CRIMSON GOLD (Jafar Panahi, 2003)

“Why are you doing this?!”

This is the question that the upscale jeweller, himself at gunpoint, asks the thief who has pushed his way into the man’s shop in the early hours. The thief kills the owner before committing suicide; we infer the first action from what we hear and the second action from what we see and hear, as the thief puts the gun to his head and the camera quickly rises. An extended flashback that loops back to the opening tragedies answers the jeweller’s question, in Talaye sorkh, which is called here in the States Crimson Gold. (Not knowing Farsi, I cannot vouch for the accuracy of this translation.) The film, from Iran, was directed (as well as edited) by Jafar Panahi (The White Balloon, The Circle, Offside), from a script by his mentor, the astounding writer-director Abbas Kiarostami (Life and Nothing More, Through the Olive Trees, A Taste of Cherry, The Wind Will Carry Us, Ten), who drew his inspiration in this instance from an actual crime reported in the daily newspaper. Crimson Gold is the sort of film that takes off from a springboard of individual reality in order to dive ever more deeply into the complexities of social reality. It is a major work about class collision.

Hussein, the tall, portly young man whose “story” the film follows, did not begin as a criminal; it would not appear that either robbery or murder was destined to be in his dossier. He was, we learn from a fellow combatant whom he chances across, a real hero during the eight-year Iran-Iraq War that ended fifteen years earlier. (In that war, the U.S. supported Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.) Hussein is a quiet, unassuming, considerate man, but the evenness of his affect may be partly due to drugs he takes to numb, perhaps, both war injuries and war memories; his bloated appearance, he notes, is the result of cortisone treatments. (“I cannot recognize myself any longer,” he says at one point.) Hussein subsists on what he earns as a motorbike pizza deliveryman. For all his wartime service and sacrifice, he is in the lower social stratum.

His best friend, Ali, is his polar opposite, loquacious and ever smiling. Hussein is engaged to marry Ali’s sister, who is intent on pleasing her fiancé lest the planned wedding evaporate. Ali will be Hussein’s accomplice in the planned robbery. Early on, the two buddies are relaxing in a tea shop when another patron, having misinterpreted their conversation about a woman’s purse that Ali found, lectures them against stealing other people’s property because the human cost, in fear, to the robbed individual isn’t worth the financial benefit to the thief. In another context, one might classify this odd exchange as irony, but in Crimson Gold, coupled with the loop-around narrative structure, it is a kind of foreshadowing, with an air of inevitability to it. Hussein, we shall see, is brought to a point where he becomes the criminal that the stranger in the tea shop mistakenly accuses him of being.

What brings Hussein to this point? A series of events. Inaugurating this is the chanced-upon purse, in which Hussein and Ali discover a receipt for a necklace, from the jewelry shop at which Hussein’s life will end. The amount indicated on the receipt is high beyond the two men’s imaginings. Their interest is piqued; they feel drawn to the wealthy part of Tehran, to check out the piece of jewelry notice of which has fallen into their laps—or, rather, onto the table at the tea shop where they have met to relax. But when they arrive at the jewelry shop, the owner treats Hussein and Ali, in their working-man garb, with disdain and dismissal, and a subsequent visit of theirs, along with Ali’s sister, when they are dressed in what we would call their Sunday best, only invites a more genteel version of this disdain and dismissal. The two events encapsulate a Tehran of two incompatible worlds, a high one and a low one. This, in turn, suggests a nation beset by social inequity. (Like ours, with what John Edwards has accurately called the two Americas.)

Every film exists on a continuum that is defined at one end by documentary and at the other end by fiction. (This is true even with documentaries.) We may also identify these extreme modes of expression as objectivity and subjectivity. If one wishes, one can imaginatively compress the continuum into a dialectical relationship between the two opposite modes of expression. Whereas all films, even if only by default, exist on this continuum, some films explore their location there and the interactions between the bookending modes of expression. All films written by Kiarostami belong in the latter category. Ultimately these films are, at some level, about the interactivity in cinema between documentary and fiction, between objectivity and subjectivity.

