BLADE RUNNER (Ridley Scott, 1982; 2007)

The director’s cut of Blade Runner divests the film of the studio-added voiceover narration and adds a more hopeful ending. Alas, the cyberpunk visual scheme hasn’t been tinkered with, so 2019 Los Angeles, once again greenish-brown, still looks like a putrid mixture of mucus and manure. Moreover, the film is still clumsy, soulless, disgustingly violent, and cop Rick Deckard’s search-and-dispatch of illegal immigrants, humanoid slaves called replicants that belong on other planets (Des Moines, maybe), remains tedious and silly. Sing: Still sleazy after a-all these years.
     Perhaps the film’s one interesting aspect is its (unsuccessful) attempt to fuse forties film noir and futuristic science fiction. Certainly the most interesting plot development is the sexual romance between “Deck” and one of the replicants, played moodily in Joan Crawford shoulder pads by gorgeous Sean Young. Poor Rachael did not even know that she was a replicant until Deck explains that her memories from childhood were really programmed in. It’s never a happy thing to learn that you are only a robot—especially when each replicant has been given an operative duration of just four years. Thus do humans and humanoids, both limited by fixed terms, oddly resemble one another—solitudinous creatures immersed in fear. Indeed, is Deck really a recommissioned ex-cop? Does he really recall being a cop? Might he not also be a replicant? The ambiguities keep a-comin’—and each and every one of them is dull.
     Harrison Ford, because his acting as Deck is so repressed, has at least been purged of most of his Star Wars smirk.
     The answer is No. Androids do not dream of electric sheep. In fact, it’s hard to believe that any of the androids that came up with this piece of trash has dreamt about anything ever.

ONE SINGS, THE OTHER DOESN’T (Agnès Varda, 1977)

In 1962, Suzanne and photographer Jérôme can barely afford the two children they have; pregnant, Suzanne seeks money for an abortion. Pauline, a teen neighbor, secures money from a singing gig. (Jérôme commits suicide.) The two women remain friends for the ensuing fifteen years, meeting again ten years later at an abortion rights rally. Reproductive freedom being the cornerstone of gender equality, one continues to sing for the cause while the other runs a family planning clinic. Each eventually marries, by which time Pauline has adopted the name Pomme (Apple).
     Films by Agnès Varda tended to have a chiseled quality; formally, her L’une chante, l’autre pas is instead loose and airy, partly to convey the breathing fabric of each woman’s life and of the “inexplicable friendship” between them. One beautiful panning shot, showing the anxious faces of women awaiting abortions at an Amsterdam hospital at a time the procedure was still illegal in France, suggests (as do other shots) the sisterhood to which both Pomme and Suzanne belong. At another point, Suzanne says, “I felt a part of the family of women.”
     Varda narrates, providing some continuity, but also finding her throwing in her lot with these women, in whose movement at the time she herself was an activist, and helping to nudge the fictional material towards documentary reality.
     Varda’s film is, typically, warm, gentle, generous. It doesn’t attack men, although it pointedly attempts to glean why a seemingly liberal one holds onto patriarchic prerogatives.
     In a brilliant scene, Suzanne confronts a client who is pregnant, having not taken the birth control pills that a doctor prescribed. “Are you Catholic?” Suzanne asks. Response: “I am not a believer.” But apparently some residual Catholic matter prevented this woman from pursuing self-determination.
     Struggles continue.

EASTERN PROMISES (David Cronenberg, 2007)

Her Russian-born mother, Helen, warns Anna Khitrova, a North London hospital midwife, not to have anything to do with the Russian mafia: “This isn’t our world. We are ordinary people.” But Anna has been taken to their door by a series of things: a fourteen-year old patient, a rape victim, dies in childbirth; Anna’s Russian uncle (filmmaker Jerzy Skolimowski, acting without distinction) refuses to translate the Russian girl’s diary; Anna’s sense of obligation to the infant. Her innocent intrusion into this strange world of the vory v zakone threatens her, her family, the baby, and an undercover police operation.
     Canada’s David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises is lovely, heartachingly sad and humane, and—be forewarned—intermittently very violent. It really has to be; the sadness is wrenched from the violence.
     Nikolai, the mob boss’s chauffeur, says at one point, “I’m just a driver; I go right, I go left, I go straight ahead.” Only, he doesn’t. Like everyone else in the mob world, he lies. It is a treacherous place, and determining how far Cronenberg intends to stretch the metaphor is difficult.
     Not everything works; a bloodbath in a steam room is too decorous and overly aesthetic. But Cronenberg’s exquisite mise-en-scène transforms the warmly underlit interior of a London restaurant into a place of the mind—first, the boss’s, a mental remake of his deadliness, complete with a Christmas tree; later, Nikolai’s haunted memory of Anna. The vast room’s subjective long-shots contrast with the coldly overlit, closer-up objective/practical realm of the kitchen. The usual expectations attached to camera distance have been turned inside out.
     The wonderful ending—Steve Wright wrote the script—transmutes and pays delightful homage to the ending of Casablanca. Cronenberg, earlier, drew upon Michael Curtiz’s 1942 film for exotic atmosphere in Naked Lunch (1991).

