VAMPYR (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1931)

Most of the best horror films, for a host of reasons, have come from Germany: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Robert Wiene, 1919), Nosferatu (Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, 1922), Jonathan (Hans W. Geissendörfer, 1970—this, from West Germany). From both Germany and France, Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Vampyr (Vampyr—Der Traum des Allan Grey) is probably the finest horror film ever made.

Dreyer had already collapsed the difference between historical reality and its fictional representation in his portrayal of Jesus and his disciples in the beautiful opening segment of Leaves from Satan’s Book (Blade af Satans Bog, 1919), from Denmark, and in his portrait of Jeanne d’Arc’s trial in The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), from France. But Vampyr, for three reasons, is very different. Like Fritz Lang’s Destiny (1921), it fully enters a magical world, in its case, a realm of sinister enchantment. Moreover, its images and sounds across a spectrum of fictional and nonfictional, and objective and subjective, suggestions is correlative to its attempt to bridge the worlds of sound and silence. The film’s additions of sound effects and spoken dialogue, both sparse, interrupt and unsettle its silent or eerily quiet dreamlike realm, helping the film to realize its central theme: humanity’s anxieties as a result of (our species presumes) its peculiar awareness of its own mortality. The dreaminess of Vampyr suggests more than an anxious dream, however; on one level, it is a desired or somehow willed dream whose aim is to relegate elements of anxious reality to the realm of dream so that the possibility exists of waking up and having these elements dissipate and dissolve. The film implies, then, a permanently objective world the fear of whose loss requires the landscape of a dream as a kind of safety hatch or escape route. The blend of elements is so complete that, throughout much of the film, there is, simultaneously, a quiet sense of stability and a disquieting sense of instability and loss. Vampyr exists within a dream, but, within that dream, it exists at the crossroads of possibility and impossibility, loss and the hope of defeating loss, subjectivity and objectivity, nonfiction and fiction. Not coincidentally, it is the grayest film among all black-and-white films.

The film opens with sound: the low, ominous strains of Wolfgang Zeller’s musical theme, perfectly suited to the theme of mortal anxiety. It immediately posits Vampyr as a sound film but then visually opens as a silent film, or as a throwback to silent films, when a long title card appears, identifying the hero of the about-to-unfold adventure as young David Gray, whose study of evil and vampires from past centuries has rendered him a “dreamer, for whom the boundary between the real and the unreal has become dim.” (The dream state of Gray’s existence is reinforced by a subsequent reference to his “aimless journeyings.”) In effect, we the viewer relate to this title card, and the one that follows establishing the setting, the village of Courtempierre in the nineteenth century, as though they are documents: documentary guideposts. This will later connect to a huge document about vampirism portions of which we will intermittently read over Gray’s shoulder, as it were, as Gray himself reads it. On one level, this is an attempt by Dreyer to bring credibility to the fantastic, as Lang attempts to do by other means in Die Nibelungen. On a more pressing level, though, this is an attempt to use an element of silent films in order to stabilize the new anxiety-ridden territory of sound cinema (this was Dreyer’s first sound film)—anxiety that is correlative to, and perhaps even representative of, anxiety related to human mortality. That the object of Gray’s study is vampires makes the point perfectly, for vampires—the undead—are projections of this anxiety of ours over our finite condition. The peculiar nature of this printed language, however, is to encapsulate the anxiety that the language would seem to counter, much as, when a patient reads about a terminal illness he or she has, with the aim of mastering fear through knowledge, he or she may nevertheless be reinforcing the original anxiety. Facts about illness do not necessarily dissipate the fact of the approaching death. Attempts at objectifying often deepen a soul’s subjectivity. To say the same thing in another way: One does what one can to reduce one’s level of anxiety, but in reality, in certain situations, there is nothing one can do. The one possibility that is open is to go through the motions of doing something. Our fear of death stubbornly resists transcendence.

In the authentic kind of cinema in which Dreyer engaged, images take primacy over language, whether the language is spoken or written. After the two title cards, the film per se materializes; but it materializes in a kind of dematerializing way. Carrying against his shoulder a long-handled net, Gray appears walking up a hill with the sea in close proximity. Although he is fully dressed and dry, the shot is framed so that the “dream possibility” arises that Gray has just walked out of the water, and, in any case, because of what we have just read about his being a “dreamer,” we immediately associate the water with the unconscious—a common symbolism predating Freud’s naming of the unconscious. The complexity of the image speaks to the complexity of the film’s tack: Gray is on land, which implicitly means he is firmly in reality, but the water, coupled with the butterfly net he totes, renders the image dreamlike, casting Gray symbolically adrift. He is, recall, an aimless journeyer.

