THE SILENCE (Mohsen Makhmalbaf, 1998)

Certain references in this old piece pertaining to people’s ages no longer apply. Time marches on for all of us, even the filmmakers among us.

It’s a miracle that the Iranian cinema is currently one of the world’s richest. Freedom of expression, sadly, has been as discouraged by political authority there as it is by the marketplace in the United States. As is the case here, genuine film artists find themselves straightjacketed in Iran, and the 1997 parliamentary elections that gave some voice to citizen opposition to state oppression have had only the smallest impact on this. The film industry in Iran has been in the grip of the ruling authority since 1950 when laws began dictating what could or could not be shown in Iranian films; Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, who came to power in a U.S.-directed coup in 1953, tightened this grip. Films could not question, much less oppose, the ruling authority in any fashion, and no adverse conditions, such as poverty, could be portrayed. The Islamic Revolution of 1979, which deposed the Shah and established a theocracy under Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, intensified restrictions further. Filmmakers made films that either avoided sensitive matter or cloaked this matter in layers and layers of distractive outer garb. One of the staples of Iranian cinema became films about children that made a point of entering their world; social criticism could then be smuggled into the films, as it were, because the films didn’t seem to be about the “real,” adult world at all. On the other hand, many films about children have had no such subversive subtext. They were mere escapes into a child’s world—escapes that themselves, of course, imply a kind of social criticism, however inadvertently. It’s sometimes difficult to distinguish one kind of film from the other, and the political motives of a film may crystallize when a subsequent film by the same artist is clearer or more direct in this regard. It’s also possible that a filmmaker might have shifted course. Who could imagine that Jafar Panahi, who made The White Balloon (1995), a tedious film about children from a script by Abbas Kiarostami, no less, would go on to make the brilliant film The Circle (2000), which passionately explores the oppressed condition of women in Islamic Iranian society?

Mohsen Makhmalbaf began making films in the early 1980s when he was in his twenties. His entire career, therefore, has been post-Islamic Revolution. He has been prolific; almost every year has seen the release of something he wrote or directed or, more likely, both wrote and directed. Makhmalbaf is still a young man; in his forties, he is the father of two daughters who are themselves filmmakers, Samira and Hanna, who is now 14. I haven’t yet seen anything by Hanna, but her sister, now in her twenties, is one of the world’s great film artists—someone whose Blackboards (Takhté siah, 2000) exceeds any film her father has made, including his most trenchant piece, Kandahar (2001). (Father and daughter co-authored the script of Blackboards.)

The Silence (Sokhout), a startlingly fresh and elegant work, is about a ten-year-old boy, Khorshid, who is blind. Khorshid’s father, in Russia, has abandoned him and his mother, who in order to sustain their existence fishes in the river on which the rural dwelling that includes their threadbare apartment is situated. This woman has no other choice but to rely on Khorshid’s meager income for rent. It is not enough, however, and in a few days’ time they will be evicted by the landlord, a greedy, powerful presence whom we never see except for, once, as a hand knocking at the door. A strange, elliptical film of haunting, limpid visual beauty, The Silence ends with two events: the eviction, as the mother, who is calling for her son, and her one great possession, a wall mirror, symbolic for art and inspiration, that is, humanity’s spirit, are rowed across the river, the mirror’s reflection in the water symbolically linking human spirituality and Nature; and the boy, as usual off on his own, passing forever into a life of the imagination in which he is able to orchestrate sounds in his environment—to which his blindness has made him acutely sensitive and receptive—into a finished piece, one in fact familiar to us as the opening movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. Only a fool could miss the social and political implications of such a film, and the government, not at all fooled in this regard, responded brusquely. The Silence was banned in Iran.

Unlike 12-year-old Edmund, who is also robbed of childhood and must also shoulder the burden of financially supporting his family, in Roberto Rossellini’s staggering post-World War II Germany, Year Zero (1947), Khorshid prevails against the forces arrayed against him, including poverty and adult indifference to his plight (the landlord; his employer), by accessing sharpened and sensitized inner resources that the oppression he endures has brought to the fore. Indeed, this is a film about stealing beauty from and finding inspiration in one’s surroundings, no matter the conditions that conspire to oppress and destroy. In a sense, the boy’s blindness symbolizes the oppressive conditions for which he compensates. This compensation, for him, is music—the music he can make out of sounds. His companion at work, Naderah, makes herself earrings out of twig-conjoined cherries, and Makhmalbaf, just as he gives us mesmerizing closeups of Khorshid’s head rhythmically sensitive to the sounds and the music he hears, provides closeups of her cherry-adorned face. In the meantime, Khorshid is constantly reminded by his mother of their imminent eviction (she wants him to ask his employer for a salary advance), and Nadereh, who is unsuccessful in her attempts to find money for her friend, has her own worry: a man with a gun is stopping and berating girls who, like her, aren’t wearing head scarves. This gentleman is like Khorshid’s landlord in that we never see him. And he is everywhere. The two children shift their course just to avoid him, and there he is in their path anyhow. We understand that it must be a different official performing the same function—but what better way to suggest a ubiquitous atmosphere of fundamentalist oppression? (The fact that these officials are always off-screen, hence invisible to us, deepens our own sense of this atmosphere.) When Nadereh asks him what they should now do, Khorshid succinctly tells her to walk past the gentleman, ignoring him. It’s as if the boy were casting his vote in the 1997 elections.

