THE CIRCLE (Jafar Panahi, 2000)

I wasn’t the least bit impressed by his White Balloon (1995), which (as far as I’m concerned) doesn’t benefit even from having been written by Abbas Kiarostami, and I was only a little more impressed by The Mirror (1997), also about a child.* (So many Iranian films are about children, I presume, to be “humanistic” and politically safe.) But the third film must be the charm, for I’m blown away by Jafar Panahi’s The Circle (Dayereh), a grownup film for grown-ups that won the top prize, the Golden Lion of St. Mark, at Venice—after the Palme d’Or at Cannes, the world’s most prestigious film prize. The Circle—Il cerchio in two of its funding countries, Italy and Switzerland—also won as best film at the Uruguay International Film Festival, and it won International Film Critics’ prizes at both San Sebastián and Venice.

Working this time from an inspired script by Kambuzia Partovi (himself a filmmaker), Panahi has made one of the world’s great films about the oppression of women in a patriarchic society. As if to prove Partovi and Panahi’s point, the Islamic Republic has banned the film on the homefront, suppressing its most essential viewing. Thus Iran, in whose streets and buildings most of the film was shot, has followed the ignominious path of Stalin’s Soviet Union regarding Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein’s Boyars’ Plot (Ivan the Terrible Part II, 1946), and the U.S. government, which consigned to darkness John Huston’s postwar documentary Let There Be Light (also 1946) for nearly a quarter-century, not to mention the Nation of Liberty, France, which banned Luis Buñuel’s anarchic L’age d’Or (1930) after its initial showing provoked riots. (It took fifty years before this film appeared commercially in the United States!) Indeed, whether it be by dint of governmental authority or the dictates of the marketplace and unfortunate distribution practices—it makes no difference which, for the outcome is the same—the suppression of art and of free expression—is one of the world’s sad customs, making life miserable for both artists and those who want to see, who often must see, their work.

The Circle, like Joris Ivens and Mannus Frånken’s Regen (Rain, 1929), instances one of cinema’s exemplary uses of hand-held camera.** Rarely has a theme so clearly invited its use. For this is a film that begins by showing one female character, but then, leaving her behind, jumps to a pair of other female characters, then follows one of these, then jumps to another woman entirely, and then another, and then another. Each of these characters reveals something more about the state of women, socially, economically and politically, in the Islamic Republic. As the circle closes and the theme of the film becomes more firmly set, the camera settles into a fixed state; by then, we ourselves have interiorized the agitation and anxiety of its earlier incarnation. The viewer is indeed drawn into this film; the viewer becomes an imaginative participant even as he or she reserves the critical, objective faculty to analyze, and sing the praises of, some remarkable camera motion, with the camera lighting on some amazing mise-en-scène. In an interview accompanying the DVD of the film, Panahi explains that shots had to be done over and over, given that the street reality, in Tehran, in and about the shooting presented visual surprises that either would or would not mesh with the principal action. Whatever; everything, no matter how meticulously planned or composed, appears off-the-cuff and surgingly real. Panahi says he was after a style of documentary realism. He nailed it.

When the film opens, the camera is fixed. The scene, not in the script, is of his own devising; “[t]he rest of the film,” Panahi has said, “explains that first shot”—a long take. In a hospital waiting room, a woman is informed by a white-garbed nurse through a small sliding window that her daughter has given birth to a girl. The woman, in the black outer garment from head to toe prescribed by hejab (the Iranian dress code for females), has her back to us as she faces the window. (In this film, women often are shot from behind their backs, often when they are running and hiding. This visually underscores two things, one objective, one subjective: the oppression to which females are subject; their constant fear of legal retribution.) The window, which has now been slid shut, is the only access to the other side in a vast white wall. The woman does not budge. Finally, her flesh-colored hand uncertainly disrupts the shot’s white-black decorum as she knocks anew at the window. She asks again for the information, wondering if it’s mistaken, explaining that ultrasound had indicated a boy baby, not a girl. The nurse answers that sometimes this happens, the new grandmother mutters, “My poor daughter,” and that the baby’s father’s family will now ask for a divorce, and the nurse curtly responds, “I’m sure everything will be all right,” before sliding the window shut with (what must seem to the grandmother) alarming finality. Distressed, the woman lies to the in-laws, saying she hasn’t heard anything about the baby’s birth and, as one of the in-laws approaches the window to inquire, she takes off down a narrow circular stairway to the street. “My poor daughter,” she again says. The camera, at her back, erupts into agitation during this black-robed descent.

The woman is worried about her daughter, whose marriage may dissolve because she did not give birth to a boy, but we think about the bleak prospects for both the daughter and the daughter’s daughter. Although two of these we never see, mother, daughter and granddaughter form a kind of circle in our minds—a chain of misery rather than of social progress. It’s the image of a gender’s imprisonment in a religious state and culture that ranks females below males. The film will end in an actual jail, in a circular holding cell for women around which the camera pans, implicitly creating an invisible chain linking characters on the basis of the subjugation they share. The camera in its circular path will light on a small window in the door. Visually, the film will come full circle. Throughout this pan, we hear a phone in the background ringing and ringing: an unbroken cycle or circle of sound. Somehow, subliminally, the fact that no one picks up the phone to answer it reinforces our sense of the confinement and impotence of those in the holding cell.

This is a film full of circular patterns and structures, curved and circular camera movements; and, quite astonishingly, all this is done very lightly. Panahi has seen to it that the camera never seems to be held by a heavy hand. Indeed, the film, against oppression, doesn’t mangle its own soul by imposing its own oppressive style on the viewer. Panahi grasps that one can’t credibly expose oppression if one is being oppressive, however differently, oneself.

Of course, the continual derailment of a single narrative is one way that the film remains too fleeting and elusive to land with a thud in the Big Message Swamp. But just as important to the film’s deliciously poignant lightness is its lack of unnecessary exposition; The Circle doesn’t explain the exact circumstances of any of its women in flight apart from the first. We must pick up the facts on the run—as the characters run or walk or sit in an automobile or minibus; or, sometimes, we need to use our imagination to fathom someone’s situation. The panic or despair that besets the main characters takes precedence over individual circumstance. What better way to imply that, although circumstances may differ, the bottom-line is the same: these women aren’t free and are under constant duress?

