BREATHLESS (Jim McBride, 1983)

Jim McBride, whose minor classic David Holzman’s Diary (1967) represents in retrospect promise unfulfilled, has chutzpah; his Breathless dares to remake the unremakeable by reversing, at least changing, key tacks and elements of the original, Jean-Luc Godard’s A bout de souffle (1959), arguably the most famous and certainly the most influential film ever made. Thus while Michel, Godard’s punk-protagonist, dreams of quitting a life of crime in France for flight to Italy, his McBridean counterpart, Jess, casts his eye, from the States, on Mexico; while Michel is in love with a resident American student, Jess is in love with a resident French student; while Michel acts out movies, Jess, the product of rock ’n’ roll, is given to breaking out into song and dance; and while Godard’s establishment-jolting style might be subtitled Studio Unbound, McBride’s film relishes the artifice of painted backdrops and back projection. Of course, McBride can go back into the studio from the position of advantage that Godard’s liberation from studio confinement has made available to him. In any case, his film tells essentially the same story.

An engrossing oddity, a dazzling entertainment, McBride’s Breathless falls far short of Godard’s. Some might even argue that this remake is superfluous, given that nearly every significant Western European or American film of the ’80s and ’90s, in one way or another, attempts to remake A bout de souffle in order to grapple with its immense influence. (Postulating an “anxiety of influence,” scholar Harold Bloom, lighting the way to this assessment, finds post-Romantic poetry grappling with the influence of, and repeatedly attempting to rewrite, William Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey.”) One might almost say that this cornerstone of the nouvelle vague, A bout de souffle (literally, “out of breath”), has given cinema its second wind following the debatable decision to experiment with sound. Wishful thinking: a character in Breathless proclaims, “Nothing lasts.”

It may well be a matter of pride with McBride; he may want to show that, alone among his peers, he isn’t overwhelmed by A bout de souffle’s shadow, a point he can best make, he might feel, by remaking directly the masterpiece that everyone else is remaking indirectly, and with such confidence and independence that he can impose all the pointed changes (and others) that I have catalogued. In contemporary cinema, it seems, there is no being out of Out of Breath, but at least McBride, McBride may be bragging, can stand lovingly on his own. Perhaps; but even he must face the music that not all his energies have worked to the benefit of his material. For instance, in A bout de souffle the “American innocent abroad” reverberates with Jamesian sociomythological meaning that McBride’s French substitute cannot hope to match; and, whereas the influence of movies on character formation, a brilliant theme of Godard’s, has been more psychological than political (hence, more critical), the parallel influence of rock music, with which McBride’s film concerns itself, has been more political than psychological. For me at least, rock as a shaping force inherently compels less interest. Whereas film is an art form in itself, rock music is, rather, the debasement of an art form already in existence. As a consequence, while Godard’s film tackles a complex subject, how we negotiate (and half-create) reality through popular culture, McBride’s film more often finds itself, along with its protagonist, looking into an aural mirror: raucous music as a form of narcissism or onanism. I like McBride; but there is more for the mind in Godard’s eye than there is in McBride’s ear.

That said, how many American movies of the past quarter-century provide such a marvelous time as does Breathless—for example, in the terrific final shot that stops motion on Jess’s reaching to the ground for a gun in his confrontation with police? Unlike Godard, whose Michel is shot to death on a Paris street, McBride, like almost all Americans a sentimentalist, can’t let go of this boy; the freeze frame preserves Jess for us, fixing him beyond the capacity of the movie police to unload the heart and the life out of him. McBride has so convincingly established the realm of his artistic creation that we do not think, “He doesn’t want to show what must happen next, which is Jess’s death.” Rather, the freeze frame formally completes the action and the film itself, holding Jess back forever from any next moment when police bullets take him down. McBride’s directorial conviction, then, precludes our mistaking his Breathless for reality, where Jess would be killed. McBride’s film is its own reality.

In A bout de souffle, Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg give two of the most graceful, engaging and enduring performances in all of cinema. By comparison, Valerie Caprisky in Breathless especially comes up short—although she looks great naked (as indeed Seberg did fully dressed). On the other hand, Richard Gere is riveting as Jess—albeit in a role far less intriguing than the one that carried Belmondo brilliantly to stardom. Cumulatively, Gere’s portrait of Jess finds in the boy’s addiction to beat-silly music a touching portrait of corrupted, wasted youth. Physically, his is one of the most kinetic and feverishly alive performances ever. (Compare goonish John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever, John Badham, 1977.) Gere is no Belmondo; but he’s Gere—and wonderful.

