Sweet Emulsion

Presenting the first episode of The Next Picture Show, a new podcast brought to you by the minds behind @thedissolve and our friends at Filmspotting.

Each two-part Next Picture Show discussion combines The Dissolve’s Movie of the Week feature with a movie of the day, taking inspiration from a new release to talk about a classic film. Our inaugural show, inspired by Tom McCarthy’s well-received new film Spotlight, takes a deep dive into Alan J. Pakula’s 1976 classic All The President’s Men, to examine the similarities and differences in the films’ respective portrayals of the Fourth Estate, the act of journalism, and political controversy. 

Christian Petzold’s Phoenix builds to one of the greatest endings in movie history, which is especially remarkable given the movie it’s riffing on—Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo—has a strong claim to that shortlist, too. The key word here is “builds,” because the emotion that surfaces so powerfully in those final moments is sublimated in all the scenes that precede it, which are clouded in mysteries of love, betrayal, and identity in post-World War II Germany. Petzold invites the audience to follow a woman who returns from a concentration camp as the only member of her family left alive and reunites with a husband who may well have betrayed her to the Nazis. We never know quite what she’s thinking—and she doesn’t know, either—but because she’s played by Nina Hoss, Petzold’s longtime collaborator and muse, her face is a puzzle we’re compelled to solve, even as her character’s actions are enigmatic to the end. Petzold relies wholly on the impact of that final scene to validate everything that preceded it, and without Hoss, he doesn’t get there.

By this point, he has reason to feel confident. Petzold and Hoss have collaborated six times now, and Phoenix is just the latest example of Hoss playing a woman who has to navigate treacherous terrain by keeping her feelings in check. There are scenes in Petzold’s films when Hoss is asked to emote—often when she’s finally forced to confront the hostility she’s so carefully avoided—but more often she has the far more difficult task of carrying a film through emotional reserve. Typically, the hostility she’s avoiding comes from the world of men: In 2007’s Yella, Hoss plays a woman who leaves her hometown abruptly to get away from her obsessive, abusive ex-husband, but winds up in trouble of another kind when she partners with a shady businessman in her bid for a new life. In 2008’s Jerichow, an ingenious neo-noir updating of The Postman Always Rings Twice, she’s caught between an abusive husband and a volatile drifter who was dishonorably discharged from the war in Afghanistan. In Petzold’s last film, 2012’s Barbara, she’s an East German doctor whose suspected subversion gets her banished to an outpost in the sticks, where she remains under watch by both government agents and her colleagues at a country hospital.

What these films have in common is that Hoss is playing characters who are trying to leverage control over a situation where they have no real power or agency. Yella and Jerichow have her trying to wriggle away from abusive relationships that keep haunting her even when she finds someone new. Barbara seethes with the dread and paranoia of East Germany in the 1980s, when the loosening grip of the Eastern Bloc led to desperate assertions of power over the citizenry. Hoss’s doctor cannot trust anyone, including a new colleague who appears to be sympathetic to her, but her guarded state winds up heightening the misconception that she’s an arrogant big-city type. She’s trying to thread a very thin needle and Hoss, as ever, holds a firm posture and gives nothing away, leaving the audience to look for hairline cracks in her facial reserve.

As Nelly Lenz in Phoenix, Hoss again treads lightly as an Auschwitz survivor whose facial reconstruction surgery—shades of Eyes Without A Face— renders her unrecognizable, even to her husband Johnny (Ronald Zehrfeld). Before the war, Nelly and Johnny were a nightclub act, with her a singer and him a pianist, but her homecoming is complicated by her friend’s certainty that Johnny ratted her out to the Nazis under interrogation. When Nelly finds Johnny working as a busboy at Phoenix, a nightclub in the American sector of Berlin, he doesn’t know her true identity, but can spot enough of a resemblance to the Nelly he knew that he ropes her into a scheme to claim the “dead” Nelly’s inheritance. Thus begins a Vertigo-like ritual with Johnny in the Jimmy Stewart role and Nelly in Kim Novak’s, with the big difference being that Nelly holds the secret of her true identity and it’s Johnny who’s left in the dark.

Johnny’s obsessive quest to mold Nelly into a missing woman is similar to Stewart’s, but Petzold and his co-screenwriter, the late Harun Farocki, shift perspective from the male gaze in Vertigo to a woman sorting out answers about her husband and herself. It’s not entirely accurate to say that Nelly is motivated by a need to know the truth about Johnny’s betrayal; there’s something deeper and unsettled about their relationship that she’s trying to clarify. On a fundamental level, Nelly is lost: She has no family and no husband, she’s not at home in Germany after the Nazis, and she’s not interested in following her friend to new terrain in Palestine. At the same time, she’s quite literally a changed woman, with a brand new face and a related lack of commitment to attach that face to a specific person. One possible reason why she agrees to go along with Johnny’s scheme is that it gives her a new life, however twisted and perverse.

