“There Will Be Blood” is Paul Thomas Anderson’s plangent parable of modern capitalism and the end of an era- whether of innocence, opportunity or sheer rapaciousness. Daniel Day-Lewis’ spectacular portrayal of the oilman Daniel Plainview is a masterful skein of biblical monumentality and subtle deeply nuanced feeling.
Daniel Plainview is always at odds with the world around him- either deep in the earth clawing out whatever thing of value will yield to his unrelenting assault or towering above the people and circumstances he must endure and negotiate. Both Anderson’s and Day-Lewis’ brilliant use of the spatial dimension- visually and metaphorically- is the magical key to this dark hymn of the fate and suffering of a man without peer, a character without antagonist or opposite.
Midway through the film Plainview asserts his hatred for the world and everyone in it. His is a life entirely aligned with Will in which, not surprisingly, he cannot find resonance or common ground with people looking for the greatest ease and gain at the least effort. His forays into the horizontal plane of everyday life only support his hatred of mankind because he never encounters anyone capable of being a true counter-force.
Plainview lives the moment-to-moment of life looking for the task at hand to which he applies himself unreservedly with preternatural energy, insight and cunning. In 1898 he digs for silver, his leg shattered in an accident when he falls to the bottom of the mine. He pulls himself up the damaged ladder one rung at a time and crawls miles into town under the glaring desert sun to cash in three dollars worth of ore. He drills for oil and makes a strike; he accepts responsibility for an orphaned baby and raises the boy, called HW, as his own.
By 1911 Plainview is patching together his conquests of land; brushing off the local false prophet, Eli Sunday; protecting his emerging empire from the oil cartel; building roads and a community to support his drilling sites and laying pipeline to free himself and other single operators from the railroad’s stranglehold.
When the first well erupts suddenly his son is hurled onto the roof of the derrick shed. From the office hut at the base of the hill it takes only seconds for Plainview to scan the chaos and spot the injured boy. Instantly, without regard for his own safety, he rushes to HW and carries him away to their cabin. Just as lightning-like Plainview leaves HW as soon as he realizes no more can be done for the boy and that the gushing well must be brought under control. Deaf and mute from his injuries, HW is sent away to a special school and doctor’s care.
A stranger shows up at the camp one day claiming to be Plainview’s younger brother, Frank, by a different mother. He has letters from their sister, a diary and other tokens of proof as well as news of their father’s death. Worn out by the struggle of life and a string of losses, Frank claims to want nothing more than a chance to work and Plainview takes him on. In the company of his newly found brother, Plainview thinks for a moment that he is not alone. To Frank, imagined blood-kin of like mind and heart, he delivers his sermon of hatred for the world. Soon enough Frank is revealed as an impostor, a cowardly false-brother. Plainview kills him and buries the drifter’s body in a nameless grove of trees.
For those who live only on the horizontal plane, the moment-to-moment of life is spent trying to gauge which identity to adopt to achieve a desired advantage.
Eli Sunday is a smarmy hick charismatic preacher so enamored of his own performance that he cannot see just how forgiving or inattentive his congregation must be to bear his childish posturing. He mistakenly imagines himself to be Plainview’s equal and tries to insinuate himself into the greater man’s plans. Humiliated by Plainview, slapped and smeared with mud, he can only run home to take out his rage on his aged father. The damning fault Eli finds in the old man is that he sold out to Plainview too cheap- he should have gotten more money. Eli is false and greedy, as is the leader of the oil cartel who offers to buy out Plainview’s interests at a handsome-enough price.
Plainview, however, wants something to do; he already has money. Later he publicly and ostentatiously insults the oilman who doesn’t even bother to defend himself and humors Plainview patronizingly. The future belongs to the nameless cartels that also own the routes of distribution and, like the old-world Rhineland Prince-Bishops, control everything and its value via access. For Plainview acquisition is always in the service of action; for everyone else, action is always in the service of acquisition.
Plainview meets his only match in the old settler who would not sell-out to him. He needs access across that land for his pipeline to the sea and submits to the older man’s condition: baptism in the Redeemer’s church. Eli makes his second mistake in thinking that it is he and not the pipeline that has brought Plainview to kneel. The scene is the only comical moment in the film, directed as a Mack Sennett Kabuki farce.
The legend of Daniel Plainview is not an Everyman’s story. By 1927, the film’s end, a mere 29 years later- the span of one generation, Plainview is the master of a vast empire of oil which neither needs nor has a place for him. Business cartels and a new era have cornered him into the preposterous oubliette of a ridiculously luxurious Tudor-bethan McMansion.
He transforms the long enfilade of formal rooms brocaded and studded with smoldering sconces into an overgrown Country Fair shooting gallery heaped with sacrificial mounds of meaningless lucre, now the object of his aim. Plainview drunkenly fires off down the marble-floored hall, his bull’s-eye hit unable to kill the dumb stuff that stalks him, for it is only furniture and already dead. Oceans of liquor cannot shrink him to fit the oversize dollhouse.
HW shows up with his teacher/sign-language interpreter. He wants to leave Plainview, go off on his own, find something for himself. Plainview insists hearing it from the boy’s own mouth and we are shocked to realize that even HW, who owes his very life to Plainview, has been false. Not for being the false son, that he only now discovers. HW has been false by pretending to be more or differently damaged than he was- he is perfectly able to speak- and using that pretense to calculated advantage. Like the false brother, HW is a coward in facing life’s challenges, adopting a false identity for the gain of substance and sentiment.
One last insult swaggers up from the past in the form of the fraudulent preacher-boy Eli. Sunday tries to extort money from Plainview to cover his low life and investment losses, not knowing that his trump card is less than a joker. Plainview first makes him admit that he is a false prophet, that there is no god- which Eli readily confirms- before revealing the zero-value of his bid. Eli dissolves into pathetic whining when his desperate illusions run dry.
In the cheerlessly nonchalant and over-lit glare of the mansion’s palatial basement bowling alley- a merciless parody of depth and life as game on the horizontal plane- the pitiful poseur’s ploy is the last straw, too puny to deserve life. Once again Plainview has been shown the worthlessness of his fellow man. As if fulfilling an obstinate duty, Plainview pummels Eli Sunday into a bloody pulp smeared across the gleaming oak floor. Blood oozes out of Eli’s body just as the oil once oozed out of the ground on his father’s ranch. In disgust, Plainview calls out, “I’m finished.”
Friday, January 18, 2008
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
The Assasination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
“The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford”, a solemn and plangent requiem for an era, opens on a closing note: the last pitiful and nearly profitless train robbery by the James Gang, reduced to little more than a rabble of unreliable petty criminals half-heartedly commanded by the famous brothers, Frank and Jesse. Soon after the gang will disband, the brothers going their separate ways.
Frank is an Old Testament thief, patriarchal and practical, yet humble in a way. He sees the world in front of him and opts for retirement when the gold watches and extra cash of bourgeois travelers no longer outweigh the rustling posse always at heel. It is really a business decision; maybe, he says, he’ll try his hand at selling shoes.
