HE WHO MUST DIE (Jules Dassin, 1957)

Following the academic, lame, turgid Du rififi chez les hommes (Rififi, 1955), Connecticut-born Jules Dassin, blacklisted in the U.S., made another film in France; this one, however, was stirring and without doubt his most personal one ever. Celui qui doit mourir is an adaptation of the novel O Hristos Xanastavronetai—The Christ Recrucified—by Greece’s Nikos Kazantzakis. Formally, it resembles a Greek tragedy.
     It is 1921; the village of Lycovrissi is under Turkish control. Father Grigoris accommodates the current conditions; if we project a word backward in time, he is a collaborationist. Let us be charitable; perhaps a repressed ambivalence on the part of this despicable priest contributes something to the extraordinary rebellion he sets into motion. Easter approaches, and along with it the annual Passion Play; in church, Grigoris assigns roles to villagers. When the café owner is announced as the Apostle James, congregants shout out: “He waters down the wine!” “He beats his wife!” The priest dismisses all this: “He will mend his ways.” Manolios, a shy, stammering shepherd, is chosen to play Jesus. “I’m not worthy,” he protests; but he shall become worthy, for the role assignments conform to villagers’ “hidden souls.”
     An event occurs that tests the moral mettle of Manolios and the others: a swarm of refugees—the film opens with a stark image of the burning of their village by invading Turks—enters Lycovrissi in desperate hope of being taken in. They are dying of hunger; but, to generate sufficient fear so that they will be locked out and sent on their way, Father Grigoris leads the charge that it is in fact contagious cholera that afflicts them. Privately, the priest has it the other way as well, declaring human starvation “God’s business” that safe, secure villagers should “leave . . . alone.” Father Fotis leads the refugees; the good spiritual father opposing Grigoris, he beseeches Manolios to tell his people the truth, that hunger, not cholera, afflicts the refugees. Manolios, still feeling unworthy, counters that his stammer will disrupt and cancel whatever attempt he makes. Reminding him about Moses, whose own stammer evaporated by the grace of God, Fotis tells Manolios: “[Y]ou won’t stammer to your people because they need to hear you speak.” Indeed, he speaks clearly to his brother and sister villagers, who, moved beyond measure, make an instant collection of food and other items for the refugees. Alas, Grigoris draws battle lines, Manolios is arrested and, when he refuses to proclaim publicly his “error,” he is beaten to death—inside the church. Already one of his compatriots, upon the death of his wealthy father, has evidenced the shepherd’s overwhelming moral influence by proclaiming, “My land is theirs—meaning, the refugees’. But such a property transfer is not permitted, and forces approach to mow down with a thousand bullets refugees and their local supporters. Dassin’s heart is in the way he ends the film; the action stops short of massacre. We are left with an image of fabulous courage—and the ironical certainty that if ever another Jesus should appear on Earth he would be handed the same fate.
     Powerful stuff, this—and Peter Van Eck, as Manolios, gives the performance of a lifetime.

THE SARAGOSSA MANUSCRIPT (Wojciech J. Has, 1964)

Finely photographed by Mieczysław Jahoda, delicately crafted, Wojciech Jerzy Has’s Rękopis znaleziony w Saragossie is based on Jan Potocki’s 1814 novel. (Count Potocki committed suicide the following year.) Jerry Garcia, of The Grateful Dead, donated a print of this, his favorite film, to the Pacific Film Archive on condition that he could revisit it upon request. Others who have also declared it their favorite movie include filmmakers Luis Buñuel, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese and Lars von Trier. Coppola and Scorsese helped pay for its restoration.
     The early scene in Saragossa, Spain, in which two military officers on opposing sides in the Napoleonic Wars discover the titular manuscript and pore over it, seems strikingly Buñuelian in its slyly, quietly explosive humor. One officer finds that the manuscript takes up exploits of his grandfather, Captain Alfons van Worden (Zbigniew Cybulski, acting very broadly), and he cannot help but read on, along with the enemy officer, whom he should instantly have arrested. Buñuel likely was also delighted by the film’s wit at the expense of the Spanish Inquisition.
     The film is famous for its plethora of stories, including stories-within-stories, and with young Alfons’s series of abrupt awakenings from sleep, often underneath gallows or around corpses—an evocation of humanity’s propensity for endangering itself that ironically reflects on the wartime “present” in the film’s narrative frame. By writing about it, this talky, too often too dull film can sound a lot better than it is. I saw the whole thing on VHS some time ago; watching it on DVD, I got through two of the film’s near three hours in length.
     Ambiguity as to what is real and what is imagined doesn’t weigh in as deliciously here as it does in some of Jacques Rivette’s films.

