INNOCENCE (Lucile Hadzihalilovic, 2004)

Although it relates symbolically to reality from the get-go, Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s mesmerizing debut feature, Innocence, unfolds as a dream. In a fairy-tale forest its girls’ boarding school, to which new students arrive in coffins and parents never visit, eludes definition, literalism. The French film opens with the transport of an indeterminate something that I guess is the coffin; there are also indeterminate sounds. These yield to the sight and sound of rushing current. Somber sepulchral imagery begins a characterization of the school and culminates in the open coffin around which pairs of girls’ legs gather. The occupant is six-year-old Iris, one of two central characters. The other is 12-year-old Bianca, who leaves the school for the outside world, before which Iris becomes dearly attached to her. Bianca disappears into the forest each night; one night, Iris follows. There, a man tries coaxing Bianca into doing something indeterminate.
     In this mysterious school, where girls study biology and practice ballet, the liquidity of a dream yields to formal restrictions: shots are formally, rigorously composed; obedience is counseled; the girls are dressed all in white, their hair adorned by colored ribbons. Perhaps the school is a kind of prison, holding children back from freedom. If they try to escape and are caught, they will have to stay on permanently, grow old there, as servants waiting on children. One child goes over the daunting confining wall, but there’s no confirmation she escapes with her life; another tries to flee by boat and drowns. (Throughout, watery immersion is a motif.) The latter’s remains are cremated in a ceremony sufficiently primitive to suggest the child’s eventual return.
     Timeless environment; but the squeak of a swing matches the beat of a clock, through whose secret doorway the girls pass to a new destination.

THERE WILL BE BLOOD (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007)

Based on Upton Sinclair’s Oil!, Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood begins in 1898 New Mexico, when Daniel Plainview breaks his leg in his silver mine before discovering a wealth there of black gold. Why does Anderson set the story’s beginning earlier than the novel does? Perhaps to give it a toehold in the decade of Darwin, evolutionism, and Tennyson’s warning against humanity’s “reeling back into the beast.”
     The film’s opening movement is extraordinary—a silent filmlet with discordant work sounds. One of Daniel’s fellow workers, a young father, dies while drilling, and Daniel assumes the burden of the orphaned son, presumably in part to ground his own consciousness in the noble concepts of sacrifice, loyalty, devotion and love. But that’s part of the problem; Daniel’s feelings proceed from abstract ideas. Is this the truth about emotions in America?
     Daniel’s pursuit of drilling rights on private property constitutes his demonic possession by competitive capitalism at the expense of humane and social values. How fitting that he uses his young adopted son, H.W., as an endearing inducement to trick people into letting him pocket their land at a minimal price. His son goes deaf as the result of a well’s explosion. This predicts the estrangement from the boy that Daniel enforces. He keeps burning his bridges to humanity.
     The film slides deeper and deeper into the muck of slick melodrama. It goes on too long, reiterating Daniel Plainview’s propensity for denying his own humanity and everyone else’s. Alas, this atheist’s long quarrel with a preacher who is as exploitive in his realm as Daniel is in his own realm leads to a bloody mess that fails to illumine the thematic material.
     Daniel Day-Lewis, as Plainview, cleverly impersonates two Hustons: Walter and John.

NIGHTSONGS (Marva Nabili, 1983)