Let us draw, then, the film’s circle of women, beginning with the pair upon whom the camera lights after leaving the woman whose daughter has given birth to a daughter. These are Nargess and Arezou, ducking and hiding because women aren’t supposed to be out on the street unaccompanied by an adult male and because they’re terrified that they may be picked up by the police and returned to prison, from which they have just been released, where they have been for what crime we are not told. (The film’s circularity suggests this possibility: the two committed the same “crime” that they’re committing now, by being out in public, because they have no place to go, without money, proper I.D., a male escort, et cetera.) The two friends want to leave town, and one of them, with the other’s help, is able to do so (this isn’t entirely explained, either); ironically, the bus’s destination seems to be the hometown of the woman who is left behind. Thus Nargess is on her own, at one point begging the person at the counter to bend the rules and sell her a bus ticket—she has sold her gold necklace so that both Arezou and she might leave—even though she lacks the proper I.D. The young man will not budge, and Panahi at that moment scores a wondrous coup because he enables us to see vis-à-vis Nargess’s desperation the legal bind that the man is in; he is enforcing the male prerogatives that Iranian law dictates, but he is doing so without personal arrogance. He will lose his job and end up in prison if he cedes to Nargess’s plea and is caught. Thus Panahi succeeds in showing that he—a male—is also trapped in the circle, that the law dictated by religion also curtails the freedom of men, especially those young enough or sufficiently enlightened to possess social views at variance with those founded in a narrow, inflexible, fundamentalist view of the Muslim faith.

The camera passes next to Pari, Nargess’s and Arezou’s friend from prison. She apparently has escaped from prison, where she may have been raped; we can’t be sure, for, although we know that she is pregnant, we don’t know how long she has been pregnant or how long she has been in prison. She is out because she wants an abortion. As a result of the pregnancy, not to mention the desired abortion, her brothers want to kill her, precipitating her escape to the streets from their father’s house: what she had hoped against hope would be a sanctuary for her. Pari seeks help from another former inmate, Elham, who, married to a doctor now and thus peculiarly able to help her, cannot do so without (she must feel) jeopardizing her marriage. The bond of female solidarity forged by the shared experience of prison has given way in her case to her new life of privilege. Elham cannot act, or even attempt to act, on the basis of their bond but must acquiesce to the dictates of her husband’s status. Marriage protects, but it’s a fragile institution in Iranian society, apparently, that may dissolve at any moment if the wife seems to be disappointing the requirements of her circumscribed role. For some reason, I thought of Othello here, of Desdemona’s pressing Cassio’s suit to her husband after the latter has discharged Cassio from his military company. Pari’s former friend, in this view, cannot risk doing anything that might bring upon her, as it were, Desdemona’s fate. I hesitate to invoke Shakespeare where it’s probably the case that neither the scenarist nor the director had Shakespeare in mind; but, for me, doing so clarifies the nature of Elham’s concern and the sense in which she, too, is confined to the circle.

The next woman upon whom the camera lights is someone Pari chances across in the street at night as she wanders in utter defeat and despair. This is Nayareh, who is planning to abandon her little daughter. Testifying to the strength and integrity of Panahi’s vision, we do not once think of Nayareh as a projection of Pari; rather, Nayareh is real to us and to Pari, who in reacting to this stranger’s planned abandonment of her born child is reacting, besides, to her own planned abortion. But what can Pari do? To have the child would socially, dreadfully, mark her child as well as herself. All she can do is make her plea to Nayareh to keep her daughter, whose flaming red hat discloses the bloodlife that Nayareh feels compelled to give up and, also, a mother’s crafty planning that her child won’t go unnoticed and will be hopefully, therefore, brought by someone to some safe harbor. Panahi’s brilliant use of the child’s red hat, impassioned and humane, contrasts with Steven Spielberg’s fish-cold treatment of the child in a red coat—where the coat is all of the child we are allowed to see—in one of his cinematic abominations, Schindler’s List (1993). Whereas Panahi’s use of red in a girl’s apparel provides a heartrending index of maternal love and helplessness, Spielberg’s use dehumanizes a child in order to concoct a clever symbol of doomed European Jewry. Form and content shouldn’t be so at variance; in art, each suits the other.

The long shot of the child being led away by some man is, for me, as ambiguous and disconcerting as the long shot of someone stopping on the road to take into his car the passed-out Mike at the end of Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho (1991); even against one’s better judgment, one must hope for the best. The camera now leaves Pari for Nayareh, for whom, as she walks at night cloaked in her distress, a car stops. She gets in. The camera remains fixed on her face, the male driver excluded from the frame. We are watching a woman who, at loose ends in her life, doesn’t know what she is doing. She begs her way out of the car, wishing to go back and find her daughter (or at least saying so), but the police stop the car—throughout the film, authorities are prying into people’s lives—and arrest Nayareh for being a prostitute. The last woman, in Westernized dress (she is the first of the main characters we have seen to wear makeup), is riding a city bus alone. Is this the woman who has given birth to a girl instead of the expected boy?; or, in a trick of time, is she that woman before she has given birth, when she has first learned of her pregnancy and has to worry what gender her child would be? As at the beginning, with the character who may be her mother, the camera is steady; but we “see” her concern in her face and her agitation in the city sights we see flying by through the bus window by her seat.

This last female of the circle also smokes a cigarette. Throughout the film, women in public are smoking on the sly, or trying but not being able to smoke, in defiance of the law that will incarcerate them for committing this offense. Panahi calls this an “insignificant restriction” that, divested of moment and focused on a small part of everyday life, provides a more telling index of the complex of restrictions to which Iranian women are subject than might some more salient behavior. (Certainly the fact that a woman is wrongly imprisoned for prostitution suggests that Iranian women in general are imprisoned commonly for no good reason—as a matter of fact, for no bad reason, either.) We are dealing here with state criminalization of the trivial. Since men can smoke freely whenever or wherever they want, this silly prohibition underscores the depth of the dire situation in which Iranian women find themselves. They must be in constant fear over matters large and small.

Shooting for a mere 35 days, Panahi has made an extraordinarily beautiful film. Its beauty lies in the use of the camera and the expressive nature of its unfussily detailed mise-en-scène. An example of the latter is a shot where Nargess and Arezou appear in the foreground of a street stall behind which only men are working: an unstressed thematic snapshot. The actresses also contribute to the brilliance of the result. All but two of them are nonprofessionals. One of these professionals gives the film’s most trenchant performance; this is Fatemeh Naghavi, who plays Nayareh. Close behind is the nonprofessional who plays Nargess: Nargess Mamizadeh. Finally, as a friend (and filmmaker) pointed out to me, the naturalistic street sounds assist the film to greatness. Their density echoes the women’s sense of distress and commotion, and at the same time the sounds do not assert themselves too much or too loudly. Panahi handles this lightly, too.

