JULIETTE, OR KEY OF DREAMS (Marcel Carné, 1951)

Vastly underrated, wrongly dismissed by some as being “cold,” Marcel Carné’s Juliette ou La clef des songes engages the beauty of romance and the power of love. It is certainly not the equal of Jean Cocteau’s splendiferous Beauty and the Beast (1946), with which it shares some elements; but then what is? Carné has made here one of his most magical, powerful and irresistible works.
     The protagonist is Michel, who begins in jail for (we later find out) stealing from his employer so that he might treat Juliette, the girl he loves, to a memorable date. Now disconsolate for being separated from her, he dreams a dream of searching for Juliette in what turns out to be the Land of Lost Memories, where everyone is eager to appropriate anyone else’s memories as his or her own. Michel’s memories of Juliette, however, never dim.
     He finds her in an enchanted forest and, by the power of his love for her, draws her heart from forgetfulness to a recollection of how much they meant to each other. Alas, the lord of a sumptuous castle, insisting that they are a long-term and loving couple, has designs on her and can sweeten the seduction with riches far beyond the poor boy’s means. Nevertheless, Michel succeeds in persuading the townfolk to storm the castle to rescue Juliette. In the Room of Locked Doors, they discover a box of wedding bands and, behind each door, a blood-stained bridal outfit. There’s no doubt who the owner of the castle is: Bluebeard! And now Bluebeard and Juliette are about to wed, but no one will help Michel intervene to stop the wedding-murder. The wedding must proceed, for the people have already forgotten what they encountered in the Room of Locked Doors. Michel wakes up from his dream’s bliss-turned-to-grief-and-horror. His employer, who resembles Bluebeard exactly, is dropping all charges against him at the insistence of his fiancée: Juliette. Michel embarks on a tragic course that surely must have brought down the Catholic Church’s condemnation on this heartbreaking film.
      Gérard Philipe is superb as Michel—tender, charming, impulsive, irrevocably in love. Michel’s joyful little dance as, suddenly free, he heads down an unfamiliar road in his dream-accessed quest to find his beloved culminates in the fierce passion of his attempt to keep Juliette from being killed; both show Michel epitomizing youth. Suzanne Cloutier, Orson Welles’s Desdemona (Othello, 1951), is excellent as Juliette.
     Our memories of love are sacred ground. If you believe this, you must see this film—although it may make you feel your heart will burst.
     From a play by Georges Neveux; black-and-white cinematography by Henri Alëkan; the score, by Joseph Kosma, was honored at Cannes.

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HOME BEFORE DARK (Mervyn LeRoy, 1958)

At 136 minutes, Mervyn LeRoy’s low-key Home Before Dark, about a woman back home after she is released from a mental hospital, probably requires a bottle of good unblended scotch to navigate and get through; but it’s largely absorbing, attractively wintry gray (the black-and-white cinematography is by Joseph Biroc), and beautifully acted by Jean Simmons in a complex, richly textured performance that may be her finest.
     Charlotte Bronn, in her mid-twenties, suffered a mental breakdown, convinced that her husband, Arnold, and her stepsister, Joan, whom she has idolized since childhood, were having an affair. At hospital she accepted that her suspicions were a delusion, but now, home again, she is mistrustful again and backsliding into insanity.
     Charlotte Bronn’s name suggests the extent to which Eileen Bassing’s novel, which Bassing herself (along with Robert Bassing) co-adapted, is a cockeyed variation on Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. The basic plot also suggests elements of Rachel Field’s novel And Now Tomorrow, with deafness rather than mental illness in play, and which became a film directed by Irving Pichel (1944)—with this exception: in LeRoy’s film there is no romantic infidelity; Arnold Bronn may be disenchanted with Charlotte, but he hasn’t strayed, much less become a melodramatic partner in treachery aimed against her. What fascinates as much as anything in Home Before Dark is the interior battle that Charlotte wages to regain and retain her mental health. Strengthening this effort is her double realization of the state of her marriage: her husband no longer loves her; her stepsister, knowing this, is scheming to corral Arnold for her own. Charlotte must divorce herself from her tendency to emulate Joan, who really is a kind of enemy: someone who by drawing her idolatry since childhood has obstructed her ability to “become herself.” Charlotte’s fight to achieve self-realization is the crux and summit of Simmons’s exquisite characterization, and the mirror-opposite of her stunning Ophelia’s (Hamlet, Laurence Olivier, 1948) “giving up.”
     LeRoy has given Home Before Dark an appealing fineness, perhaps to contrast it with the theatrical blatancy of his enormously popular The Bad Seed (1956). However, there are things about it that dismay me. I don’t like the condescending convenience of Jacob Diamond, the college English professor who by offering Charlotte a romantic alternative to Arnold obscures the thrilling battleground of her fight for stability. I also wonder at an allegedly Jewish character that gets so worked up over Christmas. Jake, like the Jewish boy in The Dark at the Top of the Stairs (Delbert Mann, 1960), is Jewish in name only: a reflection of the extent to which Jews remained “outsiders” to the American mainstream even as the U.S. approached the New Frontier.