Khorshid’s job is as a tuner of musical instruments. He has perfect pitch—or did, at least. But lately he has been so distracted by sounds and music around him, even to the point of exiting his bus to or from work in order to follow musicians, that he has become an unreliable employee. Patrons of his boss’s shop have been complaining and returning instruments. The boss fires the boy. Nadereh, who does assorted minor chores at the shop, has a theory of why the boss is treating Khorshid so badly; he is sad, she believes, because his son was killed at war. That Nadereh surmises this shows that she also has been robbed of childhood. Indeed, she is an orphan, and one or both of her parents may have been killed by war. The only “parent” she now has is her bedeviled, unsympathetic boss, whom she tells Khorshid she fears.

Much of the film is taken up with passages that contribute nothing to plot but instead evoke Khorshid’s blind negotiation of the world in which he finds himself. Makhmalbaf repeatedly shows Khorshid lost and searching for someone or other, such as in a vast fruit and vegetable market, his small hands up and flat like antennae; when he stuffs his ears with cotton or plugs them with his fingers, thus combating the distraction of sound, he may better find himself or someone else. Rarely has a film shown so sensitively the negotiation a person must make between competing claims on his or her attention, in Khorshid’s case, ironically, between what he exaggeratedly hears and what he cannot see. In a great passage, in the woods, Khorshid accidentally drops and breaks in two Nadereh’s pocket vanity mirror. On the ground, one piece of it reflects Nadereh’s vertical image, which of course Nadereh herself (and we) can see, while the other piece reflects Khorshid’s horizontal image, which Nadereh (and we) see, but which, if he weren’t blind, Khorshid, who is perpendicular to Nadereh, would see as a vertical image—the way Nadereh sees her own image. It’s a broken world in which, in different ways and ways that coincide, Khorshid and Nadereh are denied their individuality, their reality as human beings. Khorshid, little as he is, is precisely a hero because he doesn’t accept this denial of his right to personal freedom. He will make his image whole some other way, on his own terms. By her refusal to wear a head scarf, Nadereh is nodding to the future. (Neither do the schoolgirls whom Khorshid befriends on a bus wear the head cover that Islam prescribes for females in public.) Khorshid’s whole existence, rooted in the present of his imagination, nods to this future.

The Silence is visually bewitching, especially out in Nature, especially in long-shots that find water below reflecting trees and sky above. (The film is full of mirror images.) There is a massive wall sculpture (an outdoor mural that’s sculpted rather than painted), and in one wonderful shot Khorshid has found his way into the large lap of its maternal figure. The film’s color cinematographer is Ebrahim Ghafouri. There is nothing in the film to which he doesn’t significantly contribute. However, just as extraordinary is the soundtrack, which enables us to hear what Khorshid hears, including the buzzing difference between a bee that haunts dung hills and “bad flowers” and Khorshid’s pet bee, which comes and goes into his room and pollinates the gorgeous flowers with which Nadereh decorates herself.

Khorshid, who is played by Tahmineh Normatova, is the single most beautiful young boy I have seen in a movie or anyplace else. A beautiful blind boy? How does Makhmalbaf, then, avoid pathos? (Not a scrap of it is attached to Khorshid.) First, there is the boy’s stubborn independence and individuality, his existence outside any acceptance by him of pity or anyone’s proffering it. Secondly, Normatova is (under Makhmalbaf’s guidance) a superb actor, one who plays the character cleanly, without sentimentality, rather than playing on our emotions.

The Silence won three prizes at Venice.

ELEVATOR TO THE GALLOWS (Louis Malle, 1957)

One of the most electrifying thrillers ever made, Louis Malle’s first film, Elevator to the Gallows (Lift to the Scaffold; Frantic), opened up to me recently, revealing a depth of concerns that, during five or six previous viewings, had somehow been lost to my too-often-too-complacent head. Why I missed so much probably owes something to the facts that I didn’t much care for Malle, who was born to wealth and was a descendant of French nobility, and that I don’t like much of his work. It isn’t the unexpected films I most mind, for example, the strained surrealist experiment of Black Moon (1975); what artist isn’t entitled to go off the deep end every now and then? It’s the romantic garbage of The Lovers (1959), whose sickening “lyricism” deprives the bodies of the adulterous couple of all sense of flesh and blood, and the cheapness of too much of Au revoir, les enfants (1987). About the latter I have many complaints. I reject films about the Holocaust that sentimentalize the event. The Holocaust was too horrible and tragic in its reality to require some clever filmmaker going about engaging our bleeding hearts over it, in this case, in particular for a Jewish child being sheltered from the Nazis and French sympathizers in a Church-run school during World War II. The actual event presumably from Malle’s own childhood—some have suggested that Malle exaggerated the personal connection—dictates that it isn’t the vicious nun who turns the Jewish boy in to the authorities but a poor youth working in the kitchen. But Malle is himself responsible for manipulating us by treating this aspect of the material as a “whodunit.” He should have disclosed the identity of the culprit immediately, for the delay implies, “Oh, you didn’t suspect how rotten the working class can be, did you?” (When Malle’s prejudices collide with my own, I cling to my own harder than ever!) But, most of all, I resent the visual treatment of the child. Children are of course beautiful, and Jewish children (precisely because of the Holocaust) perhaps a little more so; but nothing justifies the dawdling infatuation of Malle’s camera with the boy’s physical beauty here, shot after shot after shot—not to mention the inadvertent implication that a less attractive Jewish child perhaps would have been less worthy of being spared. I know that Malle’s intentions are benign; but for the artist as well as the non-artist the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Malle wants to convey how priceless this Jewish boy is, and by holding on to the character with his camera in this way he sets us up for the closing heartbreak when the boy (along with the other Jewish children the school was hiding) is carted away and Malle himself has to let the boy go. (Malle’s poignant voiceover at the end stresses the lingering memory that makes doubly hard letting the actual boy go.) This “set-up,” though, is rank manipulation; but far worse is the objectification of the boy that (contrary to his intent) accumulates from Malle’s endless sighing with his camera over the boy’s good looks. The objectification of humanity: this was the psychological mechanism that in fact helped enable the Holocaust (not to mention Europe’s current revival of knee-jerk anti-Semitism)—and this is what Malle himself achieves, visually, with the boy, an irony that escaped Malle, whose own death by cancer in 1995, however, stills all quarrel between us. Why should he and I quarrel? The great set-piece of Au revoir, les enfants—it’s the most magnificent stuff Malle ever shot—ennobles the film, after all, even as other elements cheapen it: a school game, a hunt for buried treasure in the surrounding landscape, that encapsulates beautifully the vulnerability of childhood. Malle did some things very well, very right.