Jesse is not free to make such a sensible decision. Outside the law in entirely different ways, ruthless, fearless and driven by more than profit alone, he is keenly aware of and tortured by his dual nature as animal and man. Brad Pitt majestically portrays Jesse James as an increasingly haggard lion, roaming a shrinking plain, worn down yet ever bristling with intuitive insight, animal ferocity and deep understanding.
After the breakup of the gang and Frank’s departure, Jesse’s isolation allows for the entry of Robert Ford- Bob, 19 years old and devoid of any compelling characteristics beside a narcissistic need to be noticed and a blind willingness to believe in traits he obviously does not possess. In an enclosed garden the wannabe gangster flinches uncontrollably at the sudden appearance of two snakes which are already caught in Jesse’s absolute grip and decapitated with casual mastery, prey to be sautéed in garlic.
Casey Affleck has an uncanny feel for these empty and unknowing characters, blind to their own neediness and supposedly ignorant of the destruction they flawlessly execute. With a small arsenal of tics and evasions Affleck draws a brittle portrait of fussy and superficial exactitude that can only barely cover the Black Hole at its core, a compellingly contemporary image in contrast to Pitt’s timeless majesty, cornered and doomed.
The famous bandit is the hero of Bob’s worship and he cleaves to Jesse like a blood-sucking slug. Feeling spurned by Jesse and unable or unwilling to accept his human and subordinate status or the loss of Jesse’s solar radiance, Bob turns in vengeance to the only other authority he knows: the Police. He betrays his former comrades and makes a deal to bring in the Big Man. As an empty coward, his only possibility of heroic stature is a supreme act of cowardice.
Bob raises his gun to the occasion, not considering that it is Jesse who has given him the weapon and offered his unarmed back. Bob pulls the trigger. He denies his action as he runs to telegraph the Governor, delirious with ideas of reward and applause. His notoriety is short and loveless- Jesse is still the object of everyone’s affections and, even in death, it is Jesse’s image that carries imagination and hope.
Bob and his brother Charley- accomplice to the murder- take to the stage profiteering in artifice, re-enacting nightly, the fateful moment. Jesse had once asked a terrified Charley if he ever thought of suicide. No, always something else he wanted to do, was his honest and cautious reply. But it is not too long before these theatrical replays of shame lead him to take his own life. Bob moves on, opening a saloon in Colorado where he will eventually be gunned down by an old acquaintance who is unable to rest with the injustice done a decade before.
Andrew Dominik’s beautiful and stylized film unfolds in post-apocalyptic monochrome, a gothic Book of Hours, all quirky medieval illumination in prairie Sampler simplicity. Heavy blankets of dark clouds bear down on inky black horizons squeezing out the thinnest possibility of escape.
Frank is an Old Testament thief, patriarchal and practical, yet humble in a way. He sees the world in front of him and opts for retirement when the gold watches and extra cash of bourgeois travelers no longer outweigh the rustling posse always at heel. It is really a business decision; maybe, he says, he’ll try his hand at selling shoes.
Jesse is not free to make such a sensible decision. Outside the law in entirely different ways, ruthless, fearless and driven by more than profit alone, he is keenly aware of and tortured by his dual nature as animal and man. Brad Pitt majestically portrays Jesse James as an increasingly haggard lion, roaming a shrinking plain, worn down yet ever bristling with intuitive insight, animal ferocity and deep understanding.
After the breakup of the gang and Frank’s departure, Jesse’s isolation allows for the entry of Robert Ford- Bob, 19 years old and devoid of any compelling characteristics beside a narcissistic need to be noticed and a blind willingness to believe in traits he obviously does not possess. In an enclosed garden the wannabe gangster flinches uncontrollably at the sudden appearance of two snakes which are already caught in Jesse’s absolute grip and decapitated with casual mastery, prey to be sautéed in garlic.
Casey Affleck has an uncanny feel for these empty and unknowing characters, blind to their own neediness and supposedly ignorant of the destruction they flawlessly execute. With a small arsenal of tics and evasions Affleck draws a brittle portrait of fussy and superficial exactitude that can only barely cover the Black Hole at its core, a compellingly contemporary image in contrast to Pitt’s timeless majesty, cornered and doomed.
The famous bandit is the hero of Bob’s worship and he cleaves to Jesse like a blood-sucking slug. Feeling spurned by Jesse and unable or unwilling to accept his human and subordinate status or the loss of Jesse’s solar radiance, Bob turns in vengeance to the only other authority he knows: the Police. He betrays his former comrades and makes a deal to bring in the Big Man. As an empty coward, his only possibility of heroic stature is a supreme act of cowardice.
Bob raises his gun to the occasion, not considering that it is Jesse who has given him the weapon and offered his unarmed back. Bob pulls the trigger. He denies his action as he runs to telegraph the Governor, delirious with ideas of reward and applause. His notoriety is short and loveless- Jesse is still the object of everyone’s affections and, even in death, it is Jesse’s image that carries imagination and hope.
Bob and his brother Charley- accomplice to the murder- take to the stage profiteering in artifice, re-enacting nightly, the fateful moment. Jesse had once asked a terrified Charley if he ever thought of suicide. No, always something else he wanted to do, was his honest and cautious reply. But it is not too long before these theatrical replays of shame lead him to take his own life. Bob moves on, opening a saloon in Colorado where he will eventually be gunned down by an old acquaintance who is unable to rest with the injustice done a decade before.
Andrew Dominik’s beautiful and stylized film unfolds in post-apocalyptic monochrome, a gothic Book of Hours, all quirky medieval illumination in prairie Sampler simplicity. Heavy blankets of dark clouds bear down on inky black horizons squeezing out the thinnest possibility of escape.
Prater
The Merry-Go-Round is the heart of Ulrike Ottinger’s film “Prater”, a remarkable exploration of illusion and freedom, technology and desire, costumed as a documentary-style history of Europe’s original Amusement Park, located on the outskirts of Vienna.
As director, writer and cinematographer Ottinger literally becomes the carousel’s watchful center, a playful detective galloping in place to a frenetic calliope score, her gaze is loving and unflinching, as steady and sure as the slow and predictable path of the magic circle. What, she asks, is really going on here?
Each revolution allows the camera to lingeringly snap up new clues in multiple mug shots, accumulating myriad glimmering impressions interwoven, now and then, with vintage footage, tracking back and forth in time, cobbling together a full-scale portrait of the scene of the crime and its cast of characters- the park’s creators, workers, patrons, destroyers and a vast population of mechanical devices and automatons, old and new, that are the go-betweens, ambassador/guides as it were, to this no man’s land between propriety and imagination, brokered in profit.
The story begins with Nikolai Kobelkoff, born horribly deformed to normal parents in Siberia in 1851, without legs and with only one pointed stub of arm projecting from his right shoulder. Despite these impossible physical hardships and crushing societal and family pressures, a kindly schoolteacher teaches him to write by clutching a pen between his chin and arm-stump. Holding a brush in a similar manner, he learned to paint small landscapes; his proficiency eventually developed such that he could thread a needle.
Entrepreneurship is as old as mankind. Genghis Kahn knew that a worthless trinket from China could become a valuable and rare commodity thousands of miles away. So, centuries later did the first Dutch settlers who “bought” Manhattan. Kobelkoff’s great vision and act of freedom was in seeing a different future for himself. With his hard-won “ordinary” accomplishments he could make himself into a marketable product; what others had tried to hide away he would parade in front of a clamorous public eager to pay for novelty and escape.
