JOAN OF ARC AT THE STAKE (Roberto Rossellini, 1954)

Ingrid Bergman is a miracle of sensitivity, giving a luminous performance, in Roberto Rossellini’s Giovanna d’Arco al rogo. (Actually, I saw the French-language version, Jeanne au bûcher, but with Bergman’s irreplaceable voice, not Claude Nollier’s.) How can Bergman be brilliant here when she was dreadful in Joan of Arc (Victor Fleming, 1948)? Answer: Rossellini.
     Like the earlier film, this one is based on a (different) theatrical piece Bergman did onstage (in a touring revival): the 1930s oratorio, based on a medieval miracle play, with music by Arthur Honegger and libretto by Paul Claudel. In contrast to the choral singing, Bergman’s Joan is among the non-singing roles.
     Jean Renoir’s trilogy drawing on theatrical artifice had begun, starring Rossellini’s former partner, Anna Magnani (The Golden Coach, 1952). (Bergman herself would star in the trilogy’s concluding film.) Moreover, Bergman wanted another crack at the role. This Joan, surrounded by stage-night and blatantly artificial stars, bounds through space to no clear redemptive conclusion, glimpsing her history below, which is interwoven with the people of France, who have turned on her. The film nearly begins with Joan’s being burned at the stake and nearly ends with that. Joan’s existence is perhaps beyond Time. Is her ordeal recurrent and (as her noting the priest’s absence) changing, as if to torture her further?
     Indeed, the whole film is gloriously ambiguous. Consider the stage-lit wash of rosiness that may underscore Joan’s identification with “the Rose of Innocence,” but which jarringly draws our attention to Joan/Bergman’s lipsticked lips and rouged cheeks.
     Rossellini’s Joan is repeatedly identified with circles—of angels, children, humanity. When last we see her she is heading up, chillingly alone. This theatrical rise, which questions God’s participation, rivets our attention to Joan’s own doubts about her destiny.

THE FORSAKEN LAND (Vimukthi Jayasundara, 2005)

I will be adding the following entry to my 100 Greatest Asian Films list as soon as I determine what is leaving the list to make room for it.

Recurrent civil war since 1983 in Sri Lanka has had a devastating effect on the land and its people. Writer-director Vimukthi Jayasundara was both rewarded and censured for his Kiarostaminian Sulanga Enu Pinisa, winning the Caméra d’Or (for best first feature) at Cannes and being warned by his government to make films praising the national military rather than criticizing it. Jayasundara, now 30, hasn’t released a film since.
     Embedded in the opening credits is a long-shot of an armed soldier at night in a vast barren landscape. In a bravura long-shot the next day, a woman and a girl both aim to board a bus. The woman is walking leisurely across a field to the bus stop; the girl is on the road, running fast to reach the stop and not be left behind. She makes it; the woman gives her a lift up. Like most of Jayasundara’s images, this one is poetic, ambiguous and emotionally sweeping. We see the shared experience of two anonymous characters and something more elusive: the possibility that both are the same character, at different stages of her life, doubly inhabiting the same haunted frame. We eventually learn that the two are aunt and niece. In another long-shot a stripped-naked man is tossed into the river by fellow soldiers; a solitary bird perches on the branch of a bare, solitary tree. The bird flies off, but either another bird or the same one lands on the tree. Odd-man-out; two birds or one: both aspects of the mise-en-scène strangely connect. Both niece and aunt, the soldier’s daughter and sister, are subsequently referred to as “Little Bird.”
     Episodic, elliptical, minimalist, powerful, Jayasundara’s near-speechless film includes marital infidelity, unwanted sexual attentions, two suicides, a graphic scene of torture, a grotesque military murder.