His best film may be Le feu follet (1963), from the novel by Drieu la Rochelle. By closely following a suicide through the commission of the ultimate act, this exceptionally alert film delivers a rebuke to all those films that have dragged in somebody’s suicide as a contrived and convenient way not to work out a script to completion or to whack dishonestly the viewer’s heart with a purely sentimental bad surprise. The suicide in The Fire Within is neither convenient nor gratuitious; it is the focus and culmination of the piece. Moreover, it immensely helps that the central character, Alain, is enacted by Maurice Ronet in one of the most brilliant performances in cinema. A prolific actor of great intelligence and versatility, Ronet—the tall, skinny kid in Jacques Becker’s Rendez-vous de juillet (1949)—also succumbed to cancer, but sooner, in 1983 at age 55. One presumes that Anthony Minghella, had Ronet still been alive, would not have committed the unconscionable act of directing Jude Law to copy Ronet’s wonderful performance in René Clément’s Plein soleil (1959) for their dreadful, barely watchable remake, The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999). (Not that Clément’s film, though far better, is much good, either.) Ronet, the star of both, in fact connects Malle’s two best films, Elevator to the Gallows and The Fire Within—as does something else: the action in both films is restricted to 24 hours. (“ . . . [L]ike a Racine tragedy,” a character notes in Elevator.) These are the last 24 hours of Alain’s life in the later film; in Elevator, Ronet’s Julien Tavernier commits a murder and is apprehended by the police all within 24 hours. However, it is Tavernier’s accomplice, the murder victim’s wife and Tavernier’s mistress, who is more likely to be guillotined as the criminal mastermind. Tavernier, you see, has a military background in a nation intoxicated by the military mystique. The police captain predicts ten years in prison for the killer.

The man Tavernier murders is his employer, Simon Carala, a wealthy industrialist whose precise allegiance in the Second World War, during France’s partial Occupation, remains murky. Tavernier himself is a war hero, a former parachutist now compromised or now delivering poetic justice, depending on your point of view, because he is pointing Carala’s own gun at him—the murder is to look like a suicide—after business hours in the inner sanctum of Carala’s office. Carala’s last words fortify our sense of allegiance to Tavernier: “What is this, a joke? What do you want? Money? I’m not frightened of you, Tavernier. I’m too used to being unpopular to be frightened. Anyhow, you’re not so foolish as to shoot. In war, yes, but not in more important things.” Monsieur Carala is, then, an odious man, and Tavernier’s pointed response makes the young, slender hero shine by comparison: “Don’t laugh at wars. You live off wars. . . . Indo-China; now Algeria. Respect wars; they’re your family heirlooms.” Julien is killing Carala because he is in love with the old man’s young wife, Florence; but his political remarks add to our understanding of the disgust with which Carala fills him. Because Tavernier is Carala’s employee, his disgust includes a measure of self-disgust—the subtle revelation of which is an index of Ronet’s superb acting.

You know what the Scottish poet Robert Burns said about “the best-laid schemes” in “To a Mouse.” Julien and Florence’s murder plan, for which Florence supplied her husband’s gun, goes awry. Tavernier cannot get to his car, parked right outside, in order to meet up with Florence because he gets trapped in the business building’s descending elevator. Meanwhile, two kids in love, Louis and Veronica, steal Tavernier’s car. Spotting the car and the passenger, the girl (the two female characters are linked; Veronica is a florist), Florence worries that Julien has betrayed her and run off with this younger companion. At a motel, Louis assumes Tavernier’s identity (it goes with the car, if you will), pretending to have been a soldier, and ends up shooting to death two German tourists, using Julien’s gun from the automobile’s glove compartment. (Unbeknownst to him, Louis the night before repeated to the German some of Tavernier’s language to Carala: “My generation has other things [than champagne] to worry about: four years of occupation, Indo-China, Algeria.”) The children now attempt a joint suicide, which they bungle before being tracked down by Florence, determined to exonerate her missing lover of the motel double murder. The revelation of this crime, alas, leads to the revelation of the other one, the murder of Simon Carala. (Five years earlier Georges Poujouly, who plays Louis, was dear 11-year-old Michel in Clément’s Jeux inderdits. In 2000, Poujouly also died of cancer.)

