UNE FEMME DOUCE (Robert Bresson, 1969)

In Robert Bresson’s first color film, Une femme douce, based on Dostoievski’s story “Krotkaya,” Luc loses his beautiful young wife (Dominique Sanda, brilliant), who drops from their bourgeois balcony to the classless street. Indulging his complacency, Luc impresses Anna, the maid, into listening to his half-hearted flashbacking attempt to piece together the puzzle of the girl’s suicide. But what of human feelings can a pawnbroker understand, one who trades daily in drops of human misery? (It’s easy to be generous with my money, he tells his wife. “Perhaps,” she counters, “but that doesn’t mean you own me.”) Luc is spiritually bankrupt, having missed the chance for redemption that his wife offered him. “I want to pray,” he confesses, “but I can only think.” He insists how she tormented him; we only see him tormenting her. Another confession: “I enjoyed our inequality.”
     Bresson has updated the story to the present and moved it to Paris. The “gentle wife” goes unnamed, suggesting both her husband’s domineering and the girl’s vacated identity. All three main characters—the wife, Luc, Anna—are anonymous in a sense; Bresson delays shooting their faces, showing instead Luc’s pacing shoes, Anna’s hands in prayer, and the back of the suicide’s head as she lies on the blood-splattered pavement below the apartment. This last image—in sequence, actually the first—brings to a hard close the girl’s descent, which is rendered in mysterious, poetic, transcendental terms. From inside the apartment we view a chair rock and a table tumble on the balcony; cut to outside, where a heavenward camera captures amidst sounds of traffic the girl’s white shawl alive and floating downward, buoyed, caressed, kissed by air. It never lands.
     Footsteps; doors opening and closing. Cool, wry, sad, hilarious—and erotically brushing Buñuel.

JUMBO (Charles Walters, 1962)

Today I began watching belatedly for the first time Billy Rose’s Jumbo with this thought: This is the sort of film that my father would have (or must have) liked; but I won’t. But I do. The much rewritten 1935 Broadway musical—the original book was by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, no less—has been transformed by Charles Walters into a lovely, gracious, unsentimental film. Written by Sidney Sheldon and populated by tactful long-shots rather than an overabundance of bug-eyed closeups (partly this is strategic, since doubles are performing the spectacular circus stunts rather than the film’s stars), this film lets in a lot of sky and, with it, some of the mystery of Time. Without pressing hard, or even seeming to press at all, the film brought a fine ache to my heart.
     The weakest aspect is the plot—how much so the new plot, I have no idea. The financially struggling Wonder Circus was a good place to start, but the rivalry between it and another, more solvent rival enterprise, whose owner wants Wonder’s star elephant, Jumbo, is tedious—and the other owner’s son, working at Wonder incognito: well, this is silly. The boy, Sam Rawlins, falls in love with “Pop” Wonder’s daughter, Kitty.
     Jimmy Durante starred in the original show and has a substantial role here as “Pop” Wonder. He is (as ever) pure joy to watch and listen to—and, yes, there’s the inevitable joke about a resemblance between “Pop” and Jumbo. Martha Raye delights as a circus member who has long been sweet on “Pop,” and in clown makeup Raye’s trademark big mouth, enlarged, is a scream. Stephen Boyd is stiff as Sam, as he usually is, but of course his part is so embarrassing. Starring as Kitty Wonder, Doris Day isn’t at all selfconscious, as she usually is. She is in her comfort zone and in command there. All in all, this is her best performance.
     The terrific Rodgers & Hart score includes “The Most Beautiful Girl in the World,” “This Can’t Be Love” and, performed better by Day than one might think possible, “Little Girl Blue.”

O.C. AND STIGGS (Robert Altman, 1985)

Robert Altman, one of the best American filmmakers of the past forty years, had his share of misses, perhaps the most unendurable of which is the frigid, futuristic Quintet (1977). For a quarter-century there have been those who have wanted to relegate the teen comedy O.C. and Stiggs to this ignominious group. These must be viewers without a relish for zaniness. I like zaniness. Anarchic, anti-bourgeois and hilariously funny, O.C. and Stiggs may be the masterpiece of its genre. (Jon Cryer is on hand for authenticity.) Its reputation first sank when M-G-M shelved it for two years, giving it finally a pitifully limited release. I watched it for the first time last night. Although not so withering, its inventiveness and sheer élan more than once reminded me of Vera Chytilová’s Daisies (1967).
     Two highschoolers on the verge of senior year, Oliver Cromwell Ogilvie (“O.C.”) and best friend Mark Stiggs (Neill Barry, excellent) endlessly torment Phoenix, Arizona, neighbor Randall Schwab and his family, running up their long-distance phone bill with calls to Africa, rigging devices (including explosive ones) against them, pilfering lobsters from them, etc. Schwab, the star of his own local insurance company TV commercials, epitomizes everything that the boys (and Altman) hate: bourgeoisism, capitalistic complacency, racism, tee totaling. The boys are captured in their instinctual innocence; a modern Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, O.C., we feel, may someday capitulate to a success-track; Stiggs, whom we love, we hope never will.
     Altman directed from a script by Ted Mann and Donald Cantrell, which in turn they based on National Lampoon stories by Mann and Tod Carroll. The dialogue is terrifically funny, but it is the visual form and the pace that Altman applies that distinguishes the film as a work of art. The film never leaves one boy or the other, or both, and perhaps hits a high with a long, complex set-piece portraying the wedding celebration of Schwab’s daughter and a “Chinaman” for whom her racist father shows open contempt. Our boys crash the party, bringing their “gift,” a machine-gun with which they demolish furniture and spreads of food. Yet Altman also introduces a long, satisfying note of grace: an elegant dance to Burton Lane’s “How About You?” between O.C., in top hat and tails, and the “Ginger” of his dreams.
     The film is full of non-political correctness. O.C.’s grandfather, for example, is a retired cop who, pretty much lost in his own reverie, shows utter disregard for social niceties by regaling any guest with gory accounts of his past job adventures. Ray Walston is incredibly funny in this role, and Paul Dooley and Jane Curtin well play Schwab and his secretively alcoholic wife. Cryer plays their doofus son, Randall Jr., who keeps his head lowered as though the less he sees of life the easier it will be for him to navigate. He is probably right.
     South of the border Altman inserts a glorious one-shot hommage to John Huston’s Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), and elsewhere mercilessly parodies (with a helicopter rescue scored to Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries”) Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979).