The next images find Dreyer renewing this tack—as, indeed, will the entire film. Having mounted the hill, Gray arrives at the inn where he will stay. This is grounded in reality, for the event implies the mundane arrangements that must have been made in advance so that Gray would have a place to stay while in Courtempierre. Such arrangements counter the idea of a dream by suggesting a continuity of behavior on Gray’s part. What we see next, though, counters the countering. Gray is at the door of the inn, but he finds no way of getting in. He knocks and calls to no avail; just when it seems that the implied “arrangements” have dissolved into nothingness, as things precisely do in a dream, a bespectacled woman opens an upstairs window, calls to Gray, and appears downstairs to let Gray in. Dreyer’s choice to keep the camera on Gray rather than follow the young woman downstairs (the shot of Gray at the door is from inside the inn), though, deliciously holds us in suspense as to whether the innkeeper will in fact let Gray in or simply vanish. (Who knows what might happen in this film?) Meanwhile, a man who is carrying a scythe descends the hill and rings a suspended bell, with the water again in close view. The scythe, which traditionally is something that the figure of Death might tote, identifies the man whose face is invisible to us because the camera is at his back as Gray’s reverse or contrary image: old instead of young, going down the hill that Gray has just ascended, and carrying the solid scythe instead of Gray’s airy net. The tolling bell, too, replaces Gray’s hello-ing, and, because of its visual juxtaposition with the sea, suggests the loss of human lives. Although the scene, and indeed the entire film, is wondrously light, there is an unmistakable presence here of human fear of death. This is reinforced to a stunning degree by a shot of the man, indeed old and now obliquely facing us with his scythe, shown against the quickly flowing water that now appears much closer than we have thus far seen it. We almost feel that it might carry us away.

The ridiculous plot of Vampyr, with its conspiracy to enslave a man and his daughters by a vampire and an evil doctor out of Caligari, comes from Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s story “Carmilla” in In a Glass Darkly. The film’s immense value owes little or nothing to its debased literary source. It’s the magical quality of the film that matters, such as in those shots, in shadowy silhouette, where a man is digging a grave and we see, in reverse motion, the earth sail through space to the spoon of the shovel. What matters most is the “not-quite-rightness” of the world that David Gray navigates, which achieves its culmination when he witnesses the movement of his casket towards burial, with himself, open-eyed, in it. It is the blending of anxious fantasy and objective reportage, subjectivity and objectivity, fiction and nonfiction that makes Vampyr cinema’s preeminent (if uncredited) evocation of Edgar Allan Poe, the nineteenth-century American newspaperman and fantasist whom critic Harold Bloom has unwisely dismissed.

Vampyr’s script is by Dreyer and Christen Jul. Dreyer’s inspired cinematographers—like Dreyer, they have tapped into their dreams—are Rudolf Mâté and Louis Née.

SECUESTRO EXPRESS (Jonathan Jakubowicz, 2005)

For at least its first half, the most popular film ever in Venezuela pulsates with energy, visual dazzle, sensitivity and intelligence. Secuestro express is about the kidnapping of a young couple by three young thugs angling for a hefty ransom. Apparently these kidnappings aren’t uncommon in deeply class-divided Caracas. Jonathan Jakubowicz, the film’s writer-director, was himself the victim of such a kidnapping.
     The haves do not always see the harsh lives and despair with which the have-nots must daily contend. In a bizarre reference to noblesse oblige, the girl, Carla, barks at one of her captors, “So you’ll know, I volunteer at Children’s Hospital.” Meanwhile, her father, a medical doctor, sleeps wearing a blindfold.
     A drug dealer unites the worlds of Carla’s five-year fiancé, Martin, and the hoodlums. Something else unites Martin and the dealer. When Carla walks in on their having anal intercourse, she is scornful, he, humiliated, and the relationship crumbles. Martin’s shouted advice upon escaping: “Kill the bitch!” But Carla helps facilitate the trio’s crime and grows romantically close to one of them, who ultimately proves to be her savior—not from his compatriots, who have let her go after collecting the ransom, but from the police, who aim to rape her. Carla’s father also is a rapist. In the film’s coda, we learn about the birth of her child.
     Jakubowicz portrays a society in turmoil. The film opens with documentary footage of the shooting death of someone protesting President Hugo Chávez’s government, proceeds to exemplify, through morbid public rituals, the claim that Roman Catholicism has on the culture, and concludes with a postscript: “Half of the world is starving, while the other half is dying of obesity. We have two choices left: ‘Confront the beast, or invite it to dinner.’”
     Jakubowicz chooses to confront.