Marva Nabili, an Iranian émigré fleeing the Islamic Revolution, settled in the United States. Her first film, The Sealed Soil (1977), made my list of the 100 greatest films of all time. Her second, Nightsongs, is (like its main female character) beautifully observant of social environment, human nature and the human soul. It is essential viewing for understanding an immigrant’s America.
     The woman is, well, who? Alone among the main characters she is unnamed, anonymous; her husband has remained behind in a Southeast Asian refugee camp as he attempts to locate their two sons. It is likely this young Chinese-Vietnamese woman will never see husband and children again.
     The film opens on two Chinese immigrants who await her arrival by plane: a father and his fifteen-year-old son. They have been in the U.S. now for three years. A letter from their cousin, the woman’s spouse, is heard as voiceover introducing his wife and asking his relations to take her into their home until he arrives. The Fungs of course do this, although Leung’s wife, Lai Ping, and two small children help make their New York tenement quarters already severely cramped. Lai Ping gets their apartment guest a job at the garment sweatshop where she works for little pay. Except on Sundays Leung lives elsewhere, on Long Island, where he works in the kitchen of a Chinese restaurant. Survival requires this; the Fungs are partly, then, also “separated.”
     The film’s protagonist is Tak Men, the teenager. His English remains poor; with his two TV-watching younger siblings, it is impossible for him to study at home. The cousin’s intrusive arrival further pinches his domain. She speaks no English, and they both keep to themselves. She ends up rescuing his life from a bullet.
     Teased and bullied by peers at school who are immigrants of longer standing, Tak Men finds “protection” in a gang. Nabili’s fictional film records the recruitment and the boy’s slippage into the gang’s domain; but when he is handed a gun, he wants out. There is no out. A well-meaning teacher’s bad counsel costs Tak Men his highschooling.
     When Leung learns that his son hasn’t quit the gang as he thought his son had done, he publicly beats him, smack after smack after smack. But heed Leung’s words. Any shame that Tak Men has visited on the family by his gang affiliation means nothing to Leung. All he cares about is his son’s life, his son’s future. Throughout, Tak Men has been disobedient and disrespectful to his father; but he takes every smack on this one occasion when his father hits him because he knows the depth of his father’s worry and concern. Nabili’s long-shot prevents the scene from slipping into sentimentality.
     The operational noise at the sweatshop is ear-splitting, dehumanizing. Cousin works well but slowly and is eventually laid off: demoralizing.
     The littered streets of the impoverished neighborhood reek of hopelessness and despair. We understand that kids mistreat Tak Men because they are so frustrated with what they perceive to be their own dead-ended lives. Nabili spares us the disrespect of connecting dots, but the fullness of her view allows us to take the whole scene in.
     However, there is also hope to be had, the looking forward to a bit of advancement, such as Leung’s dream of moving his family to Queens.
     Some reviewers, while otherwise endorsing the film, were up in arms that we hear perfect-English voiceover of poetry-reading superimposed on shots of Cousin. I am not as convinced by these nay-sayers that it’s Cousin’s private journal that is being read from. Rather, I take these recitations as aural metaphor for the process of absenting one’s mind from a dreadful environment—such as a refugee camp, sweatshop, prison—in order to withstand it. (This is the role of the fantasized musical numbers in Lars von Trier’s brilliant Dancer in the Dark, 2000, which goes so far as to suggest that this is indeed the role of popular culture in the otherwise cultureless social U.S. landscape.)
     “We don’t celebrate Christmas,” Leung tries telling his youngest children. Chinese-American is not always a felicitous fit. But Nightsongs, which is entirely wonderful, is the only film on record, I’m sure, where “Red River Valley” is sung in Mandarin or Cantonese. My ignorance prevents me from saying which; but it’s a very funny moment.

MAN ON THE TRACKS (Andrzej Munk, 1956)

Very nearly forty, Andrzej Munk died in a road accident in 1961, ending the career of the Polish filmmaker whom Roman Polanski considered his mentor. Munk’s Man on the Tracks, Eroica (1957), Cross-Eyed Luck (1959) and Passenger (1961) constitute a sterling body of work. Indeed, the last, completed by Witold Lesiewicz, using stills, and released in 1963, is a masterpiece, the single finest fictional film ever made on the subject of the Holocaust. (Wanda Jakubowska’s The Last Stage and Andrzej Wajda’s Korczak—both also Polish—are the runners-up, although the former, which Jakubowska based on her own term at Auschwitz, must be accounted semi-documentary. The finest film ever about the Holocaust? Dariusz Jablonski’s documentary Photographer—again, Polish.) The passing of Munk hasn’t achieved, worldwide, the resonance of Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau’s passing, also in a road accident, in 1931 at age 42. At least Munk, though, died in his Poland, not in Hollywood, where—Santa Barbara: close enough—Murnau, one of Germany’s premier filmmakers (Nosferatu, 1922; The Last Laugh, 1924), died, riding his motorcycle. Munk did not, like Murnau, end in a wreck of compromise.

Man on the Tracks—Czlowiek na torze—is a bold film, of a kind that Josef Stalin’s recent death, and the resultant loosened Soviet grip on the Polish film industry, facilitated. It’s a work about current laborers in Poland, and about the social atmosphere in which they work. It’s the work of a committed Communist, but an observant and inquiring one who finds he has more uncertainties and questions to probe than answers he can pull out of an ideological bag. It’s the sort of film that could not have been made in Hollywood at the same time, so vastly more oppressive was the political atmosphere in the U.S. in the 1950s.

