OTILIA RAUDA (Dana Rotberg, 2001)

Set in provincial Mexico in the first half of the twentieth century, Dana Rotberg’s Otilia Rauda, from Sergio Galindo’s novel, follows Otilia’s contempt for her police-chief husband, Isidro, and her passionate love for the bandit he is trying to capture, Rubén Lazcano. Otilia’s father compelled her marriage. Isidro’s whoring results in Otilia’s contracting syphilis, which leaves her barren. For revenge, Otilia refuses to allow Isidro to touch her thereafter, threatening him, if he did so, with his “waking up dead one morning.” Ironically, this gives Otilia a measure of control in her life at a time when women were generally under the control of men. (A lyric of a song with which Isidro serenades Otilia refers to himself as her lover and owner.) Otilia becomes promiscuously adulterous largely to rub salt into the wound of Isidro’s sexual banishment.
     Secretly, Otilia nurses a wounded Rubén back to health; but who is to say she “freely” falls in love with him? By doing so, isn’t she unconsciously reacting against her spouse? Too, her falling in love with Rubén undoes the independence and autonomy she had staked out by refusing to have sex with Isidro. Lest we miss the point, she does have sex with her spouse, once, in exchange for his promise to let her see her lover one last time. This single sexual encounter (past the earliest stage of their marriage) makes additionally sore an ironical parallel: Otilia makes love with Rubén only once.
     The attraction of Otilia’s voluptuous body is rendered more intense, curiously, by the disfiguring discoloration of one-third of her face. It is the social blemish of machismo, as well as male hypocrisy, from which Otilia struggles to be free.
     As was not the case with her wedding, Otilia chooses her own death.

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PERSONA NON GRATA (Krzysztof Zanussi, 2004)

The end of the Cold War that the U.S. had launched to the detriment of the world after the Second World War has left the world changed in some ways and intact in others. Writer-director Krzysztof Zanussi’s Persona non grata revolves around Wiktor (Zbigniew Zapasiewicz, superb yet again), Poland’s aging Ambassador to Uruguay, where he finds his nation competing with the Russians for a helicopter contract, suspects Russian spying, quarrels with fellow Polish diplomats, and quarrels with his own past. His anti-Sovietism has finally prevailed, but Wiktor still suspects old friend Oleg (fascistic filmmaker Nikita Mikhalkov giving a marvelous performance) of having bedded with his deceased wife, Helena.
     The film opens with haunting snapshots of Helena. If I am to believe reviewers I have read over the past few years, Helena and Wiktor had a serenely happy marriage, the loss of which, executed by her death, has been tragic for her widower. Really? Yet Wiktor must go to Poland to attend her funeral, implying that they were probably estranged (it is possible she was on holiday, I suppose), and Wiktor’s confrontation with Oleg over possible long-ago adultery suggests the suspiciousness with which the marriage had become infected, perhaps explaining the estrangement. Once back in Montevideo, Wiktor tries enlisting a priest to safeguard Helena’s ashes, and he interestingly remarks how Helena’s unexpected death left important matters unresolved between them. Am I alone in thinking theirs was not the happiest of marriages?
     Ironically, Wiktor is viewed by peers and superiors as a Cold War relic. The only “person” he seems to trust is his old, faithful dog, Hippolyt. He drinks to excess to assuage his loneliness.
     He earns my affection, however, when he refers to lyric LXVIII of poet Alfred Tennyson’s In Memoriam (“Sleep, Death’s twin-brother . . .”).

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EUROPA EUROPA (Agnieszka Holland, 1990)