He became rich and acclaimed, married, sired numerous normal offspring and opened shop, as it were, in the Prater. The original display at the amusement park, nestled in a former Imperial hunting preserve, was not so unambiguous. In 1896 an entire tribe of Africans, the Ashanti, was transplanted to a corner of the park with all their worldly goods, including animals, housing structures and every commonplace necessity, recreating the illusion of daily life at their homeland village, exposed 24/7 to the amused, bewildered or startled surveillance of paying patrons.
With the addition of a Lilliputian Venice, complete with canals and campanile, the trend toward virtual travel had taken a new turn. The illusion of leaving home without the bother of packing a bag proved irresistible, and still is.
The park itself became extraterritorial to everyday life. Not only an attraction of exotic “otherness”, it was also capable of being a safety valve for the crushing pressures of an increasingly homogenized and complex urban life. It also served as a world of freedom for the roaming imagination, still sufficiently, if barely, disguised in a cloak of convention proper to its place and time. The discord of place and time creates its own kind of value and interest. Technology is always woefully behind or startlingly ahead, threatening to become old before our eyes as we figure out the illusion, even if we acquiesce willingly to its charms.
In Ottinger’s 21st century here and now at the theme park, African men, perhaps tourists, joyously compete in a toss-ball arcade game that animates jostling mechanical racehorses lurching to a bespangled Derby finish line. Multi-generational Middle Eastern families, posing for group portraits a la 1900, dress up in the colorful costumes of European Empires that oppressed their homelands and ancestors not so long ago.
Veruschka von Lehndorff, magnificently, if preposterously, garbed as Barbarella in a form-fitting silver and black body suit and blond wig the size of two roaring lions, wins a cuddly stuffed monkey at the Archery Arcade; her aim is true. Inside the House of Mirrors her steady gaze explores every distortion and permutation of form and meaning as her image and that of the toy monkey’s shape-shift, disappear and meld into one another. Oddly, she is the opposite of the 1920’s well dressed bourgeois city swells whose mimed gestures for the moving camera are so predictable and limited they are barely distinguishable from the legions of automatons repeating their tiny range of motion.
Other modern day characters describe varying degrees of personal fulfillment and satisfaction within the collective rituals of a bygone social existence. One woman recounts the delight of experiencing a freedom of thought, feeling and action brought to birth in the generous expanse of the Prater, a keen contrast to a crowded and constrained childhood. All too soon her practical mother sweeps it all away, forbidding her return to the Suspect Realm, fearfully certain that freedom of any kind will not lead to sensible citizenry or responsible worldly advantage.
In 1945 at the very end of the war retreating Nazis burned the Prater to the ground, unable and unwilling even in defeat to allow the existence of a place where races and classes mixed freely and imagination ran free. It was rebuilt with bumper cars and a space catapult ride. The punching bag with the shape and look of a man’s head is still very popular with gangs of young men proving their power and prowess, one euro at a time. The Prater is inextinguishable.
As director, writer and cinematographer Ottinger literally becomes the carousel’s watchful center, a playful detective galloping in place to a frenetic calliope score, her gaze is loving and unflinching, as steady and sure as the slow and predictable path of the magic circle. What, she asks, is really going on here?
Each revolution allows the camera to lingeringly snap up new clues in multiple mug shots, accumulating myriad glimmering impressions interwoven, now and then, with vintage footage, tracking back and forth in time, cobbling together a full-scale portrait of the scene of the crime and its cast of characters- the park’s creators, workers, patrons, destroyers and a vast population of mechanical devices and automatons, old and new, that are the go-betweens, ambassador/guides as it were, to this no man’s land between propriety and imagination, brokered in profit.
The story begins with Nikolai Kobelkoff, born horribly deformed to normal parents in Siberia in 1851, without legs and with only one pointed stub of arm projecting from his right shoulder. Despite these impossible physical hardships and crushing societal and family pressures, a kindly schoolteacher teaches him to write by clutching a pen between his chin and arm-stump. Holding a brush in a similar manner, he learned to paint small landscapes; his proficiency eventually developed such that he could thread a needle.
Entrepreneurship is as old as mankind. Genghis Kahn knew that a worthless trinket from China could become a valuable and rare commodity thousands of miles away. So, centuries later did the first Dutch settlers who “bought” Manhattan. Kobelkoff’s great vision and act of freedom was in seeing a different future for himself. With his hard-won “ordinary” accomplishments he could make himself into a marketable product; what others had tried to hide away he would parade in front of a clamorous public eager to pay for novelty and escape.
He became rich and acclaimed, married, sired numerous normal offspring and opened shop, as it were, in the Prater. The original display at the amusement park, nestled in a former Imperial hunting preserve, was not so unambiguous. In 1896 an entire tribe of Africans, the Ashanti, was transplanted to a corner of the park with all their worldly goods, including animals, housing structures and every commonplace necessity, recreating the illusion of daily life at their homeland village, exposed 24/7 to the amused, bewildered or startled surveillance of paying patrons.
With the addition of a Lilliputian Venice, complete with canals and campanile, the trend toward virtual travel had taken a new turn. The illusion of leaving home without the bother of packing a bag proved irresistible, and still is.
The park itself became extraterritorial to everyday life. Not only an attraction of exotic “otherness”, it was also capable of being a safety valve for the crushing pressures of an increasingly homogenized and complex urban life. It also served as a world of freedom for the roaming imagination, still sufficiently, if barely, disguised in a cloak of convention proper to its place and time. The discord of place and time creates its own kind of value and interest. Technology is always woefully behind or startlingly ahead, threatening to become old before our eyes as we figure out the illusion, even if we acquiesce willingly to its charms.
In Ottinger’s 21st century here and now at the theme park, African men, perhaps tourists, joyously compete in a toss-ball arcade game that animates jostling mechanical racehorses lurching to a bespangled Derby finish line. Multi-generational Middle Eastern families, posing for group portraits a la 1900, dress up in the colorful costumes of European Empires that oppressed their homelands and ancestors not so long ago.
Veruschka von Lehndorff, magnificently, if preposterously, garbed as Barbarella in a form-fitting silver and black body suit and blond wig the size of two roaring lions, wins a cuddly stuffed monkey at the Archery Arcade; her aim is true. Inside the House of Mirrors her steady gaze explores every distortion and permutation of form and meaning as her image and that of the toy monkey’s shape-shift, disappear and meld into one another. Oddly, she is the opposite of the 1920’s well dressed bourgeois city swells whose mimed gestures for the moving camera are so predictable and limited they are barely distinguishable from the legions of automatons repeating their tiny range of motion.
Other modern day characters describe varying degrees of personal fulfillment and satisfaction within the collective rituals of a bygone social existence. One woman recounts the delight of experiencing a freedom of thought, feeling and action brought to birth in the generous expanse of the Prater, a keen contrast to a crowded and constrained childhood. All too soon her practical mother sweeps it all away, forbidding her return to the Suspect Realm, fearfully certain that freedom of any kind will not lead to sensible citizenry or responsible worldly advantage.
