LA TRUITE (Joseph Losey, 1982)

Based on the novel by Roger Vailland that Losey had wanted to film for twenty years, Joseph Losey’s dispassionate, disquieting The Trout is the rare piece of work that somehow manages to be both raw and elegant without elegance compromising its rawness or rawness compromising its elegance. This, his penultimate film, is often considered among Losey’s lamest. In truth, it is exceptionally interesting, showing various instances of convoluted sexuality and the complicated entanglement of its characters’ relationships. It is also well acted by everyone, including its star, Isabelle Huppert, but also Jeanne Moreau, Daniel Olbrychski, Jacques Spiesser, Jean-Pierre Cassel, Alexis Smith, Lisette Malidor and, perhaps best of all, Jean-Paul Roussillon.
     The great variety of shots that he has devised, in terms of camera distance and placement, but also regarding mise-en-scène, for instance, in terms of animal imagery, reveals Losey in this instance as a visual ironist; whatever the diversity, the sum is a claustrophobic sense of entrapment. The repeated closeup of fish in an aquarium tank reflects on the lot of the human characters, who are glassed in by their compulsive behaviors and attitudes. (It is remarkable with what finesse Losey stops short of conveying here a noirish fatalism.) Many reviewers shorthand the protagonist, Frédérique, as a woman who manipulates men; but Losey does a commendable job of explaining this habit of hers, beginning with her father’s trout farm, where we see her at miserable work. When she tosses out the window and into the current her father’s friend’s trophy fish, we keenly feel the artificial existence she is striking out against and the liberation she desires. Her loyalty to her gay husband is a complex matter—and a frightening one insofar as we worry whether it will be enough to keep the boy alive.

THE SPIRIT OF ST. LOUIS (Billy Wilder, 1957)

James Stewart is wonderful as Charles Augustus Lindbergh in Billy Wilder’s thrilling, moving, mesmerizing The Spirit of St. Louis. It centers on the young former army airmail pilot’s historic 1927 trans-Atlantic flight, from New York to Paris, in a small, minimalist airplane he helped design. This incident inaugurated two eras: those of aviation (which the next world war would bring to fruition) and modern celebrity. “Lucky Lindy,” whose luck would turn in the 1930s with his twenty-month-old son’s kidnapping and murder, was amazingly courageous during the flight. The script, by Charles Lederer, Wilder and Wendell Mayes, is based on Lindbergh’s 1953 account.
     Wilder demonstrates considerable bravery of his own—on two fronts. One concerns the disfavor into which Lindbergh’s reputation had fallen. Wrongly, Lindbergh had been branded a “Nazi sympathizer”: wrongly—for instance, Lindbergh’s visits to Nazi Germany in the 1930s were at the behest of the U.S. government, which sought information about the state of German aviation—but not ridiculously, owing to two of Lindbergh’s attitudes: white supremacism; at least borderline anti-Semitism. (Lindbergh felt it more important that the “white race” survive in Europe than democracy survive there; he felt that Krystallnacht, rather than an abomination, evidenced German overreaction.) Wilder, who was Jewish (and who had lost his mother to the Holocaust), risked backlash by assisting Lindbergh in his postwar attempt to rehabilitate his reputation.
     But Wilder is braver still by his bold experiments with elements of time in the film’s second half. During the flight, Lindbergh (whose thoughts we hear either as voiceover or his speaking aloud) flashes back to incidents in his history as a pilot.
     The landing at Bourget Field, fiercely stirring, makes one tremendously proud to be an American—and tremendously proud, too, that Wilder was one.

AMARGOSA (Todd Robinson, 1999)

Enchanting. Except for a silly passage purporting to show photographic evidence of ghosts, this documentary set in Death Valley Junction, a ghost town in California with a population of ten (mortals—presumably there are many more ghosts), is lovely. It revolves around an authentic American “character” (as in “a real character”). Ichabod Crane, Pudd’nhead Wilson—these characters are fictional; Marta Becket, though, is real—and as I write, at 83, still with us.
     What a character! A born New Yorker, Marta became a member of Radio City Music Hall’s Corps de Ballet; from there, she became a much-applauded performer, a dancer-singer-actress in her own touring one-woman show. (Marta was also a fashion model.) At 43, with her husband, Tom Williams, Marta moved to Amargosa, the Spanish name for Death Valley Junction, and refurbished a dilapidated theater. It took her six years to paint the Michelangelonian mural inside the refurbished Armagosa Opera House, during which time her husband left her, feeling abandoned himself by his wife’s concentration on her work—work, she had hoped, they both shared. (Tom was her manager; it had been at his insistence that Marta pursued her dream in Death Valley.)
     Throughout the years, people (including author Ray Bradbury) have come to see Marta perform. (Bradbury is among those interviewed.) The occasion for Todd Robinson’s Amargosa, which has won a slew of best documentary prizes, is her final performance of the twentieth century; it is eerily bewitching to see Marta dance, her knees kaput, at age 73. Marta: “What right do I have to call myself a dancer if I can’t do 32 fouettés anymore? . . . the audiences kept coming . . . I discovered they didn’t come to see 32 fouettés [or] entrechat sept. They came to see what I created out of what I had.”
     Enchantment.

UNDER THE FLAG OF THE RISING SUN (Kinji Fukasaku, 1972)

Kinji Fukasaku’s Gunki hatameku motoni may not be the worst Japanese film I’ve seen, but it certainly is the flimsiest and silliest. It is launched by a Second World War army widow’s attempt to discover the true circumstances of her husband-warrior’s death. Presumably Sergeant Katsuo Togashi was court-martialed and executed, perhaps for desertion, perhaps on other grounds, and this is why Sakie, his widow, has been denied benefits. However, Sakie has letters from military officials casting possible doubt that her husband died in this manner. Bureaucratic officials whom she confronts with these documents have come up empty with their own investigation and therefore feel compelled to rely on their own previous determination. But they give Sakie a list of soldiers in her husband’s unit so that she can conduct her own investigation. Needless to say, she pieces together a bracing portrait of a horrific war; the starvation that afflicted soldiers, for example, made cannibalism a means of avoiding this end. One of the interviewees remarks, “Every soldier who fought on that front learned how terrible human beings can be.”
     It is possible to compare the film’s narrative method to that of Akira Kurosawa’s Rashômon (1950), what with its multiplicity of flashbacks, each one of which—in black and white, incidentally, inside a color film—is keyed to either Sakie or one of the persons she visits and interviews. Instead, this film comes to resemble more closely Hollywood film noir. It is ridiculous that Sakie reacts with such copious weeping and bug-eyed horror. The underlying point, that Japan has kept hidden so many truths about the war, is lost in the sensational atmosphere.
     Sachiko Hidari does what she can with her soap operatic role. She handles well her character’s shifting age.