However, I’m with Godard; I, too, would have let the boy go. Indeed, departing from A bout de souffle, neither can McBride let the girl let the boy go. But this also befits the sentimental nature of ’80s America in contradistinction to dear Jean-Luc—unsentimental any time, any place.

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KEEPING THE FAITH (Edward Norton, 2000)

In a Hollywood film of the thirties, two childhood best friends in the same New York neighborhood would take different paths in adult life, one becoming a priest, and the other becoming a gangster. A descendant of such a film as Angels with Dirty Faces (Michael Curtiz, 1938), Keeping the Faith changes things a bit for a new century. One of the boys still grows up to become a priest, but the other one grows up to become a rabbi. Mull this one over: rabbi as gangster-substitute. Or is it, now, gangsta-substitute?

A Jewish man, Stuart Blumberg, wrote this ecumenical comedy, and a Roman Catholic, the film’s star, Edward Norton, directed it, and for all I know they also have been best friends since boyhood, like their two spiritual protagonists, Rabbi Jake Schram and Father Brian Finn. It is certainly the case that the film’s title bears a double meaning, with each of the religious characters keeping his faith, and both these guys keeping faith with their friendship. What’s not to like about this? My Jewish father’s best friend was, like Finn, an Irish-American Roman Catholic; I can relate!

Unfortunately, Norton’s film carries a lot of excess baggage. This baggage consists of four failures: one, the film suffers from the Hollywood disease of our day, too much plot; two, entertainments to which a message is attached, even so pleasant a message as here, always appear more dead than alive; three, the film is farfetched and, as a result, incomprehensible; four, the film is also too timid. There is some hilarious stuff in the film, including Father Finn’s parody of Dustin Hoffman’s character in Rain Man (Barry Levinson, 1988), and his inebriated interruption of a bar mitzvah; but the movie goes on too long, only to reach an unsatisfactory conclusion. As with all “feel-good” movies, if one has a scrap of sense one ends up with a bad headache.

Actually, the friendly twosome are also part of a threesome, with their other musketeer, as the rabbi’s mom calls her, being the successful businesswoman with whom they both fall in love. Neither knows about the other’s sexual interest in Anna Riley, a spectacular, warmhearted beauty. One of them, Rabbi Schram, is bedding with her but stopping short of the marriage that she desires because she isn’t Jewish. (Jake believes that Mrs. Schram is estranged from his brother because he married a shiksa.) On the other hand, the padre sins only in his mind, although he is gathering up gumption to declare his honest intentions to Anna and bolt from his collar. Brian’s sexual reticence is an example of the film’s timidity. Absent sex between Brian and Anna, it is impossible to believe that Brian believes that Anna is secretly in love with him, and the scene in which she is about to disclose to him her love for Jake but, impatient, Brian aborts her declaration and delivers his own, along with unwanted kisses, is at the level of a TV sitcom. The script scrambles for a way to cover this gaping hole of Brian’s having misread Anna’s feelings, offering at least two lame explanations. One is that Brian mistook the “reflected glow” from the Anna-Jake partnership as Anna’s passion for him; the other is that Brian set himself up for this “fall.” Meanwhile, Jake is in danger of losing his position. In the end, though, everything is painlessly, and incredibly, resolved, triggered by Jake’s mother’s near stroke, after which she tearfully confesses to Jake that she had acted wrongly with his brother. It turns out that Anna has even secretly begun the process of converting to Judaism. People foolishly keep too many secrets from one another in this film, and all these secrets seem to tumble out in the film’s final reel.

Given the stakes involved and given Jake’s position, it is inconceivable, even in a comedy, that his reluctance to marry a Gentile is mostly explained in terms of personal and family history. Apparently the makers of the film felt that the issues of Jewish communal survival and cultural integrity would be too much of a downer in a film into which they drag almost everything else. But absent these considerations, Jake’s moods and manners strike the viewer as empty and gratuitous; given that he is in love with her, Jake just seems the perfect fool not to want to marry such a wonderful person as Anna. The couple break up, but only to reconcile, with a little helpful intercession by Father Finn, who, after a bout of humiliation, proves himself a good sport about his lost chance at man-woman love. The whole thing resolves, then, into a lighthearted soap opera.

The film’s spirited message of American pluralism is underscored by a remark made by the local bartender whom Father Finn visits when he needs to be ministered to. The remark is, in fact, a disclosure of the man’s ethnic and religious diversity. The bartender describes himself as a half-Punjabi Sikh Catholic Muslim with Jewish in-laws. He adds, perhaps because Jenna Elfman is in the cast, that he is “reading Dianetics.”

