FERNANDO ARRABAL

When I was in my early twenties, I did what I almost never do: I walked out on a film. It was Spanish-born French filmmaker Fernando Arrabal’s Viva la muerte (Long Live Death!, 1971), and I left after ten minutes. More than thirty-five years later, its appearance on DVD moved me to give the film another chance. I did not last any longer this time, however.
     I appreciate that the film is a favored cult item, and it is regarded in certain quarters as essential Surrealism. For me, it is perverted garbage—a film that assaults the audience with barbaric cruelties in the name of condemning Franco’s fascism. I also appreciate that the film may have influenced subsequent works that bring together a condemnation of fascism and the point of view of a child: Victor Erice’s brilliant Spirit of the Beehive (1976), Carlos Saura’s wonderful Cria cuervos (1977) and, more recently, Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth (2006)—alas, a film as execrable as Viva la muerte, and one that I saw in its degenerate entirety.
     Today I tried watching another Arrabal film, J’irai comme un cheval fou (I Will Walk Like a Crazy Horse, 1973), and once again I did not last past ten or fifteen minutes. Two scenes involving the protagonist’s mother (played by Emmanuele Riva, no less) conspired to sicken me and get the DVD popped out of the machine. In one, Mom spikes her son’s cock and balls; in the other, she does the same to the genitals of a wax figure of her son. I understand that this is all fantasy; I understand that the mother has just died, and her son is in the desert fleeing from the police. And I genuinely like when he encounters the diminutive stranger who takes his gun, an alien item to him, and turns it into a flute by blowing into the barrel. But the bleeding genitalia-stuff: I’m not motivated to continue with a film that assaults me with that.
     Arrabal is not for me. Way back when in Buffalo, I already guessed this fact.

LARS VON TRIER

1982
IMAGES OF LIBERATION. Lars von Trier’s Images of Liberation may be the most brilliant graduate film ever. It predicts what this graduate of the National Film School of Denmark has become: one of the half-dozen greatest living filmmakers.
     Daringly original, it nonetheless evokes films the student loves: Charles Laughton’s Night of the Hunter (1955), Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist (1970), Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mirror (1974), John Cassavetes’ Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976). Imagine being a kid in film school and having your graduation effort win the best film prize at Munich!
     World War II; the German Occupation of Denmark ends. Trier’s Images interweaves archival footage of Danish resistance fighters and the story of a German officer, who (after failing to summon the courage to commit suicide) flees Danish arrest in frantic search for the Danish girl he loves. The tables have turned, with some Danes now behaving like vicious Nazis. Fiction tests documentary; documentary tests fiction. Heroism; cowardice. Will Leo find his Esther?
     The end of war encapsulates the horror of war: German soldiers commit suicide after obligingly killing their own. Stirringly, a solitary bird symbolizes Denmark’s survival. Or Germany’s defeat.
     Mysterious, achingly lyrical and yet chillingly analytical as well, Images explores issues of humanity and national identity. In war, everything is as fluid as blood. The end of war memorializes the horror of war. In this context, relief and liberation are sorely ironic.
     In film school, Trier adopted the “von.” Why? Earlier in the century, Erich Stroheim and Josef Sternberg did this, claiming the nobility that was denied them, as Jews, by Europe. Trier, now, was expressing his solidarity with the departed two—and, through them, with all Jews: a noble gesture.
     The lone bird in Trier’s first masterpiece: Jewry’s survival?

1984
THE ELEMENT OF CRIME. The first installment in his dark “European trilogy,” Lars von Trier’s The Element of Crime is among the most sorrowful crime detection works in cinema—a film in which murder weighs heavily as the loss of human life, not as an entertaining occasion for crime-solving ingenuity. Summoned by Osborne, his mentor, ex-cop Fischer investigates the serial murders of young girls selling lottery tickets. Proceeding “by the book,” in this case, Osborne’s treatise on criminal behavior, and assisted by hypnosis that projects him into the killer’s mind, Fischer retraces the steps of a suspect based on past police surveillance of him.
     The suspect’s name is Harry Gray, an amalgamation of David Gray, who investigates vampires in a remote seaside village in Carl Theodor Dreyer’s—Trier’s idol’s—Vampyr (1931), and The Third Man’s (Carol Reed, 1949) postwar opportunist, a black marketeer in penicillin, Harry Lime. These influences suggest the weird, hallucinatory, post-apocalyptic world of bombed-out buildings, scrounging children, and sleepwalking souls through which Fischer moves as in a nightmare. It’s Noir City. Also, partly because something again is rotten in the state of Denmark (or in whatever Scandinavian post the action unfolds), Hamlet is in the heavy air. After all, what is Fischer doing but trying to vindicate Osborne, his surrogate father?
     Trier, who enacts the hilarious role of the Schmuck of Ages, and his color cinematographer, Tom Elling, have given the film a strange, haunted look, partly the result of saturating the negative with gold. A glimmer of light may insinuate itself into a bottomlessly dark frame. We feel we are looking into the end of the world, a disintegrating society populated by desperate lives. How can anybody be killing all these children?
     Stay tuned. Trier’s brilliant trilogy has only just begun.

1987
MEDEA. Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1970 Medea is barbaric, fantastic, political, anthropological. Its theme is cultural collision. Lars von Trier’s version has to contend with an anxiety of influence other than that of Euripedes (or Marx). It is based on a script that fellow Dane, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Trier’s idol, left unfilmed at his death. Moodily poetic and psychological, it shows the influence of Andrei Tarkovsky, especially his Nostalghia (1982). To the eye and the soul, in whatever connection, it’s a beautiful film.
     Here is perhaps the world’s most famous tale of a woman’s revenge—in ancient Greece, Medea’s murder of their sons after Jason abandons her and them and takes another wife. Medea’s magic brought Jason riches and fame, and the Golden Fleece. But he is “moving on” with his life, as cranky, restless spouses sometimes do. Medea gave Jason stature but relinquished much of her own in the process. Now it is her day to inflict sorrow. By Medea’s design, Jason will be married to a corpse, and his children, hanged with their mother’s tender assistance, will be corpses as well. Medea must settle for nothing less than Jason’s devastation.
     But, of course, the overwhelming tragedy is Medea’s. The children do not deserve to die, but cosmic justice, for which Medea is mere agency, demands these deaths. The one constant is Medea’s suffering—a mother’s pain as well as a wife’s.
     Trier’s visual poetry stresses Medea’s—a mother’s—continuing connection to Nature. Nonsensical interpretations, to the effect that Medea, a mother, errs by destroying her children, need not apply. It is self-righteous Jason who alone acts contrary to Nature. Only death can bring Medea peace.
     Judgments against Medea fade in the vast marsh and fog in which Trier locates/loses her. She is lost along with the rest of us.