Crimson Gold was initiated by a document: the newspaper report of a typical city crime. The film attempts to expand on that, bringing the facts into the richer consideration of the event that fiction—the application of imagination—allows. I submit that, within the film, the jewelry shop receipt found inside the lost purse is another such document. It is a factual piece that inspires Hussein and Ali to pursue a fiction of their own devising: their pretense at belonging to another, higher social world so that, hopefully by viewing the exotic necklace (which is all, initially, that they intend to do), their own drab, workday lives will be, however briefly, brilliantly transformed. That at least is the hope. Reality, though, dictates a different conclusion, one that reduces the expansive fiction or make-believe into the narrow dimensions of the inaugurating fact—the document, the discovered receipt, that, by inspiring the men’s curiosity and wonder, implies from the outset their exclusion from the world to which the jewelry store caters. In Kiarostami and Panahi’s film, then, “documentary” is correlative to Hussein and Ali’s limited social circumstance, while “fiction” is correlative to the wider and higher social circumstance that they aspire to and can never really attain. The loop-around narrative structure that Kiarostami has devised also speaks to the fact that, in Crimson Gold, fiction of one kind or another always resolves back into the social entrapment from which it was meant to provide an adventurous escape. We may thus define “documentary” in this regard as the reality of social circumstance and “fiction” as possibility—the possibility of aiming and attaining higher. Because there is, ultimately, no such possibility, the documentary influence ensnares the fictional influence in a loop, and the film, at every level, delivers on its thematic premise—that Iran provides no opportunity for upward mobility between its “haves” and “have-nots.”

Other similar “documents” in the film are the orders for pizza that inaugurate Hussein’s deliveries into the night. One such delivery provides the occasion for some of the film’s most profound considerations. It is dark, and a contingent of military police prevent the execution of Hussein’s pizza delivery as they keep under surveillance a party underway in one of the apartments in an apartment building. For Hussein, the situation is absurd since the pizza was ordered by someone in an apartment other than the one in which the party is being held. For the police, the situation is necessary so that no one can tip off the revelers, who, one by one, are being arrested as they leave the building. For Hussein, then, this “fiction” isn’t of his own devising; the workings of a virtual police state have foisted it on him. Hussein doesn’t take pride in his work; it’s a job, and he wants to get on with it, and get it completed, and go home to bed. To do this, he needs to deliver the pizza, and this the police will not allow him to do. In positing this in the script, Kiarostami has lit upon an ingenious narrative strategy for showing the state’s intrusiveness into people’s lives without making the protagonist a direct victim. In this way, Kiarostami and Panahi can suggest the pervasiveness of the oppression by a single example, with Hussein’s frustrated attempt to make his delivery providing a casual, indirect, seemingly haphazard index of the oppression. The passage also demonstrates Hussein’s remarkable resourcefulness and flexibility. When he learns that the situation might continue until dawn, for the party might not completely break up until then, he distributes the still-hot pizza to the officers and engages in conversation one of the “men,” a fifteen-year-old guard, who provides a reminder of his own innocence once upon a time and, in retrospect, a reflection of the opportunities in life that didn’t pan out for him despite his military service. The canceled pizza order, that is, Hussein’s inability to deliver the pizza to the party who ordered it, becomes, in context, a stunning metaphor—for Hussein in the film no less than for us watching it—for his own canceled prospects and dreams. Another delivery, another night, in fact deepens this awareness of his as he hands over a pizza to someone with whom he served in the Iran-Iraq War.

