Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings

Sunrise has always seemed to me a triumph of style and technique over substance, which is why I’m not over-eager to join in the chorus hailing it as a masterpiece. Extraordinary, ingenious filmmaking is brought to bear on material that seems to me tired and derivative: the town-country divide, the good wife vs. the scheming vixen, the rescues and revelations, the sentimentalizing of the simple folk. All of these were clichés in 1827, let alone 1927. The subtitle, “A Song of Two Humans,” and the labels pasted onto the characters instead of names seem to me laborious attempts to heighten the material into a significance it doesn’t really have. That F.W. Murnau, with the considerable help of cast and cinematographers and designers, was able to overcome these flaws and give us something of lasting distinction is undeniable. But a masterpiece would have given us something new, the way, for example, Fritz Lang was able to do the same year in Metropolis, a film that rises above its banalities in visionary ways. There are great moments in Sunrise, but too much of it is horseplay like the pig chase sequence and condescending hokum like the “peasant dance” performed by the Man and the Wife for the amusement of the city slickers. That said, it’s possible to be moved by Sunrise without being completely snookered by it.

The protagonist of Pavel Jurácek's Case for a Rookie Hangman is called Lemuel Gulliver, but the film owes as much to Lewis Carroll, Franz Kafka, and Luis Buñuel as it does to Jonathan Swift. It might almost have been titled Gulliver's Travels Through the Looking Glass to the Castle of the Exterminating Angel. Jurácek's Gulliver (Lubomír Kostelka) is on a trip through the countryside when he gets lost and his car crashes off the road. Extricating himself from the wreck, he comes across the body of a large white rabbit wearing a waistcoat and carrying a pocket watch, which Gulliver takes from the rabbit. He soon finds that he is in the land of Balnibarbi, the locale of the third voyage of Swift's story, above which is the floating city of Laputa. At this point narrative logic gives way to a series of extraordinary incidents, which Jurácek presents without being limited by time and space. The handsomely made film has its admirers, but I found its dreamlike transitions and off-kilter events less startling than soporific. The Czech government wasn't lulled to sleep, however, and as usual when it didn't understand something, it suspected it was being made fun of (as of course it was), so it banned it, putting an end to Jurácek's career as a filmmaker. 

Matthew (Michael Pitt), a young American in Paris in 1968, meets Isabelle (Eva Green) and her twin brother, Théo (Louis Garrel), at the protest over the firing of Henri Langlois as head of the Cinémathèque Française, and is invited home to dinner with them. There he meets their parents, a prominent French poet (Robin Renucci) and his English wife (Anna Chancellor), and is invited to stay over for the night. When he gets up to go to the bathroom, he is surprised to see, through a partly opened door, Isabelle and Théo sharing a bed, naked. The next day, the parents depart on a month’s vacation, leaving a check for the twins to cover their expenses. Matthew accepts an invitation from them to move into a spare room. And so begins a month in which Matthew’s view of life is altered. Matthew, Isabelle, and Théo form a ménage familiar to them from the movies they have watched, like Jean-Luc Godard's Bande à Part (1964), whose famous run through the Louvre they re-create. The sex and nudity in The Dreamers earned it an NC-17 rating, but in the novel on which the film is based, Matthew has sex not only with Isabelle but also with Théo. Did Bertolucci regard homosexuality as more transgressive than incest? Though The Dreamers intends to shock, it pales in comparison to the work of filmmakers like Michael Haneke and Catherine Breillat. A handsome and well-acted film, it feels inert, and the insertion of a scene from Robert Bresson’s unsparing Mouchette (1967) in the film reveals how conventional and glossy it really is. 