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LE GRAND JEU (Jacques Feyder, 1933)

“Who knows what makes us cry.”

Le grand jeu (The Full Deck) is an engrossing, highly entertaining melodrama that flashes glints of considerably more depth than Jacques Feyder and Charles Spaak’s chiseled script and Feyder’s roomy, flowing direction can deliver on. I enjoyed almost every minute of its two hours but, apart from one brilliant performance, I could not hold anything in it dear.
     Nondescript Pierre Richard-Willm—Feyder had wanted Charles Boyer—plays Pierre Martel, who embezzles money from business clients in Paris to support the lavish lifestyle that his infatuation for society girlfriend Florence demands. His family covers his debts on the condition that he leave France; when Florence won’t accompany him, he joins the Foreign Legion in Morocco, hoping to forget her. How can he, though, when Irma, a prostitute at the local bar-brothel, resembles her? They couple; periodically she will say or do something that convinces Pierre Irma is Florence, taunting him. Is this possible? Florence is a cold blonde; Irma, a warm, sensitive, vulnerable brunette. Marie Bell, her voice dubbed in by someone else as Irma, plays both roles.
     In part, Pierre’s impulse to expose Irma as Florence derives from his dogging guilt over the switch in his own identity; Pierre Martel has become Pierre Muller—an index of the disgrace he feels he has brought to his family. Yet even we sometimes share his uncertainty about Irma, if not his rage. After all, we recognize Bell. Thus Feyder’s film anticipates Idiot’s Delight (Clarence Brown, 1939), The Lady Eve (Preston Sturges, 1941) and Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958), among others. Although not so dark or moody, in its fatalism Le grand jeu also anticipates the poetic realism of Marcel Carné, who just happens to have been Feyder’s assistant on this film.
     Indeed, the film’s title refers to the “card-readings” by which Blanche, the brothel owner’s wife, distracts herself from a miserable marriage and foretells Pierre’s tragic fate. (Ironically, the Frenchman who has assumed a German last name will meet his end fighting Germans.) Françoise Rosay, already long-married to Feyder, is shattering as Blanche. An uproariously belly-padded Charles Vanel is good as Clément, Blanche’s husband, who can’t keep his hands off the merchandise, so to speak.

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A DANGEROUS METHOD (David Cronenberg, 2011)

The ridiculously titled A Dangerous Method is perhaps Canada’s David Cronenberg’s most infuriating film. It more or less tries to dim the spotlight that two other films nearly a decade earlier cast on Sabina Spielrein, the Russian Jewish Freudian psychoanalyst and pioneering child psychologist whom the Nazis murdered, along with her two young children. While I wouldn’t recommend Roberto Faenza’s The Soul Keeper (2002) to anyone, both it and Elisabeth Márton’s brilliant documentary My Name Was Sabina Spielrein (2002) reclaim Spielrein from the obscurity to which male chauvinism had hoped to consign her. Carl Jung, who had begun as her analyst and became her lover, ransacked their intellectual intimacy by plagiarizing Spielrein’s ideas. Based on John Kerr’s book A Most Dangerous Method and Christopher Hampton’s play The Talking Cure, with Hampton writing the script, Cronenberg’s film subordinates this extraordinary woman to the relationship between Jung and mentor Sigmund Freud, against whom Jung eventually, and viciously, turned. One would never guess from this by-default anti-feminist film that Spielrein was herself important, not someone who merely claimed professional acquaintanceship with both titanic men.
     Moreover, Viggo Mortensen’s studied, exaggerated Freud is not to be believed. This may be the worst performance that Cronenberg has directed.
     The film, however, is not without merit. The (ironically, Freudian!) conflict between Freud and Jung is interesting enough, and the emphasis on the role that anti-Semitism played in the reception that psychoanalysis drew in Europe gains importance from its current revival there. Michael Fassbender (best actor, London critics, Los Angeles critics) provides a monotonous whitewash of the despicable Jung, but briefly comes to vivid life in a scene of emotional breakdown. Keira Knightley, on the other hand, is both fierce and restrained, and despite Spielrein’s raging masochism retains admirable dignity, as Sabina.

