps as a rebuke to the whole idea of family. But the actual point of revelation waits for the next day. Through the window she sees “Olivier” merrily engaged in a “peeing contest” with Paul, the neighborhood child he will later rescue from Marcel’s grip; this is what Olivier and Marcel used to do, and “Olivier” is singing the same song that they used to sing together. Nadine’s initial hold-out lends credence to the idea that Olivier and “Olivier,” if not one and the same, are somehow connected—this, the core of mystery contributing to the film’s quality of elusiveness.

The film’s final scene argues best for this mystical connection between the two boys. Immediately preceding it, the dead child’s body is dug up in Marcel’s basement. Only Olivier’s wristwatch is shown, its face missing, suggesting a stoppage of time, to prepare us for a drift from reality to fantasy. Serge faints; Nadine spits in Druot’s face; the screen goes black.

The final passage consists of six shots. The first is the longest. Night: Nadine stares out the window, presumably at Olivier, at play, in her mind’s eye. The camera pans left, from Nadine’s reflection to her person—the effect is that, somehow, we have passed through a looking-glass,—and proceeds to follow her as she turns to serve her father coffee. Grim, he says: “You got your truth. Is that what you wanted?” The camera dips to Elizabeth, seated, looking stark, spent, almost in shock; behind her, Nadine continues to walk screen-left across the room’s length and then, with a turn, screen-left halfway across the room’s width, in advance of “Olivier,” whose parallel walking, in an adjacent room, we see through an archway. The camera proceeds left, passing a halted Nadine, to show “Olivier” entering through another archway and, before penetrating the room, smiling at Serge, from whose face, transformed, all care seems to have fallen away. Thus this single fluid, intricately choreographed camera movement creates an invisible thread connecting all the family members, including “Olivier” and, at the outset, by implication, the actual Olivier. We are about to reach a cut, concluding this extraordinary first shot.

Rather than fluid and extensive, the next shots are short, static. The cut beginning the second shot of the sequence occurs when “Olivier” sits down beside Elizabeth, who is, as she has been before, in a trance. (This reverses the shot, on the train, where Elizabeth sits beside the sleeping, dreaming “Olivier.”) As Olivier had done as a child, and “Olivier” except for somehow “being” him could not have known, “Olivier” waves his hand in front of Elizabeth’s face, saying, as another cut brings us a closeup of her face, “Back to Earth, Mom; I’m here.” And, just like six years earlier, this snaps Elizabeth to. Like Serge’s, her torment dissolves. Smiling, she turns to “Olivier” and says: “Olivier. You’re here?” Cut three; shot four is a closeup of the boy’s tearfully smiling face. Elizabeth continues: “You came back?” Cut four; shot five is a closeup of Elizabeth’s reciprocally tearfully smiling face. One more cut delivers the final shot, mysterious, sad, haunting: through the window, amidst blowing rain, the vacant swing. “Olivier,” the replacement, must forever remain an index of inconsolable loss.

This closing, desolate shot sweeps away whatever might be mistaken for a happy family reconstitution. Rather, what has tragically occurred indoors, at least on one level, is the completed projection upon Sébastien of Olivier’s identity. To be sure, Sébastien himself chose to return to the Duvals. However, he was really driven back by a combination of guilt, confusion and compassion. However we come to make them, though, our choices have psychological consequences. Tactfully, Holland declined to pursue these in her powerful Europa Europa, which passes over the mental and spiritual costs for Perel, not only of denying his Jewishness for survival’s sake, but of masquerading as one of the killers committed to destroying Jewry. By contrast, Olivier, Olivier fully intimates the toll of its aftermath. For Sébastien, there is neither freedom nor redemption; there will be no Israel where he can start afresh. For this boy ends as a sacrifice to stabilizing the Duvals. His mystic connection to their son clears the pathway to the altar, where the boy Sébastien is as lost to himself as his actual mother is lost to him. All loss, Holland suggests, is permanent. The empty swing evokes Olivier’s fate and, it turns out, Sébastien’s.

Holland has made an authentic film, one where each character, even Marcel, is probed and found to be behaviorally rich and complex. Holland is analytical; she has no interest whatsoever in providing a comic strip of victims and villains. She embraces the humanity of her characters in order to embrace her own humanity.