AND THE SHIP SAILS ON (Federico Fellini, 1983)

I will be deleting something from my list of the 100 best films from Italy, Greece, Spain & Portugal to make room for the following entry:

Bettered only in the Federico Fellini canon by Fellini Satyricon (1969), E la nave va is a meditation on the persistence of war and its ravages on humanity set against time’s passage. It is among Fellini’s most moving works. Like his masterpiece, it comments on human folly.
     A celebrated opera singer’s ashes are onboard a luxury liner that sets sail days after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand by a Bosnian Serb. The ship is transporting her friends to an island where her funeral service is to be held. Among the other people onboard are Orlando, a journalist and the humorous guide who speaks to us directly between attempts at interviewing guests, and Austria-Hungary’s Grand Duke.
     The film begins scratchily in sepia and silence; this bravura opening depicts the dockside activity, a good deal of it involving playful children, prior to the ship’s departure. The intricacy of this activity, especially since it’s captured primarily in long-shot, evokes allegorical paintings by Hieronymus Bosch. The artifice of the studio-bound details (cellophane ocean, solid, material smoke, etc.) likewise prepare us for an allegory, or at least a parable. The boiler room, with men working below as elaborately dressed guests espy them from on high, may even remind us of Dante’s Inferno—although guests sing for the workers, who applaud. (But do they really enjoy this zoo patron-like intrusion into their workplace?)
     Color is itself distancing: browns, white, black, and a touch of red.
     When Serbian refugees are brought onboard, spirited peasant dancing augments the plentiful operatic singing. (This film is full of wonderful music.) What is the captain to do when an Austro-Hungarian battleship demands that the refugees be turned over? The Grand Duke intervenes, but only so the funeral service can proceed.
     Heart-piercing finale.

THE GREY WOLVES (Igor Gostev, 1993)

Perhaps cinema’s most brilliant political thriller, Igor Gostev’s Serye volki depicts the ouster of Soviet Premier Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev (Khruschyov) in October 1964. Among the conspirators participating in the coup are Khrushchev’s replacement, Leonid Brezhnev, and the head of the K.G.B., Vladimir Semichastny. Unlike most films of this kind, this one finely details the surreptitious process by which the coup was formulated and executed—and this is fascinating stuff. Khrushchev finds out about the plot against him and blames himself for relaxing his vigilance. Despite all his great liberalizations (deStalinization, the freeing of political prisoners, and so forth), it never occurred to him to dismantle the K.G.B.; or, to put it another way, he still found the terrorist state police necessary. Ironically, Khrushchev ended up their prisoner, living a secluded life of retirement under their watchful eye.
     Khrushchev—Rolan Bykov caps his career with an amazing performance—is enormously complex: pure steel beneath a warm, folksy, humorous persona. One highlight occurs when he explodes over the fact that Sweden—Sweden, for gosh sake!—was a socialist country while more than 45 years after the Bolshevik Revolution the U.S.S.R. still wasn’t. (At the time of the coup Khrushchev was rewriting the national constitution.) Another highlight: Krushchev remarks to First Deputy Premier Mikoyan, “We’re the last people to remember why this nation was created!” Khrushchev says repeatedly that he needs ten more years in office to accomplish his goals.
     This terrifically suspenseful film, to whose script Khrushchev’s son contributed, suggests a more intricate, more visually graceful instance of Constantin Costa-Gavros’s cinema. It also suggests Luchino Visconti’s The Damned (1969), but with the body politic substituted for family. Gostev’s zooms, though, are petite. It is as if Gostev were telling us, “Lean in and watch and listen.”