Elfman, who plays Anna, is the principal reason for seeing the film. Tall, lovely, warm, funny and (unlike ditzy Dharma, the role she played on TV) highly intelligent, Elfman is, here, a dream of an actress, a softer Rosalind Russell. Her Anna, a dream of a woman, could make both Jake and Brian fall in love with her just by being herself. This is one area in which the film doesn’t strain credulity. (There is a marvelous dream sequence in which, stretching her leg after a sweaty joint run, Brian seems to be having sex with her.) Ben Stiller, the son of a Jewish father and a Catholic mother, is adequate as Jake, but Norton the director indulges Norton the actor way too much. Through most of the film, I wanted to wring Brian’s neck just to keep Norton from hogging so much of the footage. The late Anne Bancroft, though, is excellent as Jake’s mother. (Born Catholic, Bancroft was, of course, Jewish by association, being married to Mel Brooks forever.) As an older priest with whom Father Finn swaps tales of near sexual encounters, Milos Forman, who directed Norton in (I’m told) the surly The People vs. Larry Flynt (1996), proves he is as lousy an actor as he is a filmmaker. But, as an elderly rabbi, Eli Wallach is a pleasure to watch.

I can recommend the film, then, for a few of the performances.

THE GINGERBREAD MAN (Robert Altman, 1998)

Robert Altman, the brilliant director of The Long Goodbye (1973) and Nashville (1975), wanted to have his name erased from the credits of The Gingerbread Man, and he did manage to hide his authorship of the script behind the pseudonym Al Hayes. In short, Altman repudiated this film, which is based on a story that John Grisham wrote for the screen. In many ways it is indeed a terrible film, trading in noir clichés as it unravels its farfetched plot amidst Savannah, Georgia’s heat-baked streets and rancid swamps. But there are a couple of points of interest to the dank proceedings, and, besides, the film manages to generate a degree of spooky danger I haven’t experienced in an American film since Klute (Alan J. Pakula, 1971). Until the story slides into silliness and a string of anti-climaxes, all awash in the wet winds of Hurricane Geraldo, The Gingerbread Man just might scare the heck out of you.

The movie is unified by a theme: the humbling and humanization of an arrogant hot-shot attorney, Rick Magruder, beautifully played by Kenneth Branagh. Outside the courtroom, Magruder has three chief attributes: quick intelligence; a weakness for women; absolute love for his small, restless children, a son and a daughter. The first of these attributes, many times, fails to withstand the claims of the other two. Altman may have a clever trick up one leg of his pants, for Branagh’s Magruder strikes me, at least, as a sympathetic facsimile of the American president at the time. You know: What’s-his-face.

The mainspring of the plot is Magruder’s love affair with a pro-bono client, a waitress at a gathering in his honor, who embroils him in a series of adventures involving her father, a barefoot recluse who is part of a reactionary hillbilly cult of old geezers. (It’s an anomaly: a cult of loners.) From the start, this girl, Mallory Doss, doesn’t convince us with her tales of her father, Dixon, who presumably periodically steals her car, and even, presumably, breaks into her apartment and hangs her cat. (This is the first hanged cat I had to suffer since Sam Peckinpah’s 1971 Straw Dogs—although I vaguely recall, in between, a cat nailed to a door in some film or other.) Indeed, that’s part of the point; Mallory is unbelievable—she nonchalantly sighs, “I was fond of that cat,”—but whenever he thinks with his pecker Magruder will believe almost anything. Regrettably, his sincerity and passion in the courtroom, however misguided, are contagious; the system bends to his adolescent boy’s distorted view of things. (I presume this is intended as general criticism of the U.S. legal justice system.) As a result, Magruder succeeds in having a judge commit Mallory’s father to a mental institution for medical treatment (i.e., drug therapy). (Sloughing off his shoes in court doesn’t help the old man’s case, either.) The only evidence against Dixon is the seemingly reluctant testimony of Mallory’s ex-husband, Pete, that Dixon once pounded him into a hospital after he, Pete, accidentally took a sip out of Dixon’s coffee cup. In-laws!

Unhappily, Rick’s legal victory here opens up a Pandora’s box of problems for him, once Dixon’s cult springs him from the hospital. Suddenly, there are all kinds of threats; Rick’s kids are kidnapped. The police won’t lift a finger to help Rick because of a prior legal victory of his at the expense of one of their own, who defended himself with gunfire against a shooter. This is the court victory that generated the celebration at which Rick met Mallory.