Tricheurs are people who cheat at gambling, no easy feat in casinos where there are surveillance cameras and eagle-eyed croupiers. In Barbet Schroeder's film, they are a special breed, gamblers who add the thrill of possible capture to the compulsion to bet large sums of money. Elric (Jacques Dutronc) begins with the latter compulsion, and when we first see him he has lost big. And then he spots a woman in a red dress with a large number 7 on the back. Elric takes it as a sign and follows her to the casino, where she turns out to be his lucky charm, and soon he and Suzie (Bulle Ogier) have merged their compulsions. But then Elric meets Jorg (Kurt Raab), who claims to have a foolproof system for cheating at roulette, so Elric and Suzie go their separate ways and he begins touring the casinos of the world with Jorg, raking it in. Eventually Elric and Suzie meet again, and when Jorg gets careless and gets caught, Suzie tells him that she has met a croupier who knows a new way to cheat: a loaded roulette ball that can be triggered by remote control. The croupier, Toni (Virgilio Teixeira), wants to retire, and is willing to go in with Elric and Suzie on the scam, slipping the loaded ball onto the wheel. With a little practice, they can win big by triggering the ball at the right moment. Tricheurs is a clever morality fable and a shrewd portrait of compulsive behavior, but the techniques used by the cheaters -- distracting the croupiers, hitting the button on the remote at the right time -- seem clumsy, so that the film winds up feeling thin and contrived.

John Gavin was Hollywood’s ultimate decorative male, there to look good in bed with Janet Leigh in Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960) but otherwise to play no significant role in the film. (When he shows up later with Vera Miles, playing Leigh’s sister, to find out what happened to Marion Crane, she’s the one who does all the work, including the discovery of the mummified Mrs. Bates in the cellar.) When Gavin died, several obituaries mentioned the scene in Thoroughly Modern Millie (George Roy Hill, 1967) in which his character is paralyzed by a poison dart: He’s been presented as so handsomely wooden that it takes a long time before anyone notices he’s just sitting there. He’s not quite so inert in Imitation of Life, but that’s because Douglas Sirk, like Hitchcock, knew how to make use of him: He’s there to hang as nicely on Lana Turner’s arm as the Jean Louis gowns do on her body. The film belongs to the women, not only Turner but especially to Juanita Moore and Susan Kohner, who got the Oscar nominations they deserved. We can fault the film for “whitewashing” by casting Kohner as the Black girl who tries to pass for white, especially since in the earlier version of Imitation of Life (John M. Stahl, 1934), the corresponding character was played by Fredi Washington, who was indeed Black. But even to raise the issue of “passing” in 1959, especially in a film that some considered little more than soap opera, was audacious: The Production Code had long forbidden any treatment of so-called miscegenation. And Sirk artfully turns the issue into a generational one: Sarah Jane’s desire to be white as a reaction against the subservience of her mother, foreshadowing a generation gap that would be operative in the coming decade’s civil rights struggle. Sirk’s films have a way of working themselves into your head unexpectedly, putting the lie to the usual view that drama makes you think and melodrama makes you feel. Imitation of Life is unashamed of the clichés it exploits and usually transcends; it undoubtedly makes you feel. Is there ever a dry eye among those who watch the funeral finale? But by confronting the problems that underlie the melodrama it also has a sneaky way of making you think.

Ramin Bahrani's docufictional Chop Shop takes us into a subterranean segment of American life, viewing it through a 12-year-old boy named Alejandro, played by 12-year-old Alejandro Polanco. Ale, as he's called, is a school dropout whose only known family is his older sister, Isamar (Isamar Gonzales), who comes to live with him in a garage adjacent to an auto-repair shop in the Willets Point area of Queens, near Citi Field, the home of the New York Mets. It's a run-down area where no one but a handful of off-the-grid types like Ale and his sister live, but it comes to life during the day when the auto parts, repair shops, and junkyards are busy. "Urban blight" at its unloveliest. But there's nothing blighted about Ale, who has dreams and hustles to make them real. Even though the plot of the film demands that Ale's dreams don't come true, Bahrani and his remarkable cast of non-professionals give this story of human survivors heart and soul without compromise or sentimentality.