An interview of him on the DVD reveals Panahi to be a serious and committed artist. Let me quote the filmmaker: “How an . . . audience will receive a film [of mine] is not a concern for me. . . . Perhaps the American cinema is based on making high-grossing films . . . [but] I think that it’s up to my audience to find me, not for me to look for an audience.” Panahi’s outlook stresses the independence and integrity of the artist, who must freely express rather than compromise his or her ideas by catering to an audience. Only such an outlook could have produced The Circle.

* The world, you know, doesn’t always agree with me, and I don’t necessarily think that the problem is with the world. Panahi’s The White Balloon won the Camera d’Or at Cannes, the International Jury Award at São Paolo, and the best film prize at the Tokyo International Film Festival. The Mirror did well, too, winning the Golden Leopard at Locarno, the Golden Tulip at Istanbul, and the best director prize at the Singapore International Film Festival. My appreciation of Panahi, then, has come late. To paraphrase/mangle a soulful Victorian bard: “’Tis better to have loved at last/ Than never to have loved at all.”

** It seems to me an American problem is this: Use of hand-held camera is often so exaggerated that the agitation seems to belong to the filmmaker rather than to whatever or whomever the filmmaker wishes to portray as agitated. Certainly Schindler’s List is the worst offender (ever) in this regard, but it’s even the case in Woody Allen’s otherwise admirable Husbands and Wives (1992) the year before.

GYPSY (Mervyn LeRoy, 1962)

One doesn’t normally associate the name Mervyn LeRoy with musicals. The most substantial part of the director’s reputation derives from edgy dramatic films he made at Warner Bros. during the 1930s: Little Caesar (1930), Five Star Final (1931), I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932), Three on a Match (1932), The World Changes (1933), They Won’t Forget (1937). The last of these, which is based on the Leo Frank murder trial a quarter-century earlier, I have written, “claims a thematically rich and beautifully integrated plate of concerns, taking aim at a number of targets: regional prejudice, media’s undue influence on legal process, lynching, and the state’s inclination to fit a murder case to a presumption of guilt against the accused by manipulating witnesses and distorting evidence along the way.” Alas, this stunning social melodrama is scarcely less relevant today, nor has any movie since I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, powerfully acted by Paul Muni, done a more compelling job of showing how a decent individual can end up leading a criminal existence; it’s an American Les misérables of the Great Depression. In a showier, more fanciful vein, LeRoy produced and directed the compulsively watchable Napoleonic romance Anthony Adverse (1936), with a strange, almost delirious segment excoriating white Europe’s involvement in the African slave trade. As the quintessential Hollywood director of themes suited to the Depression, LeRoy fleetingly appears as a character in the film version of Horace McCoy’s 1935 novel They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (Sydney Pollack, 1969).

LeRoy also made musical films during the 1930s, among them Gold Diggers of 1933 starring Joan Blondell. This hugely entertaining film, about chorines struggling to find work and romance during the Depression, opens and closes with a spectacular onstage ensemble choreographed by Busby Berkeley: the ironical “We’re in the Money,” vibrantly led by Fay Fortune (Ginger Rogers), in which the girls’ costumes consist of shiny simulated coins, with a giant coin covering each girl’s crotch; the trenchant “The Forgotten Man,” essaying the related irony that those who fought for America in the world war have since been tossed onto the rubbish heap of poverty and unemployment. Both these numbers are so brilliant that the film is often attributed to Berkeley rather than LeRoy, but Gold Diggers of 1935, which Berkeley did direct, is deadly and close to unendurable except for the musical numbers. It is LeRoy’s light, lively handling of the offstage material in the original (highlighted by Aline MacMahon’s wise-cracking and bright acting) that helps impress an aura of surrealism on the opening and closing musical numbers; and, for once, the story seems to be embedded in the numbers, interrupting these, rather than the other way around, permitting the songs and dances to coalesce into a commentary on the Depression, and this, also, owes more to LeRoy than to Berkeley, superlative as the latter’s contributions are.

Show Girl in Hollywood (1930) and Sweet Adeline (1934) are other LeRoy musicals. Moreover, when toward the end of the decade LeRoy left Warners for M-G-M, his maiden project at the studio would be a musical of sorts: The Wizard of Oz, which Victor Fleming’s literal, heavy-handed direction, as well as the film’s exorbitant expense, turned into a financial flop. Those films that LeRoy himself directed at M-G-M showed little, if any, of the flair of his films at Warner Bros.; many were well-upholstered weepies (Blossoms in the Dust, 1941; Random Harvest, 1942). Now LeRoy was more producer than director, even when he directed, and his ambition was subordinated to the manufacturing of image for such stars as Greer Garson and Lana Turner, the latter of whom LeRoy had strikingly introduced at Warners in They Won’t Forget but who never again would give a single credible performance despite the strenuous efforts of LeRoy and others. One thing more: LeRoy’s films used to move quickly, as if to an urgent pulse; divested of the director’s brio, not to mention the transformative imprint of the cutters at Warners (including Ralph Dawson, who won one of his three Oscars for Anthony Adverse), his films at M-G-M tended to move at a snail’s pace. Brief scenes were replaced by long ones—long enough to accommodate Miss Garson’s slow, self-important way of talking. In his autobiography, LeRoy credited Garson with having the most beautiful voice in films—a voice, attached to a manner, that he indulged to his own detriment as artist. (On the other hand, pre-LeRoy Garson delights in Sam Wood’s 1939 Goodbye, Mr. Chips and Robert Z. Leonard’s 1940 Pride and Prejudice.)

Mister Roberts (1955) brought LeRoy back to Warners—but a Warners no longer on the cutting edge of contemporary social dramas. (These, now, tended to emerge from Columbia and United Artists.) John Ford, the principal director of Mister Roberts, fell ill during the filming, and LeRoy completed the job; since the film alternately sparkles and goes flat, many (including I) have always assumed that Ford made the thing sparkle and LeRoy took the fizz out. The film was a huge hit, as was The Bad Seed (1956) the following year, about a mother’s grief upon discovering that her little daughter is a murderous monster; the child’s ability to pull the wool over certain eyes inspired the running gag in the television series Leave It to Beaver, where Eddie Haskell is far less proficient at fooling at least The Beaver’s parents. Despite fine acting by Jean Simmons, who “goes blonde” for the first time since Hamlet (Laurence Olivier, 1948), Home Before Dark (1958), a murky marital melodrama, lost money. I have no idea how The F.B.I. Story (1960) fared, but it is somewhat entertaining and sparked by Vera Miles’s vivid acting.