Rick and his children’s mother, Leanne, are either divorced or divorcing. Leanne is really unfair and unkind to Rick, but he, we intuit, wasn’t the best of husbands. Leanne’s current beau is Rick’s divorce attorney; Rick, it seems fairly clear, had an affair with his secretary during his marriage to Leanne. The film is hard on lawyers and their out-of-court morals—but humorously so, until the film passes into routine action and loses its sense of humor, its Altmanness.

The resolution of the mystery is idiotic and not funny.

The hint of Bill Clinton in Magruder is one of the film’s points of interest. Another is the fact that, except for one silent couple at the party, there are no blacks in the film. The next year, Altman made Cookie’s Fortune (1999), perhaps the most probing (and bleakest) American film about contemporary race relations in the South, or anywhere else in the States, ever.

Embeth Davidtz, the South African actress I had hoped never to see again after Schindler’s List (Steven Spielberg, 1993), plays Mallory. She does an indefensible job in a role so tricky and decked in red herrings that it may have been, to be fair, unplayable. Robert Duvall plays her father; he is just as bad. Robert Downey, Jr., plays Clyde Pell, the private detective whom Magruder employs. Downey, as usual, is very dear.

Altman’s characteristic long-shots and subtle camera movements—one might almost call them inflections—are accomplished and mesmerizing. Color cinematographer Changwei Gu’s muted tones help create mood and tension.

The special effects crew, though, should be taken to task. I didn’t buy the hurricane for a second.

5th AVE GIRL (Gregory LaCava, 1939)

When it came to social and political issues, Gregory LaCava was an even better filmmaker than Frank Capra, and, like Capra, he was an important artist during the Great Depression, when American society suffered upheaval and dislocations. Both Gabriel Over the White House (1933), a cautionary work showing a progressive U.S. presidency sliding into fascism, and the immensely popular comedy My Man Godfrey (1936), where a rich man posing as one of the homeless turns a well-heeled household inside out when he is hired as their servant, avoid the sentimentalism that compromised Capra’s admirable social critiques (American Madness, 1932; It Happened One Night, 1934; Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, 1936; You Can’t Take It with You, 1938).

Beginning with Stage Door (1937), the only film of his to win a best picture Oscar nomination, LaCava collaborated three times with actress Ginger Rogers, who was distinguishing herself in her series of musical-comedy romances with Fred Astaire by creating a different characterization in each film. (The same cannot quite be said about Astaire, who relied instead on one of cinema’s great personalities.) In Stage Door, which essays the squabbles and solidarity among roomers in a female theatrical boarding house, Rogers sensitively out-acts top-billed Katharine Hepburn; its dimension of working-class reality makes something very appealing of her Jean Maitland, who shares her quarters with Hepburn’s Terry Sims/Randall, a rich girl masquerading as something else under an assumed identity. Hepburn’s flat-voiced, flamboyant performance has been appropriated by an approving gay community; but Rogers’ Jean matters more to those who exist outside this community. On the other hand, Constance Collier’s performance as an older, more pretentious resident of the Footlights Club—Collier was Hepburn’s real-life acting coach—outshines the acting of both her most famous pupil and Rogers. It is the film’s one unHollywooden performance, realistically detailed rather than merely drawn from some segment of reality. Fine as she is, Rogers by comparison seems smoothed-out and improbably likeable—a beginning actress, but still more popular star than actress. (Garson Kanin, who would direct Rogers in two good comedies, Bachelor Mother, 1939, and Tom, Dick and Harry, 1941, would call Rogers the quintessential Hollywood star.)

By contrast, Rogers would function as a superb actress in her final collaboration with LaCava. This is the remarkable, trenchant Primrose Path (1940), in which Rogers’ Ellie May is a shantytown girl struggling in an impoverished environment to keep herself from being drawn into prostitution, her mother’s occupation. Those who kvetch about Rogers’ Oscar for Kitty Foyle (Sam Wood, 1940) should be still long enough to take in her Ellie May from earlier that same year. Rarely does one see a performance like this, one that restrains its star power (first, there must be star power to restrain), admirably controls its contours and details, and bursts with real life—and (even with the happy ending out of nowhere) just about breaks one’s heart. Rogers, who could disappoint (Hearbeat, 1946; Magnificent Doll, 1946; even The Barkleys of Broadway with Astaire, 1949), would match or nearly match the highwater mark of her Ellie May in widely different roles: Wild Bill Wellman’s brilliant Roxie Hart (1942), Susan Applegate in Billy Wilder’s The Major and the Minor (1942), Mary Marshall in William Dieterle’s I’ll Be Seeing You (1944), a Joan Fontaine-part absent Rogers’ trademark wisecracks for a change, Edwina, hiding from herself her marital discontent, in Howard Hawks’s uproariously funny Monkey Business (1952), and Carlotta, a formidable though ultimately heartrending stage actress involved in a murder investigation, in Nunnally Johnson’s Black Widow (1954).

