INCH’ALLAH DIMANCHE (Yamina Benguigui, 2001)

A domestic melodrama with an interesting historical background,* Inch’Allah Dimanche is the first nondocumentary by Algerian-born Yamina Benguigui. It explores such intriguing issues as cultural dislocation and cultural collision but is too awash in sentimental theatrics to be of serious value. At Toronto, however, they took the whole thing very seriously, according the film their International Critics’ Prize “[f]or its sensitivity and fresh humour in dealing with the conditions of Third World women, daily racism, and clashes between cultures.” Somewhere amidst the four or five occasions on which Ahmed resoundingly smacks up Zouina, his wife, I missed the humor. The movie does pluck out of thin air a happy ending, however.

Following World War II, France began recruiting male workers from North Africa while barring family members and thus further isolating the men in an unfamiliar land. For nearly three decades this policy continued, but in 1974 President Jacques Chirac instituted a new policy, “family reunion,” which invited wives and children to join their husbands and fathers in a curious effort to stem immigration by exhausting existing quotas. Benguigui’s film focuses on an Algerian family. Zouina, along with her three children and a mother-in-law from hell, reunites after ten years with Ahmed in provincial Northern France. Ahmed apparently has another wife—legally, back home, he is entitled to four wives—but for the time being the other one remains in Algeria. We never once see Ahmed at work and, unless I missed it in the subtitles, we aren’t told just what he does for a living. What an odd omission. (Oh, we do see him, though, fumbling with a guitar at home.)

Ahmed is too worried about fitting into his adopted Christian homeland to be the least bit tender toward his wife, although he treats Aïcha, his mother, who browbeats his wife incessantly, as though she were the Queen of Sheba. As far as I can tell, he in no way practices his Muslim faith. Moreover, he is determined to reassert his authority over Zouina, perhaps to restore some part of the cultural continuity and sense of control he feels he has forfeited by having been cast adrift in a foreign space. Zouina receives the first of her several multiple smack-ups when, defending their children against a cruel neighbor, she attracts police attention—goaded by his mother, in Ahmed’s eyes, a disgrace. Another “chastisement” ensues when Aïcha rats out Zouina because her daughter-in-law has been reading a French fashion magazine and trying on lipstick. Ahmed’s are the hands that keep on giving.

A neighbor or two treat Zouina kindly, but she is lost in the village, whose customs she gets little chance to adapt to because Ahmed forbids her to leave their apartment—well, his apartment—except to purchase bread and milk at the local grocery store. When he goes out, Ahmed takes his mother, not his wife. When Zouina learns there is another Algerian family in the area, she sneaks out with the children to try to find what she hopes will be welcoming company, a spot of home. After a number of attempts Zouina finally locates the other young Algerian woman, who is too afraid of being beaten by her spouse to allow Zouina into her life. But all is not lost, because a handsome young bus driver who has had his eye on her throughout the film empties his bus so he can blissfully chat with Zouina. Back home, genuinely worried about his wife’s disappearance, Ahmed finally tells his mother to shut up and behaves decently toward Zouina for the first time. Frankly, I think she should have stayed on the bus.

Benguigui trucks in visual clichés, and her “big scene” of Zouina’s stolen jaunt of freedom pales beside the comparable passage in the Iranian film The Sealed Soil (1977), which Marva Nabili handles with such delicate poignancy and precision. Delicacy of any kind is not in Benguigui’s vocabulary.

I found the film close to ridiculous and Fejria Deliba (best actress, Bordeaux International Festival of Women in Cinema), who plays Zouina, unsubtle and wearying in the extreme. Jalil Lespert, the conspicuously actorish star of Laurent Cantet’s otherwise nonprofessionally cast Human Resources (1999), plays the bus driver. He is helped by having, this time, a simpler role to play.

* Benguigui covers the same material, through interviews of North African immigrants to France and their descendants, in her 1997 documentary Mémoires d’immigrés, l’héritage maghrébin.

MARKED WOMAN (Lloyd Bacon, Michael Curtiz, 1937)

Marked Woman is a good, tough, atmospheric film wrought from the Charles “Lucky” Luciano case prosecuted by Thomas E. Dewey, whom Governor Herbert Lehman had appointed special prosecutor in New York City in 1935. The trial of the mobster that ended in his conviction for tax evasion took place in 1936. The Michigan-born Republican was elected district attorney on his own in 1937. Dewey served as New York’s governor from 1943 to 1955, during which time he ran twice for the presidency, the second time—it was the 1948 election—being famous for his being the shoo-in who nonetheless lost to the incumbent, Harry S. Truman. Dewey holds another distinction: he was the first U.S. presidential candidate to have been born in the twentieth century. For all Dewey’s political successes and aspirations the Luciano prosecution had been the launching pad. (In many ways, former prosecutor and New York City mayor Rudy Guiliani is one of Dewey’s political descendants.) This shows, according to journalist Mary M. Stolberg, “the degree to which crime and those who battled it had taken the center stage in the national consciousness.”