Agnieszka Holland’s unsentimental Europa Europa, from France and Germany, is based on Salomon Perel’s account of his actual experiences. A Jew, “Sali” eluded German capture before and during the war. Holland’s mother was Catholic; her father, Jewish.
     In 1938 Germany, Sali is indulging in a bath just prior to his bar mitzvah—arithmetic sets his age at 15, not 13—when Krystallnacht breaks out, shattering the glass of his father’s storefront and claiming the life of his only sister, Bertha. His parents send Sali to Poland, his father’s homeland, in the care of older brother Isaac, from whom he becomes separated. (Sali is the youngest of four sons.) Sali flees to the east, to escape the Nazis, while Aryans flee westward, to escape Bolsheviks. Stalin and Hitler have signed their non-aggression pact (later, in a surreal fantasy, the two dictators unconvincingly dance together), and the partitioning of Poland is underway. Sali’s voiceover deftly relates points in his personal history to general history.
     At a Grodno orphanage Sali learns Marxist ideology and Russian, but the 1941 German invasion separates him from the protection of the teacher with whom he is smitten. His adolescence has fallen into a pattern of separation, loss, adaptability, even opportunism; serendipity as well as tragedy seems to be accompanying Sali. Eventually he masquerades (as “Jupp” Peters) as a Nazi youth, becoming a bilingual interpreter once the Germans capture Stalin’s son.
     Holland’s “superficial” style prods us to consider what, following Sali’s lead, she has left out: the psychological consequences of a Jew’s pretending to be a Nazi. Sali’s reunion with his one surviving family member, overwhelmingly moving, postpones a fuller damage assessment.
     That comes with another teenaged boy’s story. Europa Europa is best grasped in concert with Holland’s next film, Olivier, Olivier (1992).*

* Please see my essay on Olivier, Olivier under “film reviews” elsewhere on this site.

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LOVE IS NEWS (Tay Garnett, 1937)

Both 23 at the time, Tyrone Power and Loretta Young at least possessed the charm of youth in the comedy Love Is News; but they didn’t have a scrap of talent between them. Power’s good looks commended him, but even these were shiny and shallow; Power was the Tom Cruise of his day. (When he returned from serving in the war, Power resembled Richard Nixon.) Bug-eyed Young imitated Irene Dunne and Margaret Sullavan in the 1930s and Joan Crawford in the 1940s. Young may not have been very pretty (Power was prettier), but, dahling, was she ever glamorous. There isn’t the slightest spark between these two in Love Is News, and without that, given the initial antagonism between Power’s nosy newspaper reporter and Young’s rich society girl, their romance seems to come out of the blue. The viewer goes along with it, but he or she scarcely roots for the two to come together romantically.
     Young’s Toni isn’t the only character with whom Power’s Steve is engaged in a love-hate relationship. Steve’s editor, Marty Canavan, is played by Don Ameche, who is no better than the stars. Canavan’s quarrels with Steve are poorly timed and very broadly played. One suspects that none of the three took the least bit of pride in his or her work here.
     Not much that is entertaining, then, goes on in the news room, although occasionally I did chuckle. A more fruitful setting for comedy is the smoke-filled bar that the reporters haunt, where they play checkers on the checkered floor, using glasses of whiskey and mugs of beer for checkers, which upon claiming in a move the player drinks.
     The funniest performance is delivered by George Sanders, with an unruly French accent, as Toni’s caddish, gold-digging fiancé.

LA ROUE (Abel Gance, 1923)

[C]reation is a great wheel that cannot move without crushing someone. — Victor Hugo

Abel Gance’s The Wheel derives from dubious melodramatic material. Its camera opens on train tracks zipping past and proceeds to train wheels in crushing closeup. The train derails, and in the wreck that follows the single mother of baby Norma is killed. A single parent, railwayman Sisif (Séverin-Mars, superb) takes the child home, raising her as his own along with his young son, Elie. Elie and Norma believe they are biological brother and sister. As they grow up, they fall in love; Sisif also falls in love with Norma. A fight between Norma’s rich suitor and Elie results in the latter’s death, for which Sisif blames Norma. This ironical resolution of potential conflict between father and son is part of a string of losses that Sisif has suffered or will suffer: his wife, who died in childbirth; his inventions, the ideas for which Norma’s suitor stole—an encapsulation of capital’s plunder of the working class; Elie; Norma; his joy in life (several times Sisif attempts suicide); his eyesight. The film, which is set in the French Alps, ends with old Sisif’s death. He is alone, facing a window through which majestic mountains appear—to us. Sisif’s eyes are stone-cold dead; but do they now see the mountains with their spiritual sight? have they become the mountains? In extreme long-shot, figures of life dance in a wheel-like circle, inspiring the hand-holding line of ghosts in Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1956). Our sight has become one with the departed Sisif’s sight. Gance’s film transcends melodrama.
     For The Wheel Gance has marshaled a dazzling array of experimental techniques, changing the shape and size of the image, creating expressive superimpositions, varying editing speeds, also expressively.