Flight of the Red Balloon

With “Flight of the Red Balloon” Hou Hsiao-Hsien has created a jewel of lighter-than-air deception and quiet revelation that is both homage to and update of Albert Lamorisse’s beloved 1956 French classic, “The Red Balloon.” The childhood loneliness at the core of the earlier film here permeates all the characters’ lives. Despite love, desire and caring good will the characters do not connect but merely overlap. Machines and technology mediate their interactions with themselves and with each other.

In the sparkling light of a summer afternoon, a young boy, Simon, scrambles up the railing of the Place de la Bastille Metro stop. Pleading with the eponymous red balloon- off screen, above the trees- to come to him, offering a king’s ransom of 100 candies, upping the ante to 2,000 caramels, but the balloon does not respond. Accepting his loss, Simon descends into the subway.

The camera drifts upwards and a glimpse of transparent red gives the impression that the balloon is nestled or trapped in the elaborate art nouveau sculpture of the Metro entrance. But this is a false start: only the crimson-tinted globe of a period lamplight. The camera proceeds upwards and we see the too-perfect opaque orb of the red balloon that caught Simon’s eye and attention.

The balloon lingers over the requisite attractive Parisian rooftops until it comes to rest on a Metro platform, patiently awaiting Simon’s train. The train arrives, the doors open; the adults come and go, pushing the unwanted obstacle of the balloon out of their way. Simon sees the balloon hovering just inches from his grasp, but this time it is he that does not respond. The train doors close and Simon goes on his appointed way. The recurrence of the balloon is not seen as magical or surprising or meaningful. Though Simon sees the balloon, its appearance does not connect to anything inside him or to the moment just a few minutes before when the balloon was the object of desire and promised sacrifice. The balloon appears many times throughout the film, though it will never again elicit a response.

In another telling of this tale one imagines that Simon would step off the train, grab hold of the balloon and be led into a journey of the unknown, or, at least, that he might try to bring the balloon into the train, activating the metaphor of merging the “other” life into the quotidian life, with all its tandem trials and lessons. But neither happens.

Song is a Chinese film student studying in Paris. She floats down a sidewalk with the same vaguely random directionality as the balloon, momentarily fluttering in a swirl at the streets' intersection, finally coming to the address she seeks. Entering a small dark theater, she encounters the rehearsal of a Chinese-inspired puppet performance that tells of a young couple, separated by the fierce Dragon king who holds the beloved prisoner at the bottom of the sea. The lover vows to boil away the ocean into a mist of oblivion to regain his true love.

Suzanne is the magnificently nuanced and varied voices of the puppets. She is a blonde rapture of vibrant talent and too much décolletage, an incarnation of frazzled beauty and distraction. Suzanne has hired Song as sitter/nanny for her son, Simon. Together they go to pick up the boy from school and Suzanne sends them home as she returns to the theater. We come to understand the sprawling nature of Suzanne’s life; a whirl of objects and emotions without order or scale, her precision is focused only in her work. On their walk home Song tells Simon of the Red Balloon film and at that moment points out a red balloon drawn onto the side of an adjacent shop. Simon does not know of the old movie and isn't interested in the image across the street; he wants to play a game of pinball.

Lovely and imperturbable, Song floats just above engagement with Simon and Suzanne, acting often as a buffer and never at a distance too great for observation. Simon is gentle, bright and related, never withholding or fearful. Song and Simon video their daily walks and errands. Song engages the boy, fleshing out his story, neither avoiding nor pursuing any of the difficult discoveries such as Simon’s parents divorce, his father’s absence or the absence of his “sort of” sister, Louise, who lives with their grandfather in Brussels.

Later, Simon and Song enter the apartment and find the usual clutter overwhelmed by a cascade of files and papers, boxes and bags. Tearful and angry, Suzanne is on the phone, saying that she cannot find the Lease Agreement, that since her husband left she cannot find where he put it or remember if she might have moved it. Suddenly the impermanence expressed in Song’s foreignness and Simon’s absent family is transferred to Suzanne herself; domestic security, apparently, is another thing of the past.

The puppet rehearsal continues and we see the undaunted young lover ladling cup after cup of seawater into a boiling pot. 2,500- 4,652 ladles of water, he counts as he goes, his ardor undiminished. A magical Genie appears, all hair and arms. To reward the young man’s effort and dedication the genie offers a magical golden coin that will help drain the ocean, forcing the Dragon king to release the beloved. In this second view there is an ominous discordance. Of course we want the young man to regain his true love, but we live in a world where technology has made actual and possible that which before was merely metaphor. Is the young man now a sociopath intent on achieving his goal at the cost to the world of the very ocean of life?

We learn that Song is making a film of a red balloon for her school project and Simon, dressed all in green, is helping by carrying the balloon. Song explains that green is a very easy color to erase digitally, so that she can make it appear that the balloon is traveling of its own volition. Suddenly the magic of the red balloon is entirely gone.