There is another bravura passage involving another one of Hussein’s deliveries. This brings him to a palatial penthouse apartment owned by a couple visiting the United States and currently occupied by their spoiled playboy son, who has just returned from the States. As Hussein enters the elevator to make the delivery in the very posh building, we see two young women exiting the building. It turns out that they had been the playboy’s guests, one of them invited by him, the other unexpectedly invited by the invitée, and that the three pizzas had been for the three of them. In their absence, the playboy invites Hussein in. He has lost his appetite, but Hussein is welcome to eat the pizzas and have some wine, and to listen to the young man’s litany of romantic woes. Hussein is about to start in on the second small pizza when his host’s cellphone conversation with the originally uninvited female guest moves him to place it silently back in the box, as the host now reoffers the food to her. Hussein knows his place and is a model of considerate behavior. As the phone conversation continues, he wanders the seemingly endless and certainly stupendous apartment. The confrontation between the low soul and these luxuriant surroundings, including an indoor swimming pool into which he jumps fully clothed, constitutes a fictional escape from reality that rekindles cherished film memories of Charles Chaplin’s City Lights (1931) and especially Federico Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria (1956). Even in this waking dream, though, reality asserts itself. From the lofty vantage that the penthouse provides, Hussein espies his own humble home. Shades of High and Low (1963)! Hussein is ripe for committing his criminal act, much like the impoverished medical student, in Akira Kurosawa’s film, upon whose ghetto shack the capitalist’s lofty mansion looks down. Once he finds himself trapped inside that situation, Hussein is also ripe for taking his own life.

Kiarostami and Panahi’s film proceeds at a steady, measured pace, its loop-around structure tightening as a noose around Hussein’s neck. Hussein the pizza delivery man is played by Hussein Emadeddin, an actual pizza delivery man—not just a flourish of self-reflexivity, but another layer of import suggestive of social class role entrapment. A paranoid schizophrenic, Emadeddin takes drugs in order to manage his condition. The genial haze of flat affect that he emits and projects provides still another layer to the pearl that the filmmakers’ thematic purpose has beautifully brought into being.

As with Panahi’s The Circle, Iran has seen fit to ban this film at home. We have scarcely treated Panahi any better, detaining him in shackles, in 2003, for sixteen hours at JFK Airport while demanding that he secure a travel visa simply to change planes. At least we can see The Circle here. At least we get to see Crimson Gold.

HOUSE OF FOOLS (Andrei Konchalovsky, 2002)

Some of you will recall the hoopla and controversy over the Russian and French film House of Fools (Dom durakov) by Andrei Konchalovsky, Nikita Mikhalkov’s brother and the author of the screenplay for Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev (1966). Some proclaimed the film, which won the Grand Special Jury Prize at Venice, a masterpiece, while others denounced it as a trite mess.
     This is the one set in a mental hospital near the Russian-Chechnyan border during the Chechnyan War. By turns Chechnyan and Russian soldiers take over the place, and by the end a Chechnyan soldier, hiding from Russians, is taken into their fold by the patients, who have learned firsthand about the horrors of war. The film is allegedly based on an actual incident.
     Some of the film is loopy and lame, in the King of Hearts mold (Philippe de Broca, 1967); but in its portrayal of the discombobulating effects of war, it is powerful. The film is no more than punctuated by gory, horrific violence, but Konchalovsky makes it seem as though the film is steeped in the madness and violence of war, which periodically seems to erupt without warning, despite the fact that, after a while, we are bracing ourselves for the next eruption. I was shaken, appalled, sickened, horrified.
     One of the satirical comedy’s oddities that truly commends it as unique is its gentle portrayal of the soldiers on both sides, especially in contrast to the mental patients, many of whom are obstreperous and rambunctious. Eugenii (Yevgeni) Mironov gives a quiet, heartbreaking performance as a Russian officer who begs out of the doctor a “strong” injection and a promise not to tell his men while also insisting he hasn’t known a moment’s fear in combat. Clearly, the young man is so entrenched in unglue-ing terror that he can no longer objectify and recognize it in himself; he is in its grip, but he has a job of leadership to do, and at all costs he will do this job for the sake of his company. But Mironov’s is only one of a bunch of sterling performances in the film, including Sultan Islamov’s as a Chechnyan soldier, Vladas Bagdonas’s as the doctor, and Stanislav Varkki’s as Ali, a brooding patient who always carries a security sack on his back. Most commentators have fallen over themselves in praise of the lead performance by Julia Vyotsky, whose Janna is a patient, at first seemingly near recovery, who disintegrates under the stark pressure that war exerts on her. I was not so convinced by Vyotsky as I was by the other actors. The film was shot at an actual rural insane asylum just outside Moscow.
     I do recommend the film, although I feel that Janna’s infatuation with Bryan Adams, who appears in her fantasies, is ridiculous. War is not the only thing for which one must brace oneself; Adams, Canada’s Barry Manilow, sings one of his dreadful pop ballads over and over again throughout the film.

