WITNESSES (Vinko Brešan, 2003)

The Serbo-Croatian War, from 1991-1995, is both the background and the foreground of an intricately, ingeniously devised antiwar film, Svjedoci (a.k.a. Ovce od gipsa), which primarily takes place in a Croatian town, with forays to the front. The time scheme isn’t chronological; rather, the film keeps returning in pieces and patches, even more than once, to actions we have already seen to provide more of an action than we have previously seen or a different perspective on it. The murder of one of the town’s inhabitants is being investigated; the victim was a rumored black marketer who, exploiting neighbors, served Serbian interests. We know from the start “who did it” (although not all that they did, or why). Blood-vengeance is involved—issues of war and family honor; and no murder is intended, but the victim was not supposed to be at home. Nor was he alone. His young daughter also was home when the three soldiers, who have just returned from the front in time for their father’s funeral, meant only to torch his house. The child survives—a witness who could jeopardize the trio’s freedom. They must do something about her. War has many costs, and the loss of reason and civilized morality on many fronts.
     Does the Croatian film’s fascinating narrative design derive from the novel on which it is based, Alabaster Sheep, by Jurica Pavičić? Regardless, the script by the filmmaker, Vinko Brešan, and Živko Zalar is expert. I suppose it’s a bit churlish of me to question whether this odd, convoluted way in which the material is presented is at each point necessary, especially since my eyes and the head to which they are attached got lost several times.
     Perhaps a subsequent viewing will find all the pieces falling brilliantly into place.

GOLDEN EIGHTIES (Chantal Äkerman, 1986)

Shoes quickly go every which way across part of the floor at a Parisian mall called The Golden Fleece; but the viewer’s heart jumps when one pair of legs half-leaps. A reference point is the opening of Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train (1951), but there the two pairs of cross-cut shoes belong to men, not women, and they audibly click when one brushes against the other onboard a train. In Chantal Äkerman’s Golden Eighties (a.k.a. Window Shopping), faceless shoppers live separate lives; each is out on her own.
     Intertwined lives: most of the film’s action involves people who work at or own businesses at the mall. Young persons are wrapped up in romantic complications as they feel their way through adolescence; Monsieur Schwartz, who with his workmate wife, Jeanne (Delphine Seyrig, brilliant, gorgeous), owns a men’s clothing shop, worries about France’s weak economy and his declining sales. Jeanne reassures him that things will pick up. The couple is Jewish. (Äkerman herself is Jewish.) They are the parents of restless, impulsive Robert, who when rebuffed by Lili, the girl whom he loves, proposes marriage to a girl he hasn’t even dated. Half-leaping, Mado directs her acceptance not to Robert but to gathered girls who work at the mall; later, she walks in on her fiancé and Lili making love after-hours at the mall. Meanwhile, Jeanne is being pursued by someone from her past: Eli, who as an American soldier liberated her death camp during the war and fell in love with her. Now Jeanne’s feelings for Eli reawaken, urging her to betray her spouse as her son, unbeknownst to her, betrays his fiancée.
     Have I mentioned that Golden Eighties is a musical? Characters sing (poignantly)—perhaps Äkerman’s hommage to Jacques Demy.
     Dark, lilting, soulful, ironical.

GIGI (Vincente Minnelli, 1958)

From Colette’s novella, Vincente Minnelli’s Gigi took the opposite route of other Lerner-Loewe musicals: it began as a film and was subsequently adapted for the stage. Lerner’s script and lyrics are excellent; Loewe’s music is rich, varied, wonderful.
     Turn-of-the-century Paris; to ensure her future, schoolgirl Gilberte (“Gigi”) is being groomed in the family tradition of becoming a courtesan. She is learning which pearls are “dipped” and how to select a high-class cigar. Raised mostly by her bourgeois grandmother, Madame Alvarez, she is being trained by wealthy Aunt Alicia, and there is some dispute as to whether this training is striking the correct balance between “rights” and “responsibilities.” This is an hilarious film about labor-management relations—and a touching one.
     Gaston Lachaille (Louis Jourdan, marvelous) helps make it so. He is the jaded playboy who is so into teasing Gigi as a big brother might that he doesn’t hear the promptings of his own heart toward her—that is, until these are too resounding to resist. At that point he can think of no other solution than to arrange to keep her. Despite Aunt Alicia’s training, Gigi, who loves Gaston, wants instead what every schoolgirl dreams of. “No scandal!” Madame Alvarez pleads, but Gaston asks instead for Gigi’s hand in marriage. Minnelli’s film is rare (among Hollywood entertainments) for accounting a boy’s love for a girl as momentous, as transformative, as a girl’s love for a boy.
     It is superlative yet on another score: Given Gaston’s relationship with Honoré, his uncle with a prodigious sexual past, it is far more deeply infused with the feeling of passing on Prospero’s magic wand than the two-years-earlier Forbidden Planet, a sci-fi version of Shakespeare’s The Tempest.
     Leslie Caron’s feisty tomboy becomes a beauteous swan before Gaston’s amazed eyes, and ours.