The problem of the Lease Agreement concerns the downstairs neighbor who doesn’t pay his rent; Suzanne owns that apartment as well. It had been her mother’s, and she will need it when Louise returns to Paris for school, deftly indicating that Suzanne herself is the product of a broken home. She finds the Lease Agreement and must now begin the process to force the errant downstairs neighbor to release her apartment; true love is replaced with property. It turns out that Louise does not want to come back to Paris for school, and one can see why. Her mother’s world is messy, complex and costly in many ways to herself and everyone around her. Though Suzanne is generous in emotion and substance, hers is an outmoded style, not technologically clean, not so easy to erase.

Set into the filigree of this family story is a scene of a Chinese puppet master giving a demonstration, organized by Suzanne, for a small group of students. The master's movements are so few and so slight it appears that the cloth and carved-wood doll really is a living being for whom the puppeteer has merely been so kind as to cup his hands, creating a tiny stage for the little performer to enact his scene. The puppet master appears to be doing nothing more than assisting the puppet to do what it wants, a humble gesture of loving helpfulness.

On a school trip to the Musee d’Orsay Simon’s class looks at a painting of a scene from the turn of the last century- a child chases a red ball in a dark and verdant park. In the distance, across a silent pond, a young adult couple can be seen. Who might these people be- the watching parents? More importantly, where is the artist standing, from where is the scene depicted, high above? Is the painting happy or sad? A little of both, one student replies, as Simon gazes up through the gallery’s skylight at the red balloon that flutters just above the glass. It has followed him throughout the film and, as before, he has no response to seeing it again, nor to the co-incidence- synchronicity- of seeing it represented in the painting even as it hovers above, embodying the artist's point of view.

The endless variety and sophistication of technology has robbed the world of its voice for magic and the extraordinary. In one scene Simon is “drawing” Louise through a projector device that allows him to trace her outline on an affixed sheet of paper; he looks into the machine, not at her. Suzanne peers through the viewfinder of her camera to record this fleeting moment of quiet childhood togetherness; like the scattered family it will not last.

One imagines, if one doesn’t know the effect first-hand, that to Simon, brought up with technology and totally conversant with its varied modalities, seeing the red balloon now here, now there, can carry no meaning because he cannot differentiate these occurrences from the sequential and random representations on a screen while web or channel surfing or gaming. His range of expression is limited to pressing buttons and moving “mice”; all of which breaks down barriers of conventional vision while subtly directing and coercing as it robs vision of its capacity to see anew, differently, or to persist on a path of one's own making. Since anything can always appear anywhere at any time, no particular appearance is significant.

Contempt (Le Mepris)

Forty-five years later Godard’s masterpiece, “Contempt”, remains a startling visual stylization, majestically interweaving cool piercing intellect with surprising emotional breadth and depth.

Ostensibly a film within a film, the opening scene credits Godard’s film about the making of Fritz Lang’s film of “The Odyssey”. Lang, playing himself, is glorious as actor, director, Greek chorus and Tiresias all rolled into one man of heart and vision.

Piccoli and Bardot, the young married couple Paul and Camille, are to some extent merely stand-ins for the characters they play. They are not required to render real performances any more than the actors in Lang’s “Odyssey” are required to do more than place their bodies within the frame of the camera’s gaze. These actors represent pawns in a game played by the gods. So, too, forces beyond their control and understanding buffet about the actors, directors and the young couple in the “real life” of Godard’s epic journey. To be discordant is in keeping with the modern fractured world.

Bardot is never more sublimely empty than in the scene showing her smoldering nude body stretched out across a bed glowing in voluptuous semi-darkness. It is the first of many different versions of contempt. In the mumbled tones of intimate after-love, Camille inventories her own formidable physical assets, asking Paul if he loves each body part she enumerates. With her laundry list of skin and bones, she is plainly telling him that this transient envelope of existence is all of her that there is to be known.

She suspects him, even now, of not being entirely fulfilled in the thrall of the perfect specimen of the machine of her body. Her contempt is also for becoming a real woman beyond the perversely conventional dichotomy of wife/femme fatale. All she can do is try on a black wig; in her world, a different look is the closest she can get to a different dimension.

Paul asserts that he loves each part of her equally, from which she concludes in dead earnest that he therefore loves her completely. He agrees, adding, “tragically.” Matching her black wig, he has adopted the look of a black hat in the hopes of inheriting some of Dean Martin’s charisma and success. It is his effort to acquire a desired aspect rather than discover his own character.

Paul pretends that he is a serious writer rather than a hack journeyman for hire. Though he knows how to secure a reasonably hefty paycheck and to play hard to get, what he has to offer is a list of decaying literary attributes as lifeless as Camille’s body parts. If he at an earlier time aspired to even a modicum of artistic achievement, he turned out to be no more than an avenue for someone else’s prosaic imagination to travel on. The longevity of his market value will not exceed Camille’s. Neither has the substance without which personal destiny has no core.

Camille and Paul’s story mimics in pathetic dis-similarity the story of Ulysses and Penelope. Paul has been asked by a famous American producer, Jerry Prokosch- played with over-sized vulgarity and ceaseless narcissistic zeal by Jack Palance- to rewrite the script for Lang’s film to make it sexier and “new.” Prokosch invites the couple to his villa for a drink, taking the beautiful young wife in his little red sports car while vaguely suggesting that Paul come along in a cab. Camille is hesitant; Paul insists she go, that he will follow. She exudes the uncertainty and anger of being even temporarily unclaimed by the designated other. The spell of her and Paul’s magical interlude is broken; she cannot forgive.

