DUELLE (UNE QUARANTAINE) (Jacques Rivette, 1976)

Duelle is one of Jacques Rivette’s dreamiest, most elegant, most evocative “created realities.” Unfolding in an eerily vacated Paris, symbolical and expressionistic, beginning on the last night of winter’s new moon, it suggests a level of unconsciousness that’s lit, sparingly, from a yet deeper level of unconsciousness. It begins with the sound of an unseen train that may be akin to a sleeping dreamer’s heartbeat; the first image is that of a hotelier’s shaky attempt to balance herself on a huge inflated ball. Think about it; think way back. Remember in childhood when it seemed magical that trains could remain upright on their tracks? I hope you do, because if you do, Rivette’s film from the associative get-go will seem to be your own dream, whatever else it may also seem to be. One feels pleasantly immersed in it.
      Partly inspired by Hollywood’s The Seventh Victim (Mark Robson, 1943), produced by Val Lewton, in which a girl searches New York for her missing sister, Duelle involves a number of “searches,” including a mysterious hotel guest’s search for a Lord Christie (hm), involvement in which she impresses Lucie, the hotelier. Indeed, there’s a good deal of sleuthing about in this dark, fabulous adventure that everywhere suggests Rivette’s delirious fascination with female spirituality.
     The two principal characters are Viva, the Sun Goddess, and Leni, the Moon Goddess, who both search for a magical stone, the agency by which, each hopes, she can enter the human, mortal realm. Combine this with Leni’s ostensible search for former lover “Lord Christie,” and a radical reinterpretation of Jesus emerges, shifting God the father’s sacrifice of his son to the son himself, whose time on Earth thus expresses his own desire and self-determination. In reality, though, which is to say, in fantasy, Leni is initially searching for Pierrot, to whom, she hopes, his sister, Lucie, will lead her. Pierrot, who also engages Viva’s interest and desire and is a bone of contention between the deities, seems to be what makes mortality so attractive to them both; however, Pierrot’s identity is no less symbolical than that of the film’s female characters. It may be that this diminutive male figure suggests the restriction, the reassuring definition, that being a goddess denies the solar and lunar deities. In the film, these complicated connections among characters are smoothed out in intricate fluidity.
     One of the handful of underlit settings is the dance hall, where Leni proves she is named after Riefenstahl when, dressed in mannish attire, she dances with a female partner: a quiet instance of intrigue on various levels. Upstairs are equally dark rooms where guests populate esoteric gaming tables. Another such setting, and the darkest and most mysterious one, is an empty underground train station featuring solemn aquariums of large, sleek fish and, perhaps, underwater mammals—bonsai whales and sharks: on one level, a projected realm of submerged consciousness; on another, sleepier, spookier level, an allusion to the aquarium where the illicit lovers meet in Orson Welles’s The Lady from Shanghai (1947). In both films, female characters suggest fractured and alternate identities, although Rivette has replaced Welles’s angularity and savagery with silk.
     At least one soul has complained that the film degenerates into a reductive scheme involving the spilling of sacrificial blood; but, of course, this suggests a film-wide motive paralleling that of its discontent, “searching” goddesses. Mortal life is a diminishing of eternal, immortal life; but that doesn’t mean that nobody wants it. If in doubt, simply ask the next goddess you meet—or take Welles’s implicit word for it that Rita Hayworth wanted much more, which is to say, much less, than to be endlessly adored. Rivette’s film likewise documents at dawn the death of a goddess.
     This heady, voluptuous film was originally intended as the launch of a tetralogy, to which, as it happens, Histoire de Marie et Julien (2003) belatedly contributed. At least here in the States, we tend to think of Duelle as the darker follow-up to Rivette’s more playful Céline et Julie vont en bateau (1974), although his Noroît (1976), which I have yet to see, fell in between.

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THE CANDIDATE

Out of the crack of the moon,
a lizard slips,
salmon-pink, brown-spotted,
and is instantly devoured
by my sainted cat.
The walls, though upright, lie still;
glasses touch, creating
a ripple of sound,
a touch of unease,
the loss of an eye,
the drop of the moon,
a terrible song
underneath the earth.

We barely move.
The plot is tight.
The bathroom sink drips,
along with our skeleton chains
and the distant clap of a bell
from a delicate church.
Milk moves in,
flooding our veins
had we been unlucky
enough to be born.

THE MAN WITH A CROSS (Roberto Rossellini, 1943)