In 1945 at the very end of the war retreating Nazis burned the Prater to the ground, unable and unwilling even in defeat to allow the existence of a place where races and classes mixed freely and imagination ran free. It was rebuilt with bumper cars and a space catapult ride. The punching bag with the shape and look of a man’s head is still very popular with gangs of young men proving their power and prowess, one euro at a time. The Prater is inextinguishable.
The Man From London
“The Man From London”, a baleful and beauteous convergence of image, sound and meaning, is the latest masterpiece by the legendary Hungarian film director Bela Tarr.
Extracting the “everyman” hidden in the improbable armature of a Georges Simenon detective thriller, Tarr reshapes character and tale into a modern and merciless slow-motion re-enactment of “The Flaying of Marsius”- the mortal presence reduced to a nameless night Watchman whose only claim against the gods will be the mere attempt to act and survive in a hostile and stifling world.
In mythic black and white- geometrical, spare and atmospherically gorgeous- Chance opens the story. Seeping darkness of night ebbs to reveal a tattered old boat; a waiting dockside train; two men; a heavy valise; a ruse more successful than clever; a struggle.
Still clutching the treasured case, one man falls and the sea drinks him in like a drop of ink. The other man stares into nothingness, then walks away, defeated- much too easily and probably not for the first time.
The Watchman sees it all from his cage-like station above dock and rail. Slow, methodical and intent on winning the prize that fate has flashed before him, he descends, grappling hook in hand, confident. Master of this tiny corner, he knows its ways and almost too easily retrieves the valise retreating to his perch. The haul is a shoal of shimmering small banknotes, which he lays out to dry on the old-fashioned stove heater. Not a fortune, it is just enough to be too much.
By morning, his shift over, he ambles down to the dockside café and then home. The other man follows, a vague intuition or desperate hope murmurs that there may be something to suspect, but ultimately neither the power nor a direction in which to proceed materialize.
Naturally, Apollo will not deign to show up at this claustrophobic dead-end sea town where even the vast horizon glares into an impassable barrier of blinding, empty whiteness. Enter the god’s adjutant-accountant: the Inspector, nearly omniscient, the difference can be calculated in age and bother. He needs no knife to skin his victims, so thin is the worn down layer that life has allowed them.
At the café the other man from the night before, Brown- drawn in as if by magnetism- squirms under the Inspector’s droning speech that, really, only the money is wanted. In fact, a percentage will be offered for the return of the bulk, no questions asked, no formal charges. We know the pinned man thinks the money is lost into the watery past and has no way to comply.
The prize has already begun its corrosive action: the Watchman flares in the shell of his marriage and rises to the opportunity of protecting his beloved daughter’s dignity. He buys her a small cheap fur from the talking heads at the local shop. She knows better than to think of it as a sign on the road to a better or different destiny.
The women strain to comprehend the all too predictable actions of the men, and, why must it always come to this. Why is there so little range, so little opportunity to call forth and nurture whatever humble gifts they might possess?
The drowned man’s body has washed ashore. Brown’s wife has been summoned in an attempt to lure him out of hiding. Even the Watchman is confronted: surely, at the least, he saw something the night of the crime?
The Watchman is in many ways the Inspector’s equal and, like him, sees the puzzle taking shape. When his daughter unknowingly delivers the penultimate piece he reads the inverse treasure map and hurries to the spot that he suspects will mark his, and everyone’s, defeat. Next, he will bring the valise of money to the Inspector and claim responsibility for all that has happened in the wake of the crime.
Ancient though he may be, the Inspector is a thoroughly modern man and reminds the Watchman that only the return of the money is of significance. Wasn’t everything else, after all, just self-defense?
Completing his task the Inspector portions out a very few bills between two envelopes. With the leaden words of tumbled tombstones, he mouths his shock and sorrow at the course of events. As tokens of compensation to Brown’s wife and the Watchman, he offers the envelopes, leaving them behind, as he departs.
Extracting the “everyman” hidden in the improbable armature of a Georges Simenon detective thriller, Tarr reshapes character and tale into a modern and merciless slow-motion re-enactment of “The Flaying of Marsius”- the mortal presence reduced to a nameless night Watchman whose only claim against the gods will be the mere attempt to act and survive in a hostile and stifling world.
In mythic black and white- geometrical, spare and atmospherically gorgeous- Chance opens the story. Seeping darkness of night ebbs to reveal a tattered old boat; a waiting dockside train; two men; a heavy valise; a ruse more successful than clever; a struggle.
Still clutching the treasured case, one man falls and the sea drinks him in like a drop of ink. The other man stares into nothingness, then walks away, defeated- much too easily and probably not for the first time.
The Watchman sees it all from his cage-like station above dock and rail. Slow, methodical and intent on winning the prize that fate has flashed before him, he descends, grappling hook in hand, confident. Master of this tiny corner, he knows its ways and almost too easily retrieves the valise retreating to his perch. The haul is a shoal of shimmering small banknotes, which he lays out to dry on the old-fashioned stove heater. Not a fortune, it is just enough to be too much.
By morning, his shift over, he ambles down to the dockside café and then home. The other man follows, a vague intuition or desperate hope murmurs that there may be something to suspect, but ultimately neither the power nor a direction in which to proceed materialize.
Naturally, Apollo will not deign to show up at this claustrophobic dead-end sea town where even the vast horizon glares into an impassable barrier of blinding, empty whiteness. Enter the god’s adjutant-accountant: the Inspector, nearly omniscient, the difference can be calculated in age and bother. He needs no knife to skin his victims, so thin is the worn down layer that life has allowed them.
At the café the other man from the night before, Brown- drawn in as if by magnetism- squirms under the Inspector’s droning speech that, really, only the money is wanted. In fact, a percentage will be offered for the return of the bulk, no questions asked, no formal charges. We know the pinned man thinks the money is lost into the watery past and has no way to comply.
The prize has already begun its corrosive action: the Watchman flares in the shell of his marriage and rises to the opportunity of protecting his beloved daughter’s dignity. He buys her a small cheap fur from the talking heads at the local shop. She knows better than to think of it as a sign on the road to a better or different destiny.
The women strain to comprehend the all too predictable actions of the men, and, why must it always come to this. Why is there so little range, so little opportunity to call forth and nurture whatever humble gifts they might possess?
The drowned man’s body has washed ashore. Brown’s wife has been summoned in an attempt to lure him out of hiding. Even the Watchman is confronted: surely, at the least, he saw something the night of the crime?
The Watchman is in many ways the Inspector’s equal and, like him, sees the puzzle taking shape. When his daughter unknowingly delivers the penultimate piece he reads the inverse treasure map and hurries to the spot that he suspects will mark his, and everyone’s, defeat. Next, he will bring the valise of money to the Inspector and claim responsibility for all that has happened in the wake of the crime.
Ancient though he may be, the Inspector is a thoroughly modern man and reminds the Watchman that only the return of the money is of significance. Wasn’t everything else, after all, just self-defense?
Completing his task the Inspector portions out a very few bills between two envelopes. With the leaden words of tumbled tombstones, he mouths his shock and sorrow at the course of events. As tokens of compensation to Brown’s wife and the Watchman, he offers the envelopes, leaving them behind, as he departs.