Paul’s cab ride, like Ulysses' journey, doesn’t go as planned. The taxi gets into an accident. To find another cab he has to walk for 20 minutes from the Castello Sant’Angelo to the Piazza Venezia. He is half an hour late. With the heartless brevity redolent of contemporary attention deficit disorder, Ulysses’ decade of meaningful wandering and development has been reduced to thirty pointless minutes. These few minutes of unexpected waiting have stretched Camille beyond her resources. Paul makes matters worse by flirting with the producer’s attractive assistant/interpreter. Each knows that this day has revealed something neither of them wanted to discover.

Paul quotes Dante’s lines about Ulysses' last voyage: “We rejoiced, but soon our joy turned to grief…and the sea closed in on us.” Perhaps the most concise poetic description of the journey of life and a virtual blueprint description of Paul and Camille's fate, this oracle is followed by the spectacularly oppositional imagery of the harsh and dry opaque verticality of the rocky cliffs of the island of Capri partly encircling and overshadowing a tiny cove of brilliant, glistening deep turquoise water.

For Lang, Ulysses’ character cannot be changed without changing the entire nature and substance of the story- it would no longer be the Odyssey. That Ulysses could not restrain his desire to gain experience of the world despite his love for his family and known world was the instantiation of his desire to know himself; he and his world are inseparable. Lang’s interpretation and understanding of the Odyssey and of Ulysses is of no interest to the American producer. Prokosch wants to re-envision the context of the Odyssey with Ulysses restyled as a modern man, an everyday neurotic. Secretly unhappy with Penelope and suspecting her fidelity, in this version Ulysses goes off to war, not bothering to hurry home after the victory and only killing all his wife’s suitors in order to save face. Prokosch’s Ulysses is a clever, defensive ambler, irrelevant in an uncaring world, responding as best he can to gain advantage or evade the unwanted.

Paul resonates with this convenient view of Ulysses’ fate for it will explain why Camille no longer loves him. Paul’s boredom, thoughtless over-confidence, carelessness, and meaningless flirting have produced her disdain. That this idea makes no sense doesn’t matter. It fits the modern concept of mechanistic cause and effect, lacks entirely any sense of responsible volition and obviates any deeper understanding of or inquiries about the nature of love and desire. Camille responds by flirting with Prokosch partly to punish Paul, but more because she has no other persona to enact or call upon.

Camille recalls idyllic images of their earlier happiness: a simple, uncomplicated and unconscious love of unboundaried bliss and pleasant delirium. Paul envisions a time when Camille would no longer love him, but the corresponding image is of her perfect unchanged nude body, suppliant as always. She dreams of the past; he begins to imagine a different future.

The young couple argues. Paul asks Camille why she no longer loves him and her reply is that she would rather die than tell. However, barely a few minutes pass before she does tell: she hates him because he is incapable of moving her. Camille’s contempt is akin to hating god for not being more god-like. As if denouncing a false god for his impotence, she does not see that the error and responsibility are her own. She no longer loves Paul because he is just a man. Previously she placed him in the position of a god, or, at least, co-conspirator in their undifferentiated and repetitive unconscious instinctual vitality. Now she finds he cannot make her love him any more than a god can make someone believe or worship sincerely. She feels abandoned and is incapable of moving in any direction on her own. She needs the other to move her, even as she resists. Prokosch’s large gestures may be empty and false, but they are unambiguous and predictable. It is no surprise when she goes off with the American; their fates are sealed in their separate yet equal inabilities to find another dimension or view of themselves. Endless repetition requires no next scene and the handsome runaway couple meet a sudden and unglamorous end in a highway accident: the little red sports car crushed like crumpled paper in the gigantic rig of a tractor-trailer, the two bodies slumped like discarded dolls.

Lang’s deeply human and humane character reminds us that man can only be human. Dante echoes again; man is not made to live like a brute, but to follow virtue and knowledge: to aspire to them, to keep them ever in our sight.

In the final scene of Godard’s film Paul has found the letter from Camille and he, too, prepares to depart. On the rooftop terrace of the Capri villa, Lang is shooting the end of his film; he describes it to Paul as that moment when Ulysses first sees his homeland. The actor playing Ulysses, barely more than a prop himself, moves sideways across the edge of the terrace. The camera sweeps along with him and then finally past him, out to a pure uninterrupted view of the horizon of sky and sea. Nothing and everything is there. The film has come full circle back to its own beginning as Ulysses eventually comes back to Ithaca. It is no mere return, the place and man are no longer the same, each is new and more. To find his way home Ulysses must first see his home in his mind’s eye, exactly as the artist must first see the vision of his work.

The Witnesses

Andre Techine’s new film, “The Witnesses”, is a difficult and courageous vision wrapped in a gay romance and sophisticated contemporary folklore. Set in Paris, 1984, at the onset of the AIDS epidemic, it weaves together the fates of five characters whose lives passively bear witness to their era, location and personal histories. For each one of them there is a moment of experience in which the observer becomes the act-or, awakening momentarily to witness in a deeper, evidential way the truth of his/her singular existence and struggle and is permitted, through the convergence of freedom and necessity, to make some mark in the world.