But Marked Woman, which was directed by Lloyd Bacon and (uncredited) Michael Curtiz, is a helluva lot more famous for its association with another trial. Between Oscars, its star, Bette Davis, ran out on her contract to Warner Bros. after they continued to offer her dull parts. In England, she had hoped to start afresh. However, the studio got an injunction barring her from working for anyone else. Davis sued Warner Bros. in an English court. She lost—the battle at least. Shaken by adverse publicity and the prospect of further alienating their most talented female star, the studio ceded to Davis’s demands for better scripts, pay and directors, resulting in a long string of hits that brought her unprecedented popularity with both critics and the public. Marked Woman is the first film that Davis made upon what turned out to be her triumphal return to the United States. For her electric, fierce, moving portrayal of prostitute Mary Dwight (Strauber)—sanitized into a clip-joint hostess, to meet the Hollywood production code,—who locks horns with Luciano, her boss, Davis won the best actress prize at Venice. It was the next-to-last year that U.S. entries were permitted at the international festival until after the war.

The script was by Robert Rossen and Abem Finkel, the same year that Rossen, along with Aben Kandel, wrote one of the finest screenplays of the 1930s, from which Mervyn LeRoy made his most complex and powerful film, They Won’t Forget. (Seton I. Miller contributed additional dialogue to Marked Woman; Rossen later directed such films as Body and Soul, 1947, The Hustler, 1961, Lilith, 1964, and All the King’s Men, 1949, which won the best-picture Oscar.) Names of the actual persons were changed. Dewey became David Graham; Luciano, Johnny Vanning. From the latter rechristening, one could hardly guess that the actual Luciano was Sicilian-born. Helpfully, the actor playing the part brought an authentic Italian (though not Sicilian) accent to it; Eduardo Ciannelli, nearly a decade older than Luciano, is brilliant—at once elegant and cheap, reassuring yet volatile, and vicious. If Davis hadn’t given such a trenchant performance, Ciannelli would have stolen the film. On the other hand, Humphrey Bogart is out of his element on the right side of the law playing Graham/Dewey. The result is a thin, weak performance—this, the same year as his remarkable one, as a factory worker who is conned into joining a hooded xenophobic, violent fraternity, in Archie Mayo’s Black Legion. What good movies Warner Bros. made this year!—and that also includes The Life of Emile Zola, which took the best-picture Oscar.

Regrettably, Hollywood movies then were as insistently plotted as they are today. “The story” is the driving engine. Mary and four other women, all belonging to Vanning’s stable of night-club “hostesses,” share an apartment. The film shows them both at home and at work so that the implication arises that either place is an extension of the other; wherever they are, they are Vanning’s girls, his property. When a moron gambles away and loses at Club Intime without, Mary learns, the means to pay, she counsels him to leave town before Vanning learns that his check is no good. It is already too late; the establishment has had the patron followed because he did not pay in cash. Graham interrogates Mary after finding her name and phone number on the inside of a match book cover on the patron’s corpse. As directed by Vanning’s people, Mary sets Graham up, pretending to help him nail Vanning but leaving him with egg on his face in court. This trial, though, discloses to Betty, Mary’s visiting younger sister, what in fact Mary does for a living, what is putting her through college. (Mary had told Betty that she was a model.) Betty drops out, attends a Vanning party and ends up being murdered by Vanning himself for failing to provide sex on demand to one of his associates. Mary now opposes Vanning outright, drawing her pals into a united legal front against him.

The film opens with a flash of glitz. Following the usual disclaimer that all the characters and events we will be shown are fictitious (which few at the time would have taken seriously), there is a shot of a Manhattan street at night with marquees and fronts lit up, including that of a theater showing the 1935 Warner Bros. film Black Fury—one of the studio’s social problem pictures, starring (as was so often the case) Paul Muni, that not only sets the time and locale but also lets the viewer know what kind of a film Marked Woman is going to be. A theme of the film is one of social commitment: People need to summon the necessary courage to testify against criminals such as Johnny Vanning. This is what the five “hostesses” eventually do, and in his closing statement to the jury Graham makes a point of acknowledging their bravery and its social benefit and contrasting their civic responsibility to the failure of others to come forward. The five women, of course, are of the sort that mainstream society generally dismisses as lowlifes who are morally inferior to themselves, so this rhetorical use of them as a social standard is both sly and refreshing—and, too, chiding and chastising of the smug and self-righteous. Graham’s summation does not stick out like a sore thumb; Marked Woman may be a “message movie,” but it is not an overly preachy one. Indeed, that is why the reference at the outset to Black Fury is helpful in alerting the audience to the sort of issue-oriented material that might otherwise pass notice. Marked Woman is, after all, an entertaining melodrama highlighted by a superlative performance from the star who had won the best actress Oscar only one year earlier. Few will have come to the theater to be taught a lesson—a lesson that’s admirably embedded but which radiates, here subtly, there sharply, throughout.