THE TALENTED MR. RIPLEY (Anthony Minghella, 1999)

Anthony Minghella’s The Talented Mr. Ripley (actually, the complete title is much longer: The Mysterious Yearning Secretive Sad Lonely Troubled Confused Loving Musical Gifted Intelligent Beautiful Tender Sensitive Haunted Passionate Talented Mr. Ripley), based on the first of Patricia Highsmith’s five Tom Ripley novels (Wim Wenders’s The American Friend, 1977, is based on another), curiously comes just a few years after Martin Scorsese and Miramax presented with great fanfare a sparkling reissue of Purple Noon (1959), the immensely popular French thriller that René Clément made from the same book. Actually, the title of Clément and co-scenarist Paul Gégauff’s deliriously creepy Mediterranean mystery-adventure is Plein soleil, which translates as Blazing Sun. Like Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974), this is one noir that tracks down some of its darkest shadows in bright daylight. But Plein soleil is most famous for bringing international stardom to Alain Delon, whose likeability, athleticism and gorgeous good looks, in addition to real acting ability, helped Clément create a captivating rotter—a villain audiences could root for.

In Clément’s version, which follows the novel only loosely, Delon plays Tom Ripley, a poor American boy who is being paid by another American boy’s rich parents to retrieve their son, Philip, from Europe. In the meantime, though, Philip’s father bankrolls both boys in their European lounging. For Tom, it’s a delicious taste of the good life. Of course, he wants it to continue; in effect, he wants to be Phil. Therefore, he tries on Phil’s clothes, imitates Phil’s voice and, quite in front of this amused pal, practices Phil’s signature. Eventually, Tom murders Phil and, dodging discovery, takes his place. Young Delon is almost alarmingly alert to the possibilities of this role. He is everything he needs to be: crafty, intricately charming and, after the murder (and still another), ferally anxious; and Delon’s physicality amazes: he’s as supple as water. By slightly distancing us, Tom’s ruthlessness, as Delon plays it, nicely balances our embrace of the character as our surrogate as we wishfully pursue a luxuriant dream. We wouldn’t commit murder, mind you; that’s where Delon’s Tom comes in to complete our fantasy. Delon would prove himself a brilliant actor for Luchino Visconti, Michelangelo Antonioni, Jean-Pierre Melville, Joseph Losey and Jean-Luc Godard, among others; but he makes this early role so completely his own, perhaps, because his immense yearning for stardom—to be somebody—put him in the same boat, the same skin, as Tom Ripley.

Regarded now as a classic, Plein soleil has always had its detractors. It strikes many (myself included) as Clément’s vain attempt to make a New Wave film—to be exact, a Claude Chabrol film—with his own Old Wave technique and moralizing. The ending grates; at last settled in his impersonation, Tom is caught by the police. Why? Whatever is (rightly) cautionary in Tom’s example already is inherent in his awful anxiety. But the film erases this anxiety, making him complacent and smug simply to justify the plot’s cynical turn against him. Tom should have remained Tom—and free (as Highsmith would have it) to pursue more of his dangerous deceptions, assuming the identities of more of his victims. (Denial of the crimes, Freud would say.) For a number of reasons, then, I am no fan of Plein soleil.

Clément’s best film came early: with its vignettes of the Resistance over time, the neorealist Battle of the Rails (La bataille du rail, 1945). (I haven’t seen any of the short films Clément made before or during the war, including the one that Battle of the Rails expands upon.) He was “technical assistant” for Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast (1946), a marvelous fairy tale symbolizing the Occupation and the Liberation of France. Thereafter, his artistic decline was studded with prizes: three more prizes at Cannes (he had been named Best Director for Battle of the Rails), two at Venice, two Oscars, two prizes from the New York film critics. Today, though, the heavily awarded Jeux interdits (Forbidden Games, 1952) is barely watchable for its selfconsciousness and ponderous poetry; the same holds true for most of Clément’s other films. French cinema contemporaneous with these glory days of Clément’s—from late ’40s to mid-’50s—means, for me, Bresson, Franju, Becker, postwar Renoir, not Clément. The nouvelle vague soundly rejected his academism; entering into a purely commercial phase of his career, Clément responded with Plein soleil. No matter how skillfully wrought, this isn’t a work of art. For, rather than exploring a theme and giving it expressive form, the film plays on our emotions. It’s mere entertainment then. But what entertainment!