That these moments of transformation do not eventuate in transformed characters is one of the more shocking aspects of this bristling story. The changes that occur are not meaningless, but the film questions the model we use to view the development of character and of life itself. The neat progression of stacking, cumulative perceptions is replaced by the random non-linear hyper-action of the molecular images of the replicating virus and the ceaseless up/down, in/out of the flow of waves along the shore.

The film opens with a furiously-paced score that matches the intensity of a young woman, Sarah, stabbing at the keys of a red typewriter, her gaze darting everywhere in a desperate attempt to pull an elusive oracle out of thin air. She circles and crosses out the freshly typed lines until almost nothing remains. We feel her tension, urgency and dissatisfaction.

In a hospital corridor a handsome dark man, Mehdi- a police detective and father of a new-born- bickers with Adrien, a middle-aged doctor. Sarah, the new mother and Mehdi’s wife, looks trapped and cautious in the hospital bed, leery of the baby lying nearby.

Sarah’s friend Adrien is a gay man who cruises for sex at night in the park where he meets Manu, newly arrived in Paris with little more than youth, good looks and two years of culinary schooling. Manu is fiercely independent and clear in rejecting Adrien as a sex partner but welcomes him as a friend. Manu lives with his sister Julie, an aspiring young singer, in a small room in a seedy hotel occupied mostly by amiable prostitutes.

Early in the film, a dramatic example of the sudden call from observer to actor presents itself. Sarah invites Adrien and Manu for a seaside weekend. After lunch on the beach, Mehdi swims far out into the cove. Manu follows, swimming out past his ability and would certainly drown if not for Mehdi’s determination to pull the dead weight back to shore. The two go on to become lovers; their trysts are simultaneously full of passion and lifeless. Manu cannot give himself to anyone, while Mehdi feels physical longing, nothing more. Because their liaison is not the basis for renewal, they return to being observers of their lives, even at a carnal peak.

Adrien likes beautiful boys and can afford to treat himself. He comes to think of Manu as his great love, not least because they are not sexually involved. During a narcissistic outburst of well-practiced wounded love-pride, the doctor’s initiatory moment reveals itself in the sores and lesions on Manu’s chest that he rightly intuits as the presence of a new killer disease.

The shock of recognition allows Adrien to step out of his petty habituation, giving him a larger sphere in which to focus and utilize his estimable resources and expertise. Manu’s decline is steady and ineluctable. Whereas Mehdi could just pull Manu out of the deep water, Adrien is essentially helpless. Adrien’s commitment to starting a war against this disease while shepherding Manu through his decline and death lends his own life meaning and purpose. Once Manu dies and he picks up the next handsome boy, he is back to the mechanics of living, pattern without recognition.

Sarah learns of her husband’s affair with Manu but harbors no ill-will toward either man. What Sarah rejects is motherhood; it is not a child but a book that she wants to bring into the world. She is keenly aware of the unsympathetic response this provokes. She is honest and determined, struggling with a novel that does not come together and ultimately must be thrown out. She cannot find her story.

At Adrien’s for a Christmas dinner with Manu and Julie, Sarah asks Julie about the magic of her art. Julie is quick to disabuse Sarah of so romantic a notion. It is hard, muscular work- more like athletics- finding the right place in the throat from which to produce the correct sound. Momentarily alone with the diseased and disfigured boy that was her husband’s lover, Sarah gives Manu the kiss he asks for. Like a medieval princess encountering a leprous beggar in a wondrous legend, she willingly offers her lips; in that touch with death, chance and transcendence, Sarah understands that she has found the subject for what will undoubtedly be her one completed piece of adult fiction.

Manu’s moment comes in the humble guise of a store-bought stew provencal, casually and improperly prepared. He rejects it and along with the stew everything that is fractional and wrong, including his own life, which he ends with an overdose of pills provided by Adrien.

The day that Julie and Adrien bury her beloved brother, Julie admits that all her feeling and attention have gone to safe-guarding her voice for that night’s performance. Julie’s is a minor operatic talent at which she has slaved away to the point of becoming a viable performer in a small Mozart role. She has found the place in her throat and her place in career, but it does not correspond to any particular location in the world.

Mehdi returns to his detective work and family life; Sarah returns to her husband and child. Adrien continues his work and finds the next boy, relieved of having to rename convenience and habit as love; Julie is free to accept an offer to sing with a company in Munich; there is no reason not to go.

Thus it can be said that the witness element in Techine’s film is not about the distinction between action and observation. A character may be engaged with his or her life’s routine while not birthing new life within or without. A moment of engagement is just that: an experience of lived life. Only when a calling surfaces- saving the swimmer, fighting AIDS, perfecting vocal expression, discovering a narrative- is there a shift out of witnessing and into some completion, a hiatus from routine and the perpetual cycles of life.

The Duchess of Langeais

“The Duchess of Langeais”, Jacques Rivette’s new film, opens with images leading the viewer across an ancient church floor patterned with symbols redolent of mysterious power, patched and faded beyond legibility if not resonance. A filigreed iron grille of prison-like bars separates absolutely the luminous space of an elaborately carved high altar, glistening with gilding and color and embellished with narrative images that we cannot see, from the darkened nave where seated congregants dutifully listen to a vocal concert Mass by the convent nuns, now used to celebrate the latest regime change: post-Napoleonic royal restoration. The church and convent is the crowning and orienting complex on an isolated rock of island jutting up into the sky from the pure blue line of the sea.

