EL CIELITO (María Victoria Menis, 2004)

Félix, a penniless teenager heading for where he hopes to find work in rural Argentina, is onboard a train that moves screen-left. With the conductor approaching, he jumps off; an overhead shot shows him walking ahead down the tracks. Now he is walking screen-right. This direction cancels the preceding ones, suggesting that Félix is heading nowhere. An orphan who never knew either parent and was raised by a now deceased grandmother, he is all alone.
     Félix falls into a temporary job harvesting, at a dilapidated farm, for room (in the barn) and board. Roberto tries to impress the boy he has hired with his control of wife Mercedes and shooting expertise. Our first glimpse of Mercedes, who is younger than her spouse, occurs when Roberto introduces her to Félix; in effect, he is bragging. While hanging laundry to dry, Mercedes holds her and Roberto’s ten-month old baby, Chango. At farms, work is the order of the day, and an extraordinary passage alternates between showing Félix and Mercedes at work. Gradually Mercedes, guardedly silent before, opens up to the boy. We discover that Roberto, otherwise a mostly sympathetic figure, is recurringly abusive, especially when he drinks.
     Félix bonds with Chango, whose secondary caregiver he becomes. He tells the infant boy, “You’ll never be alone again,” meaning also, he hopes, that neither will he be. After Mercedes leaves Roberto, whom he does his best to parent through the ordeal, Félix takes Chango and goes to Buenos Aires to start a new life. A wonderful passage: along the way, Félix pointing out sights to Chango through the train window. But the elder boy is in over his head trying to care for Chango and himself.
     María Victoria Menis’s Little Sky is unsentimental, sad, gentle, with shots of forlorn, melancholy landscapes suggesting the hope that has been drained out of people’s lives. Félix’s recurrent unsaturated dreams of his grandmother—we see her as a pair of legs, a pair of laboring hands and finally a warm, careworn face—conjoin themes of struggle and loss.

HARAKIRI (Masaki Kobayashi, 1962)

Story-telling within the story we watch unfold: different perspectives; compounded realities.
     Seventeenth-century Japan; civil war has ended, eliminating some clans, scattering warriors to the winds of uselessness, demoralization, poverty. The samurai code prescribes an honorable solution: gaining entrance to a lord’s castle and committing harakiri. Tsugumo Hanshiro (Tatsuya Nakadai—his greatest role until Akira Kurosawa’s Kagemusha, 1980) has seemingly thus arrived at Lord Iyi’s castle to disembowel himself ritually with a sharp blade. Immediately he is suspect; lately, dishonorable men have offered the pledge of harakiri when they are really hoping for jobs or handouts. Hanshiro, therefore, is immediately suspect. He is told of a youth who had recently made the identical request, but who, armed with blunt bamboo swords, had no real intention of committing harakiri but was compelled to do so as a deterrent to other frauds. (The passage detailing the disembowelment is graphic and convincing.) This boy, it turns out, was Hanshiro’s son-in-law, who had hoped for employment at Iyi’s house to support sick wife and child. Gearing up to take embittered revenge against Iyi, Iyi’s officials and retainers, Hanshiro tells his story.
     Quiet, at times almost tortuously suspenseful, Masaki Kobayashi’s legendary Seppuku reaches into the past in order to reflect on Japan’s present. Postwar capitalism, imposed on Japan by the U.S. occupation, has restructured society, making owners and heads of corporations the new lords; Japan’s national commitment to lifelong employment is giving way to a further pampering of private enterprise’s bottom line, exposing workers to joblessness and ruin. Kobayashi’s good, strong, stinging film cries out against injustice and devises a symbolical revenge. It also implies that the Japanese standby of honor has lost ground to ideas closer to hearth and home. One’s own family now claims the importance that clan once did.

OUT 1: SPECTRE (Jacques Rivette, 1972)

Originally made as the 13-hour Out 1: Noli me tangere, Jacques Rivette’s subsequent 4¼-hour version (which is what I have seen), involving two theatrical troupes, is his most entrancing multilayered “created reality” to draw us into a self-referential dream of doubled and parallel existences. It duplicates its cast (including marvelous Jean-Pierre Léaud, who, when first introduced, plays a deaf-mute playing a harmonica in search of handouts and some sort of recognition from café patrons) while going back and forth between a mystery narrative of sorts and improvised lunacy, thus having contrivance and free form, Old Wave and New, transparency and nontransparency (although it isn’t always transparent which is which) imaginatively collide. Out 1: Spectre is cinema’s great haunted-house comedy.
     It is infused with intellectual spirit, and Rivette’s bag of tricks riddles the certainty of action and conversations into ambiguity, magic, possibility. There are long takes, and those that are reflections in mirrors put us in the position of engrossed mirror-gazers searching out strange others in ourselves; brief blackouts may interrupt a scene, reviving the discontinuity of Godard’s jump-cuts in A bout de souffle (1959) and again suggesting a revealing mismatch-up of person and persona, being and constructed image or self-image; sounds intrude to mask and obscure dialogue; and so forth. Rivette likes to keep us on our eyes and ears.
     The film’s self-divided, self-analytical nature creates a delicious air of expectancy. Some of the film hints an experiment in real time, but in fact, like it does much else, the film approaches real time, and it’s the approach from which we infer psychological reality, including our own, as we begin to sense the degree to which actions in our own lives fail to coincide with our consciousness of these actions, our minds normally up ahead, anticipating.