Her sterling trilogy about childhood suffering, begun with Europa Europa, ended with The Secret Garden (1993), based on Frances Hodgson Burnett’s children’s story. Another magnificent piece of work, this (somewhat exacting) film may be Holland’s most persuasive achievement to date. It is another gripping portrait of children enslaved in any number of ways by the adults who should be nurturing and protecting them; and, rousingly, it leads, not to devastation, but to a liberation of spirit, for which Holland devises a visual metaphor nearly as stunning as the springtime breakup of river ice that images revolution’s triumph over the tsarist regime in Vsevolod Pudovkin’s Mother (1926). For Holland uses time-lapse photography to capture a bursting into the sunlight of a dormant garden’s rebirth—stuff I remember from school science class films, here given fresh meaning and moral depth, to create a deeply moving passage. Since then, Holland has had Leonardo DiCaprio to contend with, playing Rimbaud no less, in an unpleasant Total Eclipse (1995); but she recouped with a fine Washington Square (1997), magnificently acted by Jennifer Jason Leigh.

Indeed, Holland directs actors wonderfully well. The acting in Olivier, Olivier, in fact, is nothing short of perfect. Brigitte Rouan and François Cluzet as Elizabeth and Serge Duval, and Frédéric Quiring as Marcel, are all excellent. Three of the other cast members are, however, superb. Jean-François Stévenin, a director himself, is brilliant as Druot, who, unaware of his psychological kinship with Marcel, seems to be turning away from himself when, in disgust, he turns away from Marcel after the digging up of the dead child. Faye Gatteau, as the six-year-later Nadine, and Grégoire Colin, who plays Sébastien, are memorable, too. Of course, in the decade since his exquisitely sensitive performing in this film, Colin has become one of the world’s great actors (Before the Rain, Fiesta, Nénette et Boni, The Dreamlife of Angels, Beau travail). This adds an unexpected note of pleasure to Holland’s film, for providing us in the U.S. with our first long look at Colin’s amazing talent, and his chiseled face and haunted eyes. Sébastien’s eyes.

THE DREAMERS (Bernardo Bertolucci, 2003)

The quality of Bernardo Bertolucci’s work is all over the map, but it is universally agreed that, from Moravia, the moody, spiderlike The Conformist (Il conformisti, 1970), about Fascism’s ghosts, is one of the most beautiful films ever made. I also hold in esteem Before the Revolution (Prima della rivoluzione, 1964), Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man (La tragedia di un uomo ridicolo, 1981), The Last Emperor (L’ultimo imperatore, 1987), and, partly against my better judgment, The Sheltering Sky (Il tè nel deserto, 1990). But the same artist also made the pathological, arty Last Tango in Paris (Ultimo tango a Parigi, 1972), and only Keanu Reeves, worthy of Hesse as Siddhartha, saves Little Buddha (1993) from utter chaos. I regret to say there are still lesser works, from the 1990s, that go so far down that they blur the distinction between Bertolucci and Franco Zeffirelli. Its brother-sister-friend triangle inspired by Jean Cocteau’s Les enfants terribles (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1949), The Dreamers (I sognatori) continues this dispiriting trend.

I can see the film only with my own eyes, not Roger Ebert’s, and I don’t know what to make of a film reviewer who, panning nearly every legitimate film that crosses his path (and not many do, for Ebert is addicted to seeing only the most illegitimate), has canonized this piece of mush, which “filled [me] with poignant and powerful nostalgia,” he writes, because it “evokes a time [in the 1960s] when the movies—good movies, both classic and newborn—were at the center of youth culture.” While Ebert is very much in tune with Bertolucci’s nostalgic aspiration, I am not. I would rather revisit Jean-Luc Godard’s Band à part (Band of Outsiders, 1964)—and I can, and I do—than delight in Bertolucci’s fleeting quotation from it as his three teens reenact the Godard trio’s running the length of a room in Le Louvre, no matter how skillfully cutter Jacopo Quadri has interspliced the homage and the original, shifting back and forth between color and black and white. For me, Bertolucci’s three main characters command no interest on their own, unlike the boy and the girl who meet and romance in Paris in Pascal Aubier’s 1995 Son of Gascogne (Le fils de Gascogne), a more spirited hommage to the nouvelle vague.