The film demarcates spheres of possibility and action and requires that the viewer abandon a premise normally taken as axiomatic: that the storyline will unfold in a fashion where the narrative elements build so as to reveal an underlying depth dimension.

Whatever vertical dimension exists in this work lives outside the story proper. It is referred to in the tale told by Armand, a French general; equally it shows up in the imagery of the up and above convent to which Antoinette, the duchess, repairs after her unconsummated affair seems to render daily life in society intolerable to her. Each of the two main characters encounters a life moment which offers the potential for a transformative experience. Neither, however, is prepared to receive an unanticipated shift in understanding, so that no defining moment can occur.

Antoinette and Armand meet at one of the elegant nightly soirees that constitute the socially acceptable round of amusements for upper class Parisians. She is intrigued by the damaged and illustrious soldier; he determines to make the beautiful duchess his mistress; more deeply each intuits in the other a trustworthy reflection of a substanceless stance.

Armand in successive segments tells the duchess of his time on campaign in the desert of Africa when he had to march barefoot under a punishing sun over a brutal terrain that never seemed to get closer to its goal. The native guide had lied about the distance, for there was no way back. Armand’s bitter denunciation produces no response from the guide except an indifferently offered dagger with which he may end his suffering, if he so chooses. Marching on, pushing himself beyond his physical limits and carried for the final distance on the native’s shoulders, he ultimately reaches that place which offers him a clear vision of the equal presence of opposites: desert on one side, oasis on the other. Life, he is invited to see, challenges him to choose a direction that calls to him.

To Armand, however, the experience he describes has no impact. The journey, far from being an entry into awareness, becomes reduced to a harried remembrance of when physical survival hung in the balance. The ordeal opens no new understanding because Armand does not have the capacity to encounter himself in a new form. Rather, he continues on the same road he will follow when he begins to woo the duchess- a determination to successfully complete a quest with which he is not actually engaged.

Suitably married to a husband of the right rank, Antoinette is only required to fulfill her mundane social duties. She is more than welcome to a love affair if she so desires, provided discretion is exercised as to the where and when. It would seem from very early in the film that we are witnessing the unfolding and inevitable consummation of a passionate liaison.

Something, alas, is missing. The lover, though often ardent in his words of pursuit, is barely lukewarm in his actions. Similarly, the woman for whom he is supposedly pining away speaks as though her whole life between their meetings is just dead routine. Antoinette is a flurry of energetic anticipation in preparing for Armand’s visits, yet, as soon as they are together, she is as distant in the present as ambiguous about a future between them.

The duchess takes the poses of a woman falling in love, even as we witness her infatuation with the style, not with the man. Armand brusquely makes a demand he cannot effect and Antoinette trumps his bluff by simply asking “how?” He arranges for the duchess’ abduction, but in parallel fashion loses the spark once it could catch flame. Armand has all the trappings of a man of action, but we recognize them as circumstantial, not characterological.

Once it is unmistakable that the two will never become lovers, Rivette teases us with the cleverness of the unraveling. They who cannot but be appearances to each other must remain hot in pursuit of what neither would know how to want. How can the frustration of this failed attraction be rendered meaningful?

Miraculously, the film provides an unexpected, though forceful, answer. The surrounding characters function as mouthpieces of the idea that adherence to social form and subordination of any feeling to the necessity of weighing how it is to function in the world is precisely what gives life meaning. Forget transformative experiences, grand passions, religious conversions, liftings of the veil- no one wants them. If some misfit is seduced by a moment of inner revelation into imagining a different life, it is everyone’s task, by way of censure or complicity, to unite towards supporting that person in keeping the personal private until it can be conveniently forgotten.

Each of these characters is in harmony with his/her station in life; they are survivors. The aging and practical Princess, like the convent’s Mother Superior later, understands that form is the only unconditional reality of any given collective; the worldly and veteran Monsieur de Pamier understands that life can only be lived at the juncture of appearance and sentiment. The duchess’ maid, Lisette, can easily resist the luxurious cream-filled pastries that do not agree with her and Julien, the Majordomo, knows that his lot is to obey command and bell alike. Like the Princess and Pamier, these two know how to negotiate advantage from the small, yet immensely variable, slice of latitude that social form and the necessities of life allow.

Antoinette and Armand have found in each other the needed foil for their own reflections. Seemingly the misfits, they are, in fact, utterly conventional. Their security lies in being told that there can be no life outside the rules. Neither wants the substance of contact, for each knows of his/her incapacity to fully surrender to experience. Their gamesmanship ratchets up into high gear until the duchess ruins herself socially, eventually finding her way to the inspired depravations of the religious refuge.

Armand plans to abduct the duchess a second time. With his band of accomplices, the weary and sickly general breaks in to the convent, too late: the duchess is dead. Again, he can think of nothing better than to follow through on his original plan and steals Antoinette’s lifeless body, carrying the corpse back to his waiting ship. Armand is now as adrift as the directionless vessel that suddenly no longer has purpose. His cohort suggests tying weights to the meaningless body and dumping it into the sea, henceforth thinking of the entire experience like a childhood story, or a poem.

