ADRIFT (Ján Kadár, Elmar Klos, 1969)

From Hungarian novelist Lajos Zilahy’s 1928 Valamit visz a víz (Something Is Adrift in the Water), Ján Kadár and Elmar Klos’s Hrst plná vody had a difficult birth. The 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia interrupted its filming, requiring relocation and re-shooting; the language shifted from Czech to Slovak, retitling it: Touha zvaná Anada—Desire Called Anada. Imre Gyöngyössy had written the time-juggling script, with both co-directors contributing.
     Adrift is challenging, somewhat frustrating, but intermittently very beautiful. Yanos is a fisherman who one day makes a bewitching catch: a girl, not a fish, whom he rescues from drowning. This is Anada, whom he brings into his hut. She is an embodiment of desire to whom his wife, Zuska, and teenaged son, Petr, are also drawn. But it is Yanos whose psyche is unhinged by her, secretly stalking her and becoming jealous of other men she attracts.
     Visually, the filmmakers create a compelling sense of Yanos’s interiority. At the beginning, the camera enters the hut by withdrawing from outdoors through a window (Petr is seated, reading to his sick, bedridden mother who has fallen asleep), followed by Yanos’s doorway entrance, shot from inside the hut. Much of the tragic film consists literally of Yanos’s interiority: his thoughts, which we hear as voiceover accompanying images of Yanos, who at other times converses outdoors in the dark with imaginary men, guilty projections of his. Intriguingly, after the rescue in the past time-frame, Anada appears in the bed where Zuska battles typhus in the present, suggesting a causal link between Yanos’s sexual obsessiveness and Zuska’s poor health.
     Shots of the water project Yanos’s unconscious, and his glimpse of Anada wading naked, including her reappearance after a heartstoppingly long dip below the surface, is as heady as anything imaginable.

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Z (Costa-Gavras, 1969)

From the novel by Vassili Vassilikos, based on the 1963 murder of opposition party deputy Gregorios Lambrakis, a liberal, that led to the military overthrow of democracy in Greece, Z—in ancient Greek, “He lives”—won a plethora of prizes, including the foreign-language Oscar and “best film” from the National Society of Film Critics and New York critics. The opening movement, culminating in the death of the unnamed Deputy, is indeed taut and brilliant, and the closing one close to shattering, with its series of freeze frames accompanied by oral reports and script indicating the legal and lethal outcomes of various participants in the crime, witnesses, those involved in the cover-up, the investigating magistrate, and the young photojournalist reporting the case (a closing technique, introduced here, that became standard practice in movies and television); but the long middle is slack, dull, occasionally silly, despite a host of marvelous performances (Charles Denner as the Deputy’s dedicated lawyer, François Périer as the Public Prosecutor, Jacques Perrin, who also co-produced, as the photojournalist with his persistent camera hidden in open view and, above all, Jean-Louis Trintignant—best actor, Cannes—as the magistrate, who is, despite his right-wing politics, relentless in pursuing justice), clever Oscar-winning editing by Françoise Bonnot, and evocative music by Mikis Theodorakis. The film’s Greek-born director, Costa-Gavras, who wrote the script along with Jorge Semprun, has since made much better Leftist films on political themes: State of Siege (1972), Missing (1982), Amen. (2002). Costa-Gavras, along with other members of his team, were banned from Greece.
     Every guilty person was found guilty, “even the generals,” the Deputy’s widow is informed: “It’s as if he were still alive.” Her face, though, shows this is not so and can never be—a studied, rigged moment in a superficial film.

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HUMAN DESIRE (Fritz Lang, 1954)

Flimsy, unconvincing, at times ludicrous version of Zola’s La bête humaine, updated to the present, divested of naturalism and moved to New Jersey. The script is a load of melodramatic clichés, with heavy-handed references to the Korean War to remind us that its author, Alfred Hayes, helped write Rossellini’s magnificent Paisà (1946) about the Second World War. Fritz Lang, who directed, opens Human Desire with a stunning hommage to Jean Renoir’s 1938 film version: forwardly propelled train’s-eye shots over tracks and through bridges and a tunnel, visually encapsulating two ideas: the penetration of an obsessive mind; fate. Little of interest follows despite faint echoes of the Renoir film and traces of Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944) and Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place (1950). Lang, who regretted the sanitization of the material that fifties Hollywood imposed, considered the film vastly inferior to Renoir’s. He was correct, although La bête humaine, starring Jean Gabin in a powerhouse performance, is also not among the brilliant lights in the Renoir œuvre.
     Glenn Ford stars as Jeff Warren, who returns from three years in Korea to reclaim his job as a train engineer—a hifalutin description of a brakeman. Ford, who had as little talent as Rock Hudson, was a dumb jerk. I recall a television appearance where he explained to host Mike Douglas that acting classes that have students imagining they are chairs were not for him because he had no intention of ever playing a chair. Of course, artists (whatever their medium) in preparation for a work of art perform exercises that they do not intend to show an audience. The whole purpose of the acting exercise that Ford disparaged is for actors to empty themselves of ego, creating an imaginative empty space that they can then fill with whatever character they will play. It is not hard to understand Ford’s difficulty with such a tack as he never gave a single performance that wasn’t full of himself and nothing or no one else. His Warren is a perfect example.
     This is an odious beast beset with “human desire”: at an inquest into a murder, Warren refrains from telling the truth about what he saw onboard the train where the murder occurred, because he wants to have sex with the married woman whom his lie is shielding; but nothing of this self-serving motive, or Warren’s capacity for it, is at all visible in Ford’s superficial projection of personality. Indeed, Ford’s own smugness, sanctimoniousness and complacency eventually take over the role, leaving the protagonist a cipher—at best, a non-human beast. One imagines that Ford never searched himself to find the points where his own character and Warren’s crossed. Rather, he clung to a self-idealization that he projected onto Warren, just as he had done with all the other characters he played.
     Somewhat intriguingly, Warren and work colleague Carl Buckley, the husband of the woman he beds and also the killer, seem to be split halves of a single personality. Is Buckley what Warren would have become had he stayed home rather than go to war?—or does Buckley’s becoming a killer reflect Warren’s becoming a killer in combat despite Warren’s insistence there’s a difference? I don’t know; but our first view of Buckley makes him seem just as “nice” as Warren—then Buckley loses his job, which he desperately needs to feel like a man, and discovers that his wife has been unfaithful. Warren ends up feeling even more morally superior than he used to because he resists lover Vicki Buckley’s attempt to get him to murder her husband. Looked at from a different angle, Warren abandons Vicki to her fate: Carl strangles his wife onboard the train that Jeff, the blind lug, is helming.
     All this is psychological doodling; only Buckley’s theft of his first victim’s watch—his symbolical attempt to master wife, time and fate—resonates. The rest is late forties/fifties nonsense.
     Burnett Guffey’s shadowy black-and-white cinematography is worthy of a great noir, as is Daniele Amfitheatrof’s relentless, ominous score.
     Broderick Crawford gets nowhere playing Buckley, but the next year, in Fellini’s Il bidone, he would give his greatest performance.

