LOVE IN THE CITY: LOVE FOR MONEY (Carlo Lizzani, 1953)

“The most difficult hours of the night begin. . . .” — narrator

In 1953 Cesare Zavattini produced L’amore in città, which comprises six short films, each by a different filmmaker, in one instance, two filmmakers, one of them Zavattini, who also contributed to the scripts of all but one of the films. The “city” is contemporary Rome.
     Hauntingly scored by Mario Nascimbene, whose music for The Vikings (Richard Fleischer, 1958) has been spinning in my mind since childhood, Carlo Lizzani’s “Amore che si paga” purports to interview prostitutes. In his car, moving at the pace of their walking, the invisible interviewer stalks potential interviewees, or he halts them on a late-night street.
     Immersed in poverty, struggling to survive, these women have lost husbands, fiancés, boyfriends. One of these men has fled with the prostitute’s life-savings—a forward echo of Cabiria’s fate in Fellini’s film three years hence.
     Valli (self-named for Alida Valli?), among the oldest, is called “the Wanderer” by sister-prostitutes, we are told, because she rarely scores a trick; or does she project a phantom image of their own fate? Another, Liliana, was kicked out by her father when she was pregnant without benefit of marriage. She went to Rome in search of work. “Nobody gives you a job,” she explains, “if you have a kid.”
     Tilde is inside a bar drinking coffee after coffee, hoping to find a client. She shows us her shaking hands.
     What one’s lover left her: a receipt for a coffee and two tram tickets. They are all “wanderers.”
     Liliana has rejected suicide as an option—ironically, her father’s morality. Lizzani’s contribution, following a description of the journalistic aims of L’amore in città, comes first; immediately after, Antonioni’s shows us women who, presumably, have actually attempted suicide.

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THE WEDDING SONG (Karin Albou, 2008)

I did not care for writer-director Karin Albou’s first feature, La petite Jérusalem (2005), and her oh-so-sensitive follow-up, Le chant des mariées, dispirited me. Central is the close friendship between two teenaged girls, one Jewish and the other Muslim, which is stressed by their mutual envy and the onslaught of Nazi propaganda during the German occupation of Tunis beginning in 1942. Myriam, who gets to go to school, is pressured by her mother to marry Raoul, an older gentleman whom Myriam doesn’t love but who might be able to “buy” her some protection from the intensifying Jew-hating storm; meanwhile, although she isn’t allowed to go to school, Nour is going to marry Khaled, whom she loves and who is in love with her.
     Raoul’s willingness to barter with Nazis generates a crisis of conscience; meanwhile, Khaled, sucked in by Nazi propaganda, demands that Nour break with Myriam. (Albou downplays the element of gender-jealousy that might have made better sense of Khaled’s rage and petulance.) Nour and Khaled’s wedding night proves a yukky scene. Adaptable, almost to a fault, Khaled is not in bed with an inexperienced bride as relations hover outside the bedroom door awaiting the good news that the marriage has taken flight. Khaled thus cuts Nour’s foot to provide family with a blood-stained sheet testifying falsely to Nour’s just-lost virginity. I would have preferred that Khaled had cut his own foot.
     The film ends in a clinch—but girl-girl, not girl-boy. This brings to modest fruition the real intimacy with which Albou’s film has dealt. But “dealt” is a strong word to apply to so lame and lightweight a film as this. Indeed, there seems to be no more compelling basis for Nour and Myriam’s friendship than the script’s insistence on it.

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LOVE IN THE CITY: ATTEMPTED SUICIDE (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1953)

In 1953 Cesare Zavattini produced L’amore in città, which comprises six short films, each by a different filmmaker, in one instance, two filmmakers, one of them Zavattini, who also contributed to the scripts of all but one of the films. The “city” is contemporary Rome.
     Michelangelo Antonioni wrings from the omnibus film’s overarching theme of love the tormented love that “Tentato suicidio” pseudo-documents, that is to say, portrays. Nonprofessionally cast, the film purports to have gathered young women who have attempted suicide; with a sumptuous expanse of blank space overhead, they are lit so that they appear as shades or shadows: psychologically, death’s lasting imprint. Indeed, high-contrast black-and-white cinematography (by Gianni Di Venanzo, no less) yields throughout deep shadows gripping the forms of human figures.
     Three women are individually interviewed. The first, whose fiancé didn’t want her to work at a job or to read books, appears alternately in two positions: sitting on a public bench—an indication of the recent past; standing up for the interview. Sitting down implies relaxation, but ironical Antonioni uses these images to convey the defeatism and exhaustion that preceded Rosanna Carta’s suicide attempt (as a pedestrian in traffic) and to suggest relapses following her survival. The second interviewee—an 18-year-old girl—attempted suicide twice, once by drowning outdoors and the second time, indoors, by cutting her wrist. When we watch her begin to do this, we momentarily presume we are glimpsing a past suicide attempt; but her remark, “There was blood everywhere,” corrects our error. This is typical of Antonioni’s creation of confused time elements as a means of conveying the interviewee’s high level of past and recurrent anxiety.
     “Don’t you think life has its good moments?” the offscreen interviewer asks.
     Overwhelmingly bad ones, too.