1988
EPIDEMIC. Save Vampyr (1931), by another Dane, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Lars von Trier’s Epidemic may be the greatest horror film ever made. It is certainly one of the most playful and visually fetching horror films.
     It’s pseudo-cinéma-vérité—a film-within-a-film the boundaries of whose Chinese boxes bend and blur. A film director named Lars (endearingly played by Lars von Trier himself) and his scenarist, Niels (played by Trier’s actual co-scenarist, Niels Vørsel), dream up a medical horror movie, in the dream of which Dr. Mesmer (Trier again), an epidemiologist, battles a disease that in fact he unwittingly spreads. Both films are in black and white; but the objective framing film is shot in 16mm, while the interior dream of a film is shot in luxuriant 35mm. The phenomenal cinematography is by Henning Bendtsen, who photographed Dreyer’s Ordet (1954).
     The dream is a nightmare of reality; talk of “mass graves” invokes specters of two world wars, the Holocaust, and the threat of annihilation imposed on us all by the examples of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Indeed, the framing film, in which the plague ultimately erupts with the assistance of hypnosis, seems to be catching up with the interior film.
     Irrepressibly funny and absolutely terrifying, Epidemic locates individual imagination in the grip of shared political realities. We cannot get away from our worst dreams, our worst imaginings, because they are real and because the paranoid U.S. is ever poised to drop at a whim another stupendous bomb. Art, our principal defense, only returns us to reality. Something is rotten in the state of Denmark because something is rotten elsewhere in the world. Europe exists in a colossal shadow.
     This is the second entry in Trier’s “European trilogy” begun with The Element of Crime (1984).

1991
EUROPA. The conclusion of Lars von Trier’s stunning “European trilogy” that began with The Elements of Crime (1984) and Epidemic (1988), Europa is like some ghastly prophetic warning that’s couched in such elusive, ambiguous terms that you don’t exactly know how to protect yourself. As Welles did in The Trial (1962), Trier captures, in a stream of highly suggestive, potent black-and-white (and, also, color) images, the helpless way many of us felt in our Century of Sorrows, the twentieth, which thus far is predicting the twenty-first as its unearthly continuation.
      Defeated in the war, 1945 Germany is occupied. Leopold Kessler, an American of German descent, relocates to Germany, where an uncle gets him a job as a sleeping car conductor on the Zentropa train line. Soon, Leo becomes the pawn of two competing sides, the Hartmanns, who own the line, and the occupying forces ferreting out former Nazis. Leo’s neutral position becomes untenable once he falls in love with Katharina Hartmann (Barbara Sukowa, giving the decade’s most brilliant performance—as she had done in the previous decade, as Margarethe von Trotta’s Rosa Luxemberg). Post-war, then, eerily feels like pre-war and wartime, with Nazism still an able, if, now, creepily insinuating, force. Max von Sydow’s disembodied narration looms as a voice of doom: European history, which is repetitive, compulsive, tragic. The Holocaust, in particular, strikes Trier as a nightmare there is no coming out of.
      One of Trier’s darkest films, Europa (called Zentropa in the States) wraps one up in its grim, gorgeous images (Henning Bendtsen, Edward Klosinski and Jean-Paul Meurisse are Trier’s cinematographers), tightening the folds until one feels like a mummy. The glorious impish comic of The Idiots (1998), Trier’s Dogme 95 masterpiece, isn’t in evidence here. He shouldn’t be.

1996
BREAKING THE WAVES. From Denmark, Sweden and elsewhere, Lars von Trier’s Breaking the Waves is singularly un-Dogmetic. Each chapter introduction includes recorded rock music, accompanied by a gorgeous bit of computer-enhanced Nature imagery. Moreover, the film is ultimately headed toward the supernatural and special effects. The offspring of atheists, Trier considers himself religious, but in the humanistic manner of his idol, Carl Theodor Dreyer.
     In a northern Scottish village, Bess McNeil meets and marries a Danish oil-rig worker, Jan, with whom she shares great sex. Bereft when he returns to work, she prays to God for his permanent return. God seems to answer her prayer in a way that exploits her innocence; a broken neck directs Jan’s return, confining him to a hospital bed, and they are no longer able to have sex. Increasingly she has out-loud, abrupt conversations with God, and she adheres also to her husband’s voice, which directs her to have sex with others for his vicarious pleasure. Thus begins Bess’s descent into a world of danger and degradation that isolates her from family and community, turning them cruelly against her, while welding her to her vows.
     Powerful, abrasive, challenging, Trier’s film questions whether sex sublimates religious experience to the same degree that religion sublimates sex. Its hand-held camera usage testifies to the roughness, the unsettledness, of human experience out in the world and in the heart. It explores the possibility of a chasm between God’s formal reception and messy reality. Bess’s pipeline to what she believes is God’s presence may be moving her in the direction of a marvelous redemption. Her example illumines the current fate of pure faith.
     As light as spirit, this extraordinary film shows spiritual wonders permeating our modern world. Its centerpiece is Emily Watson’s awesome performance as Bess.

1998
THE IDIOTS. Dazzling, brilliant, hilarious, poignant, Lars von Trier’s Danish Idiots is the masterpiece of Dogme 95, the movement Trier helped found that chooses naturalism and realism over artifice or technical manipulation in order to contest what its adherents see as the falsifying tendencies of individual and technologically obsessive cinema. Thus, location shooting is in, studio shooting, out; films, which must be in color and video recorded, can use no special lighting apart from a single lamp attached to the camera, nor can filters be used, nor can optical work of any kind be applied; no sound can be used apart from sounds that correspond to the images being presented; the camera must be hand-held; the action, contemporary. Trier’s creation of both Dogme- and non-Dogme films suggests he may have been putting us all on (that is, acting like an idiot), but the movement has stuck. Impishly, Trier’s off-screen voice can be heard “seriously” interviewing his fictional characters as though this film is a documentary. Indeed, few films collapse so decisively the difference between fiction and documentary.
     The Idiots portrays a commune whose members in public pretend to be mentally challenged—for instance, in a restaurant, at a home insulation factory they tour, at a public swimming pool. Each is searching for his or her inner idiot; idiots, one opines, are the people of the future.
     Of course, these young persons are having a blast with their antics. We, however, also get to see the responses they provoke—and, in some cases, the responses ordinary people keep themselves from having. Trier skewers the reactionary social tendency that in the U.S. goes by the name “political correctness”—“liberal” fascism.
     It’s exhausting acting like an idiot. Eventually, commune members test the waters of the mainstream. Some make it; some are left behind.