On the other hand, the recessive, embedded nature of the film’s “lesson” is entirely appropriate on yet another score. The essential character of Marked Woman is its rich appreciation of the humanity of the five women. Early on, when Vanning moves to discharge Estelle (Mayo Methot, whom Bogart married the following year) for being too old, Mary steps in and takes her part, challenging Vanning to give her a chance to show how well Estelle can “clip” the club’s customers, making money for him. The women have their quarrels, but they come together, and the final shot of all five of them, banded together, disappearing into the fog-enshrouded night following the guilty verdict is wonderfully moving—at once, an image of their solidarity and of the anonymity of their contribution in helping to remove Vanning from society. If, instead, the film had emphasized the moral lesson, making the women’s humanity recessive, this would have shifted the film’s moral and sociopolitical ground from Left to Right, for prosecutorial imperatives (such as endangering one’s existence by proffering legal testimony against criminals), on their own, are the opposite of progressive. Marked Woman strikes a good balance, bringing to the fore the humane accents that belong there, and keeping behind these a message that, absent this balance, would be cold-hearted and inhuman. Ultimately Marked Woman is less concerned with stiffening our socially responsible spines than with enlarging and deepening our humanity. The resultant film is odd; while seeming almost slight in the viewing, certainly not momentous, afterwards it haunts and haunts, and keeps breaking one’s heart. Marked Woman succeeds in eluding the category of “Bette Davis tearjerker,” as indeed all her best films do, with the exception, perhaps, of Dark Victory (Edmund Goulding, 1939).

The same year as Marked Woman, released six months later, Stage Door, directed by Gregory LaCava, likewise mined the theme of female solidarity, in that instance, amongst aspiring actresses in a theatrical boarding house. Both films are valuable in terms of their untutored feminism. As sterling as Ginger Rogers, Eve Arden and especially Constance Collier are in Stage Door, though, there is no performance in the film to match the interest and vibrance of Davis’s Mary Dwight. Mary is ultimately beaten up and scarred with a knife by Vanning’s thugs, thus explaining the film’s title but also demonstrating how precarious is her livelihood—the one means available to her to make the kind of money that could enable her to underwrite her sister’s education. Mary’s marked face will make it impossible for her to continue doing any of the things that might allow her to make a substantial wage. It was hard enough for a guy to prevail reasonably during the Depression. A gal largely depended on her looks. Interestingly, Mary is promised reconstructive surgery; but once she has given her testimony in court and Vanning has been convicted, this promise seems to evaporate into the heavy mists awaiting the five witnesses outside the court building. This could be a goof, something the writers and filmmakers forgot; on the other hand, it might be another bull’s-eye in terms of the richness of the film’s material.

At Davis’s insistence and own arrangement (with an assist from her private doctor), Mary’s face really looks as if it has been brutalized—an unusual occurrence in Hollywood films at the time. By metaphoric extension, Mary thus represents the ordinary American folk who were all in one way or another “marked” by the Great Depression.

THE ILLUSIONIST (Neil Burger, 2006)

Most of us have a fondness for “What if . . .” stories, but it’s always quite a trick to pull such a story off. Headed for a dead end from the start, The Illusionist is a dispiriting entry in the genre. It’s a slow, studied, long-winded playing-about with history, specifically, late nineteenth-century Austrian history, more specifically, the debated death in 1889 of the Crown Prince, Archduke Rudolf, rechristened here Leopold. (The character by either name does not appear in Steven Millhauser’s story, upon which the film is based.) It is, of course, Rudolf’s death that reconfigured the occupation of the throne, leading eventually to Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s becoming the presumptive heir to the throne. Ferdinand’s assassination in 1914 helped trigger World War I. The Illusionist means to make us wonder about what might have caused Rudolf/Leopold’s death and what was the possible legacy of the event for the whole western world. Really, the film fails. Its faint substance poorly serves the momentous history involved. While some might find the film diverting (especially those who do not mind being tricked, as it turns out that nearly everything we are shown isn’t what it appears to be), The Illusionist doesn’t send the mind of the individual viewer on the kind of speculative collective journey capable of embracing the dimension of social and political tragedy the specter of which it raises by the fate of its Crown Prince Leopold. It’s a silly movie.