TO EACH HIS OWN (Mitchell Leisen, 1946)

Hollywood films can be silly in the extreme, and one of the clearest examples of this silliness is To Each His Own, scenarist-producer Charles Brackett’s first film apart from writing partner Billy Wilder. A farfetched soap opera of the Edna Ferber variety, the film is a lavishly produced entry in the subgenre of unwed-mother sagas, for the most part excrutiatingly “acted” by Olivia de Havilland, who followed, among others, Belle Bennett (1925) and Barbara Stanwyck (1937) in Stella Dallas, Helen Hayes in The Sin of Madelon Claudet (1931) and Bette Davis in The Old Maid (1939) in paying for her romantic folly. De Havilland, a clever, forceful but essentially superficial actress, followed Hayes in another respect: acting in an overly technical way that stressed craft and virtuosity at the expense of deep insight into either individual psychology or the human condition. In this regard, both Hayes and Hayesy de Havilland anticipated a later “artist” who has succeeded in turning acting into a disease, the virus streeptococcus indicating a show of crafty tricks designed to obscure the fact that its self-involved (and, like de Havilland, very heavy-handed) carrier skirts surfaces—impersonates, not acts—rather than plumbing any human depths. I am happy to report that the current actress once thus afflicted has shown of late heartening recovery.

De Havilland had given a performance of exquisite tact and charm a decade earlier, as a decent, working-class girl who ends up being Napoleon Bonaparte’s courtesan in Anthony Adverse (Mervyn LeRoy, 1936), an outrageously entertaining romantic adventure, and capped an otherwise mediocre turn in the racist sob-story Gone with the Wind (George Cukor, Victor Fleming, Sam Wood et al., 1939) with an eerily lovely deathbed scene; but it’s the romantic melodrama Hold Back the Dawn (1941), by the same tormented soul who would direct To Each His Own, Mitchell Leisen, that introduced the selfconscious and insufferably arch performer that Paramount would later promote, with good reason, as “the dramatic queen of the screen.” In the 1930s James Cagney had said about his Irish in Us (1935) co-star, “That girl can play any part”; in the 1940s she did, grinding nearly every one of them through a technical device lodged in her high-IQed brain—both she and sister Joan Fontaine qualify as near-geniuses—that reduced each character to a series of imposing tics, mannerisms, and impressive fluctuations of voice. To paraphrase Shelley in “Ode to the West Wind”: “If Olivia comes, can Meryl be far behind?”

To Each His Own only encouraged de Havilland’s silliness. Are writers drunk in Hollywood when they come up with such goo? (The script is by Brackett and Jacques Théry.) During the First World War, Jody Norris, the young daughter of a druggist, falls in love with a fighter pilot passing through her small town; they make love, he’s killed in combat overseas, and she has his son in secret, out of town. Her plan is this: Leave the baby on the doorstep of the family in town most extensively blessed by children and then adopt the infant, making him her own without inviting scandal; but the miscarriage of someone else, Corinne Piersen, the daughter of the town’s richest family and the wife of a man who loves Jody, prompts the other woman to hand over the infant to Corinne as compensation for her loss, breaking her promise to Jody. Corinne gleans the double truth: that the baby is Jody’s and that her husband loves Jody, not her; she quickly adopts the child legally and banishes her rival from the boy’s life. Jody goes to New York and turns a gin mill—this is during Prohibition—into a cold cream factory that makes her rich. Secretly carrying the boy’s adoptive father’s ruinous financial obligations, she maneuvers herself into a position where she can extort the boy away from Corinne; but, homesick, he hates his “Aunt Jody,” who sends him home before packing herself up for London, to open an overseas branch of her company. It’s World War II and her son, a fighter pilot like his biological dad, arrives in London; she befriends him on the basis of her having once been a resident of Piersen Falls. Jody, with the help of a well-connected aristocrat who is dating her, arranges for the boy to marry his sweetheart in record time. (I’m not joking: the Archbishop of Canterbury has to intercede for this to occur.) Why has she gone to all this trouble for him? Belatedly, the light bulb turns on. The famous last line undams in audiences a torrent of tears: “I believe this is our dance, Mother.” Victor Young’s music swells; Jody searches her son’s face for his father’s face. The End.

Like so many ridiculous Hollywood films, however, To Each His Own is compulsively watchable. It’s also nicely acted by Roland Culver as Lord Desham—Culver makes the loss of a bottle of sherry a more piercing moment than Jody’s loss of either her lover or their child—and by John Lund, who plays both pilots, father and son. (The implicit stroke of genuine sadness, of course, is that these two characters can never meet.) Too bad that William Holden’s postwar career at Paramount eclipsed Lund’s; both were highly similar actors, but Lund had nothing like Holden’s charisma. Mary Anderson, so good in Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat (1944), is adequate as Corinne, but clearly she is impersonating Miriam Hopkins. Hers is a “Miriam Hopkins part” for which Hopkins herself at the time was too old.

De Havilland won the first of her best actress Oscars for her tour-de-force here. (Her second came for William Wyler’s 1949 The Heiress, based on a play in turn based on Henry James’s novella Washington Square.) Better at playing the young and slightly older Jody, she is like a child playing dress-up as the middle-aged Jody. The makeup and (Edith Head) costumes are a help, and de Havilland has several strong, sure-fire moments. But hers is an overly crafted, at times tortuous performance. By contrast, Culver and Lund are “naturals.” Both have relaxed into their roles, and not a sign of effort shows.