2000
DANCER IN THE DARK. Critic Gavin Smith has called Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark the first “genuinely tragic musical.” While I think G. W. Pabst’s Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera, 1931) qualifies as that almost seventy years sooner, Dancer in the Dark is neither the frivolous escapism (think Singin’ in the Rain) nor sentimental garbage (think West Side Story) that accounts for the vast majority of musical films. Although its deviation from some of the guidelines that Trier himself devised cost it Dogme 95 certification (the protagonist’s musical fantasies contest the rule requiring objective reality; the film is set in the past), Dancer applies its alert, light-sensitive handheld video camera to dark, substantial stuff. It’s like a demented cross between I Want to Live! (Robert Wise, 1958) and—Dreyer is Trier’s spiritual mentor—Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928). One might call it Breaking the Waves in Song and Dance.
     In early 1960s America, in rural Washington state, Czech immigrant Selma Jezkóva is a workhorse in a wash-basin factory saving her earnings to pay for an operation that might keep her twelve-year-old son, Gene, from inheriting the same disease that’s causing her own advancing blindness. The single mother had come to America, her heart set on redeeming herself from parental guilt by reversing Gene’s prognosis, and her mind full of Hollywood musicals, which continue to be her one outlet for entertainment. However, she had hoped to find the U.S., also, as light, attractive and hospitable as the musical films had made it seem; now, to escape the drudgery of heavy precision labor, she “spaces out” into reveries of these films, where, magically, she is sometimes the star. (She is also rehearsing the part of Maria in an amateur production of The Sound of Music.) These passages, among the film’s high points, address the role of popular culture in American society as palliative for the harshness, cruelty and unfairness of American life; the almost primitive simplicity of the songs and the dances exposes the insufferable ordeal that Jezkóva finds entangling and strangling her.
     Selma isn’t alone in struggling. Her landlord, the local sheriff, reverses his kindness, stealing her savings, under the strain of his own strapped financial resources—a condition he hides from his wife much as Selma hides her failing eyesight, especially at work. Eventually, at his urging, she kills the sheriff. No one believes this suicide-by-proxy; Selma is tried, convicted and hanged for theft and murder. Having refused to convert the money she stole back into payment for an appeals lawyer, she dies believing that her sacrifice will best help her son.
     Heaven knows whether this is correct; Gene becomes an orphan. On the other hand, American stupidity and prejudice suggest that no attorney, however skilled, could reverse Selma’s legal fortunes. Americans, Trier insists, are as blind and deaf to the truth as the Scottish villagers in Breaking the Waves (1996).
     Trier’s Dancer vividly conveys the crushing monotony, and also the constant danger, of factory work. Moreover, like Dreyer’s Passion, Trier’s film splendidly illustrates the possibility of autonomy and moral action even when a multitude of victimizing forces are arrayed against one. Trier has also mounted one of cinema’s most powerful, heartrending indictments of capital punishment; the irony that the U.S. still adheres to this practice of state murder is a sad coda we ourselves can add to the film’s statement. Another asset is that Björk, Sjón Sigurdsson, Thom Yorke and Trier himself have composed and written the most haunting film songs since Friedrich Holländer’s for Marlene Dietrich in Billy Wilder’s A Foreign Affair (1948). As usual, Trier is amazing with actors, in this instance drawing even from the usually clueless Catherine Deneuve good, solid acting as Kathy, Selma’s co-worker and friend. Most triumphantly, Trier has guided his first-time (and, she says, last-time) film star, Björk, through one of the most enchanting and deeply affecting performances in cinema. The Icelandic pop singer fully deserves her many accolades, including best actress at Cannes, the European Film Awards, the Bodil Festival and, here, from the National Board of Review.

2003
THE FIVE OBSTRUCTIONS. Jørgen Leth, Lars von Trier’s former mentor, made in 1967 a documentary short entitled Det perfekte menneske. Now Trier uses it for his own documentary—well, “his own,” except that Leth does most of the work again. Instructing his instructor, Trier challenges Leth to redo The Perfect Human in five different ways, observing rules—“obstructions”—that Trier commands as though he were Instructor-in-Chief-in-the-Heavenly-Skies. But artists are always restricted by rules, even impossible ones, as indeed we all are every day. The black-and-white original appears in snippets throughout the color film.
     Leth’s first challenge is to remake the film in Cuba with no set. The principal obstacle is that each shot must be 12 or fewer frames—that is, a half-second or less. (“Satanic,” Trier later calls this restriction of his!) After each revision, the two men reunite so that we can see the result and Trier can tell Leth how well he has done and give him the next assignment. Leth is sent to an impoverished section of Bombay, where he dines lavishly in public. The object is to have Leth “empathize” rather than observe at a distance. Liberating him from the Cuba challenge, a long tracking shot follows Leth down a teeming street. “Not a mark has been left on you,” Trier says, referring to the first three filmlets.
     Trier proves a charming, impish bully. We love impudent Lars—and so must Leth, to put up with all this.
     Another obstruction has Leth making (with technical help) an animated film in Texas. “I hate cartoons!” both men agree. The result, Trier rightly opines, is beautiful.
     Trier will make the last revision, with Leth reading from Trier’s script. The entire project has aimed at helping Leth, Trier claims. We half-believe him.

2003
DOGVILLE.

The abuses of Iraqi prisoners by military and nonmilitary personnel at Abu Ghraib prison, we are learning as I write, were not isolated incidences but broadly typical of American behavior as occupationists or plain bullies both in Iraq and Afghanistan, and who knows where else. Understandably, those who have been charged are pleading “the German defense,” that they were merely following the orders of commanding officers, and I don’t doubt for a moment that this is true; but what these individuals who directly committed the atrocities fail to grasp is that they were free to disobey such orders and that the orders they were given must have triggered sadistic and vicious impulses in them without which they would indeed have disobeyed the orders. Their humanity hung in the balance, and they chose to abdicate this humanity, or were so swept up in the powerful authority vis-à-vis prisoners that war and the occupation had invested in them that they failed to curb their worst and most primitive impulses. Regrettably, America and Americans have become, throughout the world, synonymous with this arrogance of power, which the wonderful film Dogville, written and directed by Denmark’s Lars von Trier, penetrates and analyzes brilliantly. It’s the first installment of von Trier’s “American trilogy” (he has since completed the second installment, Manderlay, 2005), following his two previous trilogies, the staggering “European trilogy” (The Element of Crime, 1984; Epidemic, 1988; Europa, 1991), and the “Golden Hearts trilogy,” whose middle film, though, is especially wonderful (Breaking the Waves, 1996; The Idiots, 1998; Dancer in the Dark, 2000).

Trier, perhaps the world’s greatest working film artist (some would give the title to Abbas Kiarostami or Béla Tarr or Hou Hsiao-hsien, or someone else), is one of the founders of the Dogme 95 movement. However, put that thought out of your head. As he has done in the past when the mood suited him, for Dogville Trier discards the rules he himself helped to create; for instance, far from hewing to natural lighting, there is nothing but artificial light in Dogville. (Whether this makes the film a departure from Dogme or something post-Dogme remains to be seen.) An imp of the perverse, Trier is ever ready to dismiss any and all rules, including his own. In truth, we wouldn’t have our Trier any other way.

Trier hates America. His non-Dogme Dancer in the Dark also was an American story, and he filmed it without stepping foot in the United States; nor will he come to America to shoot any part of his American trilogy. Trier’s vision of the American character, as disclosed in Dogville, is so acute and exacting, so dead-on and unflinching, that American audiences had better brace themselves for a withering look into a social mirror. In Dogville, Trier nails us to a T. This will invite typical American mendacity and hypocrisy from many quarters—from those, for example, who will insist that what other Americans did at Abu Ghraib prison, which they deem “unAmerican,” they themselves would never ever do. Trier may be in denial about much that is good about America, but U.S. Americans tend to be even more in denial about what’s not so good. Still, it is worth noting that one doesn’t have to agree with Dogville to find it a fascinating and captivating piece of work.