What I never grasped (not even partially), but do grasp now, is the precise thematic relationship between Julien and “Julien,” the real Julien Tavernier and his impersonator, the teenaged boy, Louis. I had never even given this aspect of the film a thought, but something that has recently happened in the United States has crystallized it for me and, in the process, disclosed the film’s thematic integrity, moving it from the category of classy entertainment to the category of intellectual art. Television personality and news anchor Tom Brokaw, in a series of books, has (largely for the purpose of selling those books) promoted the idea that America’s World War II combatants constitute America’s “greatest generation”—a designation that others have signed on to, particularly those upset with what they feel that Bill Clinton’s moral conduct expresses about those who were teenagers in the late 1950s or early 1960s. Unfortunately, the fallout from this elevation of one generation of Americans over others imposes a burden of expectation on the current crop of youngsters, who (though they aren’t the ones reading Brokaw’s and other similar books) are being asked to find suitable inspiring models in the self-sacrificing, heroic behavior of these now aging or dead soldiers. The rationalization is this: The whole nation pulled together during the Second World War in order to defeat the Germans and the Japanese; we also need now to pull together, to become a focused, single nation again. Brokaw’s position (as well he knows) is incapable of separating mythmaking from historical truth, and it disadvantages too many generations of Americans, past and present, for the cause of promoting just one generation. It’s silly. But Brokaw’s mission has illuminated what I missed before about Malle’s film: just as Julien is living in the shadow of his Second World War experience (his job as an industrialist’s lackey is degrading after that experience), Louis is also living in that shadow. Too young to have fought in the war, he now envies the likes of Julien who were able to prove themselves in the war in a nationally recognized way. Louis is defeated by the comparison between himself and Julien. To counteract this imaginatively, he steals Julien’s car and adopts Julien’s identity. In his unconscious, he even becomes a Second World Warrior by dispatching two Germans on French soil—with the real Julien’s pistol, no less. Another angle on the same theme may be expressed in this way: While the war finds Julien unable to stop killing (the war made murder possible for him), Louis’s exclusion from war finds him having to start killing. Unifying the film, both the boy and the barely-more-than-boy are homicidally directed in peacetime by the experience of war.

Malle’s filmmaking, his first time out, is masterful. The cross-cutting among the children’s auto theft, Florence’s agonized search for her lover, and Julien’s clautrophobic elevator entrapment and attempts to extricate himself from it is far more assured than anything from Griffith or Coppola. In one lovely shot, as Julien, freshly escaped from his entrapment, sits outdoors at a café, the camera dollies back as we hear the sound of a police siren; the camera stops cold when the police car has entered the frame, with Julien remaining visible in the background. (Worthy of Hitchcock, this shot!) However, doubtless the most celebrated passage of the film is Florence’s nighttime search, an early anticipation of the mist-enshrouded hunt in Au revoir, les enfants. (It might also have influenced Michelangelo Antonioni, whose La notte, 1961, would have the camera following the same peripatetic actress who plays Florence.) We hear Florence’s heartrending voiceover—“Julien, I looked everywhere for you”—while her walking, passing back and forth between purposeful mission and emotional wandering—in and out of utter darkness and streetlighted darkness: a visual metaphor disclosing that she also, through spouse and lover both, exists in the shadow of war, including her nation’s shameful Occupation.

Jeanne Moreau, cinema’s greatest post-Garbo actress, plays Florence, and, the film’s highest asset, her performance is tremendously moving. Hers is one of the most profound and many-faceted expressions of love in cinema. In a visually stunning piece of irony that sums up all that has gone wrong in the execution of what was meant to be the perfect crime, Florence is left with only photographs of her great love affair: fragments longing for wholeness, a living death desirous of being reconstituted as genuine life. Moreau has keyed her performance to this finish; throughout, she essays Florence’s spiritual dissolution, an event (falsely) interrupted by her determination to prove her lover’s innocence: another irony, for her exoneration of him for one crime helps seal his guilt for another. It is remarkable how successful Malle is at riveting our sympathy to Julien and Florence, and Moreau’s rapturous femininity and irresistible vulnerability are largely responsible for this outcome. One gesture in particular haunts: during her melancholy wandering, Florence shakes her head while thinking, or silently speaking to herself. Moreau’s stunned expression, its quality of basso profundo, combined with the brief headshaking, correlates a kind of physical sleepwalking to the mental traversing of agonized territory. What an amazing actress!

Two other outstanding contributors to the film merit notice. Henri Decaë’s moody black-and-white cinematography, especially in following Florence at night, is hypnotic. (Decaë also cinematographed, in black-and-white, Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le silence de la mer, Les enfants terribles, Bob le flambeur and Léon Morin, Prêtre, Claude Chabrol’s Le beau serge, Les cousins and Les bonnes femmes, and François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows and, in color, Clément’s Plein soleil and, with Jean Charvein, Melville’s Le samourai: a record of exceptional work.) Too, Malle’s film boasts an unforgettable score by Miles Davis, who, like so many African-American jazz musicians, found more hospitality in France than at home.

Malle. Now with my deepened appreciation of Elevator to the Gallows, I no longer can credit Malle with just two good fictional films, Le feu follet and Lacombe, Lucien (1974). Goodness knows, I never wish to be close again to the likes of Pretty Baby (1978) or Atlantic City (1981), and even Murmur of the Heart, Malle’s lovely comedy of a boy’s growing up with the help of a little maternal incest, doesn’t seem as fresh as it did in 1971. But it may be time for me to reevaluate the filmmaker. I am in fact on the verge of a chance to do so: I have never seen Malle’s Thief of Paris (1967), starring Belmondo, but a friend has videotaped it off of cable TV. I cannot wait.*

* The wait is over, and Le voleur (The Thief) is magnificent. It’s Malle’s finest achievement, a droll, profound consideration of a turbulent Europe at the turn of the century: a reflection of a newly unsettled Paris in the 1960s. Jean-Paul Belmondo plays Georges Randal, a young, nimble thief once his guardian, his uncle, has lost or stolen his inheritance. (“Who knew the Bank of Europe would collapse?” the old man asks.) Randal, an inadvertent avenging angel of justice against the bond- and jewel-hording bourgeoisie, is shown committing his criminal work, with flashbacks filling in a portrait of an embittered, dangerous and lonely existence amidst slowly strengthening forces of socialism and anarchy in response to pervasive socioeconomic inequity in Paris and Brussels, by extension, Europe. Belmondo, a sometimes terrific actor (Godard’s A bout de souffle and Pierrot le fou, Melville’s Leon Morin, Priest and Le doulos), once again combining wryness and volatility, is at his most brilliant here; certified by a mustache, his is a character role that engages the most incisive aspects of his remarkable range of abilities. The closing shot of Belmondo in Le voleur is comparable in force to the closing shot of Jean-Pierre Léaud in Truffaut’s The 400 Blows.