But what of the film that LaCava and Rogers made in between Stage Door and Primrose Path? Written by Allan Scott, Morrie Ryskind and LaCava, 5th Ave Girl finds Rogers playing Mary Grey, a name certifying her membership in the anonymous throngs doing their best to survive during the Depression. Mary, who is in her late teens or early twenties, is subdued, having been beaten down by hunger and unemployment, but her attitude is positive, even optimistic, although it’s hard to say to what degree she is trying to reassure herself, lift her own spirits, when she says, “Something will turn up.” Independent, Mary is on her own, possibly an orphan, more likely with parents without the means to assist her financially—assistance she wouldn’t accept in any case; but today something does turn up to help: a millionaire’s proposition for her to move into his mansion as his pretend-mistress, the object being to make his pretend-straying wife jealous. Now Mary won’t have to worry about how to pay rent.

The millionaire is business owner Timothy Borden. Today is his birthday, and he and Mary meet in Central Park in the heart of Manhattan. His wife’s misbehavior, which has become grist for the society rumor/gossip mill, isn’t the only thing troubling Borden. Only his secretary—who has to—has remembered his birthday. Moreover, disciplined by their unions, his factory workers are poised to go out on strike, and Borden’s business is already financially stressed. Borden’s firm is Amalgamated Pump Inc.

The proposition with which Borden corrals Mary pertains to a sordid arrangement that in reality isn’t sordid. Like his wife’s fake philandering, Borden’s proposition is innocent, but it will make a show of being otherwise. Imagine being married and bringing your mistress into the house! It’s absurd tit-for-tat. In the context of this wonderful social comedy, which early on smacks a bit of My Man Godfrey before going its own fresh, original way, Borden’s hiring Mary resonates pointedly. Instead of “pursuing happiness,” Mary, like countless others, is making do or not quite making do, in effect prostituting herself and her talents, whatever they may be, just to survive. The situation in which she finds herself constitutes a show of sordidness masking a show of innocence masking a compromised sociopolitical reality. Mary becomes Borden’s Woman Friday, but the burden of play-acting she must muster for their complicated arrangement threatens to undo her honesty, honor, sincerity and directness. None of this occurs to Borden, and it may not occur at first to Mary either.

Mary enters a dysfunctional household as Borden’s newest employee. Obviously Timothy and Martha have lost the connection of their marriage, partly because of the overwhelming time-drain of Mr. Borden’s work responsibilities, and partly because, under this strain, Mrs. Borden’s old money has increasingly become offended by her self-made spouse’s new money. (He is supposed to be tending to her needs!) But either’s trying to make the other jealous lets us know that the love light still burns between them, however low. Decisive in this respect, of course, is that neither violates the union by actually taking on a lover. The Bordens have two offspring. Tim, the namesake son, is Mary’s age. He has a serious office at Amalgamated Pump, but his penchant for play, such as polo, costs the company a lucrative contract that it has had for twenty years, and at a time when financial duress is the company’s order of the day. Tim’s younger sister, Katherine, loves to party with her college crowd, but her heart is increasingly the property of Michael, the strapping family chauffeur, who glibly bares his Marxist soul at every turn. Mike is egged on in this endeavor by the kitchen staff, one member of which patronizingly indulges his radicalism, and another of which derides it. What’s a revolutionary gotta do to be taken seriously! (Revolute, perhaps.) Meanwhile, Mike dismisses all Katherine’s overtures. His politics are clouding both his romantic and practical judgment!