The time is some time between the wars, probably (given the series of photographs that accompany the closing credits) the 1930s during the Great Depression. The place is a sleepy little town in the Rocky Mountains. Fleeing from gangsters, Grace happens into the town of Dogville, seeking refuge. Prodded by its resident young philosopher and would-be writer, Tom Edison, so named because he embodies American ingenuity, Dogville reluctantly lets Grace in, giving her shelter. Seemingly uncomplicated and gracious, young, beauteous Grace aims to please her new protectors; to solidify her place in the town, she is instructed by Tom to insinuate herself into the homes and lives of the residents, offering each individual job-related, household or communally beneficial work. At first, Dogvillers don’t seem to need Grace to do anything; but, assessing the risk of their hiding her from both the mob and the police, who are also looking for her, the folks find increasing amounts of work for her to do. Indeed, they exact a measure of control over her that makes her their Abu Ghraib prisoner—their virtual slave. Their sexual slave, too, for all the men either maul or molest her—all except Tom, who professes to have fallen in love with her, and with whom she, also in love with him, doesn’t wish to have what she considers unsanctified sex. This is exceptionally hard for Tom to process, since he knows that every other man in town is getting a piece of Grace. What they aren’t getting, though, is her spiritual assent, Grace’s grace; at the proper time and in the proper place, she would like to give this to Tom. Unfortunately, forced by fellow villagers to choose between her and the town, Tom contacts the mob, resulting in a scene of betrayal and brutal death.

Dogville plays out on a sound stage; expressionistic, the minimalist set consists of chalk marks, invisible doors that townsfolk open and close and knock on, see-through quarters indicating homes, a wall-less town meeting hall, a patch of invisible trees (although no elms, even on Elm Street), and so forth. Several shots provide overhead views of Dogville, which includes a patch of invisible grass for the invisible town mascot, the dog Moses. Given the plot that unfolds on this set, one might think of the film as Thornton Wilder’s Our Town Meets Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s The Visit of the Old Woman. The film also includes voiceover commentary—another nod to Our Town, although here the voice, disembodied, belongs to no visible soul—that guides us through the thinking processes of some of the characters. The net result is to shift the drama from an exterior to an interior realm. We get to see and hear, then, how Americans think, and how they pursue their own advantage at the expense of others, in this case, Grace. Even bereft of an upbeat economy, the villagers retain the rapacious love of power that American capitalism nurtures in them. It is this love, ironically bred by a system that disempowers them, that corrupts them and undercuts their human potential. With its Brechtian distancing, the film constantly urges us to reflect on its vision of the American character. (Another distancing technique: the film is divided into a prologue and nine chapters, the last title heralding the film’s ending.) I might add that, despite what you may have heard, there isn’t a touch of misogynism in Trier’s portrait of the process by which Grace becomes the town’s slave—this, too, the result of his distancing strategies. Those who hurl such preposterous insults are in heavy denial as to what the film is really about. They are probably also in denial of certain of their own thought processes and psychological mechanisms.

The film is full of perverse visual imagery. Perhaps the most beautiful and voluptuously intriguing image is provided by an overhead shot of Grace, lying face up in the open part of a truck trying to make her escape from Dogville, surrounded by crates of apples and by loose apples and encased by a translucent plastic or glass cover: with its Edenic reference, a chaotic view of her endangered innocence. At the other end of the film’s behavioral richness, there is Jason, the bad little boy who coaxes an over-the-lap spanking from Grace, pleading for her to make it harder and harder. (He later tells his mom what Grace did, leaving out the part about his having begged for it: one of the numerous betrayals someone or another inflicts upon Grace.) Trier casts in the part—make of this what you will—a boy who is the spittin’ image of what he himself must have been as a boy. Big Lars has thus endeavored to have Little Lars spanked on screen, and the moment is as dear as it’s funny, and not a little spooky. In its small way, the moment shows that Grace herself is as susceptible to being seduced by power-focused impulses as are the others in Dogville, and this lightly prepares us for the heavy finale where a gun-toting Grace turns the tables on the town.

Nicole Kidman (best actress, Russian Guild of Film Critics) is superb as Grace, giving perhaps her most sensitive, delicate and intricate, yet powerful performance thus far. It has long since become clear that Kidman is one of the best actresses around, and she continues to astonish. And Trier has given her an unforgettable line that, at the last, coolly conflates Grace and Nicole: “Goodbye, Tom.” John Hurt is essential as the narrator, Paul Bettany is as interesting as Tom Edison as he is dishwater-dull as the ship’s surgeon who operates on himself in Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (Peter Weir, 2003), Philip Baker Hall is even more interesting as Tom’s hypochondriac physician-dad, and Ben Gazzara is magnificent—it’s his best performance since Saint Jack (Peter Bogdanovich, 1979)—as the town’s blind man who doesn’t miss a chance to feel up Grace. Harriet Andersson, Stellan Skarsgård, Patricia Clarkson, Zeljko Ivanek, Lauren Bacall and James Caan are others in the excellent supporting cast.

Dogville, which is in English, won the Bodil Award as the year’s best Danish film and best film prizes in Italy, Spain, Russia and Bulgaria. Trier won the European Film Award as best director, and his screenplay was adjudged the best at the Robert Festival in Copenhagen.

2005
MANDERLAY. The follow-up to Dogville (2003) in what was going to be his U.S.A.—Land of Opportunity trilogy, Lars von Trier’s Manderlay marshals again minimalism and Brechtian distancing, this time for a powerful parable about the residual fallout from slavery in the United States. Indeed, this may be the most brilliant film ever made about the situation and the plight of African Americans in the U.S.
     In 1933, on a remote Alabaman plantation, slavery is still practiced. With a can-do liberal attitude, Grace, who has chanced upon Manderlay with her gangster-father, proceeds to liberate the place, bringing there ideas of equality and democracy. She conducts classes to ready workers for the greater world; but will that “world,” the white U.S., ever be “ready” to embrace blacks as equals? Given its ideational underpinnings and its ongoing, if transmuted evil, can American slavery ever be “undone”?
     Uproariously, some individuals have faulted the film for not offering solutions to U.S. racial problems. Such viewers cannot grasp the enormity of the winds of history, conjured by Trier in a recurrent dust storm. Not everything is fixable. Slavery isn’t a washable stain in the American fabric.
     Manderlay and its operation are not what they seem. Its black workers, seemingly so backward, prove themselves keenly understanding of the tragic course that the nation continues to take, perhaps must always take, both at home and abroad. Grace, who believes she is educating them, is exposed for her utter lack of grace.
     This is among Trier’s most sweepingly visionary works. The earthen tones of its restrained color scheme hit a sore point of irony when the womenfolk, including Grace, ward off starvation by eating dirt. But Grace also engineers Manderlay’s eventual profitability—yet another sore point, it turns out, in the scheme of things.

2006
THE BOSS OF IT ALL. Denmark’s Lars von Trier is contemporary cinema’s imp of the perverse. Inspired by Pirandello and Brecht, his Direktøren for det hele takes aim at theatrical acting and big business. By targeting each through the other, this dazzlingly clever comedy suggests that capitalism is a charade, a soulless, convoluted performance.
     Ravn owns and runs an information technology firm in Copenhagen. His employees, however, do not know this; Ravn has misled them into believing that “their boss,” the fiction behind which he hides the better to exploit them and draw loyalty, is based in the U.S. Now that he wishes to sell the company, Ravn has hired an actor to be the presumed “boss of it all.”
     A flop in his chosen field, Kristoffer takes this role very seriously. Whereas Ravn simply wants Kristoffer-as-Svend to sign the sales agreement, Kristoffer wants to assume his role from the inside out. He does his best to glean bits of information about Svend from employees (one of these bits is that Svend is gay) and enrages the Icelandic company president with his presumptuous antics during their negotiations. The discrepancy between the Icelandic president’s tantrums and the translator’s calm shows that Trier knows his Chaplin, in particular, The Great Dictator (1940). Indeed, Trier’s boardroom scenes are maniacally funny.
     Poor Lars must have suffered thusly himself, dealing with actors who aren’t content with being his pawns and who pushed to have their roles take over his plans! On the other hand, Trier finds outrageous Ravn’s lies, deceptions, schemes.
     Utilizing a computerized camera process called Automavision, Trier creates a rapid series of cuts and the appearance of suddenly changed camera distances and angles; simulated jump-cuts are accompanied by uninterrupted dialogue, snapping us to analytical attention and increasing our delight.