3:10 to Yuma
As the murderous outlaw, Ben Wade, in James Mangold’s masterful remake of “3:10 to Yuma”, Russell Crowe purrs his way through a performance so juicy it best reminds one of Lawrence Olivier’s off-hand admonition that a great actor must make everyone in the theater want to have sex with him. Christian Bale shows just how spectacularly “little” the little man can be and Peter Fonda is perfection as a virtual personification of the cantankerous and contradictory Wild West.
Hollywood westerns simply are the acknowledged representation of American mythology in all its ideological promiscuity, opportunism and self-forgiveness. Like the proverbial Melting Pot, these films can accommodate whatever is thrown into them by way of character, theme, circumstance or action, historical or current, fact or fiction.
We have a one-legged veteran of “friendly Civil War fire”, mortally harassed by a greedy mortgage lender; the velvety free-spirited thief who is rigorously honest, quotes the Bible, sketches wildlife en pleine aire, and blows up whole trainloads of prospectors; a company-man who sees no wrong in keeping the corporation out of the red, as it were, by literally killing the competition, in this case the indigenous men, women and children who want to live on their own land and are willing to fight for it.
Beautiful Womanhood gets token mention in the cameo roles of the good blond and the bad brunette, united in unanimous endorsement of the vital power and ineffable attraction of evil. The inescapable thrust of the railway, Trojan Horse technology in its 19th century mechanistic avatar; the plight of cheap-labor immigrants; a town that will murder itself for the mere promise of $200.00 and reversals of allegiance and sympathy that ricochet between all the characters draws a seemingly unmistakable connect-the-dot portrait of ourselves.
Mangold goes one thrilling step further lest we think we can wake up the morning after and say it aint so. In the opening scene of the movie Bale’s older son is awakened by the wheezing sound of his sickly younger brother. Darkness is shattered by the striking of a match, and we glimpse his bedside reading, Tales of Outlaws of the West. Can we mistake that what we are about to see is already the past?
The boy upholds the long tradition of disobeying the father’s command, following the hirelings escorting the captured thief, arriving just in time to save their lives. Despite resourcefulness and spirit the next time he does not succeed and, before his eyes, his father’s body is pummeled with bullets. Now everyone else is dead. The boy’s gun is trained on the Outlaw; he has only to pull the trigger to claim the future and truly step onto the ambiguous and sorrowful ground that is adulthood. But the trigger is not pulled. The gun is thrust away and the boy drops to his dying father, whispering last-minute lies of congratulation for an impossible job not actually achieved: placing the prisoner on the 3:10 train to Yuma, for him to be tried and executed. The Outlaw can only deliver himself into the custody of the law, ruing, perhaps, how temporary the inconvenience will be, given the power of money. He knows he has already outlived his era. He whistles to his horse to follow the chugging train, a gesture so quaint it can only bring on a smile.
Hollywood westerns simply are the acknowledged representation of American mythology in all its ideological promiscuity, opportunism and self-forgiveness. Like the proverbial Melting Pot, these films can accommodate whatever is thrown into them by way of character, theme, circumstance or action, historical or current, fact or fiction.
We have a one-legged veteran of “friendly Civil War fire”, mortally harassed by a greedy mortgage lender; the velvety free-spirited thief who is rigorously honest, quotes the Bible, sketches wildlife en pleine aire, and blows up whole trainloads of prospectors; a company-man who sees no wrong in keeping the corporation out of the red, as it were, by literally killing the competition, in this case the indigenous men, women and children who want to live on their own land and are willing to fight for it.
Beautiful Womanhood gets token mention in the cameo roles of the good blond and the bad brunette, united in unanimous endorsement of the vital power and ineffable attraction of evil. The inescapable thrust of the railway, Trojan Horse technology in its 19th century mechanistic avatar; the plight of cheap-labor immigrants; a town that will murder itself for the mere promise of $200.00 and reversals of allegiance and sympathy that ricochet between all the characters draws a seemingly unmistakable connect-the-dot portrait of ourselves.
Mangold goes one thrilling step further lest we think we can wake up the morning after and say it aint so. In the opening scene of the movie Bale’s older son is awakened by the wheezing sound of his sickly younger brother. Darkness is shattered by the striking of a match, and we glimpse his bedside reading, Tales of Outlaws of the West. Can we mistake that what we are about to see is already the past?
The boy upholds the long tradition of disobeying the father’s command, following the hirelings escorting the captured thief, arriving just in time to save their lives. Despite resourcefulness and spirit the next time he does not succeed and, before his eyes, his father’s body is pummeled with bullets. Now everyone else is dead. The boy’s gun is trained on the Outlaw; he has only to pull the trigger to claim the future and truly step onto the ambiguous and sorrowful ground that is adulthood. But the trigger is not pulled. The gun is thrust away and the boy drops to his dying father, whispering last-minute lies of congratulation for an impossible job not actually achieved: placing the prisoner on the 3:10 train to Yuma, for him to be tried and executed. The Outlaw can only deliver himself into the custody of the law, ruing, perhaps, how temporary the inconvenience will be, given the power of money. He knows he has already outlived his era. He whistles to his horse to follow the chugging train, a gesture so quaint it can only bring on a smile.
Into the Wild
Based on a true story, Snow White goes on an arctic safari, dressed in the Emperor’s New Clothes. “Into the Wild” (2007), with screenplay and directed by Sean Penn, the unquestionably sincere humanitarian and gifted actor, is an irritatingly righteous and slipshod collection of calendar art and cliché, strong-armed by good intentions into a predictable and neutered propaganda piece of mono-dimensional caricatures.
A Road Film with no Journey, just movement, “Into the Wild” is alarmingly self-defeating in its blinkered view of the attractive young central character who seems to discover, in all his vast wandering, nothing he didn’t already know, thanks to Byron, Tolstoy, Thoreau, et al- except, perhaps, a mistake about which poisonous plants to avoid.
Sadly, “Alex” comes off as a narcissistic and frozen personality incapable of maturation, of being moved by actual experience. Though his style and focus are completely different, he embodies the same narrow-minded, fixated willfulness and impermeability as his cruel father. Son and father also share an approach to life that is decidedly mental- dad is a genius aerospace engineer- and emotionally sentimental; both blame others for their volatility- the father lashes out at his wife, the son is his own target.
“People” and “Society” are destructive and bad- the young man runs from a truly traumatic and difficult childhood. Luckier than most, he encounters more than a new family’s-worth of characters- among them an old widower played with shocking and quiet complexity by Hal Holbrook- all hopelessly honest, loving and generous, but the young man remains unhealed and unheal-able. He can allow that the people and society he meets along the way are good and supportive as long as it doesn’t really matter, or change his plans.
He is all blindness and surface. Chock full of childhood hate, disappointment and disillusionment, there is no courage for inner battles, no room for a different view of himself. Just an outer path whose destination feels certain from the start, and, frankly, would have made a more interesting and challenging film told from that perspective: intentional suicide.
Unfortunately this character does feel all too familiar- a person who attempts to google-away his faults and anxieties coming up with pedigreed clichés that obviate real scrutiny. He is more un-born than wise, trusting in all the wrong places.