The aforementioned film contains right-wing propaganda. Had LeRoy, of the crusading Left during the Depression, shifted politics after the war to avoid industry denunciation and career problems, the way that Al Jolson did? This certainly would help explain LeRoy’s otherwise incomprehensible later remark that he intended no “message” in They Won’t Forget—that he was interested only in telling a good story. One may speculate that his move to M-G-M represented one self-dissociation and that this was compounded by the further self-dissociation that his disavowal of Leftist social and political intent stamped on the contours of his personality and career. In a sense, the unfair pressures that the United States imposes, where one can be oneself only at the risk of paying a terrible price, may have taken its toll. Is it possible that Mervyn LeRoy was no longer Mervyn LeRoy?

Setting aside the wonderful Mister Roberts, which, despite a few gulps and hiccups, is recognizably a Ford film, Gypsy is the best thing that LeRoy did professionally since his heyday in the 1930s. It may be the most underrated, underappreciated Hollywood musical ever. Its script, by Leonard Spigelgass, is based on the book for the 1959 stage musical, by Arthur Laurents. In turn, this was based on former stripper Gypsy Rose Lee’s book Gypsy, A Memoir. Jule Styne composed the good music for the stage play; Stephen Sondheim, the phenomenal lyrics. (Dance critic Arlene Croce has called Gypsy the all-time greatest Broadway musical.) Rosalind Russell took over from Ethel Merman the part of Rose Hovick, the thrice-divorced, promiscuous driving engine behind her two young daughters’ vaudeville act. (LeRoy had directed Russell the year before, in A Majority of One—the role for which Gertrude Berg had won a Tony.) Doubtless, Russell was in part chosen because she could sing—and had done so, on Broadway, in Wonderful Town (1953), where she recreated her role as big sister Ruth in My Sister Eileen (Alexander Hall, 1942). (Wonderful Town included early choreography by Bob Fosse.) Russell’s singing in Gypsy is terrific. However, the lion’s share of Rose’s singing is given over to Lisa Kirk, whose smooth, modest voice poorly matches up with Russell’s huskier, more robust one. Especially annoying are the painstaking attempts to interweave both voices in the same song. Regrettably, Hollywood continually practiced this nonsense of dubbing a decent singing voice with a far lesser, more agreeably conventional one, very often Marni Nixon’s shrill excuse for a voice. Because of the mismatch between someone’s speaking and dubbed singing voice, it was always a mistake to go this route, and it never failed to hurt a film.

Merman’s stage performance, by all accounts tremendous, remains legendary, although Merman lost the Tony to Mary Martin’s Maria in The Sound of Music, while two subsequent Roses, Angela Lansbury and Tyne Daly, did win Tonys for revivals of Gypsy. Merman, in truth, wasn’t the most felicitous actress, to judge by her screen work, and she was notorious for “telephoning in” performances as the run of a play progressed. (But how the run of her plays progressed—and progressed.) In any case, none of these actresses, Russell included, could compare with Anna Magnani as Maddalena Cecconi, the ferocious stage mother in Luchino Visconti’s Bellissima (1951)—the greatest film performance ever by one of the greatest actresses ever. Merman, terrific as she must have been as Mama Rose, is not the gold standard.

Russell is great in LeRoy’s Gypsy; her performance rivets attention and electrifies. Looking gorgeous (at 54), Russell is also very moving, giving full, humane weight to the fact that Rose Hovick drove her daughters in large part to make herself feel herself a mother, to compensate for her own mother’s abandonment of her and to guard against allowing issues of poverty, discouragement and distress to make her do the same with her children. It is something of the old LeRoy that would make this dread of hers the psychological crux of Rose, and Russell is brashly, warmly and hilariously onboard. For me, Russell is no Gertrude Berg in A Majority of One, but she can honorably compete with any other Rose in Gypsy. Post-1993, the year of Bette Midler’s formless, vacuous attempt at the part in a television production (Emile Ardolino), Russell seems more fetching and heart-grazing than ever. This is a performance right up there with her work in The Women (George Cukor, 1939), His Girl Friday (Howard Hawks, 1940) and Auntie Mame (Morton Da Costa, 1958). Curiously, at times Russell’s personality recalls that of forthright, wide-eyed Joan Blondell in LeRoy’s Gold Diggers of 1933. Only, there’s a good deal more razzle-dazzle to Russell, and this helps knock “Rose’s Turn”—the number in which Rose imagines herself as the stripper, the star, that her daughter has become—out of the ballpark.

Natalie Wood plays Louise, the daughter whom Rose ignores while pouring affection on Louise’s sister, June—in their act, first, Baby June and, later, Dainty June. This, of course, is future actress June Havoc; but until June runs off with a member of the cast in order to marry him and Rose redirects her attention to Louise, the one daughter that remains through whom she might realize her own frustrated ambition, it scarcely seems that Louise has a future. The running gag is that Rose doesn’t know what Louise’s talent is. A mistaken booking at a burlesque house will settle the matter. Louise, whom Rose has always exhorted to “sing out!” will become America’s most famous and accomplished stripper, Gypsy Rose Lee.

Wood is easily one of my least favorite actresses. Unquestionably, though, she was a sensitive child actress. Orson Welles, who played with her in Tomorrow Is Forever (Irving Pichel, 1946) when she was seven, believed in her talent, and Wood’s performance in Miracle on 34th Street (George Seaton, 1947) accounts for a good deal of the holiday classic’s appeal. As a teenager, Wood began her boyish phase; what no one could possibly predict is that she would never clarify the sexual blur that her screen personality became. Nevertheless, Bette Davis’s brilliant acting as Margaret Hayes in The Star (Stuart Heisler, 1952) pulled Wood up, and Wood gave a credible performance as a teenager who is worried that her mother, a film actress, is no longer a “star.” Wood’s acting in subsequent films proved wooden, hollow, ridiculous: Rebel Without a Cause (Nicholas Ray, 1955), The Searchers (Ford, 1956), Marjorie Morningstar (Irving Rapper, 1958), Splendor in the Grass (Elia Kazan, 1961), West Side Story (Jerome Robbins, Robert Wise, 1961). Moreover, her indeterminate sexuality made her the object of jokes on high school campuses across America. It escaped no one’s attention that Robert Wagner, twice her husband, was effeminate while Wood never really could be described as feminine. Wood took another turn at a tomboy part in Inside Daisy Clover (Robert Mulligan, 1965). This was post-Gypsy, and the actress was 26. Natalia Nikolaevna Zakharenko was 43 when she drowned.

