THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME (William Dieterle, 1939)

It contains the set-piece wherein, swinging on a rope, Quasimodo saves Esmeralda, the gypsy girl with whom he is smitten, who has been framed for a capital crime and is about to be executed, and delivers her to church sanctuary, causing the people of Paris to send up unbridled cheers: with director William Dieterle’s cunning alternation of anxious quiet and the jubilant noise of just humanity, one of the most thrilling scenes in popular cinema. However, Hollywood’s opulent 1939 version of Victor Hugo’s 1831 novel, Notre Dame de Paris, set in the fifteenth century just after the Hundred Years’ War, updated the book’s sentiments, while also substantially revising the plot, to target by proxy the current bane of Europe’s existence, the Nazis. No one seems remotely French in Dieterle’s striking though superficial film, and the misapplication of German Expressionism to its material, although what one might expect from Dieterle, generates a stylistic headache. Artificiality abounds. Add to all that the self-pity and drippy pathos with which Charles Laughton swamps Quasimodo, the deaf, grotesque hunchback and church bell-ringer, and you have a recipe for box office and little else. “Why was I not made of stone like thee?” Quasimodo asks one of Notre Dame Cathedral’s gargoyles as he watches far below the girl whose life he saved—Hollywood’s Esmeralda isn’t burned alive—pass out of his life forever with another fellow. Hollywood, keeping him also alive, couldn’t resist giving Quasimodo at the last a killer line that reeks of synthetic tragedy.
     The best performance comes from Cedric Hardwicke as Frollo, Quasimodo’s guardian and Louis XI’s chief justice, who honestly believes that because he lusts after her that infernal gypsy girl must have bewitched him. How about she looks like Maureen O’Hara?—at 19?

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AGNES’S BEACHES (Agnès Varda, 2008)

Although a notch below her Vagabond (1985) and Les glaneurs et la glaneuse (2000), Belgian-born Agnès Varda’s farewell film, the autobiographical documentary Les plages d’Agnès, is her most deeply affecting piece. Throughout watching it, I was either in tears or close to tears. It isn’t too much to say that Agnès (pronounced on-YES), along with actress Ingrid Bergman, has been the most widely loved woman having had anything to do with the movies ever. With its tender feelings, witty inflections (both verbal and visual), Felliniesque pizzazz, snippets of actual documentary and breathtaking bits of reconstruction, Agnès’s last film—if her announced aim that it be this holds—will do nothing to interfere with our boundless affection for this remarkable photographer-turned-filmmaker and original member of the nouvelle vague.
     Certainly I was most moved—indeed, at moments shaken anew—at everything pertaining to her decades-long marriage to Jacques Demy, especially his death from AIDS-related cerebral hemorrhage in 1990. When Agnès, who appears throughout and contributes commentary, speaks of her dear Jacques, we feel the most poignant rush; how exacting is her low-keyed indirection at one point: Agnès recalling her expectation that the two of them would grow old together, “especially after we got back together.” Seeing these two throughout the years, his hair growing gray, her slender form becoming “pleasingly plump” (her description), implicates us all in its metaphor for the passage of time. The sight of their children and grandchildren is as sad as it is joyous; it is everything that life is.
     Life, however, includes everything we pour into it, and Varda’s spacious film—with its charming refrain of her facing the camera and walking backwards, space conforming to time timelessly—is full of visual and editing inventiveness.
     Agnès: “While I live, I will remember.”

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PROTECTOR (Marek Najbrt, 2009)

