AN AMERICAN IN PARIS (Vincente Minnelli, 1951)

Obnoxious Gene Kelly, who plays the “young” American painter in “too real and too beautiful” Paris, is always something of a chore to endure, and his Oscar-winning choreography is spotty; but I like An American in Paris, Vincente Minnelli’s first Oscar-winning best picture. Its splendid romance and sprightly, artificial Paris glow. And the Gershwin music: ’S wonderful.
     Despite Alan Jay Lerner’s winning the Oscar for best story and screenplay, many routinely disparage the film for its story, which some find minimal, others find too conventional, and still others find both minimal and too conventional. “’S Wonderful” is sung as a duet between Kelly’s Jerry Mulligan and Georges Guétary’s Henri Baurel—two men who do not know that the two different girls they’re singing about as loving them are in fact the same girl, Leslie Caron’s Lise Bouvier. I submit that any script that brings us to such a moment is brilliant. But, admittedly, Minnelli and Oscar Levant, whose Adam sits between them at a café and does know that his two pals are in love with the same girl, trump Lerner with comic genius as Adam/Levant nervously mixes up his cigarette-smoking and coffee-drinking.
     I do not like everything about An American in Paris. The fact that their sex is kept off-screen doesn’t cleanse of tawdriness Jerry’s relationship with a rich patron, who is callously dropped from the film to make way for the sweeping Jerry-Lise romantic come-together.
     Guétary’s singing of “(I’ll Build a) Stairway to Paradise” is one high point, and Kelly and Caron’s charming dance in the park and vivid dream-ballet are two other high points. Yet another borrows from Buster Keaton’s “The Play House” (1921), showcasing concert pianist Adam/Levant in multiple roles in his dream: performer, conductor, other orchestra members, audience.

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ILLUMINATION (Krzysztof Zanussi, 1972)

Writer-director Krzysztof Zanussi’s early Illuminacja is autobiographical. Its protagonist, Franciszek Retman, is a graduate student in physics because he wants to know, he tells the university interviewing board, “things that are certain, unequivocal.” Zanussi himself studied physics at the University of Warsaw. But things changed for him. He proceeded to loftier intellectual ground, studying philosophy at the University of Kraków. Finally, he studied film at the Lódź Film School and became Poland’s greatest filmmaker. His “illumination,” the wisdom he attained as “an enlightenment of the mind” (St. Augustine), required the redirection of the course of his life. We see this reflected in Retman’s experience. I do not know, however, whether Zanussi suffers (or suffered) any such serious heart disease as afflicts Retman. Indeed, the disease may be metaphorical, an index of awareness of vulnerability that comes from knowing that important, human things are not “certain, unequivocal.”
     The two principal events that transform Retman are a turbulent romantic relationship and the death of a friend during their mountain-climb. But something else floats in and about: the responsibility of scientists that they are loath to embrace. Zanussi has stated: “The scientist is more interesting than anyone else as he is more responsible for the world than the usual people one finds in movies.” Yet early on Retman remarks, “I don’t feel responsible for the A-bomb,” on the ridiculous grounds that he hadn’t participated in its invention. Another student, though, wins their argument by exposing Retman’s evasiveness, self-absorption, self-delusion: “But [the inventors] were physicists, too.” Retman’s journey, then, is in the direction of responsibility. Those who climb mountains, as Zanussi’s masterpiece, Constans (1980), reminds us, must return to earth, one way or the other.
     Most decisive for the brilliance of Zanussi’s Illumination is the form he has given it. It’s a mosaic, a kaleidoscope of pieces in which one set of snippets of film sometimes is interrupted by another set of snippets. This “piecing together” opposes viewer complacency so that even those of us who are intellectually inferior to Zanussi—and that includes all but one person I’ve known or met*—are compelled to approach his film in an intelligent, mentally active way. One cannot “go with the flow” when there is no flow.
     Zanussi was at the christological age when he made this terrific movie—when a boy (according to Christian myth) becomes a man. Illumination is full of wit. At one point Retman interrupts his contemplation of cosmos to have his palm read. His motive is devious: he is curious to see how inaccurate the palm reader will prove herself! She tells him that he doesn’t like himself. She is saying this to a most self-satisfied creature. But, of course, Zanussi’s prick of wit eventually turns around and aims itself at the boy, whose self-satisfaction has been an evasion, a delusion.
     Hacks do not spare others. Artists do not spare themselves.

* René Girard

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THE EDGE OF HEAVEN (Fatih Akin, 2007)

From Germany and Turkey, writer-director Fatih Akin’s Auf der anderen Seite is a powerful, deeply affecting drama about separated and estranged family members and intertwining just-missed family reconciliations, and points of both commonality and misunderstanding between the cultures of both countries, as well as Turkey’s own wobbled identity between Muslim Asian and secular European.
     To begin with, Nejat Aksu (Baki Davrak, a young German actor of Turkish descent, wonderful) is a Turkish professor of German literature in Hamburg. His father, also a Turkish immigrant, lives in Bremen, where his live-in single-client prostitute, Yeter, also Turkish, is earning money for daughter Ayten’s schooling. The first of three parts is titled “Yeter’s Death.” It is a blow from Ali, Nejat’s father, that causes her death. Nejat estranges himself from this “murderer,” returning to Turkey to find Ayten so that he can take over the financing of her education. But Ayten is really no more a college student than her mother was a shoe factory worker, as Ayten believes; she is, according to the state, a terrorist. Believing her mother is still alive, Ayten flees to Germany, where, homeless, she becomes the lover of bohemian college student Lotte Staub in Lotte’s bourgeois mother’s home. (Hanna Schygulla and Patrycia Ziolkowska are superb as mother and daughter.) In the meantime, Nejat has bought and runs a German bookshop in Istanbul. Ayten’s return to Istanbul—she is deported from Germany—results in her imprisonment; Lotte follows to try to get her freed. Susanne, her mother, will no longer extend financial help, but Nejat, not knowing her connection to Ayten, whom he is still trying to locate, rents her a room in his flat. Lotte is accidentally shot and killed by kids playing (Ayten’s own gun, which Lotte has found upon Ayten’s instructions, delivers the fatal bullet); the second part of the film is titled “Lotte’s Death.” The tragedy brings Susanne to Istanbul, to Nejat, to his flat, where she rents her daughter’s old room. She sees Ayten, offering to do or pay anything to help get her freed because this is what Lotte wanted. Freed from prison (as Ayten will be), Ali has returned to Turkey. Nejat one night shares with Susanne a story from the Quran, about Ibrahim and his son Ismail, whom Allah orders Ibrahim to sacrifice in order to test Ibrahim’s devotion. Abraham and Isaac: in an incredibly moving moment, Susanne tells Nejat, “We have the same story.” But an even more moving moment follows. Nejat has confided to Susanne that the story terrified him as a child, so he asked his father whether he, his father, would sacrifice him if Allah ordered it. “Not even for Allah!” Ali told his little son all those years ago, and the luminous recollection reconciles Nejat with his father, whom he goes off to see unannounced. But has death intervened, as it had in Susanne’s case? The film ends with Nejat sitting on the beach, poised for his father’s return from rowing. Perhaps death is necessary to erase familial estrangement; perhaps reconciliation comes only “on the other side.”
     The brilliant, intricate script won richly deserved prizes for Akin at Cannes and the European Film Awards.

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