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WHERE LOVE HAS GONE (Edward Dmytryk, 1964)

In the late fifties, Hollywood glamourpuss Lana Turner, once the “sweater girl” and “the girl next door,” became embroiled in a scandal involving the stabbing death of boyfriend Johnny Stompanato, an enforcer for gangster Mickey Cohen, presumably by Turner’s 15-year-old daughter. An inquest determined the motive as self-defense, but rumors arose that the girl, who was protected by juvenile delinquency laws, may have taken the fall for her mother, whose career was at stake. Novelist Harold Robbins may have been exploiting these rumors in his 1962 potboiler Where Love Has Gone (beautiful title, incidentally), which many at the time saw as a fictionalization of the Turner-daughter-Stompanato event. Two years later, the film version changed the names of major characters (Luke Carey became Luke Miller; Nora Hayden, Valerie Hayden)—I presume, as a sly tease regarding the origins of the plot. (There is a vague suggestion that the 1945 film of James M. Cain’s Mildred Pierce also influenced the plot.) As in the book, Nora/Valerie is no longer a movie star but a society “sculptress.” The weapon is a sculpting chisel.
     Edward Dmytryk, the “Hollywood Ten” member who recanted his courage, tiresomely directed—there isn’t a single shot of any interest—from a lame script by John Michael Hayes. (Hayes’s script for Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window, 1954, was his best.) Susan Hayward and, as Valerie’s imperious mother, Bette Davis both act superficially—in my minority opinion, Hayward a lot more convincingly and compellingly. Joey Heatherton comes off best, perhaps, as daughter and granddaughter Dani (Danielle). What fascinates me most, though, is the scandal-dipped nature of this cast. Not long before Turner’s ordeal, Hayward had an ordeal of her own: with its sensational disclosures, her widely publicized divorce from actor Jess Barker, which, among other things, cost her an Oscar (as Lillian Roth, in I’ll Cry Tomorrow, Daniel Mann, 1955). In the 1940s, rumors started that Warner Bros. covered up studio superstar Davis’s killing of an abusive spouse. Lastly, when she was fifteen, Heatherton married Dallas Cowboys wide receiver Lance Rentzel, who broke their marriage by exposing himself to a 10-year-old girl. Indeed, Rentzel had been caught flashing earlier—B.J.: Before Joey.

CHILDREN OF INVENTION (Tze Chun, 2009)

There is genuine merit to Children of Invention, the first, digitally videographed feature by a writer-director who has made several short films: Chicago-born, Boston area-raised, New York-based Tze Chun, whom Filmmaker magazine named one of the “25 New Faces of Independent Film” in 2007, and who is set to direct, in part, the film of Will Eisner’s graphic novel A Contract with God. Semi-autobiographical, Children of Invention deals with a family—a single mother, Elaine Cheng, with two children, Raymond and Tina—on the edge of economic extinction in a Boston suburb. Elaine, divorced, hasn’t received a check for months from her former husband, who is in Hong Kong, and the check she did receive was only a pittance of the court-ordered amount. Although Elaine has struggled to find work and has approached relations, she has lost their house and is currently living, along with her disappointed children, illegally, in a model apartment with a fake telephone. Innocently, she is currently involved in a pyramid scheme for which she is arrested by the police, without the knowledge of her children, to whom not even a phone call can connect her. Raymond, about 10, asserting responsibility for himself and his sister, about 7, assumes that their mother has abandoned them. With $500 from Grandma in a Boston bank, he makes modest inventions, such as a powered sphagetti twirler, for him and Tina to sell, at a considerable mark-up, streetside. Upon reunion with his mother, Raymond, as always all-business, is initially unforgiving.
     All three performances—Cindy Cheung as Elaine, Michael Chen as Raymond, adorably irritating Crystal Chiu as Tina—are very real and touching, and only rarely borderline sentimental. Characters in such compelling circumstance are seldom portrayed in American films. Sequences conveying the children’s dreams are slyly inserted. Only the last of these elements, however, pokes the piece above the level of visual storytelling. Everything interests; but there isn’t enough expressive meat on the bones.
     Numerous best film prizes for Chun, especially at Asian-American film festivals.