A discussion of Gypsy is indeed not the occasion to dismiss Wood’s abilities as an actress. As wonderful as Russell is as Rose, Wood is better as Louise. I completely understand why Russell won the Golden Globe, but fellow nominee Wood ought to have won. Surely LeRoy helped; but let us not forget that Wood herself had been the object of a stage mother’s ambition. Wood, for once, was perfectly cast. This was her life. Here, Wood is the engine behind one of the film’s most interesting themes: a young woman’s declaration of independence from a powerful mother. For me, she accomplishes this aspect of her role with a good deal more truthfulness than Bette Davis managed in the inflated soap opera Now, Voyager (Rapper, 1942). Early on, Wood draws little attention to herself or her character as sister June dominates the spotlight at Mama Rose’s behest. This is correlative to the lack of attention that Rose pays Louise; but the kindness and loyalty to others she projects—qualities, incidentally, that by all accounts Wood shared with Louise—put us in her corner. Moreover, Wood’s unassuming take on the young Louise adds credibility to Louise’s later blossoming; when Louise’s self-assertiveness finally kicks in, it seems to have come from the “nowhere” of secret, private rumination, repressed ambition, self-doubt and an aching urge to earn a mother’s love. To both LeRoy’s and Wood’s credit, we ally ourselves to Louise’s humanity at the expense of neither Mother nor Sister. This is not a parent-bashing piece of nonsense that maneuvers the material and manipulates us to have us take sides. The truce that Louise strikes with Rose at the end of the film is heart-walloping, in part because, by then, Wood’s quiet way with the role has achieved absolute conviction through intelligently and engagingly modulated tenacity. At the close, a minimum of effort on Wood’s part thus yields a full emotional bounty.

Louise’s declaration of independence from a mother who has pursued as best she could her own independence, with its feminist implication of the pitiful range of opportunities open to American women at the time, is one of three principal themes in Gypsy. (It is hard, though, to take Gypsy Rose Lee seriously as any sort of pioneer.) The other two themes are closely intertwined. One is the setting of the sun on vaudeville—and also on burlesque, for that matter. It is ironical that Rose is trying to establish one daughter and then the other in a branch of show business that’s in the process of falling to the ground. In turn, this reflects poignantly on Rose’s own situation, that is, how the time has passed her by when she might have become a star. The theme allied with this one is that of the necessity for adaptability if one is to survive in the changing American social landscape. This theme is introduced wittily, in a bravura stroke. In an unbilled appearance, Jack Benny, no less, appears as a younger version of himself—say, someone who is 39—while performing a stand-up comedy routine in one of the many vaudeville houses where June performs her act. June is next, and as Benny passes Rose in the wing after leaving the stage he quips, “Now try to follow that!” Rose tells the backstage manager, “He won’t amount to anything!” But he did, adapting his act for radio, movies, television. Similarly, Louise grabs the chance to become Gypsy Rose Lee, performing in a way far removed from her vaudeville roots. The real Gypsy Rose Lee ended up writing books and plays.

LeRoy, abetted by the sets, costumes and Harry Stradling’s haunting color cinematography, conjures the past magnificently; here, the period evocation is untouched by any ritual of nostalgia such as somewhat strained Frank Capra’s swansong, Pocketful of Miracles (1961), only months earlier. (On the other hand, Gypsy accomplishes nothing quite so miraculous as introducing Ann-Margret!) There are two other aspects of LeRoy’s filmmaking that take Gypsy to an exceptionally high level. One is his use of camera. The predominance of long shots in this film—unusual for a Hollywood musical, especially one based on a stage play, to which closeups are routinely applied in an effort to “open up” the play—accomplishes at least two things. One, it preserves the integrity of the stage presentations within the film while also underscoring the intricate activity, hence, humanity, of these very minor performances. Such a lot of effort went into these performances, no matter how limited as art they may have been; such effort went into Rose’s endeavors for herself and her children, no matter how many times they came up short. Very often in Gypsy, when there is a cut from one of these long shots, we expect from Hollywood habit that a closeup will immediately follow; when, instead, a somewhat closer long shot follows, we become especially aware of our distance from the stage. Gradually, this awareness of ours accumulates into an appreciation of Rose’s own distance from the realization of her ambition and dreams. What a good director LeRoy can be! Moreover, LeRoy applies an identical use of camera distance to scenes backstage and offstage, and this in turn insinuates an identity between art and life. For Rose, show biz is her life.

Another expressive aspect of LeRoy’s filmmaking is his continual use of flaming red as visual punctuation. Most often, one or more objects within the frame are red. These recurrent bits and splashes of the color refer, of course, to Rose herself. The clarity of the symbolism is, again, cumulative. However dominant Rose appears, however hard she pushes herself, her children, others to notice her children, her father, her boyfriend Herbie (Karl Malden, as good as he gets), and everyone else, the mise-en-scène constantly reminds us that she is really holding on for dear life, marshaling her resources as best she can throughout a lifetime of disappointment. The red keeps cropping up, as does her persistent hope for a better life, but it always appears somewhat tentative, very often lost or buried in the image—the reality of self-doubt beneath Rose’s show of forceful self-confidence. (Everything has not come up roses.) With perfect thematic justice, the color takes over just once, when the floorboards are awash with a reddish glow during “Rose’s Turn.”

Gypsy is about American dreams. For me, its most stunning passage is the musical number “All I Need Now Is the Girl,” sung and danced by Tulsa, one of the boys in June’s show. (Paul Wallace, the original Tulsa, recreates his Broadway role beautifully.) In the alley behind the theater as twilight descends, Tulsa is explaining to his audience-of-one, Louise, that if he could only find the right dancing partner he could have an act of his own and realize his dreams—another exquisite confusion of art and life. Unbeknownst to Tulsa, Louise is in love with him. Toward the end of the song/dance, she jumps in, hoping that Tulsa will see that she is the partner for whom he is searching. But she isn’t; while Tulsa remains blind to her dream, she is equally blind to his, even as he shares it with her, because his dream requires a much better dancer than clumsy Louise shows herself to be. Wood’s inability to dance is one of a thousand things that help make West Side Story one of the worst movie musicals of all time; in Gypsy, this same inability of hers fits. It works. Louise loves Tulsa, so how could she not be the right girl for him? The answer to this question pierces: because Tulsa wants something—somebody—else. Someone who can dance—a partner for life and art.