A number of critics, Ebert among them, contend that The Dreamers shows the confluence of movies, sex and politics at a particular time in world history. Perhaps; but I see instead a movie about an American boy who prefers to urinate in sinks rather than in urinals, and, absent a lot of foolish “reading in,” I don’t see politics in this, only spankable behavior. (His French host’s toothbrush falls into the sink; the American boy wets it, shakes it—oh, brother—and the next day stands idly by as the host brushes his teeth.) Indeed, political turmoil in the streets, in Paris in 1968, is mere backdrop for the kids’ movie- and sex-obsessed games, in the apartment shared (while their parents are conveniently away) by French twins, a boy and a girl, and their American guest. Something from the street flies in through a window at one point, and the twins do end up joining the street riots (why I can’t say), but the political moment is only arbitrarily dragged in whenever Bertolucci and company want their film to seem more meaningful than it is.

In 1968 street protests in Paris, organized by Godard, followed the ouster of Henri Langlois from the venerated institution he founded, the Cinéthèque Français. (Bertolucci intersplices documentary footage of Jean-Pierre Léaud addressing the original crowd and an older Léaud doing the same in the film’s reconstruction of the event.) This event triggered a wider event: street protests and riots so voluminous and politically far-ranging in their Leftist impetus that the government nearly toppled as a result. Bertolucci’s film begins with the triggering event and ends with the outcome-event.

The twins, Theo and Isabelle, befriend fellow American cinéaste, Matthew, who is studying in Paris, taking the innocent into their quasi-incestuous domain—although chaste, the brother and sister sleep together, naked—à la Les enfants terribles. They play games based on acting out movies. When Theo fails to recognize Isabelle’s impersonation of Marlene Dietrich in Blonde Venus (Josef von Sternberg, 1932), for instance, his “forfeit,” which she gets to determine, is to masturbate in front of a still of Dietrich in The Blue Angel (Sternberg, 1930). Matthew and Isabelle eventually become lovers, triggered by the sex that is yet another forfeit, as Theo watches, vicariously participating as voyeur. Bertolucci succeeds in keeping our own voyeuristic tendencies at bay; this is not a prurient film. Nevertheless, its “innocence” wobbles in an overheated atmosphere of incipient, seemingly imminent, incest, not to mention homosexuality between the boys, whose chaste naked bodies also commingle, and whose buttocks, either bare or thinly clad, are like magnets for the gaze of Bertolucci’s camera. (So are Isabelle’s breasts.) I gather from the DVD commentary provided by Bertolucci, a producer, and the author of both the screenplay and the autobiographical novel, The Holy Innocents, upon which it is based, Gilbert Adair, that the boys originally do become lovers. The commentators seem to think this removes “homoeroticism” from the film’s “rich plate,” as one of them puts it; rather, this procedure displaces the homoeroticism, converting its repression into thick, oriental perfume. The Dreamers does for repressed homosexuality what Black Narcissus (Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger, 1947) does for repressed heterosexuality. I submit that such repression can do nothing for the film’s purported political angle, although I’m not sure that either actual incest or gay lovemaking would have been thematically any more useful.

The film achieves something of a low point when the twins’ parents return unannounced, mark their children’s and Matthew’s entwined, naked sleeping bodies, write a check so that no one will do without, and silently exit. This, apparently, was an inspiration of Bertolucci’s that owes nothing to the book. In my opinion, Adair ought to heave a sigh of relief, and we all might wonder what planet Signor Bertolucci inhabits. I know what his answer would be: the sixties! His hazy memories may require the correction of a parental mind.

But that’s just it; not much of any sort of mind has gone into this film, only a lot of warm, fuzzy feelings for those bygone days when it seemed possible for movies to change the world. The bloodless sixties revolution, Bertolucci, again on the DVD commentary track, proclaims a rousing success, for the way that men and women today are able to interrelate is the legacy of that war. Perhaps.

