KNOCKS AT MY DOOR (Alejandro Saderman, 1994)

From a play by Juan Carlos Gené, who co-authored the script with the director, Alejandro Saderman’s Golpes a mi puerta, from Argentina, is an attempt to convey the horrifying atmosphere of a police state. Sister Ana hides an unarmed anti-military rebel in her quarters. When authorities find him there, the nun resists efforts to portray him as having held her hostage at gunpoint. As a result, her execution by firing squad closely follows his.
     Lurid, melodramatic, poorly acted, this film in no way compares with Luis Puenzo’s The Official Story (1985). Sister Ana is insufferable and I couldn’t wait for the fascists to dispatch her.
     In short, agreeing with its politics didn’t assist my enjoyment of this film in the slightest degree.

OH, WOE IS ME! (Jean-Luc Godard, 1993)

Jean-Luc Godard’s Hélas pour moi brings the myth of Zeus, Amphitryon and wife Alcmene into the present. It is a film “in search of God”—this from an artist who had otherwise seemed to get along without God just fine. Eight years later, his masterpiece, Éloge de l’amour (2001), would achieve, I believe, an epiphany—the apotheosis of the elegiac mode of his that perhaps began with Nouvelle vague (1990). In all three films, “the past requires redemption.”
     Abraham Klimt (Bernard Verley, giving the film’s sturdiest performance) is a publisher tracking down Simon and Rachel for the completion of a novel that he believes lies in their story. His solemn voiceover grounds fleeting imagery of Nature’s evanescence and human transience. It joins onscreen script, dialogue, zigzagging encounters between a wide variety of characters.
     Here are a few of the film’s words (some, borrowed), in whatever form they reach us:

The past returns to the present.

Everyone slept, as if the universe were one enormous error.

It was wise [of God? Godard?] to mix tragedy and comedy.

[Addressing Klimt,] You’re not missing any pages, Monsieur. There’s simply nothing to see.

The most profound human impulse is to challenge the truth.

All of us are surrounded by invisible dreams.

One has to learn to accept love.

     At one point the screen goes black amidst cracks of thunder and Klimt relates the following:

This is what is true. In 1932 the Dutchman Jan Oort studied stars that began moving away from the Milky Way. Soon, as expected, gravity started pulling them back. In studying the position and velocity of these returning stars, Oort was able to measure the mass of our galaxy. He was surprised to discover that the visible matter represented only 50% of the mass necessary to deploy such a gravitational pull. What happened then to the other half of the universe? [At this point we see Klimt, who is facing us, looking out of a rain-splashed window.] Phantom matter was thus born. Omnipresent and invisible.

     Here are a few of the film’s most beautiful images:

Water passing just beyond and below an of course unbudging leafy tree.

Klimt, raincoat in hand, on a fog-drenched pier.

A single red poppy in a field of grass.

     Only by taking over the form of a person can God argue His own existence. A search for God discovers only this: the search for God.
     Hélas pour moi is scattershot, sometimes irritatingly so, and largely opaque. Its disjointedness presumably reflects our lost connection with Nature, ourselves, each other, God.
     Perhaps it is from our sense of this loss that some of us deduce, or presume, God’s existence.
     Including dear Jean-Luc? Hm; another mystery.

DEATH OF A CYCLIST (Juan Antonio Bardem, 1954)

