LANCELOT OF THE LAKE (Robert Bresson, 1974)

Robert Bresson’s Arthurian Lancelot du Lac, from Chrétien de Troyes, was meant to follow immediately Diary of a Country Priest (1950); by the time Bresson realized his dream project nearly a quarter-century later, his work had passed from black and white into color—color, here, rich, mysterious, hauntingly beautiful.
     Still, this isn’t a period film in which viewers “lose themselves.” One always hears a Bresson film as much as sees it, giving it immediacy. This time, it isn’t jangling jail cells or shuffling clogs or street traffic that we hear. It is alienating clanking armor, clashing swords, pounding hoofbeats. The film opens at night in the forest, and two armored men are wielding swords at one another—doubtless with skill, but also with difficulty. This is heavy combat. One prevails by slicing off his opponent’s head. Bresson creates, amplifies the sound of gushing blood, which we also see soaking the ground. Hero? Villain? Which is which? The two men look identical, and life is over so quickly. War’s trappings have changed; war has remained constant. King Arthur’s reign is coming to a sad, bitter close.
     Some of us learned about adultery, before we had a word for it, from Arthurian tales and films. Adultery absolutely fits in a world geared for war. Corrupt, it is, ironically, a reach for some antidote to corruption. Knights wear armor indoors in Bresson’s film to convey not just their vulnerability but also the burden of bloodshed into which they are locked. They hide their corruption, deceiving themselves, others, no one. Poor Gauvain so wants to continue revering Lancelot and Guenièvre and disastrously keeps defending them.
     Time passes all by. But these characters are also right here, along with their legacy: the disastrous confusion of idealism and corruption.

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DEATH OF A CYCLIST (Juan Antonio Bardem, 1954)

In Franco’s fascist Spain, María José and Juan are having a secret affair. María José is the wife of Miguel, an industrialist who benefited from supporting Franco; María José never loved her husband, but Miguel was her ticket to the sweet life, because money stays current even while class loses its grip. For his part, otherwise unattached lover Juan secured his teaching post thanks to a Francoist in-law. A student uprising calling for his ouster ignites former idealist Juan’s “journey back to himself.”
     Juan Antonio Bardem’s Muerte de un ciclista opens with María José and Juan together on the road. They are out in the country; only a small skeletal tree—symbolical of the barren outcome of the Spanish Civil War—marks the particular spot where the car that María José is driving hits and takes down a working-class bicyclist. Juan’s impulse is to help the fallen man; but María José will have none of that. Helping the stranger will expose her and Juan’s affair, which in turn will jeopardize her marriage. This she will not allow to happen. Later, when Juan feels he and María José should turn themselves over to the police, she runs him down at the spot where she had earlier hit the bicyclist. Again, she selfishly seeks to retain her lifestyle and position.
     The aspect involving the students is the lamest, murkiest part of the film. Otherwise the film is striking, intense, sometimes brilliant. Three passages stand out: Juan’s visit to the poverty-stricken tenement where the accident victim lived; at an event, art critic Rafa’s attempts to taunt María José and incite her spouse, with fear-generating two-shots of him and either, each shot silent but for the ambient noise and music; the stunning, ironical finish when, rushing back home to Miguel after having murdered Juan, María José disastrously swerves to avoid hitting a bicyclist. Another irony: censorship dictated this perfect ending. Bardem’s best shot: María José’s upside-down face, a death mask, which Bardem repeats to differentiate between her objective death and the spiritual death for Spain implicit in the bicyclist’s observation of this before he selfishly, anonymously takes off*—as María José herself once did.

* But I may be wrong. Olivier Stockman, who has just seen the film, has e-mailed me this: “I think you should look at it again because the end is not as you wrote in your article: on the contrary, the cyclist (working class guy) hesitates, but decides to go towards the house with lights, presumably to say there has been an accident. He doesn’t selfishly, anonymously take off, as María José did. On the big screen this was very clear.”

THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY (Julian Schnabel, 2007)

Strenuously overdirected (to cover a want of imagination and humanity), Julian Schnabel’s La scaphandre et le papillon surveys the reality and fantasies/dreams of an actual person, Jean-Dominique Bauby, editor of the fashion magazine Elle, whose 1995 massive stroke left him in “locked-in syndrome.” Only his left eyelid survived paralysis, and it is with this that Bauby communicates with doctors and other medical personnel at the naval hospital in Berck, to which he has been transferred from Paris: one blink for yes, two for no. Later, an alphabetical code expands the range of his communication, enabling him to “blink” his memoir. Bauby died in 1997, two days after its publication.
     Ronald Harwood’s script, from the memoir, includes Bauby’s thoughts to himself, which we hear as voiceover, and which Bauby, before he learns of his condition after he wakes from a three-week coma, mistakes for responsive speech. Schnabel leans on point-of-view shots that aim to forge an identity between us and the protagonist; we see what Bauby does and feel ourselves, as it were, “locked in.” This tack also relieves the actor who plays Bauby from extensively simulating an almost completely paralyzed face. Schnabel’s film might be called POV Run Amok.
     The actor in question is superb—witty, heartrending, haunting. Mathieu Amalric, who is prolific, is as brilliant here as he is as Gabriel in Olivier Assayas’s Late August, Early September (Fin août, début septembre, 1998). His profound talent makes Schnabel’s film mandatory viewing. Rest assured, those who cannot imagine seeing an Amalric film without seeing Amalric: he is visible in objective in-hospital shots, and of course in Bauby’s memories and fantasies.
     If only we could experience Amalric’s acting without suffering Schnabel’s silly visual antics, which demean Bauby’s ordeal and try our patience.

LIFE AS A FATAL SEXUALLY TRANSMITTED DISEASE (Krzysztof Zanussi, 2000)

Order means a continuous battle with chaos.

Writer-director Krzysztof Zanussi’s grave, mysterious Zycie jako smiertelna choroba przenoszona droga plciowa revolves around Dr. Tomasz Berg (Zbigniew Zapasiewicz, tremendously moving), who is dying of lung cancer, casting him in double roles: doctor, patient; observer, one who experiences; nonbeliever (“ . . . grace has bypassed me”), yet one poised to receive the Holy Spirit. A bird he sees fluttering underneath a painting of Jesus in a Paris church returns to Berg’s Warsaw hospital room—if a dream, perhaps a dream from God.
     The film opens, Buñuelianly, in the past—here, the twelfth century. St. Bernard takes a young horse thief to his monastery, converts him and returns him to be hanged now that he is ready to die. Suddenly the present cuts into the past; what we have been watching is a film shoot-within-the-film, with Berg the on-location medical doctor. His own situation echoes that in the film. Berg, too, must ready himself for death.
     Slow camera movements suggest life poised for its passing. When the thief rides to his execution, the camera gently lowers by the archway under which he passes—an expression, perhaps, of God’s sorrow over human fates as a consequence of the Fall. A beauteous insert evokes an identical sadness: a river’s solemn passage beneath a tree.
     “Do you find it a problem dealing with death every day?” a second-year medical student, an extra working on the Bernard film, asks Berg. They come from different worlds, as we see: Filip, a believer, in his period costume; the old atheist in his ordinary modern clothes. But they become dear friends, with the boy making the first incision in the cadaver that Berg bequeaths to his teaching hospital.
     Life goes on. Like a river.

B(U)Y THE BOOK

MY BOOK, A Short Chronology of World Cinema, IS CURRENTLY AVAILABLE FROM THE SANDS FILMS CINEMA CLUB IN LONDON. USING EITHER OF THE LINKS BELOW, ACCESS THE ADVERTISEMENT FOR THIS BOOK, FROM WHICH YOU CAN ORDER ONE OR MORE COPIES OF IT. THANKS.

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SUNLIGHT ON WINGS

Sunlight on wings
balances sky,
including the earth,
effortlessly.