The film has a shocking and ethically questionable moment when a scene includes a real-life aged eccentric desert artist recluse who does not appear to entirely understand that he is talking to Movie Stars in a Hollywood Film. From a directorial and aesthetic standpoint it is also a terrible mistake to include this footage. First, it contradicts the film’s reductive equation of movement with journey, especially odious in a condescending sermon improbably directed at Holbrook’s old veteran to get out and see the world. Much worse, however, the rest of the film instantly becomes even thinner, make-believe next to the raw vitality of a true voyager.
A Road Film with no Journey, just movement, “Into the Wild” is alarmingly self-defeating in its blinkered view of the attractive young central character who seems to discover, in all his vast wandering, nothing he didn’t already know, thanks to Byron, Tolstoy, Thoreau, et al- except, perhaps, a mistake about which poisonous plants to avoid.
Sadly, “Alex” comes off as a narcissistic and frozen personality incapable of maturation, of being moved by actual experience. Though his style and focus are completely different, he embodies the same narrow-minded, fixated willfulness and impermeability as his cruel father. Son and father also share an approach to life that is decidedly mental- dad is a genius aerospace engineer- and emotionally sentimental; both blame others for their volatility- the father lashes out at his wife, the son is his own target.
“People” and “Society” are destructive and bad- the young man runs from a truly traumatic and difficult childhood. Luckier than most, he encounters more than a new family’s-worth of characters- among them an old widower played with shocking and quiet complexity by Hal Holbrook- all hopelessly honest, loving and generous, but the young man remains unhealed and unheal-able. He can allow that the people and society he meets along the way are good and supportive as long as it doesn’t really matter, or change his plans.
He is all blindness and surface. Chock full of childhood hate, disappointment and disillusionment, there is no courage for inner battles, no room for a different view of himself. Just an outer path whose destination feels certain from the start, and, frankly, would have made a more interesting and challenging film told from that perspective: intentional suicide.
Unfortunately this character does feel all too familiar- a person who attempts to google-away his faults and anxieties coming up with pedigreed clichés that obviate real scrutiny. He is more un-born than wise, trusting in all the wrong places.
The film has a shocking and ethically questionable moment when a scene includes a real-life aged eccentric desert artist recluse who does not appear to entirely understand that he is talking to Movie Stars in a Hollywood Film. From a directorial and aesthetic standpoint it is also a terrible mistake to include this footage. First, it contradicts the film’s reductive equation of movement with journey, especially odious in a condescending sermon improbably directed at Holbrook’s old veteran to get out and see the world. Much worse, however, the rest of the film instantly becomes even thinner, make-believe next to the raw vitality of a true voyager.
The Man of My Life
Imagine a rainy-day summer camp project where the youthful avatars of Eric Rohmer and Andrei Tarkovsky unite to create a cinematic divertissement with the theme, perhaps drawn out of a hat: The Universe- amusingly, also the name of the coffee bar at the local town square. Like the universe, or, more terrestrially, the late summer in which the film takes place, there is too much of everything in Zabou Breitman’s new film, “The Man of my Life”, co-written by Ms Breitman with Agnes de Sacy (in French with English subtitles.)
I can’t help wondering how many horoscope saturated bloggers might be at this moment hashing out the exact trines and conjuncts in this over-bursting cosmos of an unabashedly romantic movie, a fable imbued with the sensibility and truth of children’s stories. It is also chock-a-block with the endless detailing and imaginative coloring that is a specialty of stories by children. It is engaging and fun to follow each piece of the complex mosaic as it inscribes yet another dimension or reference into an already crowded tale, but this may have come at too high a price. One is reminded of the advice to the novice traveler: put your clothes and your money on the bed, then take away half the clothes and double the money; now you’re ready to go. Half as much story and cleverness could have allowed for a greater emotional depth.
Set in a picture-perfect maison de vacance in the south of France, this little galaxy constellates in its pre-Copernican symmetry around Frederic, its beneficently rounded, loving and earthy center. Bernard Campan’s Frederic is like a luminous, small Dutch still life of a ripe peach in a blue and white china bowl- the sheer joy of its simple deliberateness even the most die-hard downtown conceptualist could not resist. Lea Drucker is his beautiful lunar wife, Frederique, who has yet to find out the extent to which she depends upon predictability. Their three children are a tender, if calculated, array: the quiet, older saturnine daughter spends her vacation peering into a microscope; the middle son is a would-be magician in a skeleton printed T shirt, his sleight-of-hand changes the king of spades into the king of hearts; the youngest, Arthur, is the irrepressible and irresistible masked and caped trickster, constantly in motion, searching and heroic. Various family and friends fill out the night sky and daytime activities that shuffle along seemingly eternally.
But the happy couple is just past the cusp of youth and opposition appears like a small disproportionately influential asteroid in the form of Charles Berling’s Hugo, the new, single, gay next-door neighbor. Hugo’s sphere is icy mentation and azure imagination, constricted and unforgiving, fearless and honest; he, too, is at an edge only slightly different from Frederic’s.
Myriad flashbacks and surreal imagery weave their way into the domestic drama, as Frederic and Hugo become not so much friends, as neighboring influences- this is not a male bonding film. It goes without saying that if you are expecting to see the cinema verite aftermath of a Larchmont barbecue you are looking in the wrong place for the wrong thing. The flashbacks mostly revolve around a long after dinner conversation a deux as they congenially battle out opposing views about love and life, stretching only slightly, for now, out of their respective caricatures.
As the early morning air chills, Frederic has fetched sweaters from inside for them both. The mental Hugo happily parries and thrusts in his erotically charged polemic against relationships. Like anyone who has paid a high price, he overvalues the narrow purchase he has on Eros; Frederic, by contrast, is so awash in Eros that it barely registers with him. In his bourgeois mechanical materiality, he is transfixed by the label sticking up from the back of the sweater that Hugo has just put on and, while carrying on the conversation- including a brief rendition of the 30’s cabaret song, Parlez de Moi, backlit with the golden rays of early morning- devises and executes a complex design both proper and inconspicuous to tuck the offending label back out of sight.
.
Frederic’s unconscious flow of warmth and good nature has been diverted by the force of this newcomer, now running partner, and Frederique will suffer for it. The story turns retrograde with harsh doses of reality: limitation, infidelity, deceit, cruelty and AIDS. Hugo’s mentioned but unseen daughter arrives on the scene. A beauteous treat that did not fall far from the tree, she is full of felt and clever accusation, and one previously unknown bit of information, trying to convince her father to visit, if not forgive, his own harsh, rejecting and rejected father who now lies, in hospital, dying.
Everything is set; all that can is madly breaking away from its former form. Frederique howls into the night, the conventional container of their relationship can no longer be taken for granted, she is a powerless new moon, a sunken cave of darkness. Frederic, wounded by a simple sprained ankle, is no longer the center. Something has pulled him away and into consciousness of a greater Sun-center, his world has expanded, but he must find his place within these new dimensions. To fulfill this destiny he hobbles off into the night to find Hugo, messenger of the gift, if not its source, to give him the reciprocal token: a tender acknowledgement to a man all too accustomed to so much less. Hugo’s still rampant harshness is overwhelmed by Frederic’s simple generosity and he, too, is released from a predictable repetition. As stated earlier in the movie: magic is what happens when you’re not looking, from the place you don’t expect. It looks like chance to the viewer, but it is hard work to the creator of the illusion. And what about the stars? For millennia man has looked to the heavens trying to discern the clues to fulfill his fate and outwit chance.