Rudolf/Leopold is not the film’s protagonist, although his relegation to a secondary figure by no means is any sort of dramatic problem. Indeed, seeing the one real and historically important character in a subordinate role, such as here, is capable of releasing especial delight. This doesn’t happen, unfortunately, in The Illusionist for a variety of reasons, among them, the confused and confusing narrative that we are tediously dragged through, and the insipid acting of Rufus Sewell in the role. The Illusionist is among the most listless period films that one can imagine.

Who is the main character then? The son of a cabinet-maker, a stage magician in Vienna, about thirty years old, who goes by the name of Eisenheim. (Millhauser’s story is titled “Eisenheim the Illusionist.”) The possibility exists that Eisenheim is more than an illusionist; could he be a sorcerer or wizard? What is real, what is illusionary? The film, written and directed by Neil Burger, doesn’t seriously investigate this theme but only toys with it, mostly to hoodwink the audience, that is to say, us.

Fifteen years earlier, the boy who would become “the illusionist” fell in love with an aristocratic girl, Sophie von Teschen, who at the same time fell in love with him. Sophie’s parents, of course, separated these two—literally. (This romantic melodrama is pure confection. The character of Sophie doesn’t even exist in Millhauser’s story.) When the boy reappears as Eisenheim, the pair reunite. Now Sophie, a duchess, is betrothed to the Crown Prince, a cruel tyrant who once, it is rumored, threw a girl to her death over the balcony in order to hide the fact that he had brutalized her face. (Leopold is also plotting to overthrow his father, presumably, Kaiser Franz Josef I.) In an extraordinarily convoluted and contrived fashion (we are in Agatha Christie territory here, I’m afraid), the film follows Eisenheim’s ingenious plot to reunite himself with his “lost love.” This entails the point-blank suicide, or what appears to be the point-blank suicide, of the Crown Prince. The plot in which this “suicide” appears retains the ambiguity of the real Rudolf’s death, which some believe to have been a murder.

Burger hasn’t even attempted to concoct a genuine “what if . . . .” The farfetched scenario he has come up with will strike only an insane person as a serious historical possibility.

There are a number of reasons why the romantic addition to Steven Millhauser’s story doesn’t work the least bit, either. Edward Norton, who is otherwise dryly accomplished and exceptionally good as Eisenheim, isn’t much for passionate romance. A far lesser actor such as Brad Pitt would have been better able to handle this aspect of the role. Moreover, the tangled narrative shortcircuits the possibility of vibrant, direct passion. Burger has retained from Millhauser’s “Eisenheim the Illusionist” the character of Uhl, the police chief dogging the illusionist in hopes of shutting down his increasingly popular show. At some point the principal action shifts away from the romantic couple (it almost has to, since Burger promulgates the ruse that Sophie has been murdered by the Crown Prince when she hasn’t been) to Uhl, who is as much fascinated by the illusionist’s “illusions” as desirous to end them. The film loses its focus on romance, and the new focus it achieves with Uhl is scant compensation, especially since Paul Giamatti is leaden in the part. (It should be noted, though, that Burger has so overcomplicated Uhl that there probably was no way of successfully playing him.) Finally, the film doesn’t believe in the love story of Eisenheim and the Duchess. The romance trivializes the history; but just as sadly, the history trivializes the romance. The final clinch carries no conviction.

The slapdash resolution, which includes the solution of Eisenheim’s complicated scheme, adds to the preposterous enterprise. Giamatti’s Uhl unravels the “mystery” in twenty or thirty seconds when, in fact, nothing in his character or level of expertise that we’ve seen convinces us that he could have unraveled it in twenty years!

For a film like this to work, it has to be fun. There has to be wit, not just gorgeous color cinematography (in this instance by Dick Pope, who leans on the greens and filters out the blues to give the piece a moldy one hundred-year-ago look). But the solemn piece that Burger has wrought, which stretches a 21-page story into what feels like an eternity, is absent all wit.

The “illusions” are nifty, however, and Burger’s balcony long shots retain the integrity of the stage performances. Make of this what you will: Eisenheim’s age more or less coincides with that of cinema’s great illusionist at around the same time, whose films began appearing, like magic, in the mid-1890s: Georges Méliès.*

* Burger’s film resembles a good many other films, among them Ingmar Bergman’s The Magician (The Face, 1958), Louis Malle’s Le voleur (Thief of Paris, 1967), and The Sting (George Roy Hill, 1973). The scenes of illusion-making or vision-creation do indeed suggest Méliès, their special effects having been devised, even when computer-generated, to resemble the “magic” in these early silents.