I am sorry to report that Minghella’s version isn’t half as good. Again we are transported to Italy and the Mediterranean (more duskily this time, since the color cinematographer is John Seale, not Henri Decaë); but the role of Tom Ripley just doesn’t suit Matt Damon. Dour and not quite young enough, Damon, overcompensating, flashes his teeth once too often, hoping perhaps that Ripley’s anxiety will mask his own.

It isn’t all Damon’s fault. By pushing the part in a single direction, Minghella may have left his star at loose ends. Minghella’s idea? Tom is a homosexual. The basis for this idea? It seems right to him, Minghella has said. Why, to me, this idea seems insufficient I will explain in due course. For now, though, someone else’s well-publicized difficulty with it is more relevant. When asked about it, in fact, Matt Damon has denied Ripley’s homosexuality, saying, “His sexuality is pretty much situational.” Damon prefers to think of Tom, then, as a chameleon; and, however dutifully he may have tried playing Tom according to Minghella’s plan, his intelligence—more than a match for Minghella’s flash (and crash) of intuition—has pulled him and the one-note script apart. The result is a gaping hole at the center of the film.

Highsmith herself isn’t averse to plumbing homosexual undercurrents in the motivational mix of her characters, even Tom Ripley. (She herself was a lesbian.) And, if Minghella had done that, all would be fine. In his film, however, the analytical subtext almost wholly replaces the narrative. Whereas Clément’s Tom is driven to confiscate the idleness and élan that his friend’s wealth and social class allow, Minghella’s Tom simply covets the man himself. Here, Minghella indulges in gross oversimplification. Murdering Dickie—Minghella replaces Phil with Highsmith’s own juvenile name for her character—is no longer, therefore, part of a plan for living a fantasy by taking someone else’s place; rather, enraged over being rejected, Minghella’s Tom murders Dickie because he, Tom, has failed to convert him, a heterosexual, into his (Tom’s) homosexual lover. Lest we miss the point, Minghella belabors it by showing, after the murder is done, Tom locked in a bloody embrace with Dickie’s corpse—for the whole night, it is implied.

Let’s set aside what is probably inadvertent, although distressing nonetheless: that Minghella’s strenuous misreading suggests the common homophobic nightmare that a gay person will resort to any means to impress his or her orientation on a straight person. The bottom line, for me, is that Minghella’s interpretation isn’t helpful; by substituting the explanation for the thing purportedly being explained (a recurrent practice nowadays), the “explanation” explains nothing. What could be explained no longer exists; the “explanation” has displaced it! I have a theory: criticism that Clément’s film drew for insufficiently delving into the boys’ relationship drove Minghella into a preemptive dive into this deep end. Frankly, I see no need to psychologize the material beyond Tom’s transparent motivation. This isn’t Shakespeare, you know.

Moreover, Minghella’s reductivism brings about two damaging results. It takes away what makes the material so human: the urgent yearning of Tom’s that suggests Tom’s kinship with Jay Gatsby—and with the rest of us whose fantasies of a leisured life, even apart from Fitzgerald’s consideration of class, sometimes intoxicate us. Also, the emphatic imagery gets out of hand. It’s one thing, for instance, for Minghella to show Tom gazing at his friend’s bare bottom; but how is the director extending his interpretation when, later, he also bares Tom’s backside for the camera? Obviously, the rear view can’t be meant for Tom, as it was with Dickie’s exposure. For whom then? Us? Minghella himself? (The avoidance of frontal nudity is no answer since Minghella had as an option avoiding all nudity.)

By being so one-pointed, the film comes close to being pointless. It’s an exceedingly narrow drawer into which all manner of affect and visual material is dropped. Like his The English Patient (1996), which racially distorts Michael Ondaajte’s novel for the sake of peripheral Caucasian romance, Minghella’s Mr. Ripley is reactionary and crude. It’s hardly even a film, given that it rarely makes use of any of the medium’s expressive elements. For example, rather than visual, it’s merely pictorial. The class implication of some of the décor is its only use of mise-en-scène. Its parts unrhythmically lurching or (more often) lagging, this is an ungainly production that, impersonating a film, proceeds by scenes rather than shots.