For the record, brooding Theo is played by Louis Garrel, the son of brilliant French filmmaker Philippe Garrel. When, oh when, is some outfit going to bring Garrel’s films out on VHS or DVD in the States?

28 DAYS LATER . . . (Danny Boyle, 2002)

Paced to a crawl in order to intensify the effect of punctuations of violence, and decked out in tricks of editing to manufacture the same result, Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later . . ., strenuously written by Alex Garland, is pitched between two genres: horror and science fiction. In this regard it doesn’t compare with Howard Hawks’s—sorry, I mean Christian Nyby’s—The Thing from Another World (1951), the beautifully balanced masterpiece of this category of hybrid. More to the more recent point, Boyle’s film, longer on disgusting gore than real frights, fails to rise to the extraordinary level of Lars von Trier’s Epidemic (1988), although it steals atmosphere from not only that film but the other two wonderful films that flank Epidemic in von Trier’s “European Trilogy,” The Elements of Crime (1984) and Europa (1991). The result is lame, tedious, incoherent, dishonest and, above all, given the dire circumstances the film imagines, cheapened by gestures and gushes of sentimentality. Like Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings, it’s all Christian violins behind its screen of grimacing masks.

Vaguely, in the recesses of my filmgoing memory, I recall Jack Nicholson’s maiden effort as a film director, Drive, He Said (1971), by way of writer Jeremy Larner, not to mention Robert Creeley, one of whose poems provided the title. In that good little film, a college malcontent (played by Michael Margotta as a young Nicholson) frees test animals from the school’s laboratory. 28 Days Later . . . takes that comedic premise and, adding irony to protest, generates instead a grim result. The released animals in Boyle’s film are infected with a disease that, once given a shot at infecting Brits, turns the latter into crazed, bug-eyed, murderous zombies that vomit blood and need only to get a single drop into a victim’s orifice to make her or him one of its own kind. After a lot of solemnizing, it turns out that the “virus” is nothing more than nature and human nature’s already well-honed propensity to kill its own. One character quips something to the effect that the “epidemic” hasn’t really changed anything, that people killed people before and during the outbreak. This is a film that spells out its heavy message, with sacred and quasi-sacred music being played in the background, and allusion piled on top of allusion (such as the menstrual cycle, to which, for goodness knows what reason, the title refers). Human hatred and violence, then, are what the epidemic amounts to, and indeed violence begets violence as uninfected humans hack to death infected ones to save themselves—the word survival is repeated throughout the film—and to restrict the spread of epidemic. Moreover, some casting choices imply a subcategory of this social disease of hatred and violence: racial bigotry and interracial violence. The film can’t breathe for being so overloaded with portentous meaning.

In the main, the film follows four survivors as they try fleeing to what they hope will be safety: a man, his young daughter, a young man, a young woman. The first is killed after a drop of tainted blood falls in his eye, from a corpse perched above him, giving the film one of its silly allusions to God’s judgment. (The guy was looking up.) At this point the child has lost both mother and father, but apparently is too numbed by the repetition of loss to register grief of any kind. (However, the young woman explains to the young man that the girl feels awful—something she must glean from her common sense.) At the end of the film, when the epidemic has run its course and the threesome are conveniently and unconvincingly rescued,* 56 days after the initial outbreak, the child is discarded like so much junk. Who will give her a home? Garland and Boyle couldn’t care less. The child’s loss of both parents apparently doesn’t bother them either.

The plot takes many twists; the two females become the captives of soldiers who, compelled to rape them in order to have a sense of future (somehow, though, the rapes never occur), and, in the film’s most depraved tack, we are tricked into believing that the young man has become one of the tainted killing zombies when in fact he is only one of the retaliatory untainted killing machines—this, a once gentle English fellow. (We watch him gouge out one of the soldier’s eyes with his fingers and laugh to ourselves, “Out, vile jelly!”) This is all set-up for a one-liner he snaps at the young woman, who is about to kill him, before they kiss. Boyle’s film stoops to manipulating its audience at every turn.

Twenty-eight days later, and then another 28 days later . . . . The action of Boyle’s film should have ended 56 days sooner.

* This, it turns out, is the ending for U.S. consumption only. In the version shown everywhere else, the hero dies and no one rescues the other two.