SECRET CEREMONY (Joseph Losey, 1968)

From Marco Denevi’s short story, Joseph Losey’s Secret Ceremony is a heady, baroque melodrama about loss. Leonora, a middle-aged prostitute, five years earlier lost her ten-year-old daughter (a drowning, the church tombstone claims). She must also have lost home and husband. Our first glimpse of her shows Leonora taking off her long, mod blonde wig in the morning light: an image of loss. We glimpse this through her apartment window; we are trespassing on the territory of her private life. Inside, we see in closeup her daughter’s eyes in a photograph. We are haunted by those eyes, but not nearly as much as Judith Frances Grabowski’s mother, Leonora—Elizabeth Taylor in the performance of a lifetime.
     Opening credits are accompanied by the tune from a child’s music box. The film passes into silence except for street noises and an infant’s baptism in the Catholic church to which Leonora has gone to pray and to visit her child’s grave. From the bus a teenaged girl has followed her. The girl’s eyes remind Leonora of Judith’s eyes, causing her to flash back to her inconsolable grief—this, too, is mute—at her daughter’s burial. Cenci, who turns out to be rich, takes Leonora by the hand and takes her home. Painfully ill, Cenci’s mother committed suicide. Cenci also is consumed by loss, which in her case (in concert with other things) has unhinged her. Leonora, she decides, resembles her mother, is her mother. Could Cenci be Leonora’s still-alive daughter? Leonora is drawn into Cenci’s world and Cenci’s belief/pretense that she is her mother.
     A stepfather shows up to justify the hint of incest attached to Cenci’s name (see Shelley’s play The Cenci), and the plot gets a bit complicated. But Losey and Taylor create magical emotional complexity.

POLICE BEAT (Robinson Devor, 2005)

“Z,” a Senegal-born Seattle bicycle cop, worries about his girlfriend’s fidelity—his continual voiceover is in Wolof—as he responds to one bizarre crime scene after another. (The movie claims that every criminal event in the film is from Seattle police annals.)
     Thin, disjointed, wearisomely repetitious, and painfully disgusting in spots.
     There are one or two good moments where Z’s African background wars with the inhumane ways things go down in America, and it’s amusing that Z thinks that Golding’s Lord of the Flies is a good book because it (indirectly) shows how necessary cops are. I don’t know what to make of the fact that Z considers himself a “problem solver.”
     Charles Mudede and director Robinson Devor wrote the monotonous script.

THE FACE OF ANOTHER (Hiroshi Teshigahara, 1966)

“I wonder if losing one’s face deranges one’s senses. . . . I feel as though I’ve been buried alive.”
     Businessman Okuyama’s face has been horribly burned. Nastily sensitive, he quips, “I’ll burn my wife’s face so it looks like mine.” (At home, his face has become a sore subject, and Okuyama picks fights with his wife over it.) Actually, except in a long-shot at a reflective remove, we do not see his face. White bandages cover the whole of his face, except for slits for eyes, nostrils and mouth. He must look funny, he says, with a cigarette dangling from his lips. He plans on rearranging his life, even at work, to be “as inconspicuous as possible.”
     Adapted by Kôbô Abe from his novel, Hiroshi Teshigahara’s Tanin no kao is a creepy, pretentious piece of medical science fiction. His plastic surgeon makes a mask for Okuyama; it comes from a mold made of the face of a stranger whom Okuyama selected. It is, then, a bought face in Teshigahara’s consideration of the commoditization of both human nature and human spirit.
     Okuyama’s doctor wonders aloud, with almost cruel detachment, how wearing the mask will affect the wearer’s self-image and change him “internally.” “[M]asks like this,” he adds, “could destroy all human morality.” But perhaps the most ghoulish remark that this man makes to his patient is this: “[T]he mask wants to take on a life of its own.”
     With the bandages removed and the mask put in place, Okuyama begins an alternative life. To what extent is the mask responsible for his changed personality? Or does the mask free Okuyama to effect these changes himself? Someone else’s life, that of a horribly scarred young woman, is inserted in fragments.
     Don’t we all wear masks?
     Twaddle.

WOMAN IN THE DUNES (Hiroshi Teshigahara, 1964)

Adapted by Kôbô Abe from his own novel, Hiroshi Teshigahara’s Suna no onna is curious. Niki Jumpei, an entomologist, is collecting bugs by the seashore but misses the last bus back to the city. He stays the night in the home of a local. So what if her house is situated at the bottom of a sand pit? But the next morning the ladder that got him down is gone. It appears that the woman spends her days being an insect, removing sand in order to keep herself from being buried alive by the dunes. Now Niki also is an insect; he becomes part of the woman’s existence, from which there seems to be no escape.
     The principal activity here reminds us of Sisyphus pushing a boulder up a hill and repeating the process endlessly each time it rolls back down. But there is this difference in Suna no onna: the woman’s activity is necessary, not meaningless; what she does somehow maintains the survival of the community to which she belongs and, perhaps, by extension, the whole planet’s survival. Think of those advancing dunes as Godzilla.
     Lacking Hawksian fun, the gender contentiousness down in the pit is irritating, and the entire film, aimed at aesthetes and graduate students, is too abstract, academic and schematic to add up to anything. On the contrary, everything reduces down. We think about the film as we watch it, as we might an episode of TV’s The Twilight Zone, and our thoughts dig up possibilities to which the actual film gives no formal expression. Descendence is presumably meant to convey transcendence because of the woman’s contribution to the social good; only, it doesn’t. For all its occasionally exquisite black-and-white imagery, this is a hollow and very silly movie.

LE BOUCHER (Claude Chabrol, 1969)

One of Claude Chabrol’s warmest, most elegantly ambiguous films, The Butcher seamlessly blends actors and locals in the provincial village of Trémolat. A wedding and the bride’s funeral are two key fictional events largely attended by villagers, while the lead actors, in character, weave in and out of the workday world of the village.
     Popaul, like his father, is the village butcher. At the wedding he meets Hélène, a poised, middle-class schoolteacher, with whom he falls secretly in love while respecting her withdrawal from sex and romance following a disastrous breakup. A serial killer is on the loose targeting women. By one of the corpses, while picnicking with her innocent young pupils, Hélène finds the cigarette lighter with which she gifted Popaul, or one just like it. While painting her flat, Popaul discovers the lighter inside a drawer; Hélène has not turned it over to the police. Popaul “confesses” to her that he is the killer before stabbing himself, bringing her to the point that she gives him a first and last kiss.
     How one interprets this series of events probably depends on whether one believes that a mere butcher, upon finding the lighter and recalling Hélène’s nearly hysterical relief upon seeing it (after the murder) in his hand, could figure out what’s afoot in Hélène’s mind and how impossible their relationship therefore is. He is that intelligent. His confession is the lie he must tell to move Hélène’s heart towards him. Much of the exquisite ambiguity comes from the film’s veering towards Hélène’s subjective view and by keeping the murders hidden from view.
     Both characters are related to humanity’s primitive past: Popaul, at war in Indochina; Hélène, by her enforced celibacy—a suppression of something essentially human.
     Stéphane Audran and Jean Yanne are superb.