Only one detail remains elusive: the early drowning death of a Roman girl whom Dickie probably impregnated. As if teasing us to expect a more spiritedly sinister film, Minghella neglects to say by whose hand this girl died: her own, as officially reported; Tom’s; Dickie’s; Dickie’s girlfriend Marge’s. Three things, actually, argue against its being a suicide, despite the girl’s damnable condition in a Roman Catholic milieu. One, the genre to which the story belongs: a murder mystery. Two, the fact that every other death in the film is a murder. Three, why raise a specter of ambiguity at all if the girl’s death and the official explanation coincide? Marge, surely, is the likeliest candidate for being the girl’s killer, especially given the intriguing way freckled, ever lovelier Gwyneth Paltrow plays her. Telling, also, is the fact that Marge is, among those who knew Dickie, the one person to denounce Tom as Dickie’s murderer; maybe it takes a killer to know a killer. On the other hand, since in the film it is unique the ambiguity may be inadvertent—one more example of Minghella’s carelessness. Another example: Marge is writing a book about—unless I missed some fleeting reference—we’re never told what. Or why. (In Plein soleil it’s a graduate thesis on Fra Angelico.)

Although Paltrow performs well, as does, briefly, Philip Baker Hall as a detective, most of the acting in this film is more confusing than compelling. Why, for example, has Jude Law elected to make his Dickie Greenleaf a carbon copy of Maurice Ronet’s (splendid) Phil in Plein soleil? Why does Minghella think this benefits his film? If anything, the plagiarism distracts our attention.

And again: what does Minghella think his homosexual reading adds to the material? Indeed, the film’s preoccupation with Tom’s homosexuality renders even the boy’s motto, “Better a fake somebody than a real nobody,” dispiritingly irrelevant. (Consult Woody Allen’s Zelig, 1983, for a proper treatment.) It hardly matters, ironically, that the film, unlike Clément’s, does the right thing by leaving Tom on the loose, because this time around it’s near impossible to care about Tom. Rather than the schemer Delon played, Ripley now is merely the passive recipient of one coincidence after another. Nor is it as much fun to watch Damon as it is Delon, whose whole body, in Plein soleil, is agile and alive. By contrast, Damon’s is rigid, clunkish, monolithic.

Delon. For all its shortcomings, at startling knifepoint Clément’s earlier version takes the edge; Minghella’s film fades even as one watches it. Clément may have been a better filmmaker than Minghella; but, on this occasion, his ace in the hole was his lead actor. On the verge of his tremendous Rocco for Visconti, Delon brings zest and adolescent ache to Plein soleil’s heady glimpse of just how treacherous are some of our golden dreams.

NENETTE AND BONI (Claire Denis, 1996)

Claire Denis, the spry youngster, is exactly my age; I really should have more sympathy for her. But I found her highly regarded Chocolat (1988) arid and I Can’t Sleep (1994) negligible. I am much more in tune, however, with Nénette et Boni, which in fact is one of the finest films I’ve seen about marginal contemporary youth. It took the Best Film prize at Locarno, where its two stars, Alice Houri and Grégoire Colin, also won as Best Actress and Best Actor.

Trenchant, poetic and steelily realistic, the film is very rich, very full—not schematic and message-tagged, like Mathieu Kassovitz’s La haine (1995). Rather than being driven, like La haine, by attitude and agenda, Nénette et Boni is primarily interested (as we are) in its two main characters, a fifteen-year-old girl and her eighteen-year-old brother. Nénette and Boni—Antoinette and Boniface—are out on their own, their mother deceased, their father the object of one’s fear and the other’s contempt. Quarrelsomely and painfully, the two children bridge their mutual estrangement only to reach, by the end of the film, another estrangement that sets one of them loose for a life on the streets and gives the other new responsibility. Their tough, vulnerable lives are works-in-progress.

