Lola Montès, Max Ophüls’s final, uneven, but intermittently most brilliant film, projects twentieth-century self-objectification and selfconsciousness back into the nineteenth to address the emergence of the idea of celebrity. Its case in point is an actual celebrity, Maria Dolores Eliza Rosanna Gilbert, a.k.a. Lola Montès, ersatz dancer, acrobat, and scandalous lover, including of King Ludwig I of Bavaria (Anton Walbrook, superb), who was dethroned by the 1848 Revolution.
The film’s point of departure is a circus whose focus is Lola’s life; Lola (Martine Carol, as untalented as Lola) plays herself. The ringmaster, knowing the public that his audience represents, describes her: “A master of cruelty with the eyes of an angel.” A human being is thus reduced to a caricature, a “femme fatale.” “Remember the past?” This question signals a “realistic” flashback; but is it reality or a reaction to the theatrical performance? Franz Liszt is the first of Lola’s lovers to appear. Liszt leaves Lola by coach; cut to Liszt’s coach departing from the circus stage. Similar confusions of theatricality and life ensue.
Lola’s childhood is given short shrift—another reduction of her. Backstage, Lola asks the child who plays her, “Would you like to play the part for the rest of your life?” The implication is that “Lola” is just such a role for Lola. “I do as I please,” she insists, but her unhappy marriage to a drunk was her way of escaping the marriage that her mother had planned for her.
With a weak heart poised to stop her life/performance at any moment, Lola ends, a caged commodity, as the camera withdraws and a new audience, our surrogate, moves forward to enter the tent. We who thrive on celebrity are the ones who have reduced Lola. The camera retreats into us.
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BOY A (John Crowley, 2007)
October 20, 2008John Crowley’s trenchant Boy A takes its title from the procedure in British courts to shield the identities of underaged criminal defendants. In the past, two ten-year-old boys ended the life—we aren’t shown precisely how—of a girl their own age after she confronts them with verbal abuse and class condescension and accuses them of spying on her as she engaged in sexual activity with a boy or a man—I’m not certain which. At trial and in the media, Eric became Boy A; Phillip, Boy B. Each drew a 14-year prison sentence. Phillip did not last that long; either he was murdered or he hanged himself. Eric, ill equipped to handle the outside world, has just been released. Jack Burridge (Andrew Garfield, achingly good) is the new identity he chooses. Terry, his parole officer, has arranged for him lodgings and a warehouse job; he counsels the shy, awkward, really terrified young man to look forward, not back, and to tell no one, not even girlfriend Michelle about his past. Meanwhile, one of the tabloids is sensationalizing his release under the banner line “Evil Comes of Age” and running a computerized photograph of what Eric might look like today.
Jack’s past comes to us only in piercing interruptions of the present-day narrative that suggest his haunted memory. The working-class boy suffered enormous abuse, including routine rape by his older brother. Eric’s hair-trigger violence, Jack’s general sweetness: our struggle to piece together Eric/Jack’s personality puzzle becomes correlative to Eric/Jack’s attempts at getting a grip on himself and healing his fissured consciousness and identity. No wonder Crowley has drawn so many of his film’s moods and images from film noir.
Jack’s identity is exposed. His “coincidental” encounter with Michelle in Brighton is a poignantly fantasized reconciliation/farewell.
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