The rough, powerful conclusion to his so-called Fascist Trilogy, Roberto Rossellini’s L’uomo dalla croce revolves around an Italian priest, a humble military chaplain, who ministers to the wounded and the dying, and Russians scrambling for refuge after being shelled from their homes, in a bombed-out shack on the Eastern Front during the Second World War. Throughout an apocalyptic night, artillery fire, outside, flashes darkness into bursts of light. At dawn, the chaplain, himself dying, crawls to deliver the message of God’s love to a dying man half of whose face has been shot and burned off; their deaths dove-tail in time. The camera finds the pocket on which the chaplain’s insignia, the cross, is sewn.
     The opening panning shot is phenomenal: doves populating a tree, mixed company at a distance in and hovering near a lake, young men reclining on the ground, soaking in the sun. This seeming image of leisure and tranquility is overturned when the men put back on their military uniforms. The film to follow provides a gripping portrait of war.
     The imprint of Mussolini’s political intent bears down mostly in the onscreen script that ultimately appears. Only an insane person would find this film as offensive, say, as Hollywood’s warmongering Yankee Doodle Dandy (Michael Curtiz, 1942). Indeed, Rossellini’s humanism opposes war, passionately, and expresses full compassion for all its victims.
     It is largely the urgency of Rossellini’s nascent neorealism that assists the film in eluding the script’s schematic quality and labored ironies, for instance, the death of a man as a baby, only yards away, is being born. The chaplain abandons this dying man in order to baptize the newborn, returning in time to pronounce the man dead. For me, at least, human responsibility weighs in, here, problematically.

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A BETTER LIFE (Chris Weitz, 2011)

Drawing narrative inspiration in large measure from Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (1948), A Better Life revolves around undocumented Mexican immigrant Carlos Galindo’s hopes for a better future for his 14-year-old son, Luis, who was born in the U.S. Long since abandoned by their wife and mother, father and son live in a tenement shack in East Los Angeles. Carlos works seven days a week as a gardener; Luis goes to high school, except when he doesn’t, either playing hookey or having been suspended. Together, they bond as they search for Carlos’s truck, which he needs for work and has been stolen from him.
     Directed by Chris Weitz, the film began as a story by Roger L. Simon that Eric Eason turned into a script. Eason wrote and directed the excellent Manito (2002), for which Bicycle Thieves also was a major influence. However, A Better Life, in cataloguing the hardships of undocumented immigrants, is vastly more sentimental than either Bicycle Thieves or Manito. At times, it plays like a father-son tearjerker as Carlos knocks his head and heart against the stone wall of his son’s diffidence, disrespect and all-round punkishness. Once upon a time, Joan Crawford might have played Carlos in drag.
     Despite his surprise best actor Oscar nomination, Demián Bichir is a tad too idealized to convince as Carlos—but he has many fine moments of endearing humility. For me, Bichir’s best moment comes early on, when in the morning he gently opens the door to his son’s bedroom (Luis has the one bed; Carlos sleeps on the living room couch) to peek in, to see his boy innocently asleep, gently closes the door and knocks, to wake up Luis for school. A much more interesting performance is given by round-faced José Julián as Luis, who is quick-trigger violent, seemingly impervious to his father’s humane example, which in fact embarrasses him. Emotionally elastic, Julián (for me) dominates the film, compelling us to ponder the spiritual cost to Luis of his father’s wish for his materialistic advancement. Concomitantly, we note Carlos’s—hence, Luis’s— exclusion from Sunday Mass; one of the film’s best shots finds Carlos, traveling by bus, catching a poignant glimpse of the Cross inside a church.
     The clear-cut plot culminates in the inhuman deportation of Carlos back to Mexico. A four-year-later coda shows Luis, now adopted by his Aunt Anna, assimilated into the straight-laced lifestyle she has asserted. Message: He will forget his father as he has already forgotten his mother—although his resistance to the temptation of gang life suggests his father’s continuing influence and legacy. This is followed by an ambiguous, and implicitly grisly, finish: Carlos’s return to the U.S., led by a coyote, as he enters the desert that may kill him, just as it kills so many who cross the border from Mexico. We note what the filmmakers refrain from showing: a father-son reunion, the implication being that Carlos and Luis never again meet. The naïve will interpret this ending one way; realists will interpret it quite differently. Clever cowards will invoke the convenient term, “open-ended.”
     You can lead some people to water; but, if they are determined not to, you cannot make them think.

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NINE LIVES (Arne Skouen, 1957)

A “true” adventure recounting Norwegian Jan Baalsrud’s escape from German captors during World War II, Arne Skouen’s Ni Liv is beautifully framed by shots in a Swedish hospital corridor. The opening one shows Baalsrud’s assisted entry following an almost unimaginable ordeal during which he nearly froze to death. The closing shot shows Baalsrud, assisted by flanking hospital staff, attempting to walk down the corridor, away from the camera. The camera pulls back as, up ahead, Baalsrud pulls away from those helping him and takes two or three steps on his own. How I wish the flashback that comprises most of the film was at the same expressive level as this conclusive shot.
     Unfortunately, however, this is, overall, a tedious, overwrought melodrama, despite a fine passage or two and a smattering of real jolts to the heart. The black-and-white film, which is generally primitive in appearance, is made especially ridiculous by its intermittently eruptive score by Gunnar Sønstevold.
     Much of the action finds Baalsrud dodging German bullets and surviving blizzard conditions amidst Norway’s snow-covered mountains en route to neutral Sweden. A fine passage dramatizes his hallucinations as stress and cold tempt his slippage into insanity. A couple of expressionistic flurries cannot overturn, though, the prosaic and literal nature of most of this film.
     Twenty-one years ago, Norwegian television conducted a poll to determine what homegrown film viewers considered the best one ever made. Ni liv garnered the most votes. It is still the case, apparently, that many Norwegians are fanatical about this film. One wonders what such people think of Ibsen and Hamsun—if, indeed, they think about such giants at all.