Michael’s being more a pretend-communist than a real one doesn’t mean that his caustic remarks at the capitalistic system’s expense aren’t apt. “I’m not supposed to get some sleep,” he quips, for example. “Just wind me up like a mechanical toy.” His play-acting is also a perfect fit for this film. All the main characters are pretending a part. This play-acting is certainly exhibited by Mary, who is pretending to be Borden’s live-in mistress in an attempt to stave off hunger and homelessness. However, it is also evidenced by her boss on two fronts. Like his wife, he is merely a pretend-adulterer. But his other role, as the head of Amalgamated Pump, is also something of a pretense. At one point Borden hilariously explodes: “I’m not a capitalist. I’m a victim of the capitalistic system. I never wanted all this [wealth]. It’s not my fault I invented a pump!” The firm’s lawyer fills in the portrait of Borden’s role-disenchantment: “Business can’t go on as it is, or the employees will eat up the surplus. . . . [Borden] refused to close the factory. He said his employees helped him to make his fortune, and he saw no reason why they shouldn’t share in it.” Borden accurately feels that his hard work and corporate responsibilities, moreover, have alienated him from Martha and the kids. This is why smart-alecky son Tim, reacting against his father’s example on familial rather than political grounds, has been putting little heart or time into the firm. Tim, too, is play-acting, it turns out; for when his father, up against what seems an impossible wall of union opposition, chucks the job and turns it over to the boy, Tim flourishes, proving himself adept at running the company and even negotiating a truly imaginative agreement with Amalgamated Pump’s factory workers. In effect, young Tim takes off his mask, as do, eventually, all the others.

There is a Pirandellian air to this wonderful romantic comedy—yes, romantic: the Bordens merrily reconcile; Katherine lands her Michael, leading him to his proper runway; and, amidst tears and cheers from at least one viewer (me), Mary and Tim connect. (“Mind your own business!” Mary snaps at a cop who tries to interfere with her romantic rendezvous with destiny.) Be forewarned, however: romance is not milked here; the affect of romance is missing. This isn’t a stereotypical studio film. One needs to underscore that socioeconomic as well as familial matters pressure all the role-playing. In one way or another, everyone is pursuing survival rather than happiness. The rich apparently convince themselves that even their situation is a matter of life-and-death.

Like so much comedy, this one pulls back from a dangerous precipice only at the last minute. The play-acting into which Mary Grey has been impressed has taken a toll, creating a burden on her sensibility and pointing out, to her and us, how reliant her fate is on others, like the penned seals at the zoo she observes.

Ginger Rogers gives a heavenly performance. Let me point out two of its assets. Cinema’s one-time Anytime Annie (in 42nd Street, 1933) is, of course, Hollywood’s preeminent female wisecracker; but here her puncturing wit seems to flow most of all from her beleaguered, unhappily experienced character. Rogers acts as she should act: as though there is no clever script guiding her. Stressed out, Mary eventually breaks down, crying. We do not for a second mistake this for another part of Mary’s mask or performance. Rogers makes the moment terribly, poignantly real. That said, Tim Holt as Tim—his 21-year-old eyes still sparkle—is at least the equal of Rogers. His performance is beautiful. Walter Connolly delights and Verree Teasdale appropriately grates as Timothy and Martha Borden.

The correct title of this film is indeed 5th Ave Girl. (Note the irony, given Mary Grey’s social status.) Nevertheless, in print it sometimes appears as Fifth Avenue Girl. Can Mulholland Drive be far behind?

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LA TERRE (André Antoine, 1921)

The thirteenth of his Rougon-Macquart cycle of twenty novels, Émile Zola’s 1887 La terre (The Earth, or The Soil) is a transplantation of Shakespeare’s King Lear to rural France—Beauce, in the Cloyes region. The book is extraordinary; in it, the land is alternately described in erotic terms as a woman and in cosmic terms as the Mother Sea from whence we come and to which we return. André Antoine’s silent film version, from France, does not match the poetry of Zola’s oceanic concept until the last five minutes or so, at which point naturalism rises to become the sheer poetry of Nature, and the film rises to the level of cinema’s greatest poet, whose works were yet to come: Aleksandr Dovzhenko. One must also add that socialism, Zola’s solution to the divisions of land afflicting France, plays no clear and distinct role in the film. Antoine’s La terre is, nonetheless, engrossing throughout and highly accomplished visually and, at the very last, it is one of the greatest films on earth. (It is currently available on DVD, but not on VHS. A score is added to the DVD of the film. Turn off the sound, therefore, to best appreciate the film.) But I also recommend the book, for I suspect that Zola’s identification with the naturalism that he so dedicatedly harvested has misled those who haven’t read his work to categorize him as a purely prosaic writer who is incapable of transcendence. Seek out his La terre and prepare to be surprised. While Antoine’s is perhaps less consistently engaged, in full measure Zola’s soul responds to the earth.