There are few actually false notes in this film but the director did not do the substance of her story any service by having Hugo default into conventional sentimentality when his daughter demands to know why he loves her? His replies, she grippingly points out, are all matters of chance. Instead of agreeing with her, like it or not, he dissolves into hugs and confirmations that, yes, he loves her simply because she is his daughter. No doubt this reasoning makes good and possibly necessary box-office concessions, but isn’t the rare beauty and terror of love, like grace, its pure freedom from reason and contingency?
I can’t help wondering how many horoscope saturated bloggers might be at this moment hashing out the exact trines and conjuncts in this over-bursting cosmos of an unabashedly romantic movie, a fable imbued with the sensibility and truth of children’s stories. It is also chock-a-block with the endless detailing and imaginative coloring that is a specialty of stories by children. It is engaging and fun to follow each piece of the complex mosaic as it inscribes yet another dimension or reference into an already crowded tale, but this may have come at too high a price. One is reminded of the advice to the novice traveler: put your clothes and your money on the bed, then take away half the clothes and double the money; now you’re ready to go. Half as much story and cleverness could have allowed for a greater emotional depth.
Set in a picture-perfect maison de vacance in the south of France, this little galaxy constellates in its pre-Copernican symmetry around Frederic, its beneficently rounded, loving and earthy center. Bernard Campan’s Frederic is like a luminous, small Dutch still life of a ripe peach in a blue and white china bowl- the sheer joy of its simple deliberateness even the most die-hard downtown conceptualist could not resist. Lea Drucker is his beautiful lunar wife, Frederique, who has yet to find out the extent to which she depends upon predictability. Their three children are a tender, if calculated, array: the quiet, older saturnine daughter spends her vacation peering into a microscope; the middle son is a would-be magician in a skeleton printed T shirt, his sleight-of-hand changes the king of spades into the king of hearts; the youngest, Arthur, is the irrepressible and irresistible masked and caped trickster, constantly in motion, searching and heroic. Various family and friends fill out the night sky and daytime activities that shuffle along seemingly eternally.
But the happy couple is just past the cusp of youth and opposition appears like a small disproportionately influential asteroid in the form of Charles Berling’s Hugo, the new, single, gay next-door neighbor. Hugo’s sphere is icy mentation and azure imagination, constricted and unforgiving, fearless and honest; he, too, is at an edge only slightly different from Frederic’s.
Myriad flashbacks and surreal imagery weave their way into the domestic drama, as Frederic and Hugo become not so much friends, as neighboring influences- this is not a male bonding film. It goes without saying that if you are expecting to see the cinema verite aftermath of a Larchmont barbecue you are looking in the wrong place for the wrong thing. The flashbacks mostly revolve around a long after dinner conversation a deux as they congenially battle out opposing views about love and life, stretching only slightly, for now, out of their respective caricatures.
As the early morning air chills, Frederic has fetched sweaters from inside for them both. The mental Hugo happily parries and thrusts in his erotically charged polemic against relationships. Like anyone who has paid a high price, he overvalues the narrow purchase he has on Eros; Frederic, by contrast, is so awash in Eros that it barely registers with him. In his bourgeois mechanical materiality, he is transfixed by the label sticking up from the back of the sweater that Hugo has just put on and, while carrying on the conversation- including a brief rendition of the 30’s cabaret song, Parlez de Moi, backlit with the golden rays of early morning- devises and executes a complex design both proper and inconspicuous to tuck the offending label back out of sight.
.
Frederic’s unconscious flow of warmth and good nature has been diverted by the force of this newcomer, now running partner, and Frederique will suffer for it. The story turns retrograde with harsh doses of reality: limitation, infidelity, deceit, cruelty and AIDS. Hugo’s mentioned but unseen daughter arrives on the scene. A beauteous treat that did not fall far from the tree, she is full of felt and clever accusation, and one previously unknown bit of information, trying to convince her father to visit, if not forgive, his own harsh, rejecting and rejected father who now lies, in hospital, dying.
Everything is set; all that can is madly breaking away from its former form. Frederique howls into the night, the conventional container of their relationship can no longer be taken for granted, she is a powerless new moon, a sunken cave of darkness. Frederic, wounded by a simple sprained ankle, is no longer the center. Something has pulled him away and into consciousness of a greater Sun-center, his world has expanded, but he must find his place within these new dimensions. To fulfill this destiny he hobbles off into the night to find Hugo, messenger of the gift, if not its source, to give him the reciprocal token: a tender acknowledgement to a man all too accustomed to so much less. Hugo’s still rampant harshness is overwhelmed by Frederic’s simple generosity and he, too, is released from a predictable repetition. As stated earlier in the movie: magic is what happens when you’re not looking, from the place you don’t expect. It looks like chance to the viewer, but it is hard work to the creator of the illusion. And what about the stars? For millennia man has looked to the heavens trying to discern the clues to fulfill his fate and outwit chance.
There are few actually false notes in this film but the director did not do the substance of her story any service by having Hugo default into conventional sentimentality when his daughter demands to know why he loves her? His replies, she grippingly points out, are all matters of chance. Instead of agreeing with her, like it or not, he dissolves into hugs and confirmations that, yes, he loves her simply because she is his daughter. No doubt this reasoning makes good and possibly necessary box-office concessions, but isn’t the rare beauty and terror of love, like grace, its pure freedom from reason and contingency?
Johanna d'Arc of Mongolia
Director Ulrike Ottinger slowly pares and burnishes this boisterous fantasy into a small jewel of radiant perfection. “Johanna d’Arc of Mongolia” opens like a bygone era children’s storybook. Paper-thin and somewhat tattered painted stage drops merely pretend to evoke the once-opulent interiors of the Trans-Siberian Railway and the vibrant world outside.
A troop of rambling polyglot charmers jostles amiably in this crowded and mobile house of cards: an uncomplicated and affable Broadway chanteuse; a Baedeker-immersed bourgeois German frau; an exotically dark and beautiful, young tomboyish vagabond; a rich, fat, gay, crooning vaudevillian; an amusingly pompous Russian general and his handsome, straight-faced tap-dancing adjutant.
A sister trio cabaret act entertains in the Dining Car where a small coterie of trolls and ingenious helpers create operatic splendor in this thin environment. Magisterially overseeing both characters and tale, the elegant Lady Windermere (Delphine Seyrig, in her last film role) is a modern-day sorceress and know-it-all MC, unrelentingly cheerful and resourceful.
All too quickly this world of “players and painted stage” attains its limit and the party breaks up, the men shuffling off to repeat performances of well-known roles in familiar locales. Only the women will venture further east. Suddenly the diorama of Act I gives way to a real, dimensional world as they transfer to the Trans-Mongolian Railway, whose accommodations are more substantial if decidedly less luxurious.
A vast panorama of dry mountains and cloudless sky barely begins to emerge when the train is forced to halt, ambushed by a Mongolian princess and her Amazonian warriors. The travelers are taken hostage, though the circumstances quickly change, altering their status to that of honored quests.