FLOWING (Mikio Naruse, 1956)

Isuzu Yamada gives the performance of a lifetime as Otsuta (best actress, Kinema Junpo, Blue Ribbon, Mainichi Film Concours Awards), who runs a financially struggling, heavily in-debt geisha house in Tokyo, as the custom fades into history, in Mikio Naruse’s Nagareru, based on Aya Koda’s novel. Yamada is highly particular, delicately nuanced, complex, forceful, sad and moving as Otsuta perseveres, becoming a figure of dramatic irony, like Garbo’s searing Grusinskaya in Grand Hotel (Edmund Goulding, 1932), insofar as we know her fate when she does not.
     Nearly as wonderful as Yamada, Kinuyo Tanaka, indeed a greater actress, plays Rika, who, mourning the loss of spouse and child, and fleeing the provincial strictures of her in-laws, becomes Otsuta’s loyal maid. As such she is called Oharu—for us, Tanaka’s greatest role (The Life of Oharu, Kenji Mizoguchi, 1952): beyond a postmodernist flourish, a distancing device by which Mika becomes the observant, caring outsider who flows in and (as Katsuyo anticipates) will flow out of Tsuta House, an embodiment of Japanese continuity.
     Indeed, Naruse begins and ends this beautiful film with shots of a flowing river, boats upon it, in long-shot, moving. Inside this narrative frame there’s little movement, however; rather, static shots from a variety of camera positions accumulate into the suggestion of characters in a boxed-in domain, insulated from the tide of time working against them. Movement comes in dance: Otsuta’s little granddaughter, practicing so that one day she can be a geisha; drunk, having just been jilted by her lover, a geisha brandishing bravado. And movement comes hauntingly: Tsuta House’s former pet cat, on its own, walking a ledge at night.
     Hideko Takamine plays Katsuyo, Otsuto’s elder daughter, who practices using a sewing machine. One day she will have to support her mother and herself.

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AIMLESS BULLET (Yu Hyun-mok, 1961)

A raw, stark fusion of film noir and Italian Neorealism, with added flavor from Gorky’s The Lower Depths (which Akira Kurosawa had filmed in Japan four years earlier), Yu Hyun-mok’s Obaltan, from South Korea, portrays one family’s endless hardship and despair in Liberty Village, a dead-end postwar shanty town in Seoul. The seven family members live together in tiny accommodations; the eldest, perpetually bedridden, periodically shouts, “Let’s get out of here!” This may not be possible. Planning on robbing a bank (it will take the police ten minutes to apprehend him!), one of the sons begs his sister to take a break from prostituting herself to U.S. soldiers that night, and the other son’s trip to hospital, for the birth of his third child, becomes a trip to the mortuary.
     Chul-ho slaves as a clerk but appears to make little headway in life. A cab driver christens him an “aimless bullet” because he cannot decide on his local destination—a sign that he is rudderless in a pointless existence. God, Chul-ho himself suggests, forgot to give him a purpose. Throughout, Chul-ho is tormented by two toothaches, one on each side. Despite his job, he cannot afford a dentist, but as soon as he has the money, he goes, only to discover that the dentist will extract only one tooth that day—and indeed the lone extraction turns him into a bloody mess on the back seat of the taxi cab.
     Dark, flamboyant, incapable of turning a blind eye to social realities, at times melodramatic, hauntingly scored by Kim Seong-tae, Obaltan records Chul-ho’s long, anguished walk out of The Lost Weekend (Billy Wilder, 1945) and inserts quick subjective (point-of-view) shots to suggest how trapped inside the oppressiveness of the objectively rendered teeming urban environment humanity is.

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