THREE MONKEYS (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 2008)

Politicians must be the same the world over. Üç maymun, for which Nuri Bilge Ceylan won the directorial prize at Cannes, opens at night with a single car in view, mostly in long-shot and, although the film is in color, eerily in grays, such as charcoal. Servet, the politician in question, is running for national office, but right now he is fighting off sleep behind the wheel of his car. He is alone. The whole scene is dreamy, as indeed is its unseen moment of punctuation, which we distantly hear—the cry of a woman: Servet’s hit from which he will run, hoping to maintain the viability of political ambition. What’s one woman more or less?
     Well, something. His car did the damage, after all. Whom can Servet get to take the fall? Answer: the one who works for a living driving this car—Servet’s chauffeur, Eyüp (Yavuz Bingöl, giving the best performance). Prison is for the likes of Eyüp, who will be rewarded by his wealthy employer, once he is released, with a load of money with which he can better take care of his wife, Hacer (Hatice Aslan, Ceylan’s wife), and their aimless teenaged son, Ismail. That’s the plan—one predicated on the socioeconomic power that Servet possesses and Eyüp lacks. Eyüp’s consent really has been made for him insofar his station in life has trained him in class lines, deference and, of course, gratitude for whatever comes his way. Servet’s “plan” is an opportunity for Eyüp to serve.
     The crisscrossing bars between them when Ismail visits his father in prison underscore how difficult parenting is under such circumstances. The next scene, between mother and son in their apartment, reminds us that parenting is hard under any circumstances. But between Hacer and Ismail a patriarchic, even misogynistic culture intrudes, as well as the ever present problem of money, making matters worse.
     Why does Servet not take care of Eyüp’s family immediately rather than delaying the entirety of his “gift” until Eyüp’s release. I am afraid the answer is nasty. Thus is Servet able to lure Hacer into his office; she comes calling for an advance and perhaps surrogate fatherliness for Ismail. In an ironical twist, one day Servet ends up chauffeuring his chauffeur’s wife home. They become lovers, and he leaves an envelope of cash—the advance—on top of her dresser: a power move calculated to make Hacer feel like a whore. Ismail, whose vomitting has sent him back home from the train station, derailing temporarily his planned visit to his father, hears his mother having sex with someone and peeks through the keyhole; we see his rigidly framed eye peeking in. When alone with his mother, he slaps her repeatedly, quickly across the face—his flicking hand like the darting tongue of a snake. He doesn’t grasp the context that we do; he doesn’t understand that his mother’s adultery, like her husband’s consent to the boss’s “plan,” is not a freely made choice. Rather, it is dictated by a deficiency of power. But, then, neither does Hacer, who is guilt-ridden, understand. As it happens, everyone beats or mauls Hacer, including her spouse and her lover, who ends up dead—murdered. (I’m not naming names.) She is everyone’s scapegoat, including her own; thanks to Ceylan, at least we see the larger picture.
     Visually this is an exquisite film. Shot after shot inside the apartment blankets the space in darkness and converts its inhabitants to deep shadows while a large window displays light outside. In one ironical shot, it is bright inside the apartment, but the one human figure available to our sight has his or her back—I forget which—to the camera. A few shots are bathed in a mild golden glow, as though sunlight is no more than embryonic in these people’s lives.
     A forlorn kitten haunts both the street outside the train station and the street outside the apartment. A young boy, dripping wet, haunts the apartment and just outside: Eyüp in an earlier incarnation, we learn from an old photograph on the wall—when perhaps Eyüp thought the world was all before him. Ironically, the vision comes first to a crestfallen, exhausted Ismail. This is thematically precise: the son is haunted by his father’s past.
     For me, the film slips into a facsimile of cut-rate Chabrol once Eyüp has served his nine months and gives birth to a fit of jealousy; but it regains its minimalist grandeur in the closing shots.
     The Turkish title translates as Three Monkeys: See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.