LACOMBE, LUCIEN (Louis Malle, 1974)

Pierre Blaise, who would die in a road accident shortly after the release of this film, plays Lucien, a teenaged boy whose coming-of-age battles his political indifference, sadistic streak, lack of any understanding of human nature, and lack of inquisitiveness. As the course of the war turns against the Germans in the summer of 1944, Lucien lives in a small rural town in Occupied France. When the Resistance rejects his petition to join, he becomes an employee of the German police. His adolescence somehow accomplishes this without a shift in allegiance. Lucien lets himself be carried off by self-centered winds—winds that flatter his current emotional needs, but which oppose the ultimate interests of himself and others. The boy is bewildered that Albert Horn, a Jewish tailor, and France, Horn’s daughter of whom Lucien is enamored, hold back their acceptance of him. A dullard and a bully, Lucien makes himself a fixture in their tenuous home. Against his own wishes, he becomes the agency of their destruction.
     When Louis Malle’s Lacombe, Lucien first materialized in the mid-1970s, I was unimpressed and found it overrated. Others found in it a perfect illustration of Hannah Arendt’s “the banality of evil.” Today I am even less impressed. Malle has made a plodding, mediocre film.
     However, Holger Löwenadler gives a beautiful performance as the tailor, and Thérèse Giehse is also memorable as his mother, Bella.
     Malle must be credited with focusing his countrymen’s eyes on their collaboration with the Nazis; but his film is too schematic to matter much now.
     Hollow.

INTO GREAT SILENCE (Philip Gröning, 2005)

Sixteen years after he wrote asking the Carthusian order for permission to film a documentary in the Grande Chartreuse in the French Alps, Philip Gröning spent six months in the monastery, observing and filming. He has written, produced, directed, cinematographed and edited Die Große Stille. It’s an absorbing movie—a better one, perhaps, than Gröning might have made in his twenties.
     It begins in winter and reaches verdant spring. The first image appears to be that of a monk, in closeup, sleeping. A subsequent shot clarifies the action; the monk is praying. Outside, snow falls, flakes drifting into the camera. This whitening-out abstracts Nature; montages of monks’ faces counterbalance this. Sheer silence is punctuated by the sound of bells. The white of snow connects to the flowing white robes indoors. Silence is one of the film’s themes. This is a quiet film, with quiet transitions, with fadeouts and blackouts, and faint sounds, for example, footsteps. There are group prayer and chanting, and murmured individual prayer.
     Gröning observes monastic labor, such as the unrolling, measuring and cutting of fabric. The fabric could be sound or time. It could be nothing but itself. In closeup, the downwardly panning camera surveys buttons awaiting selection and use—as was once the case with these men. Is everything a metaphor?
     One may ask why they have allowed God to choose this life for them. The answer permeates the film. These servants are drawn to a secluded, simple, quiet, tranquil life. God is in the earthen tones, the quiet wind, the silence, and the traces of sound that punctuate the silence, such as bird-songs. There is calming repetition.
     An extreme closeup of an eye makes the face to which it belongs indistinct—Fellini’s beached sea-beast in La dolce vita (1959).

CONFUSION OF GENDERS (Ilan Duran Cohen, 2000)

A curiously depressed Gallic comedy, La confusion des genres centers on a bachelor in his forties who, bisexual, finally has a yen to settle down. Alain (Pascal Greggory, excellent) is lonely.
     Alain is sexually involved with his senior partner in their law firm, Laurence, whom he has impregnated and with Babette, the girlfriend of a young client whom he unsuccessfully represented on a murder charge, who is now incarcerated, to whom he is also attracted. His boyfriend, Christophe (Cyrille Thouvenin, effervescent), is the brother of a former girlfriend and a quarter-century his junior.
     Do you see the glass as half full or half empty? Alain’s bisexuality has secured for him a lot of action, but his heart has turned up empty no matter how many partners have populated his bed. Rather than feeling confidently both gay and straight, Alain isn’t sure what he is, or what he should be. His life is at loose ends, and his difficulty in negotiating it has made him appear, and be, self-centered in the extreme. Laurence has no illusions about her law partner, nor about herself; theirs is not a love relationship. However, she also finds herself at loose ends, and with the baby on its way she accepts Alain’s marriage proposal.
     Nathalie Richard, who plays Laurence drolly, gives the second-best performance in the film. Top honors go to Bulle Ogier, hilarious as Laurence’s cranky, demanding mother. These wonderful actresses—Julie Gayet is a spirited Babette—temper the misogynistic tinge to the proceedings that find women in a holding pattern as Alain belatedly sorts out his sexuality. At least Ogier’s character knows her place—on the sidelines, wisecracking up a storm.
     Whatever my reservations, I like this film, perhaps most of all for its agile social complexity.