The Letter Never Sent

“The Letter Never Sent” directed by Mikhail Kolatozov is, above all, a film of and about passion, the manifold forms in which fire courses within, rages across and deeply defines the human struggle to find, create, experience and share a life of meaning and value on a personal level and within the collective.

“Letter” is an updated Tale of the Round Table. Medieval, that is to say “timeless”, characters in modern guise- three geologists: Konstantin, the young couple Tatyana and Andrei, and the group’s guide, Sergei- are dropped off by helicopter into the silent vastness of the Siberian tundra. Their arduous mission is to locate the much hoped-for treasure of diamonds that scientific understanding strongly suggests must be present, though no previous expedition has succeeded in finding any hint of the precious stones. This form of nature’s unceasing wealth will provide profitable and productive livelihood and pay for a futurity of further discovery- the exploration of outer space.

What makes this 1959 Soviet-era film remarkable is that- within a setting in which the grand and ruthless power of nature dominates and dwarfs the human figures- four distinct and fully realized character portraits are achieved.

Sergei’s life is akin to that of the huntsman/adventurer. Battling the elements is his home territory; sensation and action are his defining characteristics. He demands his right to distance from the others even as he grows aware that he has fallen in love with Tatyana. He is moved and transformed by the emergence of a passion and need for the other he never dreamed possible; in his inmost soul he recognizes that this love will never be consummated.

Andrei is the inverse figure to Sergei. Earnest and dedicated to his career, he has found a biding and requited love with Tatyana. Open-hearted, his energy is primarily mental; he is the husbandman who nurtures and cares for the fulfilling passion that life has brought to him.

Tatyana, herself a committed scientist, is also the instinctive feminine, passionately in love with life, utterly able to sense and deliver what the moment requires. She understands and values the unique qualities of each of the men. Her love for Andrei is deep and genuine; it must be seen as an aspect of her hunger for life.

Konstantin- the film’s narrator- is the group’s leader, a sage and irrepressible knight errant. He is the explorer who is compelled by the vision of finding and bringing new riches to mankind. His is the essential understanding that saving/securing the priceless material is his only purpose; for the seeker, this alone can complete human incarnation.

Konstantin’s mode of centering himself on the expedition (from whence the film derives its title) is to write to his beloved wife, Vera. Vera, whom we only see as a shimmering presence of memory or projection, is unmistakably an inner figure on Konstantin’s journey, like Beatrice to Dante.

Over the entire summer and well into the autumn the band struggles in the grueling and unrewarded labors of trying to locate the diamonds and with the unfolding and deepening of their individual stories. Konstantin cannot believe that both his deep, experienced intuition and the scientific data could be wrong, and regretfully acknowledges that without positive results there will be no more expeditions.

Frustrated in discovery of diamonds and of love, Sergei doubles his efforts digging relentlessly into the open wounds of the earth. Charged and pushed to the limit, his physical pull toward Tatyana is at its most overpowering. She averts the moment absolutely, yet with a keen emotional understanding that respects Sergei’s sincerity and tenderly affirms his feelings for her at exactly the right note of intimacy. Thus, though unrequited, Sergei’s love for Tatyana enables him to experience the miracle of his need for the other, thereby touching a place of inner completion.

Tatyana’s expansive and deeply human gesture seems as if to usher in the discovery of the diamonds. The group’s dedication and efforts are rewarded; it seems now that their journey has meaning. They prepare to return to Moscow with the confirming samples and maps to the treasure lode. It seems that all has ended well.

During the night the entire forest bursts into a great fire, surging in every direction. Sergei fearlessly races to secure the provisions already loaded into the small boats, as Konstantin, Andrei and Tatyana are barely able to collect their equipment and follow. Caught behind a raging stand of flames, Sergei throws the bags of supplies to the others, knowing that he will be consumed in this final quest. With his death comes a downpour of rain, diminishing- though not extinguishing- the fire, giving the survivors a slim chance to track a path to rescue.

They can only move as the fire permits, zigzagging over the treacherous terrain. Andrei injures his leg; radio contact for revealing their whereabouts to the base camp is lost. Andrei’s precipitous physical decline requires Tatyana and Konstantin to carry him as more and more of everything extra is discarded. His awareness that he has become extra baggage eventuates in his reasoned and loving plea that they leave him behind and try to save themselves. They refuse; he slips away, disappearing into the icy waters as the other two sleep. His is the second and complementary sacrifice to the needs of the now group of two.

Frantic and unable to find him, Tatyana is pierced to the core by Andrei’s suicide, her inability to save him. Yet she must stay present to what is needed next. As the Siberian winter begins to take hold she and Konstantin face the most elemental survival odds: can they, without supplies and food, make it to a clearing or the large river before the ice petrifies them? Finally there is nothing more for her to do; the moment has become frozen in time. Now she can only affirm her own death. Konstantin is left on his own.

Miraculously, he makes his way to the ice-crusted river, glistening in the dim afternoon light like the diamonds they have all sacrificed so much to achieve. He cobbles a raft from a fallen tree and loose brush. He knows that he cannot survive to deliver his message. Because he understands that personal survival is without meaning, whereas the sacred stone holds the complete meaning of both symbol and substance, he recognizes with almost his last strength that he can drift down the river and out to sea on an iceflow; there he will be visible and found after his death with the treasure and map in his pocket.