Robert Tucker is credited as the film’s choreographer. However, Jerome Robbins choreographed (and directed) the original Gypsy, and it’s hard to believe—especially with the same dancer/actor playing Tulsa as did on stage—that we aren’t seeing in this number either Robbins’s concept or some close facsimile to it. Whatever. It is the high point of a sumptuous entertainment.

EYES WIDE SHUT (Stanley Kubrick, 1999)

Life is full of coincidences; dovetailing incidents suggest a pattern, even a thread of fate. We receive reality as a kind of dream. A man tells his wife about an extramarital thought of his involving a fifteen-year-old girl, a sigh, a possibility, that occurred on their recent stay in Denmark, prompting her to tease him with a reminiscence of her own, that in their youth she accepted his marriage proposal although he failed to utter “the word” that might have swept her off her feet into his bed. The man, a doctor, becomes embroiled later that night in a fantastic mystery, a secret costumed get-together whose password to enter, which he chances upon, is “Denmark.”

Arthur Schnitzler, a Viennese Jew, died in 1931. Five years earlier a modernist, Freudian nightmare, his Traumnovelle, was published. About uncertain, mysterious matter, it is a fragile thing—like a dream; like a marriage; like life itself. The old-world Jewishness of this Dream Story isn’t embroidery; it’s part of the fabric. Selfconscious characters carry an unspecified load on their backs, shrugging their shoulders to release it. This never literally occurs in the novella; it is a constant sense, a delicate pressure on Schnitzler’s symbol-tinkling narrative.

“Hitler was right about almost everything.” Stanley Kubrick, the Jew who uttered this astounding remark (if we are to believe Frederic Raphael), drew his final film, Eyes Wide Shut (marvelous title), from Traumnovelle. He instructed Raphael (Darling, 1965), his co-scenarist, to expunge every trace of Jewishness from the script—a kind of literary replay of Hitler’s “final solution.” But if you love Dream Story (as I do), its Jewishness is inseparable from everything you love about it.

Even otherwise, the script isn’t particularly good. True enough, Raphael and Kubrick have covered their collective backside by stating in the credits that their film is inspired by the novella, not adapted from it. But it’s the spirit of Traumnovelle that’s missing. The two have kept some of the plot details and changed others; but what’s unmistakable is how blunt a film they have made, with every mysterious twist and turn cozily straightened. The action, transplanted to New York City today, causes delightful mysteries to arise which the script keeps pinning down and explaining away. And just as Raphael’s dreadful script for Two for the Road (1967) ended with a crude, clever exchange between marital partners—“Bitch”; “Bastard”—this new script of his ends with the wife taking time out from Christmas shopping to tell her spouse “Fuck” as her personal invitation to give their quavering union a second breath of life. Need I add that this is not how Traumnovelle ends? (The novella ends in the marital bed, with laughter from the couple’s daughter in an adjacent room signaling a new day.)

Kubrick died very shortly before the film’s release, his attention to its (gorgeous) visual detail, his mania for getting everything “just right,” perhaps hastening his conclusion. But what brought him to this non-Dream Story Dream Story in the first place? My guess, as good as yours, detects a complicated career path to it—one full of coincidences, as in a dream.

Two beautiful films by Max Ophüls, Liebelei (1932) and La ronde (1950), are based on Schnitzler plays. (La ronde comes from Reigen—translated into English as Merry-Go-Round.) Schnitzler died between world wars; Ophüls, a German Jew who nevertheless loved the Austrian capital above all other cities before the Second World War, died a breath or two longer than a quarter-century later. (Marcel Ophüls, the documentarian (The Sorrow and the Pity, 1970; Hotel Terminus: Klaus Barbie, His Life and Times, 1988), is his son.) Kubrick was born between the wars, in New York City in 1928. However, he abandoned his birth country in 1961 after Kirk Douglas and Universal mangled his Spartacus (1960), whose direction at Douglas’s behest he had taken over after the producer-star dismissed Kubrick’s predecessor. The former Look photographer relocated in England, thereafter making only British films, none of them good, including the fiercely funny but ridiculously overrated black comedy Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964). (Some of Kubrick’s American work of the ’50s had been mildly promising.) Kubrick earned his reputation as a nonconformist and a tyrannical perfectionist. He was also a great admirer of the films of Max Ophüls, whose Lola Montes (1955), ironically Ophüls’s last completed work, seems an especial influence throughout Eyes Wide Shut. Ophüls was temperamentally and intellectually drawn to Schnitzler’s writing; Kubrick saw himself as the Second Coming of Ophüls. Kubrick found material in Schnitzler’s Traumnovelle he knew he could exploit to satisfy his appetite for psychosexual violence. Thus he came to make his “Ophüls film,” Eyes Wide Shut—in his hands, a study of nagging jealousy and marital taunting. Postscript: Kubrick and Schnitzler died at roughly the same age.

Despite the glamorous lead casting of Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, the film has flopped financially; despite this, many, including Martin Scorsese, consider it a masterpiece. It’s grippingly suspenseful, eerily beautiful—easily the best thing that Kubrick has ever done; but it’s Schnitzler about as much as Kubrick’s dreadful Lolita (1962) is Vladimir Nabokov, despite the fact that Nabokov adapted his own novel, one of the century’s greatest. Kubrick has a way of stomping and stamping everything with his own cold literalism, so much so that his vicious A Clockwork Orange (1971) ends up promoting the kind of unbridled criminal gang violence that Anthony Burgess’s satirical novella prophesies and decries.

One must give an artist his due. Kubrick has helped Cruise and Kidman to sparkle with vulnerability; Cruise has never been better, in fact. (Compare his breakdown here, from an accumulation of stress, guilt and remorse, with the cheesy, ludicrous one he whips up on a dime in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia (1999).) Kubrick’s images resonate, creating an engrossing dream landscape; Larry Smith, the lighting cameraman, has done exceptional work at Kubrick’s instruction. It may be light years divided from Schnitzler’s Dream Story, then, but, taken for what it is rather than what it might have been, Eyes Wide Shut is a haunting and moving film.

