DAYS OF GLORY (Rachid Bouchareb, 2006)

French-born Rachid Bouchareb, whose heritage is Algerian, scored a coup with his film Indigènes, which moved then-Premier Jacques Chirac to unfreeze military pensions for soldiers from the French colonies, mostly from North and West Africa, who fought for Free France in World War II. Chirac called what he did an “act of justice”—one marking an important step by France toward (the likely impossible) assimilation of her immigrant populations and their descendants. Such an outcome as Chirac enacted, however welcome, is totally irrelevant, however, to the issue of just how good a film Bouchareb has made. I am sorry to report that Indigènes is without merit as a work of art, although at least it is expertly edited (by Yannick Kergoat) and hauntingly scored (by Armand Amar and Cheb Khaled). As a war film it is simply one cliché after another, with the only really adept passages being those that show combat—a reminder of François Truffaut’s remark that, whatever their intent, all narrative war films end up being pro-war because the actual fighting scenes are always the most exciting.
     The film follows a handful of Muslim Arab volunteers. We watch their efforts to contribute to the group effort of the 7th Battalion in Italy and France, and we see as well how shabbily they are treated by their French comrades and the military itself. Bouchareb greatly exaggerates the role that these soldiers played in the French war effort—this, a familiar strategy of propaganda, to offset historical neglect, historical dismissal of a contribution made, by going off gung-ho in the opposite direction. But that’s fine with me. The cause involved is worthy of propagandizing. But off the battlefield this film is feeble in the extreme. We can’t wait to get back into battle.

DANTON (Andrzej Wajda, 1983)

The Reign of Terror has begun, bringing Georges Danton (Gérard Depardieu, powerful) back to Paris, in 1793, from self-imposed exile to oppose former Revolutionary compatriot Maximilien Robespierre (Wojciech Pszoniak, brilliant) on the matter of its continuation. Danton arrives by coach on a rainy night. What he sees in the square is a dreamlike, painterly apparition: protected by a cover, the sleeping guillotine, its gleaming blade pulled up to the top. The static quality of nearly all of Andrzej Wajda’s Danton owes something to its literary source, Polish playwright Stanislawa Przybyszewska’s Sprawa Dantona; but it also is correlative to a suspended historical state owing to Danton and Robespierre’s quarrel. Until near the end, when many heads roll, including Danton’s, in 1794, we see nothing of the guillotine in action. Rather, it remains in our mind’s eye poised for use.
     Unlike the aloof Robespierre, Danton is a favorite among ordinary Parisians, whose warm reception he basks in as Robespierre watches from an upstairs window. One is gregarious; the other, tight-lipped. One wears his white wig loosely, or not at all; the other fits snugly under his. However, although it might seem that one is more political and the other more (and even insanely) idealistic, Wajda’s film shows a Robespierre who has his own qualms about France’s post-Revolutionary path, even though he is one of its architects—a Robespierre strongly influenced by surrounding colleagues. Ironically, it is the quarrel that Danton brings with him—at one point, in a rage, he takes a whack at Robespierre’s wig!—that seems to force Robespierre into an unbending stance. Wajda sees the animosity between them as contributing more to the unfolding tragedy than either man contributes by himself.
     While Danton is being executed, Robespierre hides like a scared child under his bedsheet.

REVENGE IS MY DESTINY (Joseph Adler, 1971)

Art and entertainment are, generally, mutually exclusive categories, and so it is the case here: no one could mistake South Florida’s Joseph Adler’s cult classic Revenge Is My Destiny as anything serious or substantial. It tells a story with superficial characters, the major one of which is a wounded Vietnam veteran, Ross Archer. The film is amiable, not probing, least of all about the war, which has taken away one of Archer’s eyes, over which he wears a black eye-patch. The former U.S. Army Green Beret comes home only to discover that his wife apparently has died, perhaps was murdered, perhaps by the sleazy nightclub owner for whom she worked, or by the former SS official living a life of leisure incognito. Archer investigates. It is as though the pulp mystery fiction into which he has fallen is some sort of hangover from his combat experience, bits of which flash through his consciousness. At times Adler’s film seems a parody of Norman Jewison’s In the Heat of the Night (1967)—or even The Maltese Falcon (John Huston, 1941).
     Given what it is, nobody needs to see this film; but “essential viewing only” makes for a poor film-going diet. It can strike one’s cinematic palate like a too-severe Chardonnay. Revenge Is My Destiny is a lot of fun. For the record, it is a whole lot better film than either In the Heat of the Night or the year’s Oscar-winning best picture, another crime/detective film, The French Connection (William Friedkin, 1971).
     Shot largely in Miami, with a dip into the Everglades, the film is scenic, its characters colorful, and Chris Robinson brings breezy charm to Archer’s tough-guy act. I wish the film had spawned a series of mysteries with Robinson reviving his Ross Archer.

PITFALL (Hiroshi Teshigahara, 1962)

Striking black-and-white compositions aren’t enough to navigate the sluggish pace and Twilight Zone-ery of Hiroshi Teshigahara’s first feature, Otoshiana, written by Kôbô Abe.
     A man who has “deserted” the mine where he last worked, seeking employment at a unionized mine, takes his young son to a remote village where he hopes to find such work. Only one person lives there, waiting for a lover to return; she explains that the mine has been closed for being dangerous. A white-clad gentleman carrying a briefcase, whom the mute child has spotted (Teshigahara works up a dramatic zoom for the moment of detection), has been stalking the miner. Just outside the ghost town the man in white stabs the miner to death; the miner’s son circles the corpse with fascinated attention but no grief. A reverse-motion shot has the miner instantly upright, but it is a ghost who can converse and be seen only by other ghosts. It chats with the ghost of a miner who died in a cave-in. The woman, an eye witness, accepting the killer’s payment and following his script, tells the police that the death was the result of a brawl between two miners. It turns out that the dead miner is a ringer for a union leader, and a quarrel between competing unions is blamed for the tragedy. The woman is raped and killed by a police officer at night. Ghosts keep a-comin’.
     The police investigation is stultifyingly tedious, and there is a lot of screaming, including by ghosts who do not wish to be ghosts. Who knew they’d kvetch so!
     Teshigahara’s themes are the danger and drudgery of the existence of miners and the exploitation of these workhorses.
     Given my political sympathies, I should go for it; but the movie is esoteric, inhuman.