MADAME BROUETTE (Moussa Sene Absa, 2002)

Present is past is present. Without markers for its many flashbacks, Senegalese filmmaker Moussa Sene Absa’s Brechtian fable L’extraordinaire destin de Madame Brouette pieces together a murder in a boisterous Dakar slum. (The French language we listen to itself suggests the colonialist past that the post-independence present totes.) The long delay of the arrival of Mati’s confession helps convince us that “the truth” isn’t at all the truth, or at least not all of the truth.
     One morning, still dressed as a woman as a sanctioned part of the previous night’s carnival-like celebration, Naago stumbles, drunk, into his hut. Mati, his wife, holds his pistol on him, demanding he not touch their son, who was born last night. Naago wrests the gun from her and slaps her in front of her young daughter, Ndèye. Cut to outside, where gathered neighbors hear shots fired; Naago stumbles out, drops dead, his “body like a sieve,” rendering hilariously dubious the first wrong solution to the crime—suicide—announced by an officer who fancies himself Columbo.
     All that divides “inside” and “outside” the hut is a flimsy drape of cloth. Naago, a corrupt cop, exists “inside” and “outside” the law. Mati is “Madame Brouette”—Mrs. Wheelbarrow, who, struggling to survive, sells goods from the wheelbarrow she pushes. Mati’s pride and statuesque elegance set her “outside” the slum she is entrenched in; Mati exists “inside” hope that exists “outside” a seemingly hopeless reality.
     Men treat women badly throughout, turning on them. Mati hoped she had found a life-partner in her womanizing spouse. When he discovers she is pregnant, her father, who seemed so loving, evicts Mati, citing the Quran.
     Is justice possible for Mati? Only if the female chorus that colorfully enrobes and permeates the action is the jury.

OUR STORY (Bertrand Blier, 1984)

A resourcefully comical Alain Delon (best actor César) plays Robert Avranche, a Paris garage owner whose impossible episodic adventures begin on a Paris-bound train. A dreamily sensual Nathalie Baye plays Donatienne, a stranger who enters Robert’s first-class compartment explaining, “I want to tell you a story,” and does, about the two of them and their sex together, which they proceed to have betwixt stations. Rather than proceeding home to wife and daughters, Robert follows Donatienne to her home, which he prefers. This is not to Donatienne’s liking; since losing custody of her children in her divorce settlement, Donatienne has filled her life with a loneliness-numbing succession of one-night stands. She has no use for Robert’s falling in love with her: “You take advantage of a poor girl just because she wants to have sex.” When someone later refers to Donatienne as a slut, Robert disagrees: “She sounds to me like a big-hearted girl”—an hilarious line whose poignancy kicks in retroactively later on.
     Preceding Martin Scorsese’s After Hours (1985), writer-director Bertrand Blier’s Notre histoire is structured as a cascading series of dreams, one spilling out of another. Donatienne delivers the key line to Robert’s successor, her new pickup off a train: “In this story . . . things are immaterial. There are passengers who wake up during a dream to realize they are not dreaming. You have to go along with the story.” Visible and audible in the background of some outdoor shots is the moving train that Robert never materially leaves until it reaches Paris. An assortment of dream characters correspond to real ones, and each performance is pitch-perfect.
     I do not like Blier’s Oscar-winning Get Out Your Handkerchiefs (1977), which I find fey, arch, mean, misogynistic. Surprise! I find Notre histoire charming, warm, zany, funny, generous.

THE SONG OF BERNADETTE (Henry King, 1943)

There is one compelling aspect of Henry King’s long film of Catholic convert Franz Werfel’s popular novel The Song of Bernadette. This is its portrait of the mass frenzy and greedy exploitation that the peasant girl Bernadette’s claim of unusual visions attracts. Otherwise, it is a lax, disjunctive effort rendered all the more ridiculous by its mishmash of accents. Kenneth Branagh can make that sort of thing work. King can’t.
     Many find offensive King’s making concrete the visions of the miniature “Lady” that the impoverished nineteenth-century Lourdes teenager says visit her. (Beauteous Linda Darnell plays the Virgin Mary, the vision of whom is visible only to Bernadette.) How can we doubt her when we ourselves “see” the same thing? King’s literalness in this regard is grotesque. Reasonably, a combination of boredom and hunger probably explains Bernadette’s “visions,” although it is certainly possible that the actual Bernadette was a liar hell-bent on attracting attention. Adolescents can be that way. Moreover, the soap operatic event of an initially imconvinced and hostile nun’s transformation into Bernadette’s most abject supporter is manipulative no matter how strikingly Gladys Cooper plays the “before” and “after.” Touching, however: the scene where convent-headed Bernadette is told by the farm boy who loves her he will never marry.
     Jennifer Jones, enjoying a second whack at stardom after failing to ignite the screen as Phyllis Isley (her real name) in the 1930s, plays Bernadette. Jones won a Golden Globe and an Oscar for this role, although her “acting” is a classic example of someone’s “playing scenes” rather than creating a coherent character. Jones is good in some scenes, not good in others; but these collected scenes do not add up to a character. Only God could connect the dots of Jones’s silly performance.*

* Jones is even worse in at least four films: Love Letters (William Dieterle, 1945), Duel in the Sun (King Vidor et al., 1946), Madame Bovary (Vincente Minnelli, 1949), The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (Nunnally Johnson, 1956). She is damn good, however, at least twice: Beat the Devil (John Huston, 1953), Terminal Station (Vittorio De Sica, 1953).

KNOCKS AT MY DOOR (Alejandro Saderman, 1994)

From a play by Juan Carlos Gené, who co-authored the script with the director, Alejandro Saderman’s Golpes a mi puerta, from Argentina, is an attempt to convey the horrifying atmosphere of a police state. Sister Ana hides an unarmed anti-military rebel in her quarters. When authorities find him there, the nun resists efforts to portray him as having held her hostage at gunpoint. As a result, her execution by firing squad closely follows his.
     Lurid, melodramatic, poorly acted, this film in no way compares with Luis Puenzo’s The Official Story (1985). Sister Ana is insufferable and I couldn’t wait for the fascists to dispatch her.
     In short, agreeing with its politics didn’t assist my enjoyment of this film in the slightest degree.