The scene is working-class Marseilles. Seven months pregnant, Nénette, having run away from school, hides unannounced in her brother Boni’s tiny place (their deceased mother’s house), which he shares with a passive pet rabbit. (The curious, demanding cat that keeps poking through his window is far less to his liking.) A buzz-cut above being a skinhead, Boni works out of a van as a pizza chef; he augments his income as an errand boy for a local gunrunning operation. What expressive filmmaking Denis marshals to introduce these two. Cutting back and forth between the teenagers, Denis establishes each in her or his own element while the formal separation this imposes on them establishes, also, their estrangement. The culmination of this bravura opening movement is testy, explosive. Discovering Nénette in his domain, Boni tosses her out. The boy cherishes his independence and, even more, his privacy—one as a reaction against their father, the other as an opportunity for the unbridled sexual fantasies that accompany his sleep and generous masturbations. Nevertheless, he takes to the streets to retrieve his younger sister, his massive decency as well as some family feeling kicking in. The shell that this boy has built around himself Nénette now threatens to pierce—as she must, for she is in terrible need.

Boni acts his age; in short, he is stubbornly immature. He insists on holding Nénette accountable for “choosing” their father over him (and, implicitly, over their dead mother); what else could she have done? Younger, Nénette needed some adult to stabilize her shattered life after the divorce of their parents or the death of their mother—the precise point of decision the film never makes clear. That the family member she went with may since have raped her—this is ambiguous; the baby she gives birth to may be biracial—is only one of the film’s numerous knitted ironies. (Two others: Nénette’s sexual experience likely exceeds her older brother’s; Boni ends up parenting, alone, his sister’s son.) But why does Boni hold this necessary choice against Nénette? Possibly Boni needs the security of believing for his own sake that people really have free and plentiful choices. Helping to make this film savvy is the fact that Denis holds no such illusion; throughout, there is a subtle though powerful sense that ruin is yawning just underneath both children. Theirs are constantly imperiled lives requiring the utmost effort to keep afloat. Hauntingly, the film opens with Nénette peacefully submerged, as in a dream, in a pool—a key image. For, if her brother’s fantasy is sex, hers is death. Unlike Boni, Nénette doesn’t see much choice in her midst. Denis balances their views; she understands—as someone her (and my) age should—that there is little choice in life, and, far from relieving us of responsibility, this in fact compounds the value of that responsibility. It is in this context that one must receive, finally, Boni’s kidnapping-adoption of Nénette’s infant.

There’s a sense of immediacy to this film that perfectly expresses the degree to which the two children constantly seek refuge in the present as their best (though fragile) defense against a potentially crippling, flypaper past. This in-the-momentness precludes the sort of detailed narrative exposition some viewers may be (too) used to; a lot of questions—whats and whys—go unanswered. For instance, consider Nénette’s nonresponse to her brother’s peevish claim that she chose to live with their father. Nénette offers neither explanation nor apology. All she does is point out how irrelevant Boni’s agitated point is since, in fact, she has now run away from their father. Indeed, Denis’s focus on how, by turns, both kids focus on the present reveals the depth of their defense against their past. Denis, an artist at work here, is employing form and style to disclose purpose and meaning rather than relying on a hack’s fatuous exposition where characters conveniently verbalize the scenarist’s understanding of them. Watch what Denis does and you begin to catch the beauty of her film. Take the father’s considerably delayed introduction. What a blunder by all conventional rules of narrative exposition; but this long delay precisely expresses the degree to which Nénette and Boni wish to keep him out of their lives. When he finally storms into Boni’s apartment looking for Nénette, we are confronted with a monstrous intrusion. Boni, who carefully guards his (mother-fixated) life, of course reacts with hostility and contempt, just as he did at Nénette’s unexpected appearance. But more: the delay of the father’s appearance moves the intrusion into the realm of violation. We feel this. It isn’t just that the boy’s comfort and convenience have been dealt a blow, as when his sister popped up; it’s as if an act of God—a torrential wind or rain—had broken through a surface barricade.

One of the film’s sharpest ironies involves this father’s sudden death. He is the victim, it would appear, of an unexplained “hit” by business associates. What Denis provides, rather than tidy explanation, is visual: a burst of blood. This now is what the man’s two offspring wanted; he is out of their lives—only, it is dramatic irony, because we know of his end while they do not. But the violence of the image compounds this irony further, for it perfectly expresses what, despite his death, will be the man’s lingering impact on his children’s lives. His is a troubling, confounding legacy of violence, the sense of which would have come across only in a greatly reduced form had we been told just why indeed the man was done away with.