Man on the Tracks begins famously with a man’s death. The man is Orzechowski, a former railway conductor—an older man, who haunts the local station post. He is run down on the tracks by the very train he used to engineer, which his replacement, recognizing him, brings to a screeching halt. How did this happen? Two possibilities are suicide and sabotage. Only one of two green lights showed, indicating safe passage for the train when in fact the situation on the tracks was the opposite of this. Did Orzechowski remove one of the lights himself?; is that what he was doing when the accident killing him occurred? And, if so, what was his motive? Was it political since he was a member of the old guard? Was he nursing a grudge for having been discharged after decades of service? Certainly Tuszka, the station master with whom Orzechowski continually butted heads, thinks it was a case of attempted sabotage. A board of inquiry will determine the truth.

Two motives of cinema intersect here: a character study; a search for truth. The intersection is this: the inquiry will eventually reveal the true nature of Orzechowski’s character. The revelation is logical; much of what we see, in flashbacks corresponding to the testimony of witnesses, predicts it, and yet it comes as something of a shock, given the distortions that these subjective accounts display. The structure of the film is often compared to that of Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941) and Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950), with their multiple perspectives on identical events. As a post-mortem, however, Man on the Tracks is at least as much like Kurosawa’s masterpiece, Ikiru (1952). There, at Kenji Watanabe’s funeral, his co-workers, fellow civil servants, piece together truths about the man. Officials interviewing Orzechowski’s co-workers attempt to do the same in Man on the Tracks.

It’s a daunting enterprise, given the atmosphere of suspicion that envelops workers in 1950 Poland. A new program of railway efficiency has train engineers and crews competing to use as little coal as possible; the nation’s progress, the Party assures them, depends on this. At the same time, there are older workers, themselves resisting the redefinition of their homeland as communistic, who must function under the deepest cloud of suspicion. At heart, they do not equate the progress of Polish Communism with Poland’s progress. Orzechowski is such an individual. He burns coal generously, explaining that he does things as he was taught to do them and as he has always done them. The English subtitle beautifully expresses his crime in Tuszka’s eyes: Orzechowski “lags behind in saving coal.” The implication is that Orzechowski is dragging Poland back rather than moving it ahead. Therefore, his older age isn’t alone his liability that attracts the suspicious concern of others; it’s the different way of political life in Poland that Orzechowski can recall by dint of his old age. For the younger workers, the new order in Poland replaces German occupation; but Orzechowski has vivid social and political memories that go farther back. He is an odd man out because of both his age and the sense of Poland that goes along with his age. “Times have changed,” the stationmaster tells him, saying in effect, “You must get with the program.” But Tuszka really is trying to provoke Orzechowski’s retirement, toward which end he replaces Orzechowski’s assistant with someone who is loyal instead to him. Tuszka is also nursing a grudge. Years ago, Orzechowski reprimanded Tuszka for shoddy work.

It won’t be easy to get at the truth about Orzechowski, in particular because the cloud of suspicion he was under made him very private, guarded, quite rigid. Thus the film begins in pitch darkness as the train inexorably proceeds until the brakes are applied. The black-and-white cinematography by Romuald Kropat and Jerzy Wójcik conjures a blackness of night blacker than any I’ve seen in any other film. This darkness is, of course, correlative to the depth of mystery surrounding Orzechowski and his motives; the gleam of the train, perhaps, indicates the possibility that some clarity can emerge from the darkness. The voluminous smoke from the train suggests the murky, self-serving testimony, given at the inquiry, that, for those directing the inquiry, will have to negotiate a path—a track, if you will—between darkness and clarity.

We come to see, in effect, two Orzechowskis. One is the tight, demanding, formal figure who doesn’t suffer fools and who feels oppressed by the surveillance he is under. The other is a more relaxed Orzechowski, who socializes with same-age friends, for example. Each exists, if you will, on a separate track, but the tracks cross one another in (until the end) the film’s most exquisitely moving moment. It’s Saturday morning in the park. Orzechowski’s new assistant is there to meet his girlfriend, who awaits him on a park bench. She is in sight when Orzechowski comes strolling with his wife. The assistant tries to hide, to avoid a confrontation with his cantankerous boss, but Orzechowski spots him and is immediately suspicious that the young man is there to spy on him. However, when it becomes obvious that the man is there to meet his girl, Orzechowski breaks into a warm smile, and the couples make gracious introductions. Boss, assistant; non-Communist, Communist; old, young: for an instant none of the divisions matter. For an instant, we see four Poles interacting. Orzechowski even asks the young couple to join him and his wife, but the assistant and his girl leave to go (the assistant says) to the movies. The good moment is gone.