THE STRANGER (Orson Welles, 1946)

John Huston came up with the story for The Stranger and gifted friend Orson Welles with it so that Welles might have a commercial success. (Welles and Huston, uncredited, both worked on the script.) The small profit that the result netted helped make possible two far, far better Welles films: The Lady from Shanghai and Macbeth (both 1947). Indeed, The Stranger, a postwar thriller about escaped Nazis lurking in small-town America, is Welles’s weakest completed film.

The hero of the film is named Wilson. A member of the Allied War Crimes Commission, he has orchestrated the “escape” from prison of Konrad Meinike so that this high-ranking Nazi will lead him to Meinike’s superior, the commander of “one of the most efficient” Nazi death camps, Franz Kindler, who has “disappeared” into Harper, Connecticut, where he has assumed the identity of a college professor of history, Charles Rankin. Marriage to Mary Longstreet, daughter of a U.S. Supreme Court justice, has further helped Kindler/Rankin blend into acceptable American society. Harper, the epitome of small-town America as much as Santa Rosa, California, in Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (1943), is in a state of satisfaction owing to the end of the war and the concomitant renewal of American prosperity after a long spell of economic depression before the war and economic sacrifice during it. Wilson eventually gets his man, who is (stunningly) impaled on the blade carried by a rotating figure on a gigantic old clock.

Kindler/Rankin is repairing this clock throughout the film. His “hobby” of clocks, we are told, borders on mania. He wishes to turn back time, at least to a point prior to the defeat of the Nazis and their dreams of world domination. Our first closeup of the campus building clock shows one hand moving backwards, that is, counterclockwise, as a result of its being cleaned in preparation for Kindler/Rankin’s work on it. On the telephone, Kindler/Rankin doodles a swastika, but a backward swastika that appears to be turning counterclockwise instead of clockwise. This is all fine visual detail—the sort of minutiae that occupies at least some of Welles’s attention, presumably to compensate for the film’s impoverished concept. I especially like the slip of the mind that exposes Rankin as Kindler to Wilson at a dinner party. Camouflaging his political disposition, Rankin delivers an earnest, well-reasoned denunciation of the German character, noting that, historically, Germany has nothing in its arsenal of beliefs comparable to France’s “liberty, equality, fraternity.” When Mary’s younger brother, Noah, rebuts with the example of Karl Marx’s vision of united workers, Rankin reacts by saying that Marx wasn’t a German but a Jew. Wilson tells his contact in Europe by phone that night that only a Nazi would say that someone isn’t German because he is Jewish. For me, this is the film’s most powerful moment, a superior example of mental detective work. I like the fact that the Nazi hunter really is an intellectual match for Rankin/Kindler, who couldn’t be more rank or less kind. Wilson tells the truth when he describes himself as “cold-blooded”; he is as ruthless in pursuit of Nazis as Kindler is in his attempts to evade justice.

The cruelty of Kindler’s impersonation leads to Mary’s near nervous breakdown and to the death of the family dog, Red (is there a political angle to the name?), which is intent on digging up Meinike, whom Rankin/Kindler has murdered. (He also murders Red.) But the shadowy nature of Russell Metty’s black-and-white cinematography suggests there may be other secrets being kept in Harper. The Longstreet family is odd. Mary addresses her father by his first name, Adam (biblically, the first of first names), and he in turn addresses her as “Sister.” For his part, the boy, Noah, always seems on the verge of tears—or, should I say, flooding? Adam, we are informed, is a very “liberal” member of the U.S. Supreme Court, and I kept wondering, in light of the strange family interactions, just how many sexual liberties at home he has taken in the past. Harper’s principal comic relief is Mr. Potter, who runs the general store and who plays mind games on opponents, preserving his own airtight focus, as he beats them at checkers for a quarter a pop. On the other hand, Harper is more hospitable to strangers than small American towns, infamously parochial and guarded, usually are. I worry that part of the film’s message is paranoid, to wit, people ought to be more vigilant. I recall from childhood my older brother describing an aunt of ours as someone who finds Nazis under every bed. I should hate to think of either Huston or Welles in this way.