EMPORTE-MOI (Léa Pool, 1999)

Emporte-Moi (Set Me Free), by Swiss-born Québecois documentarian and fictional filmmaker Léa Pool, is a very lovely, very sad, emotionally highly complex film about an impoverished, struggling, emotionally chaotic family in 1963 Montréal. The film is likely autobiographical; the central character, Hanna, is thirteen years old—Pool’s age in 1963—and by the end of the film she has become an amateur filmmaker. (One is reminded here of Claude Miller’s 1988 The Little Thief.) Its astonishing particularity—compare the broad melodramatic strokes of something like In the Bedroom (Todd Field, 2001)—also contributes to the conviction of the piece. Emporte-Moi was named best film at the Toronto International Film Festival and the Swiss Film Awards.

The opening finds Hanna visiting her maternal grandparents in the country. There, Hanna menstruates for the first time, which inaugurates a new layer of dissatisfaction over her unhappy homelife. Her grandmother, we see, hates Hanna’s father, whom she blames for her daughter’s hard life, which she links to his inability to find work in order to support his partner and two children. (Hanna has an older teenaged brother, Paul.) She hates him above all else for being Jewish, not Roman Catholic like they are; Hanna’s grandmother scores a petty triumph by serving Hanna ham for dinner.

Part of Pool’s narrative method is elliptical, concise, efficient and very rich, providing a density of pertinent information without distortion, reductionism or cheapening emphasis, and without manipulating the viewer. Let me give two examples. When Hanna departs her grandparents to return home, she saves for her uncle, who is mentally challenged, an especially warm farewell. “Of all my uncles,” she tells him, “you are my favorite.” Only her mother’s family is in Canada; her father’s family—if any of it survived the Holocaust—remains in Europe. Thus we indirectly learn that, typical of Roman Catholic families, this one is large. Throughout the film, no other mention is made, direct or indirect, of any other aunts or uncles. This serves to stress the isolation of Hanna’s family—and more: the unwillingness of her siblings to offer either job or financial assistance. (The grandmother’s singling out of Hanna’s family’s bad fortunes implies that her other offspring aren’t doing as poorly.) Another example suggests the reason for this family-wide backturning on a sister and a nephew and a niece. To be sure, the fact that Hanna’s parents aren’t legally married plays a part. (The father was and may still be married to a girl who was taken to Birkenau in Poland, a Nazi death camp.) But they are, enforced by the father’s lead, observant Jews, and this surely is paramount. At school, Hanna describes herself as neither Catholic nor Jewish, because Catholicism is passed through the father and her father isn’t Catholic, and Judaism is passed through the mother and her mother isn’t Jewish. (Her schoolteacher records that Hanna is Catholic—a sympathetic resolution that nevertheless sourly implies the need for official resolution.) The next day, a classmate confronts Hanna at recess, telling Hanna that her—this classmate’s—father has told her that Jews are bad people for this reason and that. Her father: this unseen source of opinion shifts the point of bigotry from adolescent cruelty to social authority, thus indirectly indicating the hostility toward Jews that keeps Hanna’s father unemployed. (Indeed, a passing remark notes that Hanna’s father was for a spell legally barred from seeking employment because of his immigration status.) As it happens, Hanna’s father is currently employed, as an archivist for the local newspaper. He simply quits (off-screen) one day, no explanation given. None, though, is needed given two facts that Pool has made plain: Hanna’s father’s pride in being Jewish; regional anti-Semitism. By not “spelling out” all these things in Hollywood fashion, by avoiding tagging this element or that with the kind of didactic import that would accrue to these elements if the narrative were attention-drawing and direct, Pool is able to create a fuller portrait of Hanna’s family—a portrait we are able to gather up, as it were, rather than being pushed and pulled to a succession of “meaningful” points.

Hanna’s self-description as being neither Catholic nor Jewish—in other words, not anything—and her (unconvincing) profession of not caring establish her character in a place of adolescent uncertainty and confusion. (It is in this context that her sexual adventurism, whether she is kissing a girl friend or, before she herself aborts this act, playing prostitute with a john off the street, is best understood. Pool herself is, I believe, a lesbian.) Her one sure companion is her brother, whom she dearly loves, but who is driven to avoid their tenement life as much as possible, staying away from home until all hours, and, once, recruiting his sister for an escapade of shoplifting for the sheer risk and release of attempting it. Paul’s kindness—Paul is the most caring older brother imaginable—has too much unhappiness and anguish to offset, however. The two’s parents are as miserably involved with one another as they are lovingly attached to one another. A poet, Hanna’s father cannot find meaningful work in the New World (I was constantly reminded of Jurgis in Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle and even Antonia’s father in Willa Cather’s My Antonia), nor very often even meaningless work capable of supporting his family. At home, he enforces his Old World-due of patriarchic authority, at the expense of partner and children, by way of compensation; he slaps the children, and, although she works long hours in a garment sweatshop to keep the family as little behind rent payments as possible, he enlists his partner’s help with his poetry, which it is her home job to type throughout his endless revisions, way past the point that her body craves sleep. It sometimes seems that the relationship of Hanna’s parents hobbles from one shouting match to another, the walls punishingly, and frighteningly, resounding in their children’s souls. Isolated, overworked in the extreme, Hanna’s mother has attempted suicide on a number of occasions. “Why do you do this to me?” Hanna asks the mother she adores. Hanna lives in terror of being abandoned by her mother, abandoned by dint of her mother’s death, that is, and yet she also feels the need to escape, to become someone recognizably herself apart from the imprisoning and distorting contours of personality she feels that poverty and her home environment are foisting on her. At the last, a sympathetic schoolteacher gives Hanna a motion-picture camera with which to forge a creative identity of her own. Emporte-Moi is not another coming-of-age film; it’s a brilliant one, of the artistic and intellectual order of James Joyce’s novella Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man.

Some of the home situation may remind the viewer of Beth and Jake, the impoverished, family-condemned Maori couple, living in a ghetto, in Once Were Warriors (1994). But whereas Lee Tamahori’s overheated melodrama paints broadly, takes sides, and jerks the viewer’s emotions, Pool’s film aims at a complex understanding—Pool’s own, and ours—of a complex situation. As downbeat and brutal as it is, Tamahori’s film is ultimately a piece of (albeit grotesque) entertainment; Pool’s is a trenchant, spirited work of art. Is it possibly the result of its having been made by a woman, or (more specifically) by the woman Léa Pool, that over and over again when the film might have applied either social analysis or psychoanalysis it instead applies spiritual analysis, that is, a concept of the action from the point of view of the human feelings its characters experience? There is such a sense of the sanctity of human emotions pervading Pool’s film. The film makes us feel that we are exploring the landscape of those emotions.