ALAIN RESNAIS

I have collected here all the 300-word entries and the informal entries about films by Alain Resnais on this blog. However, please also see, under “film reviews” on this site, my full piece on Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad, which everybody numbers among my very best pieces.

1950
GUERNICA (Alain Resnais, Robert Hessens, France). “Women and children have the same red roses in their eyes—their blood for all to see.”
      On April 26, 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, Germany bombed Guernica, an ancient Basque town, burning it to the ground. The newsprint photograph of this outcome, with which Alain Resnais’s 13-minute documentary opens, seems to be dissolving into dots. Working its way up to Pablo Picasso’s commemorative painting made the same year as the event, Guernica shows, first, decades-earlier drawings and paintings of his that are especially suggestive, in this context, of innocence—an innocence that the Luftwaffe has now destroyed. Accompanied by sounds of bombardment, pieces of artwork, themselves seemingly targeted, partially disintegrate. Paul Eluard’s script, heard as poetic voiceover, laments war as the destruction of innocence.
      Resnais never shows Picasso’s Guernica in its entirety, only bits and parts of it—isolated pieces, often given a blacked-out surrounding. The fragmentation again suggests bombardment while also creating its own kind of cubism. Hands are a motif that thread continuity between Picasso’s Guernica and his earlier artwork: hands that are tenderly embracing, prayerful, stretched up in horror; hands of connection, and hands of inconsolable loss. The black-and-white film, exceptionally dark, marshals a somber use of negative space and as often invokes Goya (in his bleakest etchings) as Picasso. The elegiac refrain “Guernica” haunts.
      A field of sculptures, in context suggestive of a graveyard that war has generated, replaces the painting, culminating in Picasso’s 1944 bronze L’homme au mouton, which in contrast to Guernica is shown (frontally) whole. Its depth, in contrast to the painting’s flat patches, appears to animate it; the sculpture is alive with hope, the lamb in the man’s arms symbolizing the renewal of innocence.
      Brilliantly edited by Resnais, Guernica is among his most powerful films.

1953
STATUES ALSO DIE. Alas, I have only seen Alain Resnais and Chris Marker’s Les statues meurent aussi in the infamously truncated version that the French government permitted for forty years. Even so, it’s a thing of passionate politics and dark, dazzling visual beauty.
     The film opens in primordial darkness; a disembodied voice speaks: “When men have died they enter history. When statues have died they enter art. This botany of death is what we call culture.”
     Light appears, revealing public sculptures; even outdoors, these are objects of art such as one might encounter in a Western museum. A passage in such a museum that cuts between a piece of art and a patron gazing at it underscores the point; the reality of the piece relies on the patron’s perception. This patron has entered the museum precisely to “see art”; seeing it is something she does in her life. It isn’t a part of her life. The piece no longer belongs to the person who created it and that person’s community.
     African art is part of people’s everyday lives. But by uprooting it, colonialism has usurped its identity. This is emblematic of colonialism’s assault on African communities and human lives.
     A tracking shot surveys piece after piece enrobed in darkness, but that is followed cuttingly by a montage of pieces, each one separate, isolated. Our eyes have replaced those of the patron. A montage of brilliantly grotesque death masks, intended to frighten away Death, now suggests labored curiosities: the impression on this art and its black African creators of Western museumitis. Elsewhere, scenes of Africans singing and variously working suggest the vitality from which African art has been cut off.
     Statues also die when they aren’t growing in the vibrant garden of a people’s communal existence.

1955
NIGHT AND FOG. The subject of the Holocaust has generated countless documentaries, including outstanding ones as the twentieth century drew to a close: Harun Farocki’s Images of the World and the Inscriptions of War (1989), Héctor Faver’s Memory of Water (1993) and Dariusz Jablonski’s Fotoamator (1998). But, closer to the event, Alain Resnais’s Nuit et brouillard remains the finest.
      Resnais’s theme is the need to preserve historical memory—memory ever poised to slip away. At the sight of the Auschwitz death camp, careless green grass sways in the breeze, while black-and-white photos and newsreel snippets commit the reality of Auschwitz to flypaper. A long overhead shot of a blank field is held until the camera descends to reveal the surrounding barbed wire fence, with this ironical accompanying voiceover: “A placid landscape . . . An ordinary field over which crows fly”—author Jean Cayrol’s reference to Van Gogh’s symbol of matter’s passage into ephemera.
      The film’s signature mode is the tracking shot. The camera surveys the camp, noting the massive fence, this time from the inside, and remnants of some of the abandoned structures. The film cuts from one tracking shot to another, edited to compose, seemingly, one mind’s haunted journey, perhaps the return of a ghost. As the camera explores one of the barracks, we hear, “No description . . . can restore [the inmates’] true dimension: endless, uninterrupted fear.” What we cannot grasp is already lost.
      Intermittently, Night and Fog revisits human horrors—historical memory’s overload: SS surgical experimentation on prisoners; the bulldozing of mounds of corpses into a mass grave. The commentary ends by weighing the matter of collective guilt (“War nods, but one has one eye open”), addressing denial and revisionism, and wondering aloud how much “the next executioners” will resemble ourselves.
      Indeed.

1959
HIROSHIMA, MON AMOUR. What are we looking at? The opening of Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima, mon amour is beautiful and mysterious: in darkness, glistening forms. Out of this formless mass, with its primordial echo, two bodies gradually appear: a couple making love. She is a French actress, in Hiroshima for an anti-war shoot; He, a Japanese architect. The earlier glitter? Symbolically, the radioactivity from which nothing in Hiroshima can escape? Its indeterminate nature and that of the initial forms: the awful experience of Hiroshima that She cannot know about, no matter her investigation of the commemorative museum there, or She’s awful experience at Nevers that He cannot know about, no matter how much She reminisces. Strangers, the two spend a day together, having sex, walking, having a drink together: passing time, emptying time, phantom/persons setting their souls to the rhythm of time.
     Philosopher Henri Bergson wrote that human consciousness is a memory. Resnais’s first feature is attuned to this suggestion. It is a complex fugue on the interplay of time, memory, history and intimacy, intricately edited, with slow forward trackings (through hotel, hospital, streets, etc., edited at the outset into a single movement) suggesting an ambling mind homing in on itself, with flashbacks giving the impression of a soft rainshower, and with Marguerite Düras’s solemn, repetitive prose pitched somewhere between the articulate and the unspoken or unspeakable.
      Exquisitely sensitive, Emmanuèlle Riva plays the actress who is searching somebody else’s past, which is, at some level, really her own. Her fleeting affair with the architect triggers memories of her earlier “forbidden” love for a German soldier during the Occupation. Or is this memory a dream of history, the guilty personal rendering of a national shame?
     Despite a patina of preciousness (French cinema’s Achilles’ heel), here is adventurous filmmaking.

