THE CARDBOARD VILLAGE (Ermanno Olmi, 2011)

Beautifully written and directed by Italy’s 80-year-old Ermanno Olmi, and gorgeously photographed by his son, Fabio, Il villaggio di cartone is a spare, mysterious, deeply moving parable about a group of “illegal aliens” from Africa who, seeking sanctuary from the police, occupy a defunct church whose 80-year-old priest, despite its deconsecration, refuses to vacate it, having known no other home since his ordination. Before the arrival of the immigrants, which include a wounded man and a fatherless, out-of-wedlock newborn, the priest speaks aloud to himself to assuage loneliness and ameliorate God’s overwhelming silence. The priest’s lifelong crisis of faith, which he may have thought that entering the priesthood would help resolve, now spurs him into action, not only by his extending charity to his unexpected guests, but by risking criminal prosecution and imprisonment for confronting authorities in their defense. Olmi, himself, came out of retirement to make this, his most haunting film—and one that illustrates poet Alfred Tennyson’s dictum “merit lives from man to man,/ And not from man, O Lord, to thee.”

The film’s opening passage, the dismantling of the church, includes the “grounding” by crane of a suspended painted statue of the crucified Christ, which twists around and around in space while being lowered: with the camera underneath looking up, an agonizing image that itself evokes the crucifixion of Jesus, suggesting a re-crucifixion of Jesus. Indeed, Olmi seems to capture fabulously heightened imagery such as this effortlessly: the sea over which the immigrants have traveled impresses us, for example, in inserts, as the Sea of Faith, of Hope. One might say that specific imagery thus access the “larger picture,” the essence and import of something as well as its surface appearance. This remarkable procedure extends to the shots of the immigrants inside the darkened church—and even to the sound of the torrential rain out of which they come, which seems thus to encapsulate the whole ordeal of their trek in search of a “more decent life.”

The rain, of course, underscores the vulnerability of these pioneers; Olmi therefore identifies with them—startlingly so, when the most assertive among them, a forceful young woman, articulates his own sociopoliticoeconomic analysis: “The wealth of the few is paid by the poverty of the many.”

At the last, the immigrants return to the sea to move on to France. “Home” is always somewhere up ahead—even for the priest, who remarks at one point that he has begun his return journey home. In the meantime, we all “occupy” rather than “inhabit” wherever we happen to be.

Michael Lonsdale and Rutger Hauer are both fine as the priest and his former assistant; they move us along, but it is the black actors, all of them unfamiliar to me, who move us to the depth of our souls.

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WIND FROM THE EAST (Dziga Vertov Group—Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Pierre Gorin, Gérard Martin, 1969)

Initially creating leisurely rural scenes, both contemporary and “period,” and playing these off a dense, repetitive aural collage of politically-minded voiceovers, Le vent d’est is Jean-Luc Godard’s heartfelt response to the disarray and demoralization of the French Left in the wake of May ’68. Shot in Italy and made by the filmmaking collective to which Godard at the time belonged, Groupe Dziga Vertov, it is a “what-to-do-now?” rumination—all passionate energy in search of a decisive course of action. It takes the form of a film about the making of a film, which could be the film that we are watching, or at least the one the filmmakers may be dreaming. Godard’s compatriot, Jean-Pierre Gorin, principally edited, with Godard assisting and (Godard has humbly asserted) learning. The segment titles—“The Strike,” “The Delegate,” “The Mobilizing Minority,” “The General Assembly,” “Repression,” “The Active Strike,” “The Police State,” “Theory,” “Self-Management,” “Armed Struggle,” “Civil Violence”—also came from Gorin, who, according to Godard biographer Richard Brody, devised them as a “practical” navigational tool. For me, they are irrelevant, especially as the titles are often slipped in quickly and, sometimes, almost invisibly. They are an attempt to “contain” a far-ranging, fluid dream, and it is the dream that wins out.

The film opens with a boy and a girl—we later discover, both actors in the film-within-the-film—lying together, asleep in the grass, our view of them partially obstructed by their arrangement, sheltering foliage, and the off-kilter camera angle; the purple of the boy’s pants strikes our eye and prepares us for his variously painted face in the internal film: both primitive spectacle and, past and present, terrorist—well, what is it? Self-proclamation? Camouflage? The girl also is in the internal film, but before we learn that the two actors are also playing actors we have before us the intermediate scene of their waking up and making love, during which the foliage shelters them precisely from our invasive view. I take all this as metaphor for Godard’s own desire to be “left alone” as he works through his ambivalence and confusion to reach some point of political decisiveness, for instance, regarding the role of violence that is best in order to advance the progressive cause against the oppression of workers. At different points the film seems to be rejecting or embracing violence, but viewers who assume that the final position taken—including a how-to for the homemaking of bombs—is decisive in the matter are perhaps applying a linear narrative convention to a non-linear, atomic (because, largely, fluidly associative) film. While his search for a resolution to his ambivalence sets up in certain viewers an expectation that Godard will indeed resolve the issue, adding heft to wherever the film “ends up,” this fails to take into account two things: the spirited, unpredictable nature of this film; the possibly intransigent nature of dear Jean-Luc’s ambivalence!