THE PORNOGRAPHERS: INTRODUCTION TO ANTHROPOLOGY (Shohei Imamura, 1966)

The following is one of the entries from my 100 Greatest Asian Films list, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis

“Subu” Ogata is an illegal artist, a skinflickmeister making two films a day, who reasons he is making a valuable social contribution. (Discussions amongst Subu and collaborators, such as his cutter, convey their absolute seriousness about their work.) He lives with Haru, who, believing her dead husband, reincarnated as a carp, disapproves, is herself ambivalent about their relationship. Subu finds himself increasingly attracted to Haru’s daughter, Keiko, whose surrogate father he has been since she was little, and whose flirtatiousness summons all Subu’s powers of resistance. Meanwhile, Subu must hide from the law and the mob.
     Shohei Imamura’s wickedly funny black comedy Jinruigaku nyumon: Erogotshi yori satirizes both sides of the coin of sexual impulses: the government, for denying their existence in attempting to sanitize art; Subu, for yielding to them, at home and at work. It also addresses the human capacity for self-examination that results in transforming existential life into an object of study featuring “meaningful” symbols (camera; carp). Imamura additionally weighs humanity’s voyeuristic preoccupation, which helps explain all these matters as well as cinema itself.
     It is structured as a film about a film (the interior one being Ogata’s personal story), an early image showing a window within the screen populated by those viewing the film; they could be looking at us. (Subsequent images feature another window, populated by someone else, inside the frame.) Thus Imamura adapts realism for his purposes. Elsewhere, images are surreal dreams punctuated by freeze frames. They mine Ogata’s history, psyche.
     Ogata has his priorities, and all hell breaks out when he spends Haru’s savings to save money by setting up his own film processing laboratory. To quote Seiko: “Everything is about money.”
     Except for some floor-level shots, one would never guess that Imamura’s mentor was Yasujiro Ozu!

K[W]AIDAN (Masaki Kobayashi, 1964)

The following is one of the entries from my 100 Greatest Asian Films list, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis

An early twentieth-century Japanese folklorist of Irish and Greek descent, Lafcadio Hearn wrote the “strange tales” that Masaki Kobayashi’s Kaidan samples. This tense, spooky, stylized, painterly quartet of ghost stories transports us to another world in order to return us to human nature.
     In “The Black Hair,” a samurai abandons his devoted wife and marries a governor’s daughter for the sake of career advancement, eventually abandoning her for his first wife, citing his thoughtless youth. But, as in Ugetsu (1953), the reunion is illusory, and the man here is punished for continuing selfishness; for doesn’t this motivate his abandonment of his second wife also? To underscore the point, the segment ends in a freeze-frame of his horrified face as he fails to exit a world of caustic memory and avenging ghosts.
     “Woman of the Snow” features a supernatural snowstorm—trees dance in its thrashing winds—and culminates in the abandonment of a woodcutter by his wife over a broken pledge he made to a spirit in the storm. “Hoichi, the Earless” includes a ferocious battle at sea under a blood-orange sky and horrific revenge by ghosts of its warriors exacted against a blind musician for favoring pride over his sacred obligations to art and to the past. “In a Cup of Tea,” about a man who sees a stranger’s reflection in his cup of tea, is introduced by voiceover narration speculating on why some tales are left incomplete. After the cup falls to the floor, claiming being “wounded,” the stranger mysteriously appears in front of the man, de-materializes. The same thing happens to the aborted story! The author has vanished, too, leaving it to others to complete it so that he doesn’t disappoint. For us, the man has replaced the stranger at the bottom of the cup.