Satyajit Ray’s final film, The Stranger, based on one of his own short stories, ends with a sentimentally gratifying gesture on the part of its central character, but even this rather conventional narrative twist doesn’t spoil the lovely seriocomic mood cast by the film as a whole. It’s the story of a long-lost relative who suddenly, after 35 years without contact, arrives at the home of his one surviving family member, a niece who was 2 years old when he disappeared. Anila Bose (Mamata Shankar) and her husband, Sudhindra (Dipankar Dey), are well-to-do residents of Calcutta who can’t help being suspicious that the man who appears on their doorstep may not be who he says he is, her mother’s brother, Manomohan (Utpal Dutt ). Sudhindra is especially cautious, warning that the man may be planning to filch some of the valuable antiquities they have collected, so Anila dutifully locks them away. But almost from the beginning, the “uncle” begins to win over Anila and especially her son, Satyaki (Bikram Bhattacharya), with tales from his travels and unusual insights into the way of the world. Even Sudhindra is disarmed when the man produces his passport but also warns him that passports can be forged. Some curious friends of the Bose family are recruited to form their own opinion of the stranger, and they, too, are won over. Anila begins to have her doubts, however, when, while reading an Agatha Christie novel in bed, it occurs to her that the long-lost uncle may be there to collect his share of her grandfather’s will. Finally, it falls to another, more deeply skeptical friend to challenge the man and his ideas: his observations on civilization that he has formed from his travels. Their heated debate is the intellectual and dramatic turning point in the story. Ray’s typically roving camera keeps the film from becoming stagy: It takes place mostly in the Bose home, because Ray’s doctors had warned him to do most of his filming indoors, but there are also some lovely outdoor scenes, especially toward the end, when Manomohan takes the family to a tribal village where dancers show the family that there is more to Indian culture than their privileged middle-class lives. The Stranger is a fine farewell to an illustrious career.

Curry Barker's low-budget shocker Obsession hinges on one of those "be careful what you wish for" plots. Baron, aka "Bear" (Michael Johnston), works in a music store and is attracted to the pretty Nikki (Inde Navarrette), but he's too shy to make a play for her affections. So when he finds a magic gizmo in a New Agey store he makes a fatal wish that she will fall in love with him. Everything that could go wrong does. The film succeeds because of the commitment of its performers, particularly Navarrette, who switches deftly from modestly charming to murderously terrifying as the unwitting victim. Obsession was a big surprise hit, perhaps because there seems to be a lot of post-feminist angst going around. It's the age of the "manosphere," in which the secretary of war wants to pump up the troops with testosterone, so why shouldn't an incel like Bear turn to magic for help? Fortunately, Barker's horror-comic sensibility keeps that particular subtext in check.  

*That transliteration appears in the subtitles, but it’s often seen as “Dokfa” in sources that attempt to translate the film’s original title, “Dokfa in the Devil’s Hand.”

Antonioni Pietrangeli's I Knew Her Well is a "lost girl" movie most often compared to Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita (1960) because its setting is Rome in the hedonistic 1960s. But the film it reminds me of is John Schlesinger's Darling, made the same year as Pietrangeli's. Both movies center on a pretty young model who comes to grief because she doesn't have much more than beauty going for her. Darling won an Oscar for Julie Christie, but Stefania Sandrelli is just as impressive in her performance as Adriana, who breezes through a series of men and incidents until she realizes that she's going nowhere fast. If I prefer Pietrangeli's film, it's because its satire is less heavy-handed. The cruelty and exploitation of the entertainment industry is skewered in both, but Pietrangeli at least demonstrates that the people it hurts and exploits feel something, especially in the scene in which the has-been actor Baggini (Ugo Tognazzi) is humiliated at a glamorous party. I Knew Her Well doesn't quite avoid the problem that movies about aimless and empty lives can be aimless and empty, but the performances give it an appearance of substance. 

The bank heist hostage movie is a thriller subgenre that reached its glory in Dog Day Afternoon (Sidney Lumet, 1975), and Derek Tung-Sing Yee's People's Hero begins almost like a remake of that classic. Two inept would-be robbers, Sai (Tony Leung Chiu-wai) and Boney (Ronald Wong), take the customers and staff of a bank hostage, immediately attracting the attention of the police. Like Lumet, Yee is as interested in the hostages and the cops as he is in the robbers. The hostages are a fractious, quarrelsome lot; the cops are hamstrung by bureaucracy. But People's Hero takes a twist almost as soon as the standoff of cops and robbers occurs: One of the hostages turns out to be a gangster, Sunny Koo (Ti Lung), who immediately takes charge, turning Sai and Boney into both hostages and accomplices. Koo is so well known to the police that he has the clout to summon an old adversary on the force, Capt. Chan (Tony Leung Ka-fai), to negotiate with. The result is an entertaining suspense thriller, more focused on characters than your usual Hong Kong action movie. The performances are stellar, particularly Lung as the masterly, cunning gangster and Elaine Jin as his girlfriend, Lotus, called on by Koo to help him make his getaway, only to show she has a mind of her own. People's Hero ends with a little more graphic bloodshed than necessary, but it's a movie with a perhaps unexpected wit and irony. 

