THE RAIN PEOPLE (Francis Ford Coppola, 1969)

The Rain People—which one critic, Danny Peary, has called “probably Coppola’s most personally felt film and certainly his most honest one”—is so powerful and wonderfully observed as to suggest the different course that Francis Ford Coppola’s career might have taken had he not sold his soul for profits. The Rain People does have some of the artiness that afflicts all of Coppola, but none of the bloatedness, manipulativeness or stupidity. It is a fine piece of contemporary social observation, moody yet light, buoyant and, unlike all the dismal works that followed, absolutely sincere. How sad that the person who was capable of this ended up as the purveyor of such garbage as The Godfather (1972), The Conversation (1974) and Apocalypse Now (1979).
     Yes, the resolution of The Rain People is facile, but what a ride the movie gives us beforehand. Its financial failure, alas, had Coppola regroup, ending in the meeting with the Devil that sealed Coppola’s artistic fate and doomed the rest of us to some of the worst movies ever made. Only the highly impersonal Peggy Sue Got Married (1986) would lighten a heavy load; but The Rain People offers the unique opportunity to see a Coppola film that is both good and personal.
     The acting by Shirley Knight and Robert Duvall is excellent, while James Caan handles his pathetic part of the brain-damaged college football player with admirable tact. Knight is simply superb as the young pregnant woman who wakes up one morning and leaves her husband because marriage has imprisoned her, leaving her no time for herself. What a kick to see Knight, one of the best American film actresses of her generation, slim again and at the top of her form in a part she navigates nimbly in order to miss colliding with all its inherent histrionics. What socially revelatory agony her character endures as the runaway bourgeois practices utmost fairness by attempting to explain her confusion of emotions to her spouse by way of public telephones as she drifts cross-country discovering a more responsible life than her New York home afforded her.
     The Rain People suggests that Coppola (at least) wasn’t a misogynist. In conjunction with this, isn’t it heavenly that he identifies Natalie/Sarah’s growing responsibility with her shift on the road rather than with the home she has (temporarily or permanently) left behind? Isn’t it remarkable, given the dispiriting run of Coppola’s subsequent pseudo-cinema, that this shift on the road plunges the woman into an apprehension of working-class life? Did Coppola really make this film? Yes, he did—which is all the more reason to lament what followed.
     Artists, beware! Cancel all future appointments with Beëlzebub! Your soul isn’t something to trade away for all the riches that Cop-Out America can dangle in front of you! Stay yourself for better or worse, or you may end up huckstering unflavorful spaghetti sauce.

EL TOPO (Alejandro Jodorowsky, 1970)

The preface of the Mexican film El Topo, by Chile’s Alejandro Jodorowsky, considers the titular animal, the mole, that searches through earth for sunlight and, when finally finding it, goes blind. Relating this to the protagonist (played by Jodorowsky, who also composed the film’s sometimes annoyingly raucous music) may come hard or not at all; one can never be sure just what Jodorowsky had in mind—if anything.
     Jodorowsky’s gunfighter on horseback in the Mexican desert is accompanied by his naked 7-year-old son (played by Jodorowsky’s young son). At the outset they perform a ritual culminating in Dad’s announcement that the boy is “a man”—a dig, perhaps, at Latin American machismo. In a scene of recent massacre (including animal carcasses with innards hanging out), the pair encounter a man on the sand who, in terrible pain, begs to join the dead others. Father hands pistol over to son, who does the dispatching. Tweaking the Roman Catholic line on eternal damnation, an act of Christian mercy becomes a suicide by proxy.
     Indeed, although El Topo’s taunting by the band of bandits responsible for the massacre suggests John Huston’s Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1947), a good deal of the film’s imagery and Catholic-skewering anarchism and wit derive from Luis Buñuel. El Topo shows all the bloodmarks of additional influence by Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns.
     It is hard now to see the Eastern mysticism that captured the attention of John Lennon, the film’s legendary champion, but Jodorowsky’s irony survives intact. A woman whom El Topo rescues from the bandits’ grip rewards him by leading him to the four gunmen he most wants to confront. To paraphrase a familiar saying, “All roads lead to violence.”
     Resplendent with barbarous beauty, El Topo is something to experience rather than perfectly grasp.