One of the film’s motifs is borrowed: Hanna submerged in water, holding her breath as long as possible. Of course, these images may also be drawing on Pool’s personal experience; but I at least was reminded of tragic Nénette in Claire Dénis’s marvelous Nénette et Boni (1996). I found the visual echo distracting. The clips of Jean-Luc Godard’s Vivre sa vie (1962), a film that Hanna views over and over again in search of raw material for an identity determined by something apart from family, something chosen by her rather than imposed on her, also seems arbitrary for all the intensely personal recollection it may be disclosing. On the other hand, I appreciate the special role that films play in a filmmaker’s imagination, and so I accept at some level both the Godard and the Dénis contributions. It’s simply that other elements in the film—including the heartachingly innocent ménage à trois that forms in bed among Paul, Hanna and Hanna’s friend, Laura—are all of a captivating emotional piece. Let’s just say that Pool fails to use Godard’s Vivre sa vie as searchingly and compellingly as Godard’s Vivre sa vie uses Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), the film that Nana, the prostitute (after Zola) in Godard’s film, uses to mold a spiritual sense of herself in the midst of the sordid life engulfing her.

The fine script is by Pool, Nancy Huston (who also plays the schoolteacher who resembles Anna Karina in the Godard film), and Isabelle Raynault. It won the top prize at the Chicago International Film Festival.

The acting of all the major parts is splendid: Karine Vanasse as Hanna, Miki Manojlvic as Hanna’s father, Alexandre Mérineau as her brother, and especially Pascale Bussières as her mother. Vanasse and Bussières won Jutra Awards as best actress and supporting actress of the year.

The Jutra prizes, the Canadian film industry’s prizes, are named for filmmaker Claude Jutra.

ONIBABA (Kaneto Shindô, 1964)

War—humanity’s disfigurement: this is the theme of Kaneto Shindô’s Onibaba (The Hole), a film that has become a minor classic.

Sixteenth-century Japan; civil war. In a small hut by a river, along with her daughter-in-law, a woman awaits her soldier-son’s return. It’s a harsh time. The crops have failed. In order to survive, the two women strip dead soldiers and sell both the armor and weaponry. If a soldier is only wounded, they kill him; and if an uninjured soldier chances into their domain, they kill him, too. The naked corpses that their labor produces they cast down into a ground hole. It’s a huge, open war wound, piled deep with the dead; for these women, “back home,” are as immersed as any soldier—as immersed as their son and husband—in war’s practical ruthlessness and horror.

Shindô, who himself lived near Hiroshima, earlier made Children of Hiroshima (1952) focusing on the fates of victims of the American atomic bombings. The source for his “tales,” there, was published remarks by actual victims. In Onibaba, however, he spins a single, more generalized tale that assumes the form of a parable. Befitting the form, the two women are denied the specificity of names.

One day the women are told by a neighbor that their loved one has been killed in battle. A deserter, this neighbor thereafter seduces the “widow” behind her mother-in-law’s back. The older woman nevertheless finds out. Grief-torn, jealous of these young lovers, and above all fearful she can’t survive if her daughter-in-law abandons her, she is determined to put an end to the relationship. Into the danger zone one night wanders a lost soldier wearing a fearsome mask. It’s to protect his handsome face from becoming battle-scarred, he explains; its real purpose, though, is to hide his dread of combat. Alone, the older woman tricks whoever he is into falling to his death into the hole. By rope she follows him, to take his armor and to unmask him. The latter task proves nearly impossible, so wedded has the false face become to the real one underneath—a face, it turns out, scarred and blistered beyond recognition. Each of the next three nights, when she is en route to her lover, the younger woman is turned back by a demon. The older woman confesses her identity only when, unable to loosen the mask, she must beg her daughter-in-law’s help. The mask must now be split with an ax; only, what now lies beneath resembles the original face—the soldier’s face—beneath the mask. In horror, the younger woman flees the hut, her companion, pursuing, pleading, “I’m not a demon! I’m human!” The older woman tries unsuccessfully to leap across the hole. Already the younger woman’s lover has been killed, by an intruder who may in fact be her husband.

What a marvelous story, and its main idea is forcefully presented. The older woman’s descent into and ghastly labor inside the hole constitute an unwitting descent into self—a self, however, warped by war. Thus the unmasked face that the woman confronts reflects her own corrupted spirit—a point which her rationalization of murder, that her victim may have killed her son in combat, underscores.

The hole is one of four motifs around which Shindô, directing from his own script, has organized his artistic purpose. The mask is another. A third is the tall, bladelike, seemingly boundless grass whose currents and crosscurrents in wind create a dynamic image of war as an all-devouring monster. It’s this grass that hides the hole; out of this grass the mask is seen to arise. The grass resembles, too, narrow, eerily fluid swords; it’s war’s own camouflaging mask, a point driven home when an actual sword penetrates the grass to claim a victim. Finally, there is the river—a murky, foul extension of the oceanic grass: a source of life transformed by war into an arena of death, where two soldiers fight and one of the women drowns the survivor, afterwards washing her hands in it. By extension, the whole of Japan has become a blood-soaked battlefield.

Shindô and his black-and-white cinematographer, Kiyomi Kuroda, have created some fierce and compelling beauty. (The poetical The Island, 1961, also is a collaboration of theirs.) Onibaba is seriously damaged, though, by a coarseness and a tendency to manipulate—for instance, when, without notice of the reality underneath, the viewer “sees” the demonic apparition along with the daughter-in-law. Exploiting the material and us the audience, this and other melodramatic ploys—nonsense at the Spielberg level—violate the objective tone of the piece, producing a sensational atmosphere that begs the question of Shindô’s sincerity, as does his fixation on irrelevant nudity. Moreover, the acting is blatant, particularly that of Nobuko Otowa as the older woman and Kei Sato as Hachi, the neighbor—a blemish that often turns the intended parable and macabre fairy tale into a comic strip. All these mistakes in taste and judgment are not entirely offset by Shindô’s one incontestable coup: the sets, which he himself designed, are among the most stunningly apt in all of cinema.