Marriage is a complicated thing; add to it the tumult of history and you have material so potentially rich as to cry out for the kind of rigor, formal beauty, and close, penetrating attention it receives in Protektor, from the Czech Republic and Germany. Beautifully written by Robert Geisler, Benjamin Tuček and Marek Najbrt, and directed for the ages by Najbrt, it is a devastating film, at least as wonderful as the Hungarian Bizalom (Confidence, 1980) by István Szabó on the subject of foreign occupation, whose dreadful atmosphere it, too, evokes brilliantly. Najbrt’s film is essential.
     The title is cunningly ironic. The film opens on a Prague street in 1942, with a man, journalist Emil Vrbata, bicycling home furiously; it is the day that the Butcher of Prague, Reinhard Heydrich, Reichsprotektor of Czechoslovakia, has been assassinated. The film flashes back to the late 1930s, showing us Emil and his wife (Marek Daniel and Jana Plodková, both superb), popular movie star Hana Vrbatová, whose greater success tries her husband’s professional self-esteem; he becomes her “protector” for real, however, when to spare her reprisals, and to court success for himself, he joins a radio station and propagandizes on-air for the Third Reich. Hana, you see, is Jewish. Emil’s compromises to protect the love of his life generate horrible results. Now he is ordered to divorce and denounce his wife. Proceeding ahead in time, even beyond the (now comprehensible) 1942 starting-point, the loop-around structure, suggesting a noose, pulls tight. Drawing on the closing shot of Pabst’s Die Dreigroschenoper (1931), Protektor ends with a hauntingly out-of-focus evocation of the Holocaust.
     Indeed, one of the film’s many ironies is that, although in color (the murky cinematography is a liability), it marshals silent-film techniques of German Expressionism—at first, intriguingly; ultimately, piercingly.

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YOU’RE A BIG BOY NOW (Francis Ford Coppola, 1966)

Returning after four decades to You’re a Big Boy Now, which in the interim has become a minor cult classic, is painful. The paramount cause is the 1987 post-divorce suicide of its star, Elizabeth Hartman, whose “great precision and style” as Barbara Darling, the principal reason for seeing the film, either for the first time or again, David Benedictus, the author of the novel, has cited in tribute to her. Barbara seduces 19-year-old virgin Bernie Chanticleer, whose father, library curator I. H. Chanticleer, refers to him as Big Boy for no apparent reason, perhaps by affectionate habit or as a veiled way of cutting him down, and thus adding to the number that his wife, Bernie’s domineering mother, keeps doing on Bernie, whom she warns away from girls on the ostensible grounds that he isn’t ready. Margery Chanticleer distrusts her own sex as much as Barbara Darling hates the opposite sex, examples of whom, like Bernie, she eats up and spits out.
     The film provides another reason to patronize it: the casting of two glorious actresses as Margery Chanticleer, with her massive hair and swinging earrings, and Miss Nora Thing, Bernie’s landlady: Geraldine Page and Julie Harris, whose scenes together sparkle like diamonds. Rip Torn is expert as Bernie’s father.
     But Peter Kastner is intolerably mopey as Bernard, and writer-director Francis Ford Coppola cannot handle satirical comedy, much less the saga of an adolescent boy bursting at the seams to be let into manhood. Coppola inflates everything—and cluelessly directs Karen Black, whose Amy modestly waits her turn for the boy she has long loved, telling Bernie at one point: “Please don’t call yourself a mess. You have no idea how much it hurts me when you call yourself a mess.”

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THE SONG OF SPARROWS (Majid Majidi, 2008)

Avaze Gonjeshk-ha is, by far, Majid Majidi’s finest achievement to date (best director, Fajr). The protagonist is Karim (Mohammad Amir Naji, best actor, Berlin, Asia-Pacific), who loses his job after one of the birds gets loose at the ostrich ranch where he works because he left the corral to retrieve daughter Haniyeh’s hearing aid, which had fallen down an unused, muck-filled well. The hearing aid now no longer works. The film thus begins with a quadruple loss, and indeed life as a series of losses is a principal theme here. Encasing these losses is Karim’s loss of his quiet rural existence; he finds a job when a stranger hops onto his moped—Karim is in Tehran to replace Haniyeh’s hearing aid, which it turns out he cannot afford to do—after someone mistakes him for a motorcycle taxi driver.
     Karim has embarked on a humbling odyssey that takes him from what in retrospect seems Paradise to a more complex place; for example, especially after he breaks a leg, he must cope with the shame of having his young children work to support him and their mother. His existence moves from being experiential to being, also, contemplative, and with very brief forward movements of the camera, whether towards Karim or an outdoor storage space, Majidi evokes the spiritual dimension of Karim’s odyssey.
     Patches of blue, the color of spirit here, crop up, such as when Karim carries by hand a blue-painted door that he has promised someone; a shot of him underneath it emphasizes life’s burdens, while an overhead long-shot dissolves the burdensomeness, suggesting Karim’s capacity to transport a bit of sky. Another overhead shot appears to be the star-dappled nighttime sky; the camera pulls up, revealing women’s hands at work on sequined fabric.

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