THE DELTA (Ira Sachs, 1996)

The Delta, a good first feature, was shot on a shoestring, in 16mm. Ira Sachs directed from his own script. A “gay film” insofar as the two lead characters are young homosexuals (I know nothing about Sachs’s own sexual orientation), The Delta is in fact a study of the impingement of raucously contemporary issues on a traditional setting, here, Memphis, Tennesse, Sachs’s hometown.

The main character is Lincoln Bloom (how historical; how literary), a 17-year-old boy from a well-off white family who divides his social time among the white friends with whom he hangs out, drinking and smoking marijuana, his girlfriend, Monica Rachel (a part of that group), and not-always-white strangers in the closeted homosexual area of his life. Lincoln’s near passivity in his acquiescence to those picking him up deep into the night suggests the difficult, hesitant steps he has taken in this forbidden direction in a southern-border community. We also see how these experiences are motivating him to overcompensate with Monica; she feels that his sudden forwardness fails to take her feelings into account. Without any scripted waste of time “filling us in,” we can see that Lincoln wasn’t always this way. He must have changed, and recently, because we see from her distressed and disappointed eyes that Monica is now trying to sort out this unidentified change in order to figure out whether and, if so, how she fits into Lincoln’s life now. He says he loves her, but he doesn’t always act lovingly towards her, and because he seems to be stretching the form of his affection beyond its actual content she doesn’t quite know what to make of this longtime friend of hers and his current attentions. Rachel Zan Huss, who plays Monica Rachel, gives a bright though brief performance, as if Sachs missed seeing that hers is the most interesting character in the film. (The entire cast is nonprofessional.) Perhaps he did see this during the shoot, but his limited resources required him to stick to a script that gave this intriguing teenager short shrift. Regardless, Sachs has sketched in a disheartening world, one prejudiced in terms of race, ethnicity, class, religion (Sachs’s one reference to anti-Semitism stings), in which all the teenagers live largely aimless lives crippled by social apathy.

Shayne Gray gives a sensitive, delicately nuanced performance as Lincoln, who aims to please the middle-aged man who one night picks him up and takes him to a hotel. He is too unsure of himself and too polite in the conventional southern fashion not to aim to please, but at the same time the stranger crosses some invisible line that finds the boy’s pride and comfort level recoiling. He will leave this stranger with no more than a kiss. When he asserts himself, Lincoln does so politely, in a low voice, his manner deliberate but inoffensive. Gray suggests the exact measure of fear in Lincoln’s response after the man has him strip, stand up and turn around by a mirror in the hotel room. In this mirror we ourselves see a projection of Lincoln’s discomfort: the man, seated as though at a fashion show, gazing at the boy with penetrating involvement; and when he stands up and moves towards Lincoln the encroachment is compounded by the image in the mirror matching the imposing authority of the actual figure entering the frame. Sachs has thus handily devised purely visual means for expressing the “boxed-in” situation that Lincoln feels he must get out of. Gray’s shrewd acting completes the mix of uncertainty and certainty, calm and panic, boyish compliance and mature assertiveness. I understand that Sachs had some difficulty finding in Memphis a boy the right age who was willing to depict Lincoln’s gay character. His search, it appears, did not go for nought.

The other main character is Minh Nguyen, a character Sachs revised in order to include features from the actual life of the actor playing the part, Thang Chan. Chan gives a sly, passionate and convolutedly complex performance; he is brilliant. Minh—“John”—is, he says, about ten years older than Lincoln. He is a Vietnamese immigrant. He has left behind in his homeland his mother (if she is alive) and his wife. Minh’s father, an African-American soldier during the Vietnamese war, abandoned “wife” and child after three years. Minh, too young, never knew him. “I want to kill him,” he tells Lincoln, the point in the film when the irony of Lincoln’s name exerts its most potent force. Minh left Vietnam because of the insupportability of his false heterosexual life and because interracial outcomes of the American presence are treated as pariahs in southeast Asia. These “blacks” are hated and shunned—a racist response, to be sure, but also a social response scapegoating identifiably pertinent individuals with the intense vulnerability that the community still feels as a result of the war and of the American intrusion. (Stunning irony: the object of racial bigotry at home, African Americans elsewhere in the world seem to personify America.) In a sense, then, Minh has come to America in search of the father who has always been missing from his life. Tragically, he will eventually find him.