1961
LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD. Resnais’s grand hotel in Last Year at Marienbad, in haunting black and white, is the Mansion of Europe housing France’s memory. The twentieth century’s traumatic events, beginning with the Great War, have emptied the mansion of inhabitants. Everyone now is a guest in what used to be a home. The place feels abandoned by history. No one quite knows anyone else because people do not quite know themselves anymore.
      Resnais and scenarist Alain Robbe-Grillet share an irritation with conventional narrative, that is to say, plot, a lack of interest in character psychology, and a more flexible sense of time than chronology permits. Motivated to forget the century’s horrors, can we be selective and retain the memory of love which once helped bring a sense of continuity to our lives? Few films seem as hermetically sealed as this one, but its insistence that it exists apart from our chaotic shared world only underscores its connection to that world. Hotel guests retreat into a fantastic realm where order can be (however unsuccessfully) imposed.
      Fluid, upwardly tilted tracking shots through hotel corridors eternize human preoccupation with time. An elegant pair “reunite” in what may be, actually, their first meeting. How can one remember love when memory exists in time and in time’s passing, but love exists, sublimely, outside time? At once this-worldly and otherworldly, Classical and Romantic, rigorous and at capricious liberty, Resnais’s masterpiece is a compulsive yet unfettered dream that fulfills while yet confounding desire. The film’s trackings are our eye’s journey, the film’s voiceovers the voice that the muteness of dream denies us. Like an epiphany, however mysterious, even unfathomable, Last Year at Marienbad is also crystal-clear—and cold, beautifully cold: the memory of love longing to be filled by the feeling of love.

Please also see my full essay on Last Year at Marienbad, which is categorized under “film reviews.”

1963
MURIEL OR THE TIME OF A RETURN. Written by Jean Cayrol and directed by Alain Resnais, Muriel ou Le temps d’un retour takes place during two weeks mostly in early October 1962, that is to say, after Algeria’s achievement of independence in July following war between France and its colony that had begun in 1954. Information about the French military’s widespread use of torture on Algerians had also come to light. With its topical brace of history, Resnais’s film is a haunted repository of ongoing relevance.
     Delphine Seyrig gives a beautiful performance as Hélène, a widow who sells antiques in Boulogne. She lives with stepson Bernard, who is haunted by memories of Muriel, an Algerian girl he tortured and killed while soldiering in Algiers. Hélène remembers love: her first love, Alphonse, whose visit (with his current mistress, masquerading as his niece) is ostensibly the “return” to which the title refers. Moreover, Alphonse keeps “returning” to his fifteen years in Algeria, where he may never have actually been. Bernard keeps returning in his mind to Algiers, and as a result (possibly) kills again: this time, Robert, with whom he tortured and killed Muriel. Or is the memory of Muriel an oppressive phantom encapsulating for individuals a national burden of guilt? The substance to which our memories allude is elusive because it is dispersed throughout our sensible lives.
     Resnais’s trademark intricate editing creates a mosaic of past, present and, implicitly, future—lives fractured by war, even on the homefront. Humanity breaks down when memory is either attached to or dissociated from traumatic experience.
     The titular “return” refers also to Cayrol and Resnais’s return to their previous collaboration, Night and Fog (1955), a documentary survey of the history that haunts Auschwitz and Resnais’s only previous film also in color.

1966
LA GUERRE EST FINIE. Yves Montand, in perhaps his finest performance, brings weary humanity to the role of Carlos Diego, a “full-time revolutionary,” part of Spain’s dedicated underground anti-Franco network. The Spanish Civil War, which replaced Spain’s democracy with fascism, ended a quarter-century ago.
     It is a life of constant danger in a “landscape of self-exile.” Crossing the border between Spain and France, Diego is stopped by the police. Juan, who is in Barcelona for a few days more, must be warned against going to Madrid lest he be caught in the current series of raids. Comradery—political solidarity—contributes more to Diego’s existence now than political hope. But it is comradery on the run—rather than extended times together, bits and pieces of shared time: time fractured by political history.
     ”Once again you cross the border in the early morning light”: Jorge Semprun’s splendid script brings out the poetry in Diego’s soul and the fear in his heart. Alain Resnais’s superlative filmmaking integrates tracking shots—moments of transport and flight—and static shots, the nuts-and-bolts of meetings and strategy sessions. A night with Marianne (Ingrid Thulin, marvelous) matters; no film shows better the capacity of tender intimacy to repair for a little a frayed life.
     The film’s grayness is correlative to Diego’s gray existence, the pursuit of freedom for Spain that has long since passed from adventure to monotonous struggle, endless work. The title on one level is ironic; on another, it expresses anxiety. Perhaps the war really is over, fought and won by the wrong side, with no real possibility of shifting Spain’s political course.
     ”You’re fatter,” a comrade notes. Diego: “. . . the easy life.”
     La guerre est finie was initially as overrated as Resnais’s Je t’aime, je t’aime (1968) was underrated. However, it is a fine film about an anonymous, committed, largely invisible life.

1968
JE T’AIME, JE T’AIME. Written by Jean Sternberg (?), I Love You, I Love You is Alain Resnais’s most daring attempt to use images and editing to suggest thought processes. Claude, recuperated following a suicide attempt, is recruited by scientists who are researching time in order to verify their experiment with a mouse, which they believe they succeeded in transporting to a moment in its past before bringing it back to the present. But something goes awry with the human version of the experiment, and Claude is stuck in the past, not only recapturing a lost moment of time, but also reliving seemingly random fragments of the past, many revolving around his conviction that he has murdered a woman, Catrine. Among the events that Claude relives is his attempted suicide.
     An astonishing essay on how the human mind organizes time elements thematically, achronologically, this science-fiction poem gives Claude a companion for his time-travel: his predecessor, the mouse—a perplexed image of himself, it turns out, straining for breaths in the cage, in this instance, the belljar of time that proves its eventual home.
     Wry dialogue includes the delightful possibility that the cat was created in God’s image, and that man was created to be the cat’s slave and caregiver. By extension, time’s relation to humanity is a cat-and-mouse game. A cab driver casually asks Claude, “Have you got time?” Really, time has us.
     Resnais’s film can seem a fiendishly desentimentalized version of Frank Capra’s lugubrious It’s a Wonderful Life (1946); but its ultimate effect recalls the powerful last shot of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958): Everyman, on a ledge, all but falling, fixed in helplessless, guilt, loss, regret.
     Moreover, this haunting film, especially given its themes of time, loss and memory, anticipates another great work of science fiction: Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972).