In Franco’s fascist Spain, María José and Juan are having a secret affair. María José is the wife of Miguel, an industrialist who benefited from supporting Franco; María José never loved her husband, but Miguel was her ticket to the sweet life, because money stays current even while class loses its grip. For his part, otherwise unattached lover Juan secured his teaching post thanks to a Francoist in-law. A student uprising calling for his ouster ignites former idealist Juan’s “journey back to himself.”
     Juan Antonio Bardem’s Muerte de un ciclista opens with María José and Juan together on the road. They are out in the country; only a small skeletal tree—symbolical of the barren outcome of the Spanish Civil War—marks the particular spot where the car that María José is driving hits and takes down a working-class bicyclist. Juan’s impulse is to help the fallen man; but María José will have none of that. Helping the stranger will expose her and Juan’s affair, which in turn will jeopardize her marriage. This she will not allow to happen. Later, when Juan feels he and María José should turn themselves over to the police, she runs him down at the spot where she had earlier hit the bicyclist. Again, she selfishly seeks to retain her lifestyle and position.
     The aspect involving the students is the lamest, murkiest part of the film. Otherwise the film is striking, intense, sometimes brilliant. Three passages stand out: Juan’s visit to the poverty-stricken tenement where the accident victim lived; at an event, art critic Rafa’s attempts to taunt María José and incite her spouse, with fear-generating two-shots of him and either, each shot silent but for the ambient noise and music; the stunning, ironical finish when, rushing back home to Miguel after having murdered Juan, María José disastrously swerves to avoid hitting a bicyclist. Another irony: censorship dictated this perfect ending. Bardem’s best shot: María José’s upside-down face, a death mask, which Bardem repeats to differentiate between her objective death and the spiritual death for Spain implicit in the bicyclist’s observation of this before he selfishly, anonymously takes off—as María José herself once did.

LIONS LOVE (Agnès Varda, 1969)

There is an exquisite moment of postmodernist self-reflexivity in Agnès Varda’s free-flowing tragicomedy Lions Love. It involves Shirley Clarke, who is playing Shirley Clarke, which is to say, herself, the New York filmmaker of The Connection (1962) and Portrait of Jason (1967), who has come to Hollywood, the town of Desi[l]lusions (what a word-play!), to make a film. During her visit she is staying with the Andy Warhol actress/diva Viva, who is attempting to commercialize her résumé, and her two bungalow-mates, two male actors, all of whom share one bed for the camera that is being womanned by Varda, who is documenting the goings-on (much as the documentarian does in The Connection, although here we have actors, or would-be actors, in lieu of junkies), or pretending to, perhaps, according to a script. At a certain point, when things haven’t panned out, Shirley, the character, is supposed to overdose on sleeping pills. Contrary to what Shirley, the real person, had agreed to, now she doesn’t want to do it! Shirley insists she cares only about her daughter, Wendy, and not about whether she ever makes another film. Finally she relents, enacting her ultimately unsuccessful suicide attempt. During their sparring, Varda slips in front of the camera, and even into bed to perform the scene that Shirley is refusing to perform. But do we know what’s what? Is Shirley’s rebellion really her rebellion or part of Varda’s plan? At the end, when Viva laments not having been given a script for her part in this film, is the lament real or part of the script? Before she completes her American portrait, Varda suggests that U.S. Americans, nurtured on Hollywood movies and culture (not to mention the artificiality that a plastic pineapple represents), are wedded to wars because they cannot distinguish between reality and illusion.
     Devastating: in this color film, the black-and-white television coverage of Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination and immediate aftermath. (The TV set has been put into mourning, with a black cloth draping its top and sides.) Viva and her apartment-mates are glued to the screen, but the reality that unfolds there seems unreal—a national nightmare, which Coretta Scott King’s televised reaction, so shortly after her own loss, painfully deepens.
     Dazzling, with one passage expressing Varda’s great love of children, this film celebrates humanity—and warmly embraces the influences of Godard, Rivette, and Vera Chytilovà’s Daisies (1967).

LEONOR (Juan Luis Buñuel, 1975)

A bewitching, soulful medieval vampire movie played out against the background of the Black Plague, Leonor, from Spain, France and Italy, is a work of death, loss, suffering, undying love, romantic obsession, doomed remarriage, child abductions, environmentalism, the bridgeable “gap between life and death,” harsh hoofbeats, rough mountains, bleating sheep and howling winds. Juan Luis Buñuel, whose father, I believe, is not unfamiliar to you, co-wrote and directed, with Ingmar Bergman as much in mind as Pop. I love this spacious, haunting movie, which is based on Edgar Allan Poe’s wonderful story “Ligeia.” Michel Piccoli and Liv Ullmann star, and Piccoli in particular is magnificent. Ullmann gives me the creeps, and on this occasion is actually supposed to!
     Things beautifully, and surprisingly, connect in this film. Early on, the Black Plague is identified with stench. When the first wife returns from her tomb after ten years, she asks to have “a very strong perfume” made for her.
     Poe-people! This one is better than Jean Epstein’s Fall of the House of Usher (1928) and is not to be missed!