Minh survives in America as a gay hustler picking up boys and men on the dark street and in dimly lit Memphis bars. Except for his johns, he keeps to his Vietnamese immigrant community. Being black as well as Vietnamese, he doesn’t always perfectly fit in there, either. We know this from the $50 tab he has run up in a Vietnamese hangout. Can he pay it? The owner’s wife thinks so. He tells her that he will pay what he owes in two or three days. She is skeptical. “There have been so many ‘two or three days,’” she says. In response to what may be a hypersensitive misconception that he is being kept to the fringe of this immigrant community, Minh thus keeps himself at the fringe, not fully embracing the community. He responds to the woman with the kind of prejudice that fills in the background of this film. He tells her he will talk to her husband, not to her. (Elsewhere in the film, in a similar outburst of misogynism, Lincoln calls Monica a “bitch.”) You know a filmmaker is immensely gifted when by so seemingly simple a detail—an unpaid tab—he concisely provides such a wealth of analysis.

Minh and Lincoln have made love. Minh later tells this midnight friend that he loves him. Minh seems utterly sincere in this, although Lincoln counters that Minh doesn’t even really know him—this, a bourgeois remark that fails to take into account the perilously fragile and surface-skimming life that Minh leads. On the other hand, Minh may be a little like Brigid O’Shaughnessy in not knowing when he is telling the truth, if ever. He later confesses to someone else that his solicitous manner covers a void of feeling, the deadness inside him. This is the one statement Minh makes whose veracity we cannot doubt because there is nothing self-serving about it. However, we do believe, I think, that Minh loves Lincoln with all of what heart he has. He finds Lincoln “beautiful” and touchingly modest, at times even sweet: an antidote to everything sordid and miserable in his own life.

Perhaps the most remarkable passage in the film is the long trip that the boys take down the Mississippi River deep into the night and the morning after in Lincoln’s father’s boat. Many compare this journey to Huck’s and Jim’s, on a raft, in Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The camera languorously and tenderly records the journey, through water under an illimitable sky, under a bridge, finally onto shore; it isn’t rendered grand or showy, but mysterious and deeply sad, as though encapsulating the last stretch of Lincoln’s childhood and Minh’s profound reach after the childhood he never had. The end of innocence, it’s the flare of a flame just before burning out; it’s an exquisite passage, full of thoughts that lie too deep for tears. The outing culminates in Minh’s sharing, on land, the intimate details of his life, including his love for Lincoln and his hatred of his father. When they kiss, Minh lightly bites Lincoln so that Lincoln also will remember this experience of theirs that will never leave his heart.

The brief romance and love affair ends. The boys illegally set off fireworks and escape the police officer who is just about to arrest them. In the deep of night, their forms less discernible than the frantic speed and roughness of their flight through woods, the passage recalls the comparable (and incomparable) one in King Vidor’s all-black Hallelujah (1929). The boys stumble and fight. Arrest would have meant the exposure of Lincoln’s secret life. Lincoln is not ready for this, and he blames Minh for helping to bring it about. To his mind, Minh has thus crossed the same invisible line that the stranger in the hotel room crossed. He will never have anything more to do with Minh, and this shatters Minh—though not us, at which point we may begin to appreciate how astutely Sachs has distanced his material. The nearly abstract presentation of the boys’ flight from the law is a terrific example of this, although some commentators have instead cited the film here for technical shoddiness. The murkiness of the 16-millimeter shoot is no liability, however, when the artist uses it to achieve the kind of expressive result that he does here.

Indeed, the film is full of distancing devices, usually visual ones. For instance, the most intimate exchanges of conversation between the two boys occur on shore and in daylight, not at night in the close, dark quarters of their boat cabin. This separates the talk from sex, compelling us to analyze it in terms of the separateness of the boys rather than in terms of their shared experience. Scenes of sexual intimacy, on the other hand, are framed in such a way as to compress bodies: there is one such encounter in a car seat; another, in the boat cabin, is shot from outside the cabin so that the door frame limits our view. Thus by purely visual means Sachs has devised a way of conveying two ideas: the enormous burden to make the most of fleeting sexual encounters; the societal oppression that requires homosexual encounters to be uncomfortably “stolen,” as it were, much as Lincoln “borrows” his father’s boat. When Lincoln returns, moreover, he visits Monica. He undresses to take a shower, asking her to join him. “Join” him: togetherness. But Sachs’s presentation of this undercuts the couple’s togetherness and reveals instead their separateness. For one thing, Lincoln is inside the bathroom while Monica undresses in the bathroom doorway. For another, while she undresses a slight blue shadow of her plays on the open door’s surface, dividing our attention between Monica and her shadow, both in the foreground, rather than between Monica and Lincoln, thereby making it exceedingly difficult to bring the two characters together in our mind. Throughout the film there are like instances that instead of encouraging us to enter the film keep us at a distance from which we can better think about what we are seeing and analyze its thematic content.

Another distancing device Sachs uses is the repetition of remarks or of the same kind of remarks. “Whatever,” “I don’t care,” “It don’t matter”: Lincoln and Minh say these things over and over. Cumulatively, the remarks achieve a portrait of both boys as unhappy, of being unable to live one’s life fully or to direct its course, of apathy, of uncertainty. Elsewhere, a repeated remark underscores the bisexual split in Lincoln’s life, and how this split deprives that life of integrity, a sense of being complete. Minh tells Lincoln: “You’re a good flirt. I like it.” Later, Monica recoils when Lincoln, inappropriately acting on Minh’s, flirts with her. Thus with great economy Sachs reveals the boy’s sense of being fractured, incomplete. He is living in two different worlds, and the rules of one cannot be successfully transferred to the other.

