WHEN NIGHT IS FALLING (Patricia Rozema, 1995)

A teacher of mythology at a conservative Christian college, engaged to marry a fellow teacher at the school, is drawn into an unanticipated lesbian relationship with a circus acrobat. When the dust settles, she forsakes the guy for the gal. The light of love thus wins out over homophobic Christianity’s darkness.
     Uneventful would be a good word to describe the tone, the subdued attitude, of When Night Is Falling, a Canadian film written and directed by Patricia Rozema (I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing, 1987). The pervasive sense of uneventfulness is deliberate; for Rozema, it is no big deal that a woman should leave a man for another woman, no matter how bigoted elements in society, here represented by the ridiculous school chaplain, feel. Rozema refuses to make her film a reaction to anticipated responses from the dark side. When night is falling, one should do more than assuage loneliness; one should choose love.
     This film refreshes. The two women, Camille and Petra, have other differences between them apart from their initial sexual orientations. (The film makes effortlessly clear that Camille’s Christian training made it unthinkable for her to consider any lesbian component to her personality prior to Petra’s tenderly pressing the matter.) Camille, who is Québecois, is a grown woman, while Petra is, really, a girl. Camille is caucasian; Petra, racially mixed. Camille is timid, cautious—and not only in the sexual arena; Petra, adventurous. Gentle, patient, Petra’s drawing her out of her shell helps Camille to fall in love with this new friend of hers.
     Pascale Bussières, whom I named best supporting actress for Emporte-Moi (Léa Pool, 1999), plays Camille—perhaps because of Camille’s reticence, somewhat irritatingly. Rachael Crawford, as Petra, is gorgeous, resembling a cross between Shelley Duvall and Angelina Jolie.

MATER DOLOROSA (Abel Gance, 1917)

Cinematographed by 24-year-old Léonce-Henri Burel, whose use of chiaroscuro is gorgeous, Abel Gance’s Mater dolorosa was as an even huger hit in the United States, where it was called The Torture of Silence, than in France. Its silly sentimental melodrama could even pass for something American. However, the deliberate mistranslation of subtitles and of the written word in the film itself (in letters, for instance) changed the story to make it more attractive to puritanical U.S. audiences. In the actual film, for example, the protagonist, Marthe, has a love affair with her neglectful husband’s brother; in the U.S. version, the two men are “best friends,” not brothers. One might think, since a child is a result of the adultery, that keeping everything in the family would be most suitable. Apparently the U.S. distributor felt that audiences would be disinclined to find sympathetic someone who loves her own brother-in-law!
     Decorative rather than genuinely expressive, and burdened with the ugliest little boy in cinema, Gance’s eighteenth film—Napoléon (1927) would be his twenty-sixth—is full of the lead actress, Emmy Lynn, in ridiculous sad and anguished poses surrounded by blackness. The plot hinges on two bits of nonsense: the oath her dying lover binds her to—his attempt to prevent Marthe’s suicide ends in his own death by gunshot—to keep Marthe’s husband, a pediatrician, from discovering “the truth”; the doctor’s keeping Marthe, even when her son is deathly ill, away from the child. Anticipating the sadism of a Spielberg, Gance arranges a route right by a cemetery when the doctor finally relents and agrees to take Marthe to see her son. The woman nearly has a heart attack—and Lynn’s ostentatious emoting, well, I’ve already used the word ridiculous.
     Still, I recommend the film for Burel.

THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD (Andrew Dominik, 2007)

Slow and inexorable, Andrew Dominik’s Assassination of Jesse James follows America’s favorite Western villainous hero to his end, the bullet in the back he receives from the boy who idolizes him, Bob Ford. That fatal shot resolves the ambivalence of either figure: James, a psychotic, for the torment of having an illusion of controlling the world that his paranoia, lack of self-control, and the haunting, bitter failure of the South in the American Civil War contest; Ford, an unformed kid, for feeling that he is a nobody whose only connection to substance depends on Jesse’s shadow, whose light he covets and whose darkness he desperately desires to shake loose from. Such a premise invites a great film. This is not it.
     “Do you want to be like me, or do you want to be me?” Jesse asks this of Bob, sitting naked in a bath pail, with Bob having crept up behind him, Jesse’s back to him, an echo of how he has insinuated himself generally into Jesse’s company, and also an echo of Bob’s future murder of Jesse. Dominik is not as successful as John Ford in evoking that double sense of time, legend at the time of actual existence, the actuality, as part of cultural memory, that has become legend. Dominik may make dialogue sound echo-y, and he may direct his otherwise crisp cinematographer, Roger Deakins, to have patches of the screen be out-of-focus (the old vaseline trick); but these tricks call too much attention to themselves to succeed in imbuing the past with the haunted difference in time between it and us. The voiceover works better at this, but the film’s elements never come together.
     This is certainly not a bad film, but a thin one, especially if one recalls Walter Hill’s beauteous, compelling The Long Riders (1980), with Carradines as the Youngers and Keaches as the Jameses. The belated effort of Missouri to take down Jesse James is an especially unconvincing element in Dominik’s film. Another is Bob Ford’s vulnerability to being killed by Jesse unless Bob kills Jesse first.
     Neither Brad Pitt nor Casey Affleck, as Jesse and Bob, do more than skim a surface despite their acting accolades.