It’s been nearly a year since Robin Williams took his life, finally succumbing to the depression he had masked so successfully in comedy for decades. But I’ll confess something now that I (and many other critics) couldn’t then: I rarely looked forward to a Robin Williams movie. There’s some irony to the fact that eulogizing Williams brought his critics closer to the father he played in one of his best movies, World’s Greatest Dad, who answered the predicament of losing a difficult, disappointing son to auto-erotic asphyxiation by re-imagining him as far nobler figure than he was. Directed by Bobcat Goldthwait, one of Williams’ closest friends, the film ultimately argues that acknowledging the full, painful, complicated truth about the boy is better than comforting fabrications, but it also understood the impulse to remember the dead in the best possible light. It would have been callous to express any ambivalence about Williams so soon after his death, because he was a human being first—and by all accounts a sweet and decent one at that—and frank discussions of his artistic legacy could wait.

Yet in the process of eulogizing Williams and taking stock of his entire career on screen, it was actually helpful for me to stop rolling my eyes at Mrs. Doubtfire or Bicentennial Man or Patch Adams, and try to understand what qualities he brought to his best work and why audiences loved him so much. Sometimes, the effort to find the good in an artist’s work can be productive, because you can cast aside your assumptions and get a fresh understanding of his intent. Does that mean I’m ready to embrace those movies that succumbed to his signature fusion of breathless comic improvisation and drippy mawkishness? No. And I’d still assert that the manic persona Williams adopted for mainstream movies and public appearances was not funny, and functioned almost like a smokescreen to guard against the truer, more discomfiting pain (and humor) that wasn’t fit for the masses to see.

Much of that pain—and the mania, too—is on display in Terry Gilliam’s The Fisher King, which features not only one of Williams’ best performances, but also one that accommodates the full range of what he had to offer. In his more serious roles, Williams had a tendency to close the tap entirely on his comic side and it made him seem more limited as an actor, like he was actively repressing an aspect of himself that made him more fully human. In The Fisher King, we see him leap onto a table and zip down his pants in an impish fit of pique and we see him gaze through the window at a Dim Sum restaurant, considering the fumblings of a lonely, “mousey” accountant as if she was God’s most precious creation. As Gilliam himself said of the film in the wake of Williams’ suicide: “It is the whole breadth of Robin, which no other part I think out there does. From the hysterically funny to the manic to the utterly sweet to the sensitive and tormented, it’s all there.”

Rather than look at the whole of Gilliam’s typically dense urban fairytale, I want to focus on a single scene that I consider the best in Williams’ career, but first a little context. Jeff Bridges stars as Jack Lucas, a New York City “shock jock” whose on-air callousness leads to tragedy when he inspires a caller to open fire at a “yuppie” restaurant. Three years later, he encounters Parry (Williams), a homeless former professor whose wife was killed that night, a trauma that sent him first into catatonia and then to a life on the streets. Jack seeks redemption by helping Parry on several fronts, including his courtship of Lydia (Amanda Plummer), an accountant whose every move Parry finds unaccountably enchanting. Jack and his girlfriend (Mercedes Ruehl, whose every move I find enchanting) go to extraordinary lengths to bring Parry and Lydia together, and their efforts pay off in a night out where they connect like long-lost soulmates.

This brings me to the scene, where Parry is walking Lydia home and the two talk out loud about where that might lead. It is Lydia’s expectation that Parry will walk her to her doorstep. It is Lydia’s expectation that she will invite him up for coffee. It is Lydia’s expectation that they will have sex and it will be great, but the next morning he’ll seem distant—again over coffee—and for the rest of the day, she will realize that he never intends to see her again. She has these expectations because she’s that mousey woman from accounting and on the off-chance that anyone takes a romantic interest in her, he will surely not find her special enough to stay for more than one night. This probably doesn’t stop her from wanting Parry to come up anyway—salving her loneliness and desire, if just for a few hours, is worth the pain of having her assumptions confirmed. She’s so certain, in fact, of what’s going to happen that she doesn’t hear him say, repeatedly, “I don’t like coffee.”

Then Parry says this: “I’m in love with you.” And this is how Williams looks when he says it:

Parry has completely disregarded social protocol. This is not something that’s said after a first date. And the way he explains himself afterwards to Lydia could earn him a restraining order. He talks about how he’s been watching her and her daily routine: How she gets bounced around in the crowd when she leaves on her lunch break, how she picks up romance novels on good days, how she orders the same dumplings on Wednesday and eats a jawbreaker before going back into the office. In other words, he’s been stalking her, and though the screenwriter, Richard LaGravenese, has written a beautiful monologue, there are not many actors who could make it sincere and moving rather than chilling. Parry is confessing a romantic obsession that often manifests itself as violence, here in the same city where Travis Bickle made an angel out of a pretty campaign volunteer.