The final movement of the film is tremendous. Minh takes a black man to Lincoln’s father’s boat and chokes him, from behind, in bed. He has found a black man to kill, as he said he wanted to kill his father. Sachs thus delivers his most gripping and grim irony. By generalizing his hatred from one black father to any African American and, by extension, all African Americans, he has, finally, at least to this extent, entered the American mainstream. As we have so many times before, we see Minh riding off towards the camera on his motor scooter. His face is blank. We instantly know that this isn’t the last time he will kill his father. Only now we realize we have witnessed the birth of an American serial killer. And because Sachs has so distanced us to facilitate our making connections and bringing his film to intellectual completion, we think of war—like the war that gave Minh a father that he wanted to kill in the first place. And we think of Lincoln’s family, its complacency—the complacency that enables hatred and wars. Now at last the film has shattered us.

Sachs grew up in Memphis, was Yale-educated in New Haven, Connecticut, and wrote the original script for The Delta in New York City. He returned to Memphis to make the film, having already made a short film. His talent is awesome. One commentator has dismissed The Delta as being “ridiculously ambitious.” This might have been true had Sachs’s reach exceeded his grasp.

CODA: Forty Shades of Blue (2005) leaves no doubt. Ira Sachs is a wonderful American filmmaker.

JUNEBUG (Phil Morrison, 2005)

We each have our different tastes and just as others, I’m sure, are appalled by mine from time to time, I am appalled by the praise that has been heaped on Junebug, the sentimental union of soap opera and farce that first-time scenarist Angus MacLachlan and first-time director Phil Morrison have wrought, to my taste, into the most shallow existence imaginable. And if it seems, in light of everyone else’s delight with this small, independent film, that I am skirting perverseness with my opinion, account me absolutely perverse, I guess, on another score: for me, Amy Adams—best supporting actress, National Society of Film Critics, San Francisco film critics, Southeastern film critics, Broadcast film critics, Sundance—gives one of the lousiest performances I have ever seen. This film, spotlighting Adams’s god-awful acting, is the sort of total crap that flies high at Sundance.

Because of all the buzz that Junebug has drawn, you probably know the premise of its plot even if you haven’t seen the film. A Chicago art dealer marries a transplanted small-town North Carolinian and, on a trip to the South to close a deal with a southern folk artist, gets to meet her husband’s non-artsy, unsophisticated folks, brother and brother’s wife. The last of these, pregnant, is the character that Erstwhile Adams plays, although there isn’t really a character in her performance as Ashley because all Adams does—endlessly does—is emote. Childlike, gushing, “spontaneous,” Ashley is carrying one man’s child while harboring a crush on his visiting newly-married brother; southern girls perhaps go big for their brothers-in-law, especially when their spouse is surly, cranky, private, uncommunicative. Ashley overcompensates for her resentment of her new sister-in-law by assaulting the poor woman with southern hospitality, love and friendship, leaving it to her mother-in-law to front the inhospitable, unloving and unfriendly end. Poor Ashley, as presented here, is such a caricature that even her losing her baby fails to humanize her.

Roger Ebert is not alone in finding Junebug a detailed revelation of small-town American life. Ashley tells her husband, “God loves you just the way you are, but he loves you too much to let you stay that way.” Ebert finds “clarity and truth” in this remark and countless other lines of dialogue in the film; to me it sounds like moviespeak—the simultaneously down-home and hifalutin way that people in movies talk, particularly movies set in the South. My ear just doesn’t catch the ring of truth in Junebug, which I find closer to Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird than to Carson McCullers.

With one exception, the acting is either mediocre or bad—and that includes Benjamin McKenzie’s turn as Ashley’s husband, Johnny. (McKenzie played Ryan on TV’s The O.C.—and he spoke at the 2004 Democratic National Convention.) The exception is Scott Wilson, of In the Heat of the Night (Norman Jewison, 1967), In Cold Blood (Richard Brooks, 1967) and Krzysztof Zanussi’s A Year of the Quiet Sun (1984). Here he plays Eugene, the boys’ father, and he plays the reticent, deliberate man to the bone. I would contrast his concise, intriguing acting to the rhetorical, sanctimonious (and Oscar-winning) performance that Melvyn Douglas gave as the Texas rancher in Hud (Martin Ritt, 1963).

LILIOM (Fritz Lang, 1934)

A sweet comedy of life and afterlife, Liliom is the one film that Fritz Lang made in France after fleeing Adolf Hitler’s Germany and before settling in the United States. It is based on the 1909 play by Hungary’s Ferenc Molnár. The year after she arrived in the United States in 1939 (on the same ship, incidentally, on which Molnár arrived), Ingrid Bergman starred in a New York stage production of Liliom, and five years hence the play formed the basis for the Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II musical Carousel. Bergman and Lang, who never worked with one another, had something else in common. Both had been approached to contribute to the Nazi film industry, in the case of Lang, as the principal man in charge. This is what precipitated Lang’s flight from his homeland. Lang was half-Jewish, but Hitler, who probably knew this, especially wanted Lang’s gifts for the road ahead—a curious exception that, in fact, Hitler was prepared to allow on other occasions pertaining to other Jews whose gifts he wished to appropriate for his own ends.

Those familiar with the story of Carousel are familiar with the story of Liliom, which, in the film, is set in rural France. A carnival barker exits his job to pair with a girl who has also just lost her job. The boy, Liliom, treats the girl, Julie, roughly. Julie, however, remains devoted. She becomes pregnant. In order to provide for Julie and the baby, Liliom joins a friend in a street robbery that goes awry. The police chasing him, Liliom commits suicide, stabbing himself with his knife. (This is one of the plot elements that Carousel changes; there, Billy—the Liliom character—is killed when he accidentally falls on his knife.) From heaven, after he has spent time in Purgatory, Liliom is allowed to return to Earth for one day so that he may see his now 16-year-old daughter. Failing to take her feelings into consideration, Liliom tells his daughter, who is also named Julie, that her father was not the virtuous man that her mother has led her to believe, that he routinely beat her mother. When his daughter pulls away, Liliom strikes her, but, because he is spirit, she feels nothing. When mother and daughter compare notes on how it is possible to be struck and feel no pain for the love that one bears the assailant, Liliom, despite his most stubborn efforts to resist it, achieves, at last, redemption.