The inquiry finds its way back to the Orzechowski we glimpsed in the park. For all the suspicion of sabotage that had been leveled at the dead man by Tuszka, the Communist board of inquiry, acting intelligently and humanely, arrives at the truth. I will not disclose the particulars about the damaged signal, for this revelation involves a visual moment that’s a surprise and a cheat—a glorious cheat! In one of the flashbacks, we observe something that the witness to whose testimony the flashback corresponds could not and did not; and what we observe exonerates Orzechowski of any charge of sabotage against fellow Polish workers and fellow Polish citizens. Luckily, the head of the board of inquiry, without benefit of what Munk shows us, is able to figure out what happened. Orzechowski was on the tracks on that fateful night to attempt to correct the problem of the missing signal that would have properly halted the train, averting disaster. He dies in the attempt, for it is he, ultimately, who halts the train at the forfeit of his life. Orzechowski was a Pole and a working-class hero; how can we not have seen that? Thus Munk strikes down the equation (embodied by Tuszka) of Communism and the righteous element of the working class. Munk stresses instead Polish identity under the political skin. The humanity of this resolution is overwhelming.

The boldness of the film is a little jaw-dropping. While in the United States, in its grip, McCarthyism generated films either in support of it or, otherwise, so riddled with allegory and indirection that audiences had to ferret out subterranean gleams of dissent, at the same time Communist Poland kept the green light glowing for this bluntly, highly critical film of a deleterious atmosphere of suspicion amongst Polish workers. Man on the Tracks assails Polish McCarthyism, where the bedeviling accusation is not that one is a Communist but that one is not. The wisdom of the board of inquiry doubtless smoothed the edge of the film’s scalpel, rendering the film more acceptable to Polish authorities. And no one doubts that the film couldn’t have been made had Stalin been alive in the Soviet Union. Still, the jaw drops.

The acting in this film is competent except for the lead. Kazimierz Opalinski is superb as Orzechowski.

The excellent script is by Munk and Jerzy Stefan Stawinski, whose story the pair adapted. Their next collaboration would be Eroica (Heroism), a biting, sardonic satire about Polish wartime heroism.

With Munk about, shooting film, the shibboleths do not stand.

LE PETIT SOLDAT (Jean-Luc Godard, 1960)

French censors held back the release of Jean-Luc Godard’s Le petit soldat for three years—until after the Algerian War. It’s the love story of two young terrorists. Unbeknownst to her boyfriend, Véronique belongs to the National Liberation Front, which is dedicated to the cause of Algierian independence from colonialist France; Bruno, to the right-wing, nationalist O.A.S. (the Organisation de l’armée secrète), which seeks to prevent this. Wanted in France, Bruno lives in Geneva, where post-World War II international conventions have defined and outlawed torture.
     Much of the film plays out in cars. Bruno’s voiceover guides us. His opening remark that he is too old to participate, that it is time to think, reflects how old he feels because of what he describes deludedly as his “anti-terrorist” activities. Indeed, Bruno’s prissy conservatism marks him as old before his time. He tells a compatriot, “I only screw girls I’m in love with.” Surely this shows, according to Jean-Luc, a lack of imagination and humanity. Godard would counsel Bruno, “Fall in love more easily, more often.”
     Godard’s liberated black-and-white camera, particularly in its urban street photography, ironically homes in on an atmosphere of spies spying on spies. Captured by Arabs in Zurich, where he is on the lam, Bruno is subjected to a form of torture called waterboarding. In this long, painful passage, Bruno’s face is repeatedly submerged in a filled tub, the water entering his lungs and beginning to strangle him from the inside. (“A little dunking,” the current U.S. vice-president has dismissively called the procedure, which his administration practices.) Godard notes that the French routinely torture Algerians.
     Through Bruno, Godard remarks famously, “Cinema is truth 24 [frames] per second.” Poignantly, through Bruno, Godard falls in love with and imagines losing forever Véronique: Anna Karina.