FIVE CONTENTIOUS GIRLS (Evald Schorm, 1967)

Beautifully written by Iva Hercíková, Evald Schorm’s Pět holek na krku, which may be set in Prague—my guess, because Schorm is a native of Prague—opens with a montage of shots of old city architecture and sculpture. The narrative centers on five fifteen-year-old or so schoolgirls, whose modernity tilts at times towards the past: for instance, Carl Maria von Weber’s 1821 German Romantic opera Der Freischütz, a performance of which is interspliced into the main action involving the girls. (Schorm himself was a former opera singer.) One of the girls, Nataša, overhears an antique dealer telling an elderly female customer, to whom he is showing a clock: “And that young countess detested the old count and said she wouldn’t marry before this clock was repaired.” As it happens, the count paid for the clock’s repair but the countess eloped with someone else.
     Nataša, who is pretty and whose parents are materially comfortable, is envied by the other four girls, who conspire to ruin her friendship with Petr, with whom she is smitten. They constantly humiliate and exclude her and their “jokes” push her to the brink of suicide. Nataša just wants friends so she can feel that she “belongs.”
     The film is full of wonderful bits. For instance, the girls ape apes at the zoo, with the envious four tossing Nataša’s purse into one of the cages. Cut to a closeup of a lion’s face—a face of seeming wisdom, close observation of humanity, and sorrowful disapproval. Think Pudovkin on the subject of Kuleshov’s montage.
     Moreover, the film moves towards a surprising and powerful finish. Nataša gets from her father, an administrator at school, what she thought he wouldn’t give her: the expulsion of the other four. What follows is necessary and heartbreaking.

BLESSED BY FIRE (Tristán Bauer, 2005)

Inexplicably, Tristán Bauer has won a plethora of prizes for the Argentinean Iluminados por el fuego, which he co-wrote and directed. About the tragic aftermath of the “unwinnable” 1982 Malvinas War, Bauer’s film is protracted and spuriously sentimental. The war, which in the U.S. we knew as “the Falkland Islands dispute,” was the United Kingdom’s clutch at the delusion of a remaining British Empire, for which it marshaled support from the U.S. and other NATO allies. Set twenty years after the war, the film involves two of the war’s back then-young combatants, one of them now a journalist (a tad convenient), and the other in a coma after attempting suicide. The film contextualizes Alberto Vargas’s suicide attempt with staggering statistics of suicides and other traumas that have beset Argentinean veterans of that war. For whatever reason, the cause of Argentinean self-determination resonates only lamely here. Perhaps inadvertently, a documentary insert of arch monsters Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan standing coldly, arrogantly side-by-side reminds us of Blair and Bush and the war of the film’s own time in Iraq.
     The narrative is structured as journalist Esteban Leguizamón’s trips to hospital to visit his comatose long-ago comrade and the extended flashbacks to the war these visits trigger. From the start, Vargas is a fear-ridden, maudlin soldier, and this weakens the larger case that the film pursues on the basis of this soldier’s post-traumatic stress disorder. Even worse is Vargas’s ex-wife, with whom Leguizamón interacts in the present, who mawkishly goes on and on about how impossible it was to live with the war-battered Vargas. Apparently, she believes she is a saint for having stuck with him for as long as she did.
     The use of gorgeous artificial color signals these flashbacks. Little else is of interest.

THE DIARY OF A CHAMBERMAID (Jean Renoir, 1946)

In introducing, on VHS, the fourth of Jean Renoir’s five Hollywood films, The Diary of a Chambermaid, Roddy McDowall assures us it is “lighthearted.” The style of this tragicomedy, based on Octave Mirbeau’s novel as midwived by André de Lorde and André Heuzé’s play, may indeed be “lighthearted”; but (except for the momentarily happy ending) the “heart” of this film is scarcely “light.” By film’s end, two of the main characters have been killed and the lives of two others have been destroyed. For some of us, its “light” style renders all the more poignant the film’s rush of sad and vicious incident.
     Celestine, a spirited chambermaid, is manipulated by her mistress, who is trying to keep her convalescing son from leaving home. Celestine falls in love with George; his mother may already be in love with George. (Repeatedly giving Celestine her clothes to wear, even as Celestine is just about to enter George’s room, suggests Madame Lanlaire’s vicarious sexual seduction of her son.) The action culminates amidst national celebration on July 14, Bastille Day, in the early 1900s; this action is set in Normandy, which adds yet more recent connection to French freedom and liberation. Madame Lanlaire is an unreconstructed monarchist; “Death to the Republic!” she toasts, along with spouse and servants, every July 14th. Characters are divided between the rich and the poor, the poor who identify with the rich and the poor who do not, the rich who are willing to share with the poor and the rich who are not. As in Renoir’s phenomenal La règle du jeu (1939), there is a series of clashes and alignments between the classes, between masters and servants.
     Paulette Goddard plays Celestine. Jeanne Moreau would star in Luis Buñuel’s grittier 1964 version.