ALL ABOUT LILY CHOU-CHOU (Shunji Iwai, 2001)

A film composed almost entirely of fleeting and sometimes esoteric sensations, Shunji Iwai’s Riri Shushu no subete aims nonetheless at a complex portrait of contemporary young Japanese teenagers. The superficiality of the film is, one supposes, correlative to the superficial lives, thoughts and feelings of these children.
     Iwai’s rough, perpetually near-epileptic use of handheld camera conveys the degree of dissociation these junior high school children experience. But perhaps nothing is so on the mark as the system of unity that Iwai has devised to hold together the film’s essentially discontinuous series of flashes and sometime vignettes. About a dozen times I thought the film had ended, but it went on. This attenuated style vividly conveys both the emptiness of these lives and the children’s own ambivalence about lives they desperately wish to hold onto even as they are loath to have them continue.
     Yuichi, the protagonist, is bullied at school but compensates for this with an alternative cyber-identity, in which capacity he commandeers a site devoted to Lily Chou-Chou, an unseen yet ubiquitous pop singer whose “ethereal” music is inspired by Debussy—a duality that itself reflects the existence of her schizophrenic fans. Yuichi, who is caught shoplifting even as his pregnant mother is convinced he is “a good boy,” is close to impossible—and some of his peers are worse. Adults, including teachers, seem unwilling even to attempt to control and discipline children who are unruly, violent and plain nasty. In short, society is in chaos; when Yuichi must fetch the bully a Coke, one recalls that U.S. capitalism and commercialism greatly helped undo Japanese society and traditional culture, beginning with the American occupation following World War II.
     Disagreeable, repetitious, tedious, cruel, brutal. However, a few lyrical passages affectingly show lonely lives.

TELL ME THAT YOU LOVE ME, JUNIE MOON (Otto Preminger, 1970)

Old devil hate, I knew you long ago,
Before I learned the poison in your breath
Now when I hear your lies my lovers gather round
And help me rise to fight you one more time . . .
     — Pete Seeger, “Old Devil Time”

Otto Preminger’s Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon, whose script Marjorie Kellogg adapted from her novel, distills the passion, soulfulness and wisdom of Pete Seeger’s song “Old Devil Time,” which Seeger himself performs, out on the earth amidst towering trees, before and after the film proper and in between. This powerful film, a heartfelt plea for tolerance, revolves around a community of social outcasts who are renting a tiny house together, “pool[ing their] disabilities”: Arthur, who has epileptic-like seizures that have eluded medical diagnosis but, to us at least, seem linked to feeling unloved and unloveable; wheelchair-bound Warren, who keeps secret the incident that put him there, and who is gay; Junie Moon, whose face is disfigured because the date her mother warned her against poured battery acid on it when he mistakenly felt she is questioning his manhood. Minnie, who is close to death from a melanoma, briefly visits from hospital. She is black, the peeping next-door neighbor remarks, with her husband throwing in, “They’re all black to me.”
     Minnie (Clarice Taylor, endearing) drifts in and out, drawing brief comfort from friends before drifting to death. We see Junie Moon’s mother in a flashback, never to see her again: a perplexing estrangement helping to explain Junie Moon’s desperate need for new ties. Warren’s flashback shows his doting adoptive father; almost as soon as we meet Guiles (Leonard Frey, unforgettable—and Motel in Fiddler on the Roof, 1971), though, Warren’s voiceover reveals that he died a week later. People come and go, not once thinking of Michelangelo.
     The best performance is beautifully delivered by Ken Howard, all skinny 6’6” of him. Arthur is stuck in his past, bedeviled by it. Arthur, wandering throughout the night, feels lost and abandoned after he is fired before even starting his job at a fish market. (The next-door neighbor has anonymously branded him a sex pervert.) Well, he half-wanders, haunting the scene of his greatest humiliation, the state institution where as a child his parents deposited him. Devising expressive visual forms, Preminger shows a pack of boy-furies—transmutations of the taunting peers from the state institution—seemingly swooping from nowhere to assault Arthur en masse in the street. But Arthur’s flashbacks conflate present and past, with Arthur even at his full-grown height pleading with his parents not to put him in the institution, that he is not “retarded.” At the institution, his grown self amidst the taunting children conveys how out of place he always felt there, how impossible it became for him to reconcile himself with his lot and his life. Preminger has the flashback of Arthur’s arrival at the institution lensed so that the image is scrunched, distorted; the life has been squeezed out.
     Arthur finally takes the risk and reaches out. “Tell me that you love me, Junie Moon.” Junie Moon hesitates. Should she take the risk? “I love you,” she answers with all her heart. Arthur is in her arms under a tree at night. He dies there.
     Liza Minnelli is good as Junie Moon. She is capable of projecting both a screech of physical pain early on and, looking the cosmos in the eye, a very different tragic howl near the end.