1973
STAVISKY . . . Alain Resnais’s pre-World War II tragedy depicts actual French history for its elusive reality; there is about it an air of surmise. This suits its protagonist (Jean-Paul Belmondo, excellent), the Ukrainian-born son of Jewish immigrants, passing for Gentile, whose fraudulent financial dealings, including the floating of worthless bonds, in 1934 upheaved the government, undoing the political Left and taking France to the brink of civil war. A French Gatsby, Serge Alexandre Stavisky roams the ethers of social elegance, nearly as unknown to himself as to others as a result of cultural dislocation and uprooted identity, and fiercely in pursuit of recognition and affection. He is driven by more than greed. He wants desperately to believe that he exists. Hounded by grief and guilt over the suicide of his father, who felt dishonored by his son’s earlier activities, Stavisky is restless, perpetually “in play.” His flight from anonymity leads to his death and to his becoming a national scapegoat.
     Working from a script by Jorge Semprun, Resnais counterpoints Stavisky with Trotsky, who in 1933 gained admittance to Paris. Soviet dictator Stalin pursued the exile’s assassination partly because Trotsky continued to work for the revolutionary aim of workers’ democracy that Stalin had betrayed at home. Resnais’s film finds a parallel between the two men, Trotsky and Stavisky, that becomes a fluid pair of intersecting lines in imaginative and political space.
     A film of frosty blues and whites, Stavisky . . . is assembled as a mosaic of pieces of time correlative to Stavisky’s fractured existence and the crumbling existences of France and, indeed, the whole of Europe.
     As Resnais films go, this one is a bit of a chore for me to navigate; not so my brother, who thirty years ago described Stavisky . . . as “sheer pleasure.”

1980
MON ONCLE D’AMERIQUE. Alain Resnais’s Mon oncle d’Amérique blends documentary and fictional aspects. Evolutionary biologist/behaviorist Henri Laborit, who appears as himself, had selected Resnais as the logical person to direct a documentary in which he, Laborit, would present his views about human behavior on the basis of experiments with rats. Resnais brought in Jean Gruault to expand the concept, however, by devising a script about fictional characters to accompany Laborit’s science lectures. A female and two males, these characters whose lives intersect come from different backgrounds; they are a one-time radical who subsequently pursues careers in acting and business, a factory middle-manager who anxiously faces corporate downsizing, and a public radio news manager who leaves wife and kids for the actress. Their autobiographical voiceovers extend a documentary air to the fiction. Depending on one’s point of view, the film conforms to a point-point model, in which fictional characters illustrate Laborit’s ideas, a point-counterpoint model, in which the characters’ actions and behaviors ill match Laborit’s ideas, or a more elusive and ambiguous thing that falls somewhere in between these two models—if you will, a partial illustration.
     Among the issues addressed: inhibited behavior; uninhibited behavior/“defensive violence”; circumstances under which one turns aggressive behavior against oneself or others; the relationship between social conditioning and nervous system functioning; competition; domination; “what we call ‘mental illness’”; group and individual survival; the cultural, political and geopolitical applications of all these, including war and racism.
     Laborit: “Language convinces the individual that in serving the group he is serving himself.”
     The title refers to an illusory ideal of happiness. What one of the characters says: “America doesn’t exist. I know; I lived there.”
     Wonderfully, characters at certain points wear rat heads!
     The film ends with a montage of building bricks, a metaphor for human “personality” and the unconscious.
     Fascinating film!

1983
LIFE IS A BED OF ROSES. Three time-frames infiltrate one another; three stories interlock—and a fourth, medieval story is contained in the contemporary story as an expression of children’s imagination. Alain Resnais’s La vie est un roman—literally, Life Is a Romance, but in the States, Life Is a Bed of Roses—is all about imagination: imagining a royal estate, imagining a utopian society that’s also expressionistic and solipsistic, imagining two persons in bed contrary to what appears to be their natural paths of sexual interest. There’s something of a Shakespearean fairy-tale air hanging about, and much of the film is (monotonously) punctuated by original choral music. Jean Gruault wrote the script, perhaps on a whim.
     A lifetime ago my brother described a particular Resnais film as “sheer pleasure,” and that sums up what Resnais films generally have been for me. Watching this one, though, bored me stiff. Early on there’s a visual and contextual coup, and I had a foreboding things were going to go badly when it registered for me as mere cleverness. Just prior to the outbreak of the Great War, a count unveils outdoors a model for the castle he intends to have built. Darkness and flames soon after become the backdrop for the model: war has erupted, engulfing Europe and putting on hold its aristocratic dreams, which will have to reinvent or reconfigure themselves in order to survive (see Jean Renoir’s La grande illusion, 1937). This is amazing stuff, with the model baldly announcing itself as a movie miniature, thus calling attention to its own artifice, illusion and superficiality in a mentally gymnastic postmodern way. My mind spoke to me: “This is delightful”; but I wasn’t delighted. Rather, I was vaguely annoyed, and as the film proceeded my annoyance continued and deepened.
     Rather than intellectual, this film comes off as overly intellectualized, and it wastes a lot of good actors in uninteresting roles.

1984
LOVE UNTO DEATH. A frantic Elisabeth struggles with Simon on their bedroom floor. Apparently Simon has had a heart attack. Dr. Rozier pronounces him dead.
     After the doctor has left, though, light as air Simon descends the corkscrew staircase that reminds us of the spiral staircase encapsulating the mysteries of Time in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958). Simon, we learn, abandoned wife and children a couple of months earlier to live with Elisabeth. Are we watching Elisabeth’s fantasy of Simon’s resurrection? “I don’t think I loved you before,” Elisabeth declares. “Before?” “Before your death.”
     Directing from Jean Gruault’s script, Resnais tweaks Time in L’amour à mort. A genetic botanist, Elisabeth works toward the future; an archaeologist, Simon digs into the past. At a site, Elisabeth tells Simon, “Here come Judith and Jérôme,” a long-married couple, both ministers, and Simon’s oldest friends. A long-shot follows, which we expect to be a point-of-view shot of the Martignacs’ arrival; but Elisabeth and Simon are also in the shot, making their way down a hill. Time has turned, briefly collapsed.
     Resnais has stated that music set the film’s course. (Hans Werner Henze is the composer.) Simon is haunted by music he heard when he was “[a]mong the dead,” which eludes his memory, however. But we hear it periodically, the accompaniment to full-screen inserts of vast mystery: dark heavens in which white specks float around representing stars, snowflakes, drifts of Time. (This implicitly placed us “[a]mong the dead.”) Sometimes the inserts are only blackness, and sometimes the inserts are so frequent that the human drama seems what’s inserted.
     As Simon dies again Elisabeth promises to join him. They already seem a fully meshed couple; the Martignacs, an unmeshed one. Resnais’s final shots suggest that the film has always really been about the Martignacs.