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IMAGES OF A LOST CITY (Jon Jost, 2011)

“I think we are blind. Blind people who can see, but do not see.” ― José Saramago

Prolific Jon Jost’s videographed Imagens de uma cidade perdida, from Portugal and South Korea, now that I’ve seen it, replaces Lars von Trier’s Melancholia as my choice for the best “film” of 2011. Jost has written about “the Portuguese inclination towards fatalism and sadness,” their saudade. His portrait of modern Lisbon perhaps suggests this (although this would not have occurred to me had I not read Jost’s remark), but reflects as well its mirror-image, the sadness that derives from the gradual loss of everything to Time. Jost has dedicated Imagens to his young daughter, Clara. (For an explanation of the tragic situation involved, see my essay on his 2006 Passages.) Poetic and never poetical, it is a documentary that ferrets out glimpses of human and material disrepair. Only children at play and hands at work hammering pieces of stone into the sand to create an alley pathway—something for future feet—escape the pervasive tenor of loss, exhaustion, dilapidation. We witness people who are being, or feeling, left behind in a globalized city dropping from its historical and cultural stature into the Third World.
     Jost casts his camera behind and under places and structures, favoring peoples’ backs. (A mischievous boy, though, pops his face into the camera; we enjoy following his vivid shirt to the far back of the frame and again up front.) The framing divides and otherwise restricts exterior space. The opening static, long-held shot is behind a residential structure—a house, I think—and another, an apartment building, with an alley in between the two. Children play. On a bench, closer to us, her back towards us, a solitary older woman sits; at one point, the boy mockingly kisses her and is reprimanded, presumably by his mother. The woman sits and sits; is she observing, or simply staring into space? Is she as much remembering as living?—inside her head in the past, or in the moment? Eventually she is joined by a neighbor her age. They softly converse. What of life has slipped away from them? Both are nearly as stationary as the camera—so much so, in fact, that when the first woman, alone, reaches once to the ground, this motion of hers perplexes and unsettles.
     Jost’s video passes between substantiality and abstraction; sometimes, abstract images are conjoined with clear, immediate sounds, or substantial images are conjoined with abstract sounds, the echo-y or distant sounds of seeming voices of the past. Images also pass between color and monochrome. An overhead long-shot, seemingly black-and-white, studies children at play in the street. They resemble the blind, groping, evolutionary beetles in Robert Browning’s poem “Two in the Campagna.” Individually some of them may have futures; but, visually, vertically, the group of them, however young, are imagined lost to Time. In time, most everything we see and hear in this “film” becomes a metaphor.
     The governing one, because it evolves into a metaphor for the creative process that is generating Imagens, as well as a wider metaphor for the narrow, peripherally blind purposefulness of our laboring lives, shows masculine hands at work constructing the aforementioned pathway. The activity is “in the moment,” direct and immediate, except that the abstraction achieved by focusing only on hands almost feverishly busy amidst speechlessness and the alienating sound of hammer on stone, consigns it to something more elusive than a material dimension. Later, a dissolve restores the activity, now approaching completion, to our view. Both passages seem to be in black and white—until a glimpse of a worker’s blue jeans enters the frame: as quietly explosive a visual gesture as when the woman on the bench reached momentarily to the ground. Is it an illusion that the present seems capable of redeeming, however briefly, whatever has been lost to Time?
     For a long time, Imagens remains out of doors, in a way separating us, as well as the people themselves, from the stability of their lives. Eventually, the camera is indoors—for instance, at a window observing a municipal bus, as well as other traffic, outside. Darkness; covered with blinds, the window—or another window—is doubly mysterious. Jost applies distortion to create the illusion that the venetian blinds and window are undulating—breathing. It is a blind and labored—a mortal—breath. Sound, also, seems distant, ghostly. The occupants of the house or apartment, although it is their own struggle, are themselves blind to the struggle at the window.
     Imagens de uma cidade perdida, outdoors again, closes on an older gentleman occupying a bench. The image startles for two reasons. This bench, on the street, isn’t shot from behind; we are given a lateral view. The solitary occupant, moreover, seems to be in the throes of anguish or terrible pain. Rather than sitting upright and facing forward, he is all over the bench, as though he were using it to hold himself together. We are seeing how he feels—for whatever cause. Jost doesn’t budge the camera, and we cannot help but see. Is it Portugal’s experience of fascism, which an earlier inserted passage addressed, what is weighing on this man? Is his health, like his city, in disrepair? We do not know, we will never know; but we cannot help but see.
     Lisbon is a city that has never meant anything to me. Now it will haunt me for the rest of my life.

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