The script, which is credited (at different stages) to Victor Trivas, Decla Dunning and Anthony Veiller, is convoluted and farfetched; I can’t imagine a father, much less one who is a Supreme Court justice, participating in a scheme to catch a menace that puts his daughter’s life in such keen jeopardy. On the other hand, the film is full of excellent visual touches and flourishes. It is a Welles film, however dimly. Welles himself plays the Nazi and doesn’t wink at us once. Edward G. Robinson brings a recognizably Jewish face to the role of Wilson, although a stronger result might have been achieved had Welles gotten his way; Welles wanted Agnes Moorehead to play Wilson! The film’s chief liability is its lead actress. Welles can do little or nothing to make Loretta Young appear even vaguely human as she emotes all over the place in the role of Mary. This is another of Young’s fatuous, empty performances. As she imitated Irene Dunne in 1930s romantic comedies, Young now was imitating Joan Crawford. She is given a beautiful line when Mary expresses disbelief to Charles that, regarding Germans, he should “favor a Carthaginian peace,” and one can just tell that Young hasn’t a clue as to what the line she is speaking means. I am sure that Welles took time to explain it; but, while you can lead a Young to water, you cannot make her think.

THE CABIN IN THE COTTON (Michael Curtiz, 1932)

About the conflict between poor white tenant farmers in the South and (to use the word that draws a direct line of connection to the slave system that the current feudalistic system had supplanted) their “owners,” The Cabin in the Cotton smacks of some uncredited indebtedness to the greatest American novel of the twentieth century, Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, at least insofar as a boy (a stocky Richard Barthelmess) is poised between a girl of his own social class and a rich girl (Bette Davis). (In fact, the film comes from a book, which in turn may have been drawing upon the Dreiser.) This I don’t mind, except that the Depression-era film doesn’t wring from the romantic triangle a full draught of social consciousness; it strikes me instead as mere romantic melodrama, with a faint, lemony socially conscious twist. What really annoys me, though, is Hungarian-born director Michael Curtiz’s “balanced” approach to the material. The script is on the side of the angels (the exploited), but Curtiz imposes on the material a maddening impartiality. Imagine a film about Nazis and German Jews that insists on a “balanced” approach, and you will get some idea how unseemly a movie The Cabin in the Cotton is. Curtiz should have gone the way of the script, although it’s possible that the studio, First National, wouldn’t allow him to in light of the financial failure the previous year, at Paramount, of Sternberg’s film version of Dreiser’s novel, with its bias toward the hardworking lower class, as embodied by Sylvia Sidney’s most appealing factory worker.

SHATTERED GLASS (Billy Ray, 2003)

Stephen Glass became a journalist and associate editor at the venerated The New Republic in the mid-1990s. He was in his mid-twenties. (He was also published in George and Rolling Stone.) As it happens, he was making up quotes, making up whole articles even, inventing people and places. He was trying desperately to keep up with expectations of him, in fact; but you would hardly guess this from the vague, silly film that Billy Ray wrote and directed about his ordeal, which casts Glass as the villain, or at least pretends to, and casts his editor, Charles Lane, as the hero—or at least pretends to. There’s no reasonable approach to this material, however, where Lane isn’t the one who is the villain. His mistreatment of Glass, who is ten years his junior, is unmotivated according to the meager information that the movie provides. Indeed, Lane is so astoundingly unkind and insensitive that one doubts that any motivation could account for his behavior. It doesn’t help that Peter Sarsgaard, who plays Lane, gives a bent-out, humorless performance. (Others may disagree. Sarsgaard received a number of year-end prizes as best supporting actor, including the accolade from the National Society of Film Critics.)