Interweaving four characters with this level of complexity so that the viewer can see each destiny fulfilled and can grasp that securing the treasure for the use of the community is the ultimate human purpose allows the director to convey a vision of futurity of far greater significance than the specific politics of the state. Only the unconditionally embraced journey can lead to the new.

Cassandra's Dream

Woody Allen’s provocative new film “Cassandra’s Dream” might aptly be titled ‘All in the Family’. It opens with two young men, brothers Ian and Terry, caught -like everyone- in the maelstrom of modern consumer capitalism, feverishly scheming to buy a beautiful sailboat they cannot afford. The men reinforce each other’s desires in exactly the wrong ways and hoped-for rescue from their uncle Howard, the mother’s brother and a self-made tycoon, turns out to be the sealing of their terrible fate.

They want the boat. Already it is a symbol of a futurity of freedom based on a shared childhood memory of an idyllic afternoon sailing. That they are too young to be looking back so desperately and so longingly is only one of several sirens screeching from the wings. Terry, a mechanic at a local auto shop is a gambler. Recent winnings at the dog track secure the boat and the dog’s name, Cassandra’s Dream, is not heard as warning but used to christen the new purchase.

Ian and Terry are not unsuccessful, per se, but going nowhere and hopelessly adrift on the raging tide of modern life that is predicated on buying what one cannot afford. Installment plans, credit and subsidies are the smoke and mirrors that soften the hard edges of unrelenting routine and shrinking futures.

The young men and their parents live a comfortable life well beyond their means, subsidized by uncle Howard. Long ago their ultra-practical mother accepted that- without the largess from her brother- the earnings from her husband’s barely sustainable restaurant would have left them an impoverished family and made untenable her agreeable days of television and cigarettes. She shares her brother’s vision, minus the ambition.

The more substantial sibling, Terry, has an innate desire to live within his means; he serves an inherent moral sense. It is his voice that speaks the weightless Cassandra-like prophecies so easily and reflexively deflected by his brother Ian. But Terry can neither afford nor maintain conviction; he is drowning in alcohol, pills and gambling debt. Ian, on the other hand, lacks character and conviction equally. Time after time in their conversations, his vacuous amorality trumps Terry’s decency. Terry simply must have money for booze and the gaming table, thus, must defer to Ian even as he inwardly wrestles with the wrongness of Ian’s point of view.

Ian is willing to believe and do whatever it takes to keep alive his fantasy of future potency as a hotel mogul while he marks time working in the family restaurant. On the sly he borrows flashy Jaguars from his brother’s auto shop and pretends he already has the life to match the cars. His eye is always roving for the ‘upgrade’; he dumps a waitress from the restaurant for Angela, an attractive but talentless actress whose image, and costliness, is more fitting to his imagined life.

One scene alone stands in contrast to the rest of the film. Angela’s parents come into London, presumably to meet the new financier-beau. In a brief moment the father takes Ian aside, conceding that he knows his daughter is high-maintenance merchandise. He reveals that he, too, once had a chance for a life at the high stakes table, but recognized he hadn’t the nerves or stomach for it and became, instead, a driver for the men he was destined not to emulate. Here is one small man who can take his own measure and face what he sees. But times have changed.

Enter uncle Howard! Despite humble beginnings, he established himself as the head of an international enterprise with vague medical associations; over the years his financial success has kept his sister’s family afloat. His nephews hope he will rescue them, again, as usual. Howard is readily willing to foot the bill for the boys’ new futures, but has a favor of his own that is the price of their second chance. As in all higher-level financial dealings, Howard’s gains have been at the expense of others; he is actively immoral. Irregularities in his business affairs have not so much been found out as that there is now a witness, a former colleague, willing to testify. Howard faces exposure, jail and ruin, while his nephews need his economic support- Terry to erase his outsize debt, Ian to sign on to his dream investment.

Howard contracts his nephews to remove the threatening witness by whatever means they choose. Beyond economics this is their opportunity to internalize the truth that the world’s morality is whatever you can get away with and that the spoils belong to the victor. Whoever accepts those rules has a fighting chance to make a mark in life; everyone else (like the boys’ father) is merely washed in and out by the waves.

The neat small core of the film is the planning for the crime and the after effects of its execution. Terry, predictably, cannot live with himself in the secret knowledge of his participation. For Ian, this has just been one more disagreeable task on the road to imagined power and prestige.

As the witness’ plan to tell all against Howard set the central plot in motion, the threat that Terry, burdened by conscience, will expose what occurred repeats the same idea. He must be gotten rid of for Howard and Ian to feel safe. Now it is brother versus brother in a battle for survival. The plan Ian contrives to make Terry’s death appear a suicide looks foolproof; however, at the last moment Ian’s will is not strong enough and it is he that cannot survive. Herewith comes the repetition of the theme that immorality can only succeed when it has no boundary.

The film ends with the police speculating about the double-death: lots of booze and drugs; one kills the other, by accident or on purpose, the survivor kills himself.