This is quite simply one of the most brilliant stories ever conceived, and both Molnár’s play and Lang’s film—at one point, Lang anointed it as his personal favorite—influenced other films to come, including Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death (Stairway to Heaven, 1946), and Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast (1946) and Orpheus (1949). The special effects, primitive and theatrical, are magical, and the details of the afterlife—for instance, someone there is reading the Daily Paradise—wittily suggest that heaven is conceived by humanity as an extension of the earthly experience with which humans are familiar. There is no grandeur here to afterlife.

The film centers (as the title suggests) on Liliom, a boy who, like so many other males, hides his feelings of inferiority and insufficiency behind an aggressive mask. In a stunning scene, the bureaucrat in charge of the section of afterlife at which, escorted by two spooks, Liliom, as a suicide, has arrived shows Liliom a film capturing one of the times that Liliom treated Julie arrogantly and (briefly) brutally. But this film isn’t a mere copy of reality, for—shades of Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude!—superimposed on the action that we already observed in the earthly portion of the film are Liliom’s thoughts at the time, and these reveal that Liliom’s assault on Julie hid and overcompensated for his own private feelings of insufficiency and inadequacy. Confronted with this irrefutable evidence, Liliom nevertheless maintains his arrogant posture, denying that the film is truthful. For Lang, of course, film is truth. Thus we see that the crisis involved in human redemption stems from humanity’s inability to conceive of itself beyond the behavioral terms that marked it on earth. Indeed, this is metaphorical, since, in reality, the film throughout is about life, not afterlife. Liliom’s defensiveness is, alas, his one source for a sense of integrity, the one method he has for navigating through and negotiating life’s blows and disappointments. It is therefore left to others, in Liliom’s case, both Julies, to effect an arrogant man’s redemption. Those who love us, not God (who never appears in the film) or even ourselves, may offer the ultimate hope for our redemption here on earth. It matters that others love us even though we may make ourselves as unloveable as our warped and devious feelings demand.

The film (after a fleeting nod to the afterlife) opens at night in a phantasmagoric passage wherein Liliom reigns like a sexual god on his carousel, a symbol of fortune’s wheel to which, very Langlike, his existence is bound. Lang creates an image of almost surreally attractive, sturdy youth—Liliom is in his late twenties and played by Charles Boyer, no less—that seems efficient and powerful. But the tawdriness of the atmosphere moderates this image, as does the fact that Liliom’s female employer feels that she “owns” him, given that she pays his salary, and when she intervenes between Liliom and two patrons, Julie and a female friend, Liliom’s sense of autonomy, injured, requires his quitting his job. Liliom, then, is essentially adolescent in his mindset: irresponsible, driven by his (self-)sensitivities and by a need to feel free and strong. Something of the same dark atmosphere reappears during the attempted robbery that goes awry. The plan is ironic, because, for once, having learned of Julie’s pregnancy, Liliom is trying to be responsible; however, his pervasive mindset submits this responsible urge to the course of his pre-existent irresponsibility. No wonder that Cocteau was so drawn to this film, for it seems to locate a kind of determinism in the imperatives, the mechanism, if you will, of male adolescence.

A prelude to the attempted robbery constitutes one of the film’s most beautiful moments. Liliom and his cohort are hiding off the main road in preparation of their attack. When a suitable victim appears, Liliom will approach him, ask him for the time, and Liliom’s accomplice will beat him over the head, Liliom will stab him to death, and the two criminals will divest the dead man of his pocketbook. However, the first passer-by is himself poor: a traveling (yes!) blade sharpener. Liliom is about to reveal his knife to have it sharpened when his accomplice intercedes and prevents this. Two things: the passer-by is unmistakably Jewish; Liliom later learns, as do we, that this “man” was in fact his guardian angel offering him a final chance to avoid the upcoming attempted robbery and, therefore, his resultant death. One might say that the (presumably) Catholic, unemployed Liliom’s “better angel” is a hardworking Jewish individual whose (apparent) poverty echoes and cries out to Liliom’s own. All this reflects on Liliom’s insularity, his dire fate as a result of remaining locked inside his adolescent egotism. Liliom should have reached out to others—to Julie, of course, but also to others, however different and unfamiliar: others, in the same or a similar social circumstance. However dissimilar the two films appear on the surface, Liliom is Lang’s Kameradschaft.

It falls far short of Georg Wilhelm Pabst’s masterpiece, however, and, no matter Lang’s fondness for it, Liliom is not in the same league as such German Lang films as Destiny (1921), Die Nibelungen (1924) and M (1931). It’s a good film, though, and at times a superlative one. But in one respect it is a towering achievement: Boyer’s performance—which, along with his work in Max Ophüls’s Madame de . . . (1952) and Alain Resnais’s Stavisky (1973), reminds us that the man with the bedroom eyes and voice achieved his most profound results when acting at home in his native language. Boyer also came to Hollywood, for financial rather than political reasons, but he returned to France after the war and continued to work on both sides of the Atlantic, a highly successful and consummate professional. One element of his biography adds a haunting spark to Liliom. Boyer, like his character in the Lang film, ended up a suicide—in his case, following the loss, in old age, of his lifetime partner and wife. Without spending a jot of time in Purgatory, he shot straight up to Paradise and into the arms of unceasing love.