In the finest scene in Romanian filmmaker Radu Muntean’s depressing, cliché-ridden adultery drama, Marți, după Crăciun, a middle-aged couple come apart, perhaps irrevocably. Having decided to choose mistress over wife, Paul tells Adriana, “I’ve met someone, and we’re in love.” His casual manner salts Adriana’s wound at the point of its infliction. At their kitchen sink, between the ten-year marrieds are stacks of dishes in the open cabinet above the sink. At Adriana’s insistence, Paul discloses the other woman’s identity: their 9-year-old daughter Mara’s 26-year-old dentist. Adriana, initially civilized and constrained, pronounces, almost parentally, her great disappointment in Paul; but in their living room, she “loses it” and begins ferociously pummeling him. He struggles to hold her down on the couch. We may wonder whether Paul really did choose Raluca or, perhaps unconsciously, by his confession of adultery, left it to Adriana to make “the choice” for them both. Paul packs his things and moves out—just in time for Christmas.
All this is creepier yet; Paul and Adriana are played by real-life couple Mimi Brănescu and Mirela Oprişor (best actor, best actress, Gijón).
This film of confident long takes is better at providing acting opportunities for its cast than at creating expressive mise-en-scène. Above, I describe a wonderful shot of the imminently estranged couple, their backs toward us at the sink, stacked dishes—a likely symbol of their low-passion marriage—dividing them. Regrettably, most of this seemingly endless film is visually atrocious, its use of color—soft, silly color—a meaningless component and continual eyesore. Here, too, a single shot uses color as arresting punctuation: in the background and the middle of the frame, in Raluca’s living room, the dangling red Christmas sock rupturing the frame. Otherwise, Muntean’s ho-hummer is a dumb-bummer.
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TIH-MINH (Louis Feuillade, 1918)
January 2, 2012The territory of dreams: actual dreams, or visions; flashbacks, shifting and Chinese-boxing time; characters toting split identities, echoed by a series of material divisions, such as two distinct mansions; related to this, mirror-imaging, which is to say, opposite alternatives, including moral alternatives of human nature; shifting identities, at least, appearances, where disguise turns one character into someone new to our eye; instances of bondage and release, such as repeatedly befalls the titular heroine—and, in another example, the women imprisoned in the basement of the villains’ mansion, who are set free, creating an especially spooky image; lots of spooky apparitions and sights; seeming deaths that do not stick; and on and on and on.
In its repetitions and complexity as well, perhaps no other film is as dreamlike as Louis Feuillade’s phenomenal serial Tih-Minh. Made toward the end of the First World War, and perhaps anticipating a Europe of lingering menace, it is more lyrical than the silent crime films of Fritz Lang that it and other Feuillade crime serials may have inspired. The least interesting shots are the most prosaic ones, usually consisting of two standing men conversing with one another; formally, perhaps these incidents invoke the element of denial whereby dreamers deny they are dreaming and embrace their dreams as reality. Otherwise, the film—if you will allow me to call this 12-part serial a film—soars.
Jacques d’Athys has returned home from Indochina, accompanied by Tih-Minh, whose father is French, her mother, Asian. (In a prologue introducing the main characters, she is shown twice, once in the lotus position, and then “domesticated,” feet down and a cat in her lap.) Presumed to possess a treasure map in an ancient language, she is repeatedly kidnapped by a trio of avaricious villains, who administer an opium-based potion that induces amnesia, in which state she appears throughout much of the film. She has thus forgotten her father’s death and her intent to avenge it: a parody of Hamlet.
What beauteous imagery in haunting silence! Rowing across water, with its languorous suggestion of the unconscious; gathering flowers, here associated with the frailty of memory; hidden amidst bushes, a figure of surveillance, whom we alone espy, making us his mirror-image, each reflecting each. Feuillade’s Tih-Minh, lasting a dreamy seven hours (and, because of its open-endedness, lingering longer than that), may be cinema’s greatest orchestration of shadow and light.
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