In Woody Allen’s pitch-dark vision, there are neither wins nor partial triumphs; death and destruction claim their daily victims, preparing the way for the story’s next version. The Cassandra of myth (she whose prophecy was fated not to be believed) lingers on in some new story with the same characters. Corrupt CEOs and those in their debt continue to play out the inertial life of money.

Last Year at Marienbad

“Last Year at Marienbad” (or was it Fredericksbad?) explores the phenomenon of memory and the idea of possibility in the context of the spa-going European rich between the wars. More precisely, its concern with memory- which on the surface is about identifying and proving what happened when, where and to whom- describes an obsession with naming literal events that had no outcome last year anymore than they can in the present.

Alain Resnais’ film moves through repetitive ritual to a depiction of the stagnation which results when forms and patterns of behavior become surrogates for action. The environment of Marienbad is an active element of the film barricading and confounding any possibility that even chance could enter the equation to counter inertia.

The film begins with long, elaborate and repetitive scenes of the setting of the luxurious spa. Its gilt encrusted ceilings and walls; the endless enfilade of dimly glittering hallways and heavily paneled doors that lead to more hallways and other doors, an ineluctable Piranesian loop.

The colorless trompe l’oeil murals of the walls and the occasional framed period etching depict formal gardens almost identical to the flat geometric park surrounding the villa. These images are less works of imagination than random game board instructions. They are relentless reminders for the characters parading from room to room, that this world operates in single-point perspective, where depth is merely alluded to by way of elaborate adjustments and calculations. It isn’t actually achievable, let alone desirable, by the rules of their game.

On stage an actress and actor- dressed, coiffed and bejeweled exactly as the audience members at the spa’s little theater- deliver their lines as if automatons. All of the characters, only three of whom emerge as actual identities, share a lifelessness which is inescapable.

The narrative voice belongs to one of them, the suitor. His pervasive role is to establish, particularly with the woman he pursues, what happened when they met the year before and fell in love. His fractured argument moves to define what has to have happened at that time for him to know all that he does about her. Almost convincing in its specifics, the case he makes nonetheless lacks any embodied reality.

That this is so continually leads the viewer back to the film’s central paradox: the very urgency of unveiling the truth about last year is trumped by the certainty of inertia. The suitor cannot differentiate between persistence and will, which he entirely lacks and fears. The unrelenting quality of his quest is entirely betrayed by his willingness to postpone action.

The object of his love, the exquisite, young Delphine Seyrig, is a parody of restless passive beauty. Neither can she give herself to anyone or anything, nor can she maintain a position or point of view (- she never stays anywhere more than a few weeks and, repeatedly, we see her break the heel of her shoe.) She represents fear in its overt form. Her modus operandi is escape; whether sitting, standing, lying or walking her internal focus is on knowing where the exit from the moment lies. For her, fear is not a negative emotion, but a comfortable milieu and an actual safeguard enabling an exploration which cannot eventuate in any conclusion. Even if unwillingly, she can endure small doses of her pursuer’s portrayal of what transpired when last they met. Her decisive place of confidence rests in her ability to counter any certainty about what happened with the parry that decision can await a future time. Such time, of course, could never actually present itself, since only the fear has life.

The third figure, her husband, is an agent of death who inspires fear. Little more capable of action than the others (who represent feelings of fear and sentiment), he represents will, though meaningless and without effect.

The symbol of his might is a game/trick that he displays early in the film to establish his dominance among the residents at Marienbad. Sixteen objects- matches, cards- are placed in four rows: 7. 5. 3. 1. The rule: each of the two players may, in a given turn, take away one or more pieces, but only from one row. Whoever must take the last piece loses. The husband calmly asserts that though he could lose, he never does.

Everyone wants to figure out a strategy or gimmick to explain the winner’s luck: who goes first; take away even numbers only; etc. But the game can only be won by paying attention as you go. The husband neither needs to confuse nor cheat; he only has to concentrate- an impossibility for the other characters who are either unconscious or dead in their faithful observance of meaningless forms. The husband lives only through the will to win, however pointless. Obviously the winnings mean nothing to him, only the power.

That power also describes his hold on his wife. Given that his very presence inspires fear, he is her perfect mate. She gets to hold onto the freedom of being afraid without respite, while he gets to experience total control with the absence of desire. Each of these characters remains impervious to any external stimulus; each also achieves constancy of occupation because their own feeling states never bore them. They are ghosts in an airless world. Like the images on the walls, the characters live a 2-dimensional existence, lacking depth in every sense of the word. Their world is like a blueprint or a map, where a journey can be conceived, plotted and traced, even confirmed, but never taken.

When finally the wife does go off with the suitor, they are each fulfilling a role like young children in a school play, or markers on a game board. The suitor does not want, nor can he, change his role to become a man, the lover. He is terrified of will and force- potency, and of the loneliness of even momentary non-consensuality. The wife cannot live in an environment free from fear and the need to escape. Having nothing but surface and form, she has nothing to give to a man who would want her as a woman. Equally powerless where real action is concerned, the husband cannot stop them, but knows they can go nowhere.

As the fatelessly mismatched couple flees into the night, the narrator puzzles over how it is possible, in this plain, flat garden- devoid of all vegetation or any obfuscating element, where everything is straight paths and right angles- that, even now, they are losing their way.