Antoine, who presumably also wrote the script (no one is credited), has inherited the Shakespearean story from Zola’s novel. Père Fouan, too old and tired to farm any longer the land he owns, has it surveyed and divided into three parts, each of which goes either to a son or a son-in-law, in the latter case, his daughter Fanny’s spouse. By society’s established terms, he and his wife, Rose, will be allowed to remain in their home and will receive from the offspring a monthly complement of wood, wine and eggs. They will also receive money for the land and a generous monthly allowance on which to live. It is not long, however, before Fouan must threaten the children with notification of bailiffs. The children who seemed so loving to begin with turn out to be greedy and unfeeling, and there isn’t even a Cordelia in sight. Indeed, Fouan’s older sister and neighbor, piqued that she wasn’t given a piece of the land, pronounces her brother a fool and predicts both his betrayal by his children and his homelessness. She tells her brother, and she means it, that he should not come knocking at her door for shelter, for all she will want him to do is die in a ditch.

It is a problem that Shakespeare doesn’t travel well beyond the limits of its royal settings. Things that fit so perfectly within a royal domain make less sense outside it. Moreover, new things need to be wedged in that do not fit so well, either. Money is not an issue in King Lear, as it is here, and the absence of this issue in the original makes the issue of land there a springboard for metaphysical concerns. Lear is proud humanity brought down low as he realizes his existence is stretched on fortune’s wheel—the capriciousness of the cosmos. The issue of money, a bourgeois preoccupation, delays the film’s embrace of the material’s fullest and most profound dimension.

At the same time, however, the familiarity of the story is of enormous benefit to the film. Points of plot connecting the film to Lear become like Stations of the Cross that Fouan must hit, one after the other, as he navigates his familial ordeal. The plot turns into a meta-plot to which we scarcely need to attend, so well do we already know it, and this has the fortuitous result of making what would otherwise be a considerable amount of plot virtually disappear. None of the greatest films have much, if any, plot; cinema is a twentieth-century (and, now, twenty-first century)—that is, modern and postmodern art form—while plot as such belongs to the nineteenth century and earlier. Zola’s novel, of course, indulges its plot elements, which the echoes of King Lear rather reinforce. In Antoine’s film, these same echoes turn plot into nothingness; and nothing will come of nothing—and nothing in the modern sense of the nothing that is there.

But Zola is a genius, and it turns out that on one crucial point his La terre is more highly analytical than the wonderful film that Antoine has wrought. In the latter, Fouan is increasingly weakened physically by the cruel and vicious blows that his family members deal him (this includes the denial of his pension and the theft of his financial reserves); this weakened state alone explains why he makes no recourse to the legal system that arranged the terms of the land division and could conceivably set right much of the wrong that has been done to him. In the novel, though, the matter is far more complex. There, each blow that the old man is dealt further erodes his sense of authority and importance, which is bound to his sense of patriarchic entitlement by dint of society’s organization and founding bias. To be sure, the elements remain for such a reading of the film, for instance, the fact that Fanny’s husband, not Fanny per se, receives a portion of the father’s land along with the father’s biological sons, while his elder sister is excluded from consideration altogether. But, in the film, these elements do not coalesce into the thematic resonance—the sociopolitical analysis—that the novel provides. Launching Fouan’s downward spiral is Rose’s death. This terribly weakens Fouan, but the film doesn’t specifically explain how, permitting the sentimental explanation, that Fouan has lost his life-partner, to take precedence. Fouan has, in reality, lost more than that. Fouan’s marriage, modeled on the hierarchy that sets man above woman, had daily, constantly, however unconsciously, reinforced Fouan’s sense of authority and importance. Filial deference, likewise eroding, had helped reinforce the same sense. The old man’s gradually diminished social, cultural and political standing are central to the novel, and they contribute to Fouan’s gradual debilitation; in the film, unless we “read into” what we see from the novel, the old man’s physical deterioration stands alone. Zola’s concept is more astute and penetrating. It is, if you will, a fuller explanation. Moreover, the patriarchism that Zola opposes acts in concert with another theme in the novel: humility vis-à-vis the female earth. Farmers bend to the fields that they work, in anticipation of their eventual burial: life as a preparation for death. In the novel, the two themes are interwoven.

Indeed, the novel is conceptually more complex. In the film, the cycles of both Nature and humanity’s inhumanity (such as greed) exist parallel to one another. In the novel, they seem to be intersecting circles of import. Zola was no Flaubert, but his novels bear some degree of interesting design, for all his slapdash methods of composition.

