THE GREEN ROOM (François Truffaut, 1978)

Drawn from Henry James’s “The Altar of the Dead” and “The Beast of the Jungle,” La chambre verte is one of François Truffaut’s oddest and most deeply affecting films. It is set ten years after the end of the Great War and was made ten years after Jean-Luc Godard’s mobilization of street protest against the firing of Henri Langlois as director of the Cinémathèque Française (February 1968). Truffaut and Godard had been fellow critics at Cahiers du cinéma, among those who founded the nouvelle vague, and close friends. Their subsequent and ferociously bitter falling-out, as Godard held true to their original sympathies and extended these politically leftward while Truffaut pursued bourgeois adulation and a bourgeois career, is encapsulated in Godard’s response to Truffaut’s La nuit americaine (Day for Night, 1973), both in the form of a personal letter to this former compatriot and the film Numéro Deux/Essai Titres (1975). Truffaut would call Godard an imposter and an egotist. Truffaut’s death from brain cancer in 1984, Godard would say, left him “feeling nothing.”
     It is perhaps not a stretch to find in the disintegration of the Godard-Truffaut friendship signs of the wreckage of Leftist dreams in European politics that the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, also in 1968, launched. But what interests me at the moment in all this is Truffaut’s Green Room in light of the lost friendship. Julien Davenne, who writes obituaries and devotes his heart to commemorating his dead wife and dead friends, is played by Truffaut himself. One other deceased soul obsesses Davenne: Paul Masigny, the close friend who, he feels, betrayed him. I cannot say whether Truffaut was conscious of what I am about to suggest, but I have no doubt that it participates in the meaning of this film: Masigny suggests Godard.
     Others have pursued other interpretive paths in Truffaut’s film. My own contribution may be therefore minor. However, I find it clarifies how Truffaut, consciously or otherwise, tried to grapple with the loss of what had been an important friendship. For me, this is what makes the film a bleeding event.
     Truffaut wasn’t the best actor around, as this film reminds us. But that misses the point, doesn’t it? This is one part he himself had to play.

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TOO LATE BLUES (John Cassavetes, 1961)

The same year that his marvelous Shadows (1959) was belatedly released writer-director John Cassavetes made his first brief foray into commercial filmmaking. (Wife Gena Rowlands’s sort-of stardom would bring him back to its fringes.) Too Late Blues is a powerful drama about struggling white jazz musicians in Los Angeles. This bleak, beautifully acted film led to the even more commercial A Child Is Waiting (1963), a mentally retarded children-tearjerker with Judy Garland singing at the schoolroom piano and Burt Lancaster watching.
     The protagonist of Too Late Blues is “Ghost” Wakefield, whose attempt to be a “pure” and uncompromising musician nonetheless devolves into his becoming the resident gigolo of The Countess, who specializes in Sunset Boulevard-ing young jazz composer/musicians. We are never told The Countess’s real name, but I think I know: Holly Wood. At least on one level, surely Cassavetes is off on an autobiographical riff.
     I love this film, with all its tensions and anguish, and the tenuous love affair between Ghost and Jessica Polanski, a singer whose body, she unfortunately believes, defines the limits of her ability.
     All in all, the eeriest thing about Too Late Blues is that it came out the same year as The Hustler, which tackles similar themes with oddly similar characters. But whereas Robert Rossen’s study of a pool-hall hustler is rhetorical, academic, schematic and visually phony, Cassavetes’s film overflows with humanity. There is pool-playing in this film also, and the mannered way in which Rossen executes his scenes of the game and the naturalistic, offhanded way in which Cassavetes executes his form an interesting basis for comparison.
     Bobby Darin is sensitive, nuanced and extremely intelligent playing Ghost; Stella Stevens, haunting and heartbreaking as Jess. Best of all, perhaps, is Everett Chambers as Benny, Ghost’s satanic agent.

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VENGO (Tony Gatlif, 2000)

Tony Gatlif, the maker of the stupendous Romany musical Latcho Drom (1993), scores another wonderful film with I Come, a tragic musical from Spain. Opening with one of them, the film is studded with flamenco, Andalusian Gypsy, and Egyptian musical performances—documentary events with fictional characters in attendance. The fictional story interrupts these events or binds them, given the viewer’s perspective; for me, its enormous passions and sorrows are lent notes of objective distancing by the bursts of song and dance. It is useless for the purist to say that Gatlif’s film isn’t really a musical since the main characters, involved in their fictional story, do not participate in the musical performances. First of all, they do participate, as spectators and as members of a single community comprising real performers and imagined characters. Secondly, the music helps reveal the feelings of these characters, their lives and the motives for one death. Finally, the percussive concert of automobile parts marking this fictional death brings all the film’s elements and aspects together. Vengo is one stitched-together garment of brilliant entertainment.
     The story involves the blood feud between two families that live in the country and own rival nightclubs in Seville. The backstory is this: Mario has apparently murdered one of the Caravacas and is eluding revenge by hiding in Morocco. The Caravacas, brooding with vengeance, have been unsuccessful in uncovering Mario’s whereabouts and as a result have set their sights on his mentally challenged son, Diego, the most loveable kid in creation, who misses his father very much. Diego’s surrogate father is now Uncle Caco, who protects the boy with especial tenderness given the tragic loss of his own young daughter, Pepa, the close cousin to whom Diego remains heartfully attached. The Pepa-Diego closeness, Pepa’s death, the murder, Mario’s flight: all these matters predate the film’s action. What we see is this: Caco’s monumental grief and devotion to his daughter’s memory; Diego’s continuing love for his cousin and his worry at the rumors that the Caravacas are set to kill him; the great love between uncle and nephew; the hatred of the vicious Caravacas, whose killed member probably was handed a much deserved fate. For his nephew’s sake Caco tries to negotiate a truce between the families, but to no avail. His own self-sacrifice and suicide-by-proxy will hopefully protect his brother and dear Diego and reunite him with his lost daughter. Above all, Gatlif’s film revolves around Caco’s grief and love.
     Antonio Canales plays Caco, but some dislike that a dancer has been cast in a nondancing role. This makes no sense on two fronts. Canales is no Gene Kelly; he is phenomenal in his dramatic role. Moreover, Vengo showcases women dancing because each of these creative women projects Pepa’s vibrant life, which is to say, all that Caco, her father, has lost. Anyone who doesn’t “get” this film must be a Caravaca.

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