1986
MELO. For Alain Resnais, making a film that unfolds in time in a simple forward direction is an “experiment”! Mélo, from Henri Bernstein’s play, mines Resnais’s signature theme, past haunting the present and thus helping to determine future, but without constructing an intricately edited mosaic of different time elements; and in this instance the situation developing this theme seems uncomfortably conventional: a married woman’s adultery with a friend of her husband and the guilt this engenders, finally driving her to commit suicide. Conventional plot, conventional treatment; can we call this Resnais?
     Yes; and despite the fact that it’s widely considered one of Resnais’s lesser works, Mélo may be as good an index of his filmmaking brilliance as any other Resnais film.
     In 1926, a dinner at a couple’s home; the host and hostess entertain one guest: the host’s friend, a violinist who has a concert career while the host toils modestly in an orchestra and gives lessons on the side. But Pierre has one thing that Marcel doesn’t: Romaine (Sabine Azéma, best actress César). At least until tomorrow. As the friends talk, the camera records something extraordinary: the new couple, Marcel and Romaine, gradually taking shape from the clay of the married couple and their guest, with the host none the wiser. It simply occurs, with only a minimum of subtle flirting on Romaine’s part, and a corresponding bit of vacant loneliness on Marcel’s part, in the direction of the eventual outcome; our seeing this almost entirely innocent process (as innocent as anything human can possibly be) neuters any inclination we may have to pass judgments, thereby enlarging our capacity to take in the outcome’s generalities and particulars. Moreover, while compositions stress the connectedness of the trio, the camera moves to isolate Marcel, enrobing him in the darkness of the failed romantic past he seems fixated on, to suggest the possibility of his upcoming betrayal of Pierre. It is Romaine, however, whose guilt will prove the most corrosive—and, in an odd way, Pierre’s, whose subsequent illness reflects the double betrayal, by spouse and friend, that he doesn’t quite know about but also, unconsciously at least, doesn’t quite not know about. Pierre is heartsick, and Romaine may be trying to bring things to some fort of conclusion by poisoning him on the side.
     Despite what you might have read, this is a great film. Its title, incidentally, reflects the melodramatic genre to which the plot belongs—and more: especially on the twin axes of past and present and openness and deceit, Mélo explores the line along which marriage and adultery themselves conform to the nature of melodrama.
     Early on, Marcel muses about “the joy of long ago.” He is lying, or he is whistling in the dark.

1989
I WANT TO GO HOME. Alain Resnais’s films possess rigor, a quality notably lacking in his mostly English-language I Want to Go Home, a comedy about the gap between an estranged father and daughter and, also, French and U.S. attitudes and culture. The father, a septuagenarian cartoonist (beautifully played by Adolph Green—yes, that Adolph Green), is in Paris for an exhibition of comic strip work, including his, but, really, to see his daughter, Elsie, who is completing her graduate dissertation on Flaubert, and who hasn’t written him once during the two years she has lived in France. Her parents were divorced; her mother, to whom she was close, is deceased. Joey Wellman, the father, arrives with longtime live-in, Lena. Resnais won a best film prize at Venice (but not the Golden Lion of St. Mark) for this amiable, engaging comedy and sometime satire.
     It also won the best screenplay prize at Venice for U.S. cartoonist Jules Feiffer. Feiffer has written drivel for the movies before; his script launched the atrocious Carnal Knowledge (1971), whose faults (among them, shallowness and crudeness) Mike Nichols’s direction compounded. The script is somewhat better this time, but its sentimentality—an American bugaboo—necessitated Resnais’s unaccustomedly loose style. Resnais tried his best to rein in the Bad Feiffer in order to let the Good Feiffer, the satirical Feiffer, prevail. Although he isn’t working at his usual high level here, Resnais is not the problem with this film. Feiffer is.
     Gérard Depardieu, no less, plays Elsie’s professor, Christian Gauthier, who is a fan of her father’s artwork and other aspects of American culture. Micheline Presle, no less, plays Gauthier’s mother, Isabelle, the masquerade at whose country home invokes Jean Renoir’s Rules of the Game (1939). There are also numerous references to Green’s career.

1997
SAME OLD SONG. In hommage to a British television mini-series, Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective (1986), Same Old Song (On connaît la chanson) is an unusual musical film; when they open their mouths to let out with a song, the characters are actually lip-synching familiar tunes in popular recordings. These songs reveal what the characters are thinking.
     Alain Resnais, that ol’ light musical-comedy film magician (well, here he is!), directs from a sparkling romantic script by Agnès Jaoui and Jean-Pierre Bacri, who also play characters in the film. Each of the latter won two Césars, for their supporting performances and their collaborative script. André Dussollier won as best actor. Resnais won for the year’s best film. The French film critics also named Same Old Song the year’s best film, and it won as well the Prix Louis Delluc. Resnais, who had made some of the world’s grimmest great movies, had a lot that year to sing and smile about.
     This one is as light as a soufflé, but a subtle chord of melancholy deepens the aftertaste. One knows the song; it is the mortal song of life and love.

2006
CŒURS. One of Alain Resnais’s loveliest films, Cœurs, based on Alan Ayckbourn’s play Private Fears in Public Places, is an upclose meditation on six crisscrossing lives in Paris. Its leitmotif is sparse falling snow that appears outdoors and in, conflating the emotional distance between venues, and evoking the fragile nature of feeling and the transience of life. Snow falling outside is extended indoors, by way of superimpositions, and when this expressionistic technique is erased we still see snow falling outdoors, through an open door, perhaps, converting expressionism to naturalism and leaving us a little haunted. Resnais is always humane; here, more intimately so.
     The main characters: a real estate agent; his co-worker; Lionel, a bartender at a hotel whose father is in his son’s care and is dying; the father (Claude Rich, hilariously libidinous in an offscreen performance); Lionel’s most committed barfly, whose partner had been the agent’s client in search of a new apartment—a new life—for the both of them; the barfly’s new girlfriend, the agent’s sister.
     Charlotte, real estate agent Thierry’s devout Catholic co-worker, keeps giving shy Thierry tapes of a TV program, Songs That Changed My Life, but with an add-on: herself in strutting sexual get-up. Following her cue, one day at work he steals a kiss, only to be greeted by incensed virtue; impelled by worries of charges of sexual harassment, he proffers profuse apologies. In truth, if only he could see it, the one he ought to be pursuing is client Nicole (Laura Morante, wonderful), but Thierry doesn’t know that Nicole has parted ways with her barfly-boyfriend. But one is always inside and outside one’s own life, like the snow, and loneliness seems to be what one can settle on.
     The TV show provides pseudo-documentary excerpts inside Resnais’s melancholy dream.

WHO IS THE GREATEST LIVING FILMMAKER?

Now that Michelangelo Antonioni has departed for Paradise, the greatest living filmmaker is dear Jean-Luc, it seems to me.

Dear, dear Jean-Luc!

Apart from Godard, perhaps these five, in alphabetical order, round out the half-dozen greatest living filmmakers:

Chantal Äkerman
Hou Hsiao-hsien
Kon Ichikawa
Abbas Kiarostami
Nelson Pereira dos Santos

At least I think all of these folk are still with us! And if any of them isn’t, keep it to yourself, please! I’ve had enough rotten news of departures the last couple of days!

MICHELANGELO ANTONIONI (1912-2007)

Today is sadder than yesterday.

Michelangelo Antonioni has died. With Ozu, Dreyer and Eisenstein, he was one of the four greatest film artists of all time. Antonioni was 94.

Just three years ago, he made one of his loveliest works: “Michelangelo’s Gaze.”

“L’eclisse,” the single most essential film for understanding the sixties, is among my five favorite films. No one can hope to understand me either without embracing this film. “L’avventura” also places among my fifteen favorite films.

“L’avventura” begins and “L’eclisse” completes cinema’s greatest trilogy. The wonderful middle film is “La notte.”

“Netteza urbana,” “Il grido,” “Il deserto rosso,” the film known in the States as “The Passenger” (which is in English), “Identificazione di una donna”—these are among Antonioni’s other great works.

“Zabriskie Point”? Isn’t it time, now, for us to revisit it? I suspect it isn’t as bad as we remember.

Michelangelo Antonioni’s cinema is gracious, precise, expansive, humane.

I don’t know where Ingmar Bergman, who died yesterday, ended up. But Michelangelo Antonioni has joined Dante Alighieri in Paradiso.