On the other hand, the film repeats one of Zola’s most regrettable penchants: hoary symbolism. A teenaged neighbor of Fouan’s, Françoise, is leading a cow of hers to another neighbor so that the animal, in heat, may mate with a bull. The cow’s mood is testy, to say the least, and she—one can hardly call her an “it” in this context—goes wild, dragging Françoise across the field until a passer-by, Jean, a wanderer on the open road, who is looking for work, rescues her. Françoise comes to, her eyes aglow, in Jean’s sturdy arms. The scene’s meaning is insultingly reductive: Françoise is tied to her sexuality, at the mercy of her sex drive, its pushes and pulls (not to mention, bulls). This sort of nonsense actually works better in print than on film, but it works well nowhere. At the same time, Antoine scores a visual coup when we see Fouan, exhausted from farming, also on the ground, in need of as much supportive attention as Françoise, but ignored by Jean. The message in this case, that youth will have its day, shutting the elderly out, arises naturally from the dramatic material. Here, Antoine is being reflective, not reductive.

Despite the film’s shortcomings, visually, La terre is remarkable, almost from start to finish, especially nearing and at the finish. An early shot provides an outstanding instance of Antoine’s level of achievement. The film visually interrelates wild animals, domesticated animals, and humans, that is to say, the domesticaters of animals. We see wild animals as they are being poached, and we see farm animals as they contribute to the farming of the land and the lives of the farmers. Antoine devises in this regard a transformative shot, a thing of visionary brilliance. A conveyance, a truck, is opened at the back; the camera, creatively positioned, faces the rear opening from inside the truck. The truck is full of sheep, and they all appear black because of the darkness of the truck’s enclosure. They also appear wild in their haste to exit the enclosure. Below, on the ground, are white sheep in an orderly procession. Within the same frame we see the dark sheep, billowy, formless shadows, reach the ground and, themselves white in sunlight, meld with the definable white sheep. It is, at once, an encapsulation of domestication and, by dint of metaphor, a vision of the process of civilization: disciplined by light, the emergence of humanity from its dark, primitive impulses. The whole film (as does the novel) reminds us how close is the light of humanity to the dark of humanity, but here is an image, belonging to cinema, that bounds beyond Zola’s limits.

The daughter of one of Fouan’s sons is known as La Trouille, “The Pest.” She and her father, nicknamed Jésus-Christ, are poachers. We see her thinly clad feet mounting a tree; another creatively positioned camera greets her arrival up the tree, where figure and ground are as indistinguishable as the woman and the proliferation of branches. La Trouille reaches into the nest that was her goal. We expect her to lift out an egg or two, but it is fully-hatched, naked, vulnerable life that she pilfers for collection in a box. It’s a monstrous image—and another extraordinary shot, another visionary shot disclosing the dark capacities of humanity. The emotional coloration is also complex, for we may wish to distance ourselves from the mirror-image of us that La Trouille provides, while at the same time we identify the baby birds with human babies whom we feel moved to protect.

Commentators have noted that shots of the peasants, especially as they work in the fields, appear to be drawn from paintings by Jean-François Millet. This is a misleading remark, no matter how many repeat it, because not once does Antoine freeze human activity in order to invoke a canvas (as, say, Bob Fosse does in Cabaret). Rather than invoking Millet paintings, I would say, Antoine evokes a spirit of rural life that inspires him as much as it did Millet.

The finale of the film is organic rather than contrived; one can feel its growing out of what has preceded it. Antoine, then, has achieved a Zolaesque vitalism. At the same time, though, he does not bear down on it to forge, in some ideological crucible, the determinism that is one of the cardinal (and daunting) features of Zola’s fiction. By now, Fouan is homeless and roaming the fields, seeking comfort in a stray conversation, bitterly regretting the fact that he has lost everything and no one will take him in. In long-shots, we see him walking, by now with the help of two canes, through vast fields with an even vaster sky overhead; he is a tiny figure in a seemingly illimitable ground. The weather beats him (I forget whether it is snowing or raining); the sunshine, when it arrives, seems to be mocking the weak, marginalized Everyman. He falls down in the morning and finally dies. Meanwhile, at the same time, a young woman rises from bed to face the day. She stretches her arms outside her upstairs window. The cycle of life continues, favoring the young, and Fouan, nearly even by us, is already forgotten.

I appreciate that a closing, with dazzling cross-cutting, that anticipates the grave, and with the incomparable beauty of Dovzhenko, does not translate into the greatness of Dovzhenko. But let us give La terre credit for what it is rather than complain about how it falls short of this or that. If it is not the greatest film ever made (which Dovzhenko’s 1930 Earth perhaps is), it is close enough to being so to provide one of the most sublime experiences in cinema.

Armand Bour gives a tremendous performance as Fouan; we perceive Fouan’s foolishness as reflective of our own, and we feel for his plight without absolving his judgment. He and Zola are among Antoine’s four great collaborators here, the other two being his phenomenal black-and-white cinematographers, René Gaveau and René Guichard.

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