In the commentary that he provides on the DVD of the movie, Ray asserts that he wanted to approach the material “as a journalist.” Thus he gives us gratuitously accurate atmosphere in the New Republic office in Washington, D.C. (as though many of us will ever be able to corroborate this), but withholds vitally necessary context on two ends. One involves Glass’s alleged crimes. This film never convinces me, at least, that Glass did anything so horrific, nor do suggestions of normal journalistic integrity settle the matter. If Glass did something wrong, the film has to make some sort of a case against him without resorting to platitudes and clichés. The two times that the script attempts to bestow dignity on TNR—or, as it’s referred to in the film, The New fucking Republic—by noting it’s “the in-flight news magazine of Air Force One” amount to pointless drivel. The “tall tale” occupies a much higher seat in American tradition and culture, and, if it’s a showdown between the two, a mischievous license to lie in print must trump spurious notions of journalistic integrity. The ghost of Ben Franklin wouldn’t have it any other way. The usual defense of journalistic scrupulousness—a case that the film might have made but (wisely) didn’t—is that the maintenance of democracy requires that the citizenry be given accurate information. This won’t wash here. TNR’s small circulation, to which the film itself alludes, diminishes this requirement, which is canceled altogether by the marginal and sensational nature of the pieces that Glass generally wrote. The piece that would prove his downfall, for instance, is about a convention of computer hackers quite taken over by a teenaged boy flanked by his agent and his mom. (The disaster comes when an online magazine fact-checks the piece.) All this Glass made up; the exposure of Glass’s lies serves only to make democracy smile, no matter the anxiety and near ruin it afflicted on Glass himself. Sarsgaard’s humorlessness as Lane, then, is strategic; it’s to intimidate us from breaking into any kind of joy over young Glass’s prodigious gifts for fantasy and whoppers.

The film makes a good deal about Glass’s attempts to give credibility to his shenanigans, as though his fear of exposure and possibly implicit guilt certify the manipulative nastiness and evil of his ways. To corroborate sources, the boy invents a business card and even constructs a Web site; he enlists the aid of an older brother to impersonate someone who really doesn’t exist. Horrors! From what we see, however, Glass, relentlessly bullied by Lane, is perfectly entitled to defend himself in ways that are part of the same fabric of fabrications as the articles themselves that he wrote. The kid was in a groove.

The other failure of the film to provide context is even more debilitating. As uncurious a journalist as ever existed, Ray has nothing whatsoever to say on the subject of Glass’s motivation. Lane, joining Ray on the DVD commentary track, notes that Glass was fully capable of creating legitimate stories. Why didn’t he do so exclusively then? One can approach this question from two fronts. One is psychological. What in Glass’s personal history brought him to such antics? More importantly, what about TNR and, more generally, competitive journalism prompted Glass’s behavior? In a 60 Minutes piece also included on the DVD, TNR’s literary editor, Leon Wieseltier, all but implies the encouragement that Glass was given by being treated as a young hotshot, a wunderkind, whose “pitches” for articles that he made at staff meetings were greeted with ever more delight and awe. By contrast, Lane’s suggestion on the DVD commentary track that Glass’s dissembling had something to do with Bill Clinton is noxious and ridiculous.

Ray’s cutter, Jeffrey Ford, has devised some fancy editing footwork blending actual meetings and scenes of Glass’s fantasies. The film is fraudulently framed by a triumphant visit by Glass to a school class of budding journalists. The whole thing is Glass’s fantasy. The (perhaps) unintended implication is that Glass is delusional. Nothing in the film, though, supports the idea that Glass is delusional. Clearly, Ray is an incompetent who is incapable of controlling the meanings that arise from the film that he has wrought—although, since on the commentary track he credits his cinematographer, Mandy Walker, with the film’s visual aspect (that’s his, not her principal responsibility), it’s unclear in what sense he is the film’s maker. Indeed, the bevy of assistant directors involved in the project—a film with little action—further begs the question: Just what did Ray contribute to the making of his own film?

Hayden Christiensen plays Stephen Glass close to the vest. He looks remarkably like Glass. It’s a shallow performance.

Postscript: Glass has since written a novel, The Fabulist, about a chap engaged in activities echoing Glass’s, and he has earned a law degree. No comment.