The opportunity immediately appeals to all except the uncertain frau who must choose between this uncharted experience on the Steppe and a difficult retreat to her urban obligations and hotel reservations. She decides, however, to stay, initiating an astonishing vision of timeless tribal life. The realm of the warrior princess is ritualized in every aspect- even the smallest actions are imbued with meaning and significance, direct lines of access to an ever-present transcendent.
Restless in a tame world, the exotic vagabond seems to find a natural place in this rough and vital community. The sister trio and Broadway star, artists and shape-shifters accustomed always to making their own way in any surroundings, adjust quite easily to this very out-of-town run. Lady Windermere perfects her Mongolian, interprets the archetypal signs and symbols, witnessing and cataloging the spectacular variety of creation and customs as she mediates the two cultures.
The harsh clash of sensibilities falls squarely on the frau when she unknowingly hangs out her laundry to dry and is nearly attacked by the Mongolians who believe the exposed wet clothes will bring threatening storms. She survives this ordeal and in giving up the modest propriety of bourgeois habit opens the way for a different journey. Ambling on the grassy plateau at the edge of a ravine she becomes spellbound with the resonant mandala of a simple white flower and descends a deep cavernous path that erupts into a colorful, shimmering grotto- a benevolent shaman at its potent magnetic core.
Above ground the annual festival of the Mongol tribes unfolds as a vast and varied living artwork- rapturously beautiful, unexpected and dichotomous, reconstructing the object of its inspiration, life itself.
A cycle fulfilled, the festival, season and story come to a conclusion. The women are escorted across the desert to the train that will take them out of this magical realm, back into a sense of time that can only go violently and single-mindedly forward. The vagabond has chosen to remain. Astride her pony, costumed in silky vest and fur-trimmed hat, she blends seamlessly into the Mongol tribe, waving her former comrades farewell.
With the reliability and exactitude of a metronome, Lady Windermere divines and dictates foible and fact as she sips tea from a lidded cup, ensconced in the Salon Car of her oriental counterpart- a contemporary avatar of the warrior princess, stylishly dressed for the business world of Paris. One last glance back reveals a single horse and rider galloping frantically toward the lumbering train and, with flawless precision, the vagabond leaps into the waiting arms of the knowing Lady. Like the frau she, too, has surrendered to a freeing vision, equally hard and perhaps more humbling: that it is more important that the dream rings true. She makes the best of it, becoming the manager of a Mongolian-themed restaurant.
Ottinger, who also wrote and filmed “Johanna d’Arc of Mongolia”, fashions a creation hard to describe: tender and joyful, funny and knowing, unafraid of darkness, always inclusive. What looks at first like a kaleidoscopic patchwork of infinite detail- from an impossibly heartfelt and campy performance of “So Long Tootsie, Goodbye” to a matter-of-fact on-screen, real-time ritual animal sacrifice in broad and glorious daylight- is more synthesis than collage. Through the prism of Ottinger’s unique sensibility the spectrum of discrete elements composing her story co-mingle into a bright and singular vision.
A troop of rambling polyglot charmers jostles amiably in this crowded and mobile house of cards: an uncomplicated and affable Broadway chanteuse; a Baedeker-immersed bourgeois German frau; an exotically dark and beautiful, young tomboyish vagabond; a rich, fat, gay, crooning vaudevillian; an amusingly pompous Russian general and his handsome, straight-faced tap-dancing adjutant.
A sister trio cabaret act entertains in the Dining Car where a small coterie of trolls and ingenious helpers create operatic splendor in this thin environment. Magisterially overseeing both characters and tale, the elegant Lady Windermere (Delphine Seyrig, in her last film role) is a modern-day sorceress and know-it-all MC, unrelentingly cheerful and resourceful.
All too quickly this world of “players and painted stage” attains its limit and the party breaks up, the men shuffling off to repeat performances of well-known roles in familiar locales. Only the women will venture further east. Suddenly the diorama of Act I gives way to a real, dimensional world as they transfer to the Trans-Mongolian Railway, whose accommodations are more substantial if decidedly less luxurious.
A vast panorama of dry mountains and cloudless sky barely begins to emerge when the train is forced to halt, ambushed by a Mongolian princess and her Amazonian warriors. The travelers are taken hostage, though the circumstances quickly change, altering their status to that of honored quests.
The opportunity immediately appeals to all except the uncertain frau who must choose between this uncharted experience on the Steppe and a difficult retreat to her urban obligations and hotel reservations. She decides, however, to stay, initiating an astonishing vision of timeless tribal life. The realm of the warrior princess is ritualized in every aspect- even the smallest actions are imbued with meaning and significance, direct lines of access to an ever-present transcendent.
Restless in a tame world, the exotic vagabond seems to find a natural place in this rough and vital community. The sister trio and Broadway star, artists and shape-shifters accustomed always to making their own way in any surroundings, adjust quite easily to this very out-of-town run. Lady Windermere perfects her Mongolian, interprets the archetypal signs and symbols, witnessing and cataloging the spectacular variety of creation and customs as she mediates the two cultures.
The harsh clash of sensibilities falls squarely on the frau when she unknowingly hangs out her laundry to dry and is nearly attacked by the Mongolians who believe the exposed wet clothes will bring threatening storms. She survives this ordeal and in giving up the modest propriety of bourgeois habit opens the way for a different journey. Ambling on the grassy plateau at the edge of a ravine she becomes spellbound with the resonant mandala of a simple white flower and descends a deep cavernous path that erupts into a colorful, shimmering grotto- a benevolent shaman at its potent magnetic core.
Above ground the annual festival of the Mongol tribes unfolds as a vast and varied living artwork- rapturously beautiful, unexpected and dichotomous, reconstructing the object of its inspiration, life itself.
A cycle fulfilled, the festival, season and story come to a conclusion. The women are escorted across the desert to the train that will take them out of this magical realm, back into a sense of time that can only go violently and single-mindedly forward. The vagabond has chosen to remain. Astride her pony, costumed in silky vest and fur-trimmed hat, she blends seamlessly into the Mongol tribe, waving her former comrades farewell.
With the reliability and exactitude of a metronome, Lady Windermere divines and dictates foible and fact as she sips tea from a lidded cup, ensconced in the Salon Car of her oriental counterpart- a contemporary avatar of the warrior princess, stylishly dressed for the business world of Paris. One last glance back reveals a single horse and rider galloping frantically toward the lumbering train and, with flawless precision, the vagabond leaps into the waiting arms of the knowing Lady. Like the frau she, too, has surrendered to a freeing vision, equally hard and perhaps more humbling: that it is more important that the dream rings true. She makes the best of it, becoming the manager of a Mongolian-themed restaurant.
Ottinger, who also wrote and filmed “Johanna d’Arc of Mongolia”, fashions a creation hard to describe: tender and joyful, funny and knowing, unafraid of darkness, always inclusive. What looks at first like a kaleidoscopic patchwork of infinite detail- from an impossibly heartfelt and campy performance of “So Long Tootsie, Goodbye” to a matter-of-fact on-screen, real-time ritual animal sacrifice in broad and glorious daylight- is more synthesis than collage. Through the prism of Ottinger’s unique sensibility the spectrum of discrete elements composing her story co-mingle into a bright and singular vision.
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