Irony in this film begets irony; one is interwoven with another and another. The man’s legacy of violence for his children who do not even know of his death is compounded also by the fact that, a man with a dream of the future, he was planning on moving into a new, larger home where he hoped his son and daughter would join him. In death, he has been dispossessed of his dream; in life, his children may have thus been dispossessed of their last chance to come together as brother and sister.

The fabric of Denis’s richly textured work, though “tight” (no wasted shots here), breathes. Also, it’s a joyous work, from the sheer beauty of much of its imagery, to Boni’s delightful fantasies involving (with a nod to Pagnol) the baker’s wife up the street (in which context their actual encounters provide, from them both, wonderful instances of comical anxiety), to Boni’s spirited boogie-ing in his cramped, narrow pizza van—a stunning visual metaphor for his irrepressible adaptability in a hard, limited environment. Nothing in this unsentimental film invites even to the smallest degree self-pity by proxy.

Denis this time triumphs. (Since then, she has achieved something even finer: loosely based on Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, her Beau travail, 1999.) In Agnès Godard, her color cinematographer, moreover, she has an ideal accomplice—someone as adept as she at negotiating a union between seamy, messy reality and exquisite beauty. And there are her two leads. Houri is an unforgettable Nénette. Her face is at once timelessly lovely and teenage-ordinary, focused and confused, “settled” and “unsettled”—a mix of pluck and defeat, world-weariness and world-readiness. Here is a performance fit to break one’s heart. Following splendid work in Agnieszka Holland’s Olivier, Olivier (1992), Milcho Manchevski’s Before the Rain (1994) and Pierre Boutron’s Fiesta (1995), Colin as Boni is even better. His chiseled face, exotic, opaque eyes, and spiderleg fingers Denis and Godard find ideal for projecting a difficult boy “on the edge,” one as much out of the world as in; and with deft sensitivity and rough, riveting presence he creates one of cinema’s most compelling portraits of troubled male adolescence—perhaps the finest since Jean-Pierre Léaud’s first crack at Antoine Doinel in François Truffaut’s hovering The 400 Blows (1959).

THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER (Jean Epstein, 1928)

Jean Epstein’s beautifully photographed La chute de la maison Usher disappoints. If one is honest, one can even understand why Epstein’s assistant, a Spaniard named Luis Buñuel, despised and denounced it.
     However, my own main difficulty with the film lies elsewhere than in its application of surrealistic techniques (mere mannerisms here) to apolitical matter. Epstein’s grafting onto Poe’s brilliant “Fall” another story of his, “The Oval Portrait,” dictated the change of Roderick and Madeleine from brother and sister to husband and wife, and this does nothing to illumine Poe’s text. Indeed, this clever marriage of two different Poe texts becomes a means by which Epstein can avoid confronting any of the story’s complex issues as he easily withdraws into a romantic, poetic mode—for this, one of Poe’s densest and most rigorously analytical tales. While Epstein fails even to give the Usher mansion the lifelike dimensions that Poe does, a matter where one would think his intent coincided with Poe’s, the bulk of his film seems rather more based on an image of Poe the poet—an image to which the French were highly susceptible—than on the meticulously thoughtful author of the tales. Nevertheless, in the course of the film Epstein ingeniously lights on allusions to other Poe tales as well, including “Ligeia,” “Hop-Frog,” “The Pit and the Pendulum” and “The Masque of the Red Death.” Would that he had kept his mind on “The Fall of the House of Usher”!
     Poe isn’t the only writer who had a “poem mode” and a “fiction mode”; it isn’t helpful that Epstein fails to differentiate these—and even in his portrayal of the material House of Usher, where Poe is very much his poetic self in the short story, Epstein isn’t much with the story. And the intrusion of “The Oval Portrait” helps him wipe his artist’s hands of the phenomenal complexity of the brother-sister duet in the story, with all its tormented inwardness. On the other hand, though, there is the film’s eerie atmosphere and agile marshaling of techniques—the different kinds of shots, the myriad camera angles, the artful use of slow motion, in a film that leans on soft focus a stunning instance or two of deep focus. The film is a treat for the eyes, at least—and as the wind turns the curtains down a long hallway into billowing folds, one can see how the image seized the imagination of Jean Cocteau, who resurrected it for his magnificent Beauty and the Beast (1946).
     There is much, then, to like about Epstein’s film. But Henri Langlois showed a shocking want of judgment in praising it as the artistic equal of the God of Cinema’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928).