Besides, it is always possible with Godard that he is “being playful,” testing us as well as himself, or deliberately mixing up dream and reality, filmic and non-filmic life. To be specific, Godard may be weighing in his mind the “terrorist” bombing of the café in Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (1965), which Le vent d’est directly notes in passing. (It is the poignant style of Le vent d’est that whatever it notes or shows it does so “in passing”—a quality that disputes the charge of “ideological rigidity” routinely lodged against it.) As such, the film circles in Godard’s memory of the Algerian War—and oppressive French colonialism in general: a point of national disgrace, and an instance of Godard and Gorin’s attempt to see the single river of the struggle for justice, whether economic or political, to which each separate struggle, wherever, whenever, contributes. Training terrorists to make bombs? Instead, Godard may be “wearing” this film of his as a kind of makeup or mask. A visual key to this “playfulness” is the Weekend-“blood” of unmistakable red paint that he splashes over period-guerrillas in the film-within-the-film: more makeup; another “mask.”

Rather than the poker-faced instructions on bomb-making, something else in the film might give one pause: despite their criticism of the “Socialist Realism” that Stalin expected Soviet filmmakers to aim at achieving, Godard and Gorin’s surprising ambivalence regarding Comrade Stalin—this, sixteen years after the tyrant’s death, and even less time after the launch of deStalinization, by Nikita Khrushchev, in 1956. Yet this is explained, at least in part, by the film’s optimism and historical sense. One of the fleeting voiceovers lights on the pertinent theme: History advances “masked,” in disguise. Despite Stalin’s mass murder of his people as part of his collectivization policy, the show-trials and CPSU’s purges, his vicious and virulent police state, Stalin may yet have contributed to the advancement of world communism, if only by the corrective reaction that his criminality and “cult of personality” invited. Godard and Gorin are taking, then, “the long view.” But they leave unmentioned the grim, implicit converse to their positive perspective—at least, hope; for if history sometimes benefits humankind when it least appears to do so, it may be equally true that seeming positive advancements could be masking regression. Repression can be the real-world outcome of what sometimes appears to be the advancement of social, economic and political justice. It is nothing short of dazzlingly brilliant how this film plays with the motif of makeup, masks and disguise—sometimes, even when it seems not to.

Seeing Le vent d’est for the first time more than forty years after it first appeared (and was largely dismissed) has been, for me, a heady experience. My grasp of Godard remains wonderfully deficient, whetting my appetite for successive viewings, new insights and delights. This film, even at this late date, is fresh, vibrant, witty, poetic. To get underneath its masks, start by taking off your own.

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INFERNO (Henri-Georges Clouzot; Serge Bromberg, Ruxandra Medrea, 1964; 2009)

A heart attack prevented Henri-Georges Clouzot from completing the filming of what some have nevertheless projected as his likely masterpiece, L’enfer, the script to which Clouzot’s widow sold to Claude Chabrol in the 1990s, resulting in Chabrol’s brilliant film with the same title (1994). The material details a man’s waking nightmare as he steadily slips into madness, consumed by increasingly hysterical sexual jealousy targeting his guiltless wife. Chabrol’s, one of cinema’s leading feminists, here lays claim to one of his most dazzling and riveting works.

Around the same time that Chabrol acquired the sixties script, Clouzot’s widow also released to the public her late husband’s aborted film—fragments that now gloss the infamous history of the original ill-fated production. Among elements of that history are these: the transformation of a small project into a superproduction once Hollywood’s Columbia came in and extended to Clouzot an “unlimited budget”; the illness and subsequent dropping out of the original male star, Serge Reggiani, whose considerable footage had to be scrapped, his replacement by Jean-Louis Trintignant, who wasn’t even tested for the role and remained for less than a week; Clouzot’s debilitating heart attack.

Utilizing examples of what Clouzot had shot of L’enfer, as well as interviews of cast and crew members, in 2009 a documentary, Henri-Georges Clouzot’s L’enfer, appeared, which takes its unifying perspective from a remark by one of those interviewed, I believe Constantin Costa-Gavros, that the normally focused and “precise” Clouzot was at loose ends on this particular project, seemingly increasingly “lost.” The directors, Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea, won the best documentary prize at São Paulo and the César Award.