GHOST WORLD (Terry Zwigoff, 2001)

Terry Zwigoff came to prominence with a documentary about cartoonist Robert Crumb (Crumb, 1994). He segued into fictional filmmaking by directing from a script by another such artist, Daniel Clowes, and himself. The protagonist, a new high school graduate, is herself such an artist, whose “diary” consists of comic book sketches of people she comes across and works over in her imagination and others who are actually in her life. This is Enid. Seymour, the middle-aged oddball whose personal ad inspires a bit of mean-spirited mischief on her part, gives Enid the chance to “see more” about life and into the workings of the human heart. Zwigoff’s Ghost World is one of the sharpest, funniest, warmest comedies of the twenty-first century. It leaves one a bit haunted.
     Enid is spiritedly played by Thora Birch (best actress, San Diego and Toronto critics), whose slitting gaze or reaction, besides being hilarious, pegs her also as an oddball—someone who doesn’t quite fit in with the high school crowd. She is an artist after all, and that means she lives her life as much observing as being herself in the moment; the vast majority of her peers are content with the moment. Everything about Enid—her hair; the way she dresses; her attitude—makes a statement: “I’m me, so fuck off!” Or something like that. Her practical best friend is Rebecca (Scarlett Johansson, best supporting actress, Toronto); Rebecca is a reluctant ally in mischief, and the girls pursue a long-nurtured dream of getting their own apartment. Meanwhile, Enid has an art class she needs to complete (Illeana Douglas, Melvyn’s granddaughter, gives a knockout caricature of the ridiculous teacher), is secretly in love with a boy whom she torments and who doesn’t have a clue, and is becoming increasingly involved in Seymour’s life. She presses Seymour to get a date and, drunk, one night takes him to bed herself.
     The film is sheer pleasure from start to finish, but two things stand out. One is the gentle, affecting performance that Steve Buscemi gives as the genially weird Seymour (best supporting actor, National Society of Film Critics, Independent Spirit Award, critics’ groups in New York, Chicago, Kansas City, Las Vegas, Vancouver). The other is the film’s final movement. Throughout the film, Norman, whom life may have passed by, waits on a bench for a bus whose route has long since been discontinued. One day Enid witnesses its showing up; otherwise without passengers, the bus takes Norman away. At the end, helpless at a crossroads and unsure about the course of her life, Enid parks herself on that bench. In long-shot, in the dark night, a bus pulls up and Enid enters and is slowly taken away. Every artist worth her salt must embrace her destiny: her place in the world of ghosts.
     Zwigoff won the prize of the ecumenical jury at Karlovy Vary, and the San Diego critics named Ghost World best film of the year, Zwigoff, best director, and Zwigoff and Clowes for the year’s best script.

THE INSECT WOMAN (Shohei Imamura, 1963)

Shohei Imamura’s stark black-and-white Nippon konchuki (Entomological Chronicles of Japan) begins with a beetle crossing blank terrain; the overhead camera seems to show unimpeded travel: a God’s-eye whitewash of reality. The camera shifts lower so as to be looking up at the beetle, which, upon closer inspection, is struggling horribly up a hill, each step a hardship. This metaphor for human life will be fleshed out by the saga of the film’s protagonist, Tomé (Sachiko Hidari, superb, best actress, Berlin), which begins with her rural birth in 1918, lurches forward to 1924, 1942, and so on, depicting her hard life of constant sexual exploitation and the need to eke out a living, which takes her to Tokyo and to work as a prostitute and her ascendancy to the role of brothel madam. It was a female life like any other, only a bit more accomplished because of Tomé’s pluck and skill; but its upward arc misleads, since Tomé’s “success” is encased in a life-story of restricted possibilities proceeding from victimization, including rape and incest. The time-lurches formally convey a discontinuous life out of the hands of the one living it, recall the beetle’s efforts to make any sort of progress, and link Tomé’s fate to her country’s fate, including after World War II. This is an ambitious, somewhat superficial film.
     But a fascinating one!—and one graced with some remarkable filmmaking. In the 1918 segment, for example, several compositions include deep contrasts of light and darkness in enclosed spaces, with the darkness sometimes enrobing human forms, and with the human forms themselves at other times the dark element—brought to life, a kind of photographic negative. In both cases, the idea of instinctual blind lives once again links these to the beetle’s broken existence.