Prison break movies tend to fall into three types: the moral fable like A Man Escaped (Robert Bresson, 1956), the technical thriller like Escape From Alcatraz (Don Siegel, 1979) and Le Trou (Jacques Becker, 1960), and the sentimental melodrama like The Shawshank Redemption  (Frank Darabont, 1994). The Escapist tries to be all three, which results in something of a muddle. Director and co-writer Rupert Wyatt intercuts the drama leading up to the escape with scenes from the escape itself, which challenges the viewer to keep track of time and place. This scrambling of the narrative serves a purpose which is revealed at the end of the film, at the risk of alienating the viewer. Fortunately, he has an ensemble of fine actors, headed by Brian Cox, who make things watchable even amid the confusion and occasional implausibility.

For Federico Fellini, there was no business like show business. More than almost any other major filmmaker, his movies centered on the lives of performers or directors or just would-be stars and starfuckers, people in search of a way to be larger than life. He launched his career as director with a pure example of this preoccupation, Variety Lights, co-directed with Albert Lattuada but distinctively Felliniesque. It's the story of Checco Dal Monte (Peppino De Filippo), the hapless manager of a rag-tag company of vaudevillians, who thinks he's found the way to the big time when an ambitious would-be star, Liliana (Cara Del Poggio), latches on to him after seeing the troupe perform. Initially skeptical, Checco comes round when the young woman, whose beauty exceeds her talents, wins over a raucous audience and attracts the attention of a wealthy man whose obvious aim is to seduce her. Checco's mistress, Melina (Giulietta Masina), is furious when he falls for Liliana and begins trying to promote her career. The film goes a long way on the energy of its performers, including the members of the marginally talented company, but it lacks enough story to give it coherence.  

Paris belongs to the French, which is one of the problems Francophobes have with it. And there’s much for them to find problems with in Jacques Rivette’s first feature, one of the key works of the French New Wave. I found myself squirming at the gallery of poseurs at the party near the beginning of the film, before I realized that the film is a critique of poseurs: Everyone plays a role, and everyone tries to bend the narrative in their direction. The narrative of Paris Belongs to Us is a deconstruction of the political paranoia thriller: Its characters are caught up on a vast international right-wing conspiracy that may or may not exist. The idea that it does exist seems to be supported by the fact that several of its characters are exiles from Franco’s Spain and Joe McCarthy’s America, and some of them end up dead. Contrariwise, the idea that it exists only in the minds of the characters seems to be supported by the fact that none of these anxious artists and intellectuals ever manage to accomplish anything: They’re paralyzed by their own paranoia and egotism, or rather, like the Red Queen, they’re running fast to stay in the same place. Rivette admired Lewis Carroll, so we can see his protagonist, Anne Goupil (Betty Schneider), as Alice in the Parisian pays des merveilles. She falls into the chaos of a production of Shakespeare’s Pericles, a mess of a play that he probably wrote only half of, directed by Gérard Lenz (Giani Esposito), who is somehow ensnared in the political mesh that claimed the life of a composer named Juan, who had recorded a guitar piece as accompaniment for the production. But after his suicide (if it was one) the tape has disappeared. Anne takes on the job of finding it, which leads her deeper into the mess and into encounters with more strange characters. In the conclusion, nothing is concluded except the lives of several people, and the viewers are left wondering, “What was all that about?” Which is exactly what Rivette wants them to wonder. The film is like life: full of loose ends.