Perhaps their singular achievement is to revive the notion that, had he completed it, L’enfer would have been Clouzot’s masterpiece. To me, this doesn’t seem likely. The Clouzot-footage is, here and there, indeed arresting, and certainly the scene where the Slinky slinks down Romy Schneider and comes to rest on her vulva is erotically charged; but, when “lost,” filmmakers do not create masterpieces. Such events do, however, contribute interesting glosses on their psychological profiles. What drove Clouzot to his precarious state, not to mention the heart attack? You know as well as I do. Try as he did to keep the wife’s innocence in his line of sight, Clouzot found himself torn, increasingly siding with the misogynistic spouse. This bedeviled and undid him. Bromberg and Medrea leave it to us to figure out—or were they themselves a bit “lost”? Their insistence that Clouzot was “one of the world’s greatest filmmakers” inspires little confidence in either their judgment or their sanity.

DAMAGE (Louis Malle, 1992)

Two lethally twisted mothers—acted shrilly and theatrically and with scant humanity or insight by always worthless Miranda Richardson and once-charming Leslie Caron—plot the coordinates of intersecting domestic tragedies in Louis Malle’s ridiculous, brain-dead Damage, one of the half-dozen most grotesque movies ever made. David Hare, no less, wrote the damn thing, from the novel by Josephine Hart.

The protagonist is a British MP: Dr. Stephen Fleming, listlessly played by Jeremy Irons. Fleming is married to Ingrid, a piece of perversion who is monstrously possessive of Martyn, their journalist-son, more or less having shut out her spouse from the circle of her affections in favor of Martyn, the “one person . . . for me,” as she puts it across two s[l]ick sentences. Perhaps unconsciously influenced by his low marital status (everything in this film is below the surface), Stephen instantaneously falls in lust with enigmatic Anna (Juliette Binoche, of course), Martyn’s French fiancée. Anna, also, seems to fall in lust with him, after their eyes reasonably lock at first sight. Thus begins their sordid love affair, replete with “dark” and twisted positions. Upon discovering Pop and Anna at it in bed one afternoon, poor Martyn, mesmerized, walks backward and falls to his quasi-suicidal death over a high bannister. Stephen suddenly realizes the depth of his betrayal of his son and rushes naked downstairs, wrapping his lifeless Martyn in his belatedly loving arms. Anna slips away; Ingrid is fucking pissed when Stephen arrives home. Despite their shared complicity in the hellish outcome, Queen Ingrid isn’t one to embrace even a smidgen of responsibility. Instead, she rips off her top and confronts Stephen with this remark: “Wasn’t this enough for you?”

By now, we have also learned about the homelife of Anna’s that also dripped into Martyn’s nasty spill. Suffice it to say that Elizabeth, Anna’s dear mom, was possessive of her son, who committed suicide over his love for sister Anna—which is more or less what Martyn has now done. These crazy moms! These crazy kids!

In two parts, here is the bottom line on why this movie revulses me: (1) the clichéd British quietude that suppresses this agitated plot; (2) the fact that Sally, Martyn’s wholesomely adoring kid sister, is simply dropped once Martyn is dead. I can well understand Ingrid’s having relocated Sally for the night; but the film’s having altogether dropped her as though she is worthless confetti? For the record, Gemma Clarke gives the best performance, as Sally Fleming.

YOLANDA AND THE THIEF (Vincente Minnelli, 1945)

Slack, shallow, almost bereft of any entertainment value, Yolanda and the Thief is the worst film by Vincente Minnelli that doesn’t star Barbra Streisand. It is a musical romance where most of the “romance” is offscreen (I guess), despite Fred Astaire’s lead role contains only two dances, and—this, the year after Meet Me in St. Louis!—has color cinematography (by Charles Rosher) as dreary and meaningless as it could possibly come.

Irving Brecher’s script cannot transcend the stupidity of Jacques Théry and Ludwig Bemelmans’ concept. In Patria, a mythical Latin American country, Johnny, a U.S. con-man, convinces Yolanda, a rich heiress fresh out of convent school, that he is her guardian angel—literally—to hoodwink her out of her fortune, which he does, but returns it all, having fallen in love with her innocence (I guess—for what else is there to her?).

Astaire is strikingly good early on; but the crook’s transformation would have defeated anyone. Mildred Natwick is a hoot as Yolanda’s dizzy aunt. However, Lucille Bremer is a cypher as Yolanda. She isn’t worth a moment’s notice.

Eugene Loring choreographed. The lengthy “dream ballet” tries to pass off its disjointedness as surrealism; it’s a no-go. The “Coffee Time” dance is much better—but also more conventional.

Except for a few costumes, nothing here pleases the eye.