LUCÍA (Humberto Solás, 1968)

The following is one of the entries from my list of the 100 greatest films (through 2006) from Africa, Latin America & the Caribbean, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis

Ten years after the Revolution deposed Batista, Lucía, by Humberto Solás, expressed hopefulness of the future. Depicting progressive changes in Cuba over more than half a century, the film’s formal design—three episodes, each in its own visual style, showing the role of Cuban women at three different times—implies quantum leaps in political consciousness. Lucía adheres to the dictum that a woman’s lot reflects a nation’s value.
     In the case of Cuba, that lot is marked against entrenched patriarchy and socially rampant machismo, one source of which is Spanish culture. The first Lucía is embroiled in a well-heeled romantic melodrama in colonial times, their late nineteenth-century romance at the mercy of her lover’s whims, and the period sets, costumes and florid attitudes—betrayal and madness figure in—correlative to the entrapment of history. In the next, tragic episode, romance strikes out at another Lucía’s insulated world as the political ground underneath the Caribbean island begins to shift. Society-maiden Lucía falls in love with a guerrilla fighter and joins Cuba’s war of independence from Spain. The idea of independence resonates on different levels as the personal and the national cross, resulting in the kind of “intimate epic” that Gone with the Wind (Victor Fleming et al., 1939) failed to achieve due to its intellectual vacuity and sentimental compromises. In the final episode, a third Lucía has yet more sociopolitical distance to cover. After the Castro revolution, then what? Progress is being made throughout the island, but Lucía’s spouse, who at times keeps her (literally) locked up, is resistant to any tampering with his male prerogatives. For Solás, “revolution” must be an ongoing thing, and education is the key.
     The lukewarm mush of Solás’s recent Miel para Oshún (2001) begs the question: Is the Cuban Revolution dead in the water?

RAMPARTS OF CLAY (Jean-Louis Bertucelli, 1968)

The following is one of the entries from my list of the 100 greatest films (through 2006) from Africa, Latin America & the Caribbean, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis

Concentric circles of oppression structure the main action in Remparts d’argile, French filmmaker Jean-Louis Bertucelli’s beauteous, sun-bleached adaptation of Jean Duvignaud’s novel. In a Tunisian village in the early 1960s, a strike by salt mine workers, which is set off when they are paid only half their wages, inspires a young villager to assist in their cause. However, she is deemed by village elders to be somehow possessed for discarding her traditional garb and modest demeanor and for behaving rebelliously, and the women attempt to bring her back to her senses by subjecting her to purifying rituals. But there is no turning back for her; her mind has already touched the border of freedom and self-determination.
     Seamlessly mixing actual villagers and professional actors, Bertucelli translates documentary into fiction and fiction into documentary. It is amazing how thoroughly the film absorbs viewers into its reality—an outcome that the sparseness of dialogue facilitates. When villagers spatter the protagonist with fresh animal blood to drive demons out, one is unlikely to ask, “What were these superstitious people thinking in relation to the actress that they were treating as though she were one of their own?” They are simply maintaining their way of life; and one wonders only after the film has ended what parallels are to be drawn between the intruding filmmakers and, in the film, the intruding mining entrepreneur and the thugs he brings in to intimidate the strikers.
     Banned in Algeria, where it was filmed, and in Tunisia, Remparts d’argile is a powerful feminist fable portraying a brave, solitary soul’s rebellion against both primitive local custom and intrusive neocolonialism. The workers’ strike helps crystallize both her sense of exclusion and her radical dream of real, not nominal, independence. Her desire is to shed two African pasts.

JAGUAR (Jean Rouch, 1967)

The following is one of the entries from my list of the 100 greatest films (through 2006) from Africa, Latin America & the Caribbean, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis

Cine-fiction: France’s prolific Jean Rouch coined this term for ethnographic documentaries that are launched by a contrivance. Shot in 1954-55 and edited more than a decade later, Rouch’s Jaguar casts three young African non-actors as three African men who journey from rural, impoverished Niger, along the Ivory Coast, to robust cities in Ghana in search of seasonal work. Their migration is the launch, but the film is the product of Rouch’s research into actual activities and social customs in areas at both ends of the journey and along the way. Jaguar contrasts country and city, the primitive and the more advanced. We may say that the camera follows countryfolk to where people take the camera’s presence—modernity—in their stride.
     The slight narrative was improvised by Rouch and the trio, and the soundtrack, consisting of remembered dialogue, ruminations and questions, was improvised post-production. At the time the film was shot, the portable equipment that might have recorded synchronized sound did not exist.
     Jaguar is dazzlingly cut and assembled, with perhaps more shots per length than any other film in existence, to convey the complex experience of the trio on their city adventure. This diamond-faceted, restless, highly analytical visual style—Resnais out-Resnaised, and without the long trackings to add countervailing lyricism—is correlative to the real adventure going on: the social elasticity of the protagonists, their Keatsian negative capability, their ongoing need to process the unfamiliar experiences bombarding them, and the mental and emotional agility that allows them to readjust and reinvent themselves as a result. To turn around a famous remark by Tennyson’s Ulysses, all that they have met becomes a part of them. Back home three months after they left, they are partial strangers to themselves and others. Jaguar is a model of technical form analyzing humanistic content.