Two young men escape from a Nazi transport at the start of Jan Nemec's Diamonds of the Night, and the camera follows them in a breathless run through the fields toward an uncertain destination. And in a sense that destination remains uncertain, even though they manage to cadge a hunk of bread from a woman in a farmhouse and are eventually captured by a group of old men with hunting rifles. Nemec gives us two visions of the young men's fate at the hands of their captors. His first feature film, a little over an hour, is laced with memories and ambiguous images and touches of the surreal. At its best, it's almost hyperreal. In the scene in which the old men celebrate their capture, for example, the soundtrack is filled with the slightly disgusting noises of eating as the victors scarf down their lunch. It's possible to interpret Diamonds of the Night as a fable about the repression of the young by the old, or as an allegory about escaping from Nazi terror only to end up under Soviet repression, but it stands on its own for its innovative use of cinematic technique, a hallmark of the brief period of liberation experienced by Czech filmmakers in the 1960s.  

Syndromes and a Century is the kind of film that is apt to have some people say it’s like watching paint dry. And that’s what makes it so fascinating. During the long stretches in which the viewer has nothing to do but watch an odd dark oval, the aperture of some kind of device that seems to be vacuuming up smoke from a room full of mysterious medical equipment, we’re left with nothing to do but meditate on how that oval suggests a black hole, or how it echoes a solar eclipse earlier in the film, or how medical technology seems alien, or to wonder nervously whether the hospital in which the scene takes place is on fire. Things happen in Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s film; sometimes they even happen twice, a kind of reincarnation of earlier events – Weerasethakul is fascinated by the belief in past lives. But the events are there for us to assemble in our imaginations: The film isn’t going to do that for us. A doctor has a somewhat oddball interview with a job applicant, who later reveals that he’s madly in love with her, whereupon she tells him of her inconclusive relationship with a man who collects orchids. A dentist works on a patient, a Buddhist monk in saffron robes, and begins singing to him. Later, the two meet in a scene in which the dentist speculates on whether the monk might be the reincarnation of the brother for whose accidental death he blames himself. It’s also clear that the dentist has something of a crush on the monk. A young doctor’s girlfriend wants him to move with her to a burgeoning new city, and shows him pictures of the industrial construction there as if it were some kind of enticement. They start to make out and he gets an erection. An older doctor, a hematologist, tries to treat a younger doctor’s patient, who has suffered from carbon monoxide inhalation, by healing his chakras. When it doesn’t work, the young doctor tells her he had already tried that. And so on, through various incidents that somehow echo one another but stubbornly refuse to be assimilated into a conventional narrative. Syndromes and a Century takes place in a scientific culture at which untamed nature only laps furtively around the edges. The settings are modern hospitals, not plantations or jungles, and there are no ghosts or forest monsters on hand. But for all that, the world remains as haunted and mysterious as the worlds seen in Tropical Malady (2004) and Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010). Weerasethakul has been compared to Michelangelo Antonioni in his technique of introducing situations and settings that never quite resolve themselves into completed stories, but where Antonioni was filled with angst by the world’s intractable conflicts, Weerasethakul seems content to enjoy the mystery without worrying about its implications.

Full Moon in New York is based on a concept: Show something about the Chinese diaspora through the lives of three young women in New York. And as far as the concept goes, it works. Stanley Kwan gives us three points of origin and three distinct societal roles: Lee Fung Jiao (Maggie Cheung) is a type-A businesswoman from Hong Kong who is having an affair with another woman; Wang Hsiung-Ping (Sylvia Chang) is an unmarried aspiring actress from Taiwan; and Zhaohong (Gaowa Siqin) is a newlywed homemaker from the mainland. Despite their disparate backgrounds, they meet and become friends largely because they’re all Chinese trying to make their way in an alien land and culture. The film is full of lively scenes in which each meets her own particular challenge and finds a way through it, and equally lively scenes in which their friendship blossoms over the way they met these challenges.  The three actresses are marvelous, but the supporting cast isn’t always up to their standard. I speak no Chinese, so I can’t judge the delivery of the Chinese actors, but I found the Americans in the cast sometimes inept and amateurish. There’s also something off in the scene in which Wang auditions in English for the role of Lady Macbeth: She seems to be speaking a paraphrase of the sleepwalking scene instead of the actual lines from Shakespeare’s play. The scene is really a setup for her to give the American casting director, who wants to know why she thinks a Chinese actress could play the role, a lesson in Chinese history. Still, Full Moon in New York is good enough to leave me wanting more of the stories of these women. It feels very much like the pilot for a TV series that never got made.