PONETTE (Jacques Doillon, 1996)

Writer-director Jacques Doillon, who is the father of three girls, to his everlasting disgrace made Ponette, a pornographic exploitation of a four-year-old’s coping with the death (by road accident) of her mother. It’s a piece of “sensitive” trash.
     Preposterously, Victoire Thivisol won best actress at Venice; the child does nothing but react as she has been directed to. There is no “performance” here, good or bad.
     There is the possibility, I guess, of a theme: the collision between Catholic education (as a child processes it) and the reality of such a loss as Ponette has suffered. It is momentarily interesting that a peer should assail grief-stricken Ponette with the nonsense that God must have taken her mother as a consequence of her, Ponette’s, bad behavior.
     There is a heartless, despicable passage where Ponette receives some sort of compensation for her loss of her mother. The latter appears to Ponette, and to us, in the flesh. Such cruelty as Doillon’s is impossible for me to process. One is left to wonder just who responds to this sort of film.
     The New York Film Critics Circle named Ponette best foreign-language film of the year.

SECOND CIRCLE (Aleksandr Sokurov, 1990)

What, if anything, does Aleksandr Sokurov’s Krug vtoroy have to do with Dante’s second circle of Hell, to which those who lusted, such as Francesca and her brother-in-law, are consigned? Regardless, the film is visually transparent, with its color repressed almost to the point of monochrome. This is, after all, a film in which a young man attends to the details of burying his father. This includes a draining confrontation with insensible bureaucracy. The colors, then, suit a consciousness steeped in a sense of mortality, without recourse to the spirituality that might enable the man to bring his grief to fruition and retain a sense of an indestructible spiritual bond with his father. Sokurov, of course, intends a criticism of the Soviet Union, which hasn’t been hospitable to Russia’s historic Orthodox Christianity. In something of a visual coup, Sokurov conjoins his wan colors with deep contrasts of light and dark, thus managing simultaneously to suggest a suppression of spirit and the attendance of spirit that is being suppressed! Films do not get more formally brilliant than this.
     The pre-credit opening is staggering. Walking towards the camera, the man proceeds through a whited-out landscape during a blizzard. When it grows more intense, the dark figure crouches to withstand the storm. The sound of the storm continues as the credits appear. Thus Sokurov stresses the primacy of the individual, while the storm suggests the social and political forces arrayed against the individual that deny this primacy. We may well imagine as we watch the opening that we are looking directly at the spirit of the man.
     For me, though, this is an arid, arduous film that only too successfully realizes its formal/thematic aims. The protagonist’s Kafkaesque ordeal of getting Father buried is painfully rendered in painstaking detail.

THE LOWER DEPTHS (Jean Renoir, 1936)

Poverty, and fresh love’s capacity to undo its grip of despair, at least temporarily: in adapting Maxim Gorky’s play Na dnie for the French screen, Jean Renoir takes on a great theme. On this occasion Renoir’s primary interest lies elsewhere than in social analysis, the crux of Gorky’s concern. However uneven the result, Les bas-fonds has little or no connection with such analysis or with French poetic realism.
     Outdoors sunlight, liberated, expansive camera movement, Alochka, the young, agile accordian player who clicks his heels in the air: what does this have to do with the lower depths?. For one thing, all this speaks to the need of the poor to cope with their poverty. The alcoholic actor’s fate reminds us that not everyone can cope. But the Baron’s apparent transcendence of his gambling habit as he settles into his new existence in slum lodgings raises questions about individual responsibility that perforate the social rigor of the indoor setting. The Baron (Louis Jouvet, brilliant) trades in his high stakes, aiming at high-style survival, for sociable card games.
     For me, Renoir’s amiable film carries a subtext that defines it and lifts it into a category of its own. Wasska Pépel is a thief who has at least convinced himself he can turn over a new leaf for the sake of Natasha, the girl he loves and who loves him. Earlier, he said that he knows no other way of living because his father, a thief who died in prison, taught by his example. That may be the point: what fathers teach their sons. Renoir learned something else from his father. A phenomenal outdoor scene evokes the sociability of such a painting as Impressionist Pierre-Auguste’s Bal du Moulin de la Galette (1876).
     Like father like loving son.