The essential fact about the camera in non-fiction films is that it doesn’t observe or document, even at its most unobtrusive. There is no such thing as a fly-on-the-wall. The camera transforms reality and creates its own truth. It doesn’t lessen the impact or legitimacy of a documentary to recognize that filmmakers and subjects have their own complicated agendas—sometimes complementary, sometimes not—and the camera plays an active role in the human drama that unfolds. To a degree, having this knowledge spoils an illusion that most documentaries are eager to cultivate: That everything you see is “real” and that everyone on screen lost all awareness that they were being filmed and behaved accordingly. And while there may be degrees to which subjects become less self-conscious over the course of a shoot, technology hasn’t invented the invisible camera yet—and even once it does, the law doesn’t allow for invisible waivers.

Among other things, Joshua Oppenheimer’s stunning companion docs The Act Of Killing and The Look Of Silence—the latter of which begins a limited run on Friday—are a testament to the power of the movie camera. Oppenheimer spent years investigating the Indonesian genocide that began in 1965, when the military dictatorship, with the backing of prominent western governments, purged the country of one million “communists.” (The scare-quotes around “communists” are necessary: The dictatorship, deploying gangsters and regional militias, used it as a catch-all label for opposition of any kind, including union members, homeless farmers, and other ideological innocents.) The two films are very different in style and conceit: The Act Of Killing follows two gangsters as they participate in filmed recreations of the mass murders they perpetrated in 1965 and 1966. (One of them, Anwar Congo, may have killed 1,000 people personally.) The Look Of Silence shifts the focus from the perpetrators to the victims, tracking “Adi,” a 44-year-old whose brother Ramli was tortured, killed, and dumped into the Snake River two years before he was born. Adi interrogates the men responsible for his brother’s death, many of whom are still in power and largely unrepentant.

Of the two, The Look Of Silence has the simpler, more journalistic bent. Adi wants to know what happened to his brother, so he sets about constructing that harrowing story and questioning the deranged rationale behind his murder. But it’s important to emphasize that The Look Of Silence isn’t merely an act of journalism that would be just as affecting on the page as it would on the screen. It’s a feat of filmmaking, too, owed to Oppenheimer’s understanding of how the camera can be used as a tool to arrive at truths that would be impossible without it. Here are some of the key things the camera does in The Act Of Killing and The Look Of Silence:

It appeals to vanity. To quote The Rules Of The Game, “Everyone has their reasons.” And that includes mass murderers in Indonesia. Were Oppenheimer merely a reporter with pen and paper, it seems unlikely that he could have convinced Anwar Congo to open up about his genocidal methods. But even if he could, the impact of Congo actually appearing in re-creations for The Act Of Killing is another matter entirely. Oppenheimer appealed to Congo’s love of the movies, but the true appeal was to his pride and narcissism. Though he admits to being haunted by nightmares, Congo expresses no remorse over his prolific role in the slaughter of innocents; in fact, his face often breaks into a Cheshire Cat grin, as if he knows he’s gotten away with something. By making himself the star of Oppenheimer’s re-stagings, he gets to show the world the efficiency of his technique, like how a particular form of wire strangulation limited the bloodshed. He also gets to wield his still-active power over ordinary people, whose terror in being recruited for these macabre scenes is shockingly real, to the point where some have questioned Oppenheimer’s duplicity in empowering these thugs to do it.

It makes the past present. The Act Of Killing and The Look Of Silence both expose the atrocities of Indonesia’s past, but that is not their true purpose. The point isn’t to make audiences aware of a genocide that was committed nearly half a century ago, because that is a matter of historical record. And though The Act Of Killing especially is a stunning example of the “banality of evil,” that isn’t the thesis, either. Oppenheimer wants to let the world know that the same men responsible for killing a million people—and their children and grandchildren—are still in charge of the country and still a threat to citizens who cannot speak their minds. As the director explained to Jason Bailey at Flavorwire, it’s “like wandering into Germany 40 years after the Holocaust if the Nazis were still in power, and if the rest of the world had celebrated the Holocaust while it had taken place.” Much of the power of these two films derives from the camera picking up on a pervasive, unsettling mood on the ground in contemporary Indonesia, especially when widely recognized men like Congo and the leaders who orchestrated Ramli’s murder are tromping through the streets. The country is ostensibly a “democracy” now, forever freed from communist influence, but the camera exposes that peace as a lie, enforced by fear and intimidation.

It’s the catalyst for unexpected revelations. Roger Ebert famously likened the movies to “a machine that generates empathy,” but it’s not just limited to the viewer. The process of making a movie also requires empathy, particularly for actors who have to sink into a character and be emotionally present in a scene. Toward the end of The Act Of Killing, Congo stops playing himself as the swaggering, pitiless gangster who takes pleasure in showing off for the camera and instead takes the part of purge victim, subjected to the same strangulation method he boasted about earlier in the film. As the scene unfolds, the camera registers a sudden and unmistakable rush of discomfort, as the tremors of guilt and horror that were usually confined to Congo’s nightmares crack his confident façade. The re-creation requires him to lose the power and control that allows him to laugh monstrously over pleas and cries of the helpless and understand for a second what it’s like to have life taken from you. He cannot halt the production fast enough, but Oppenheimer’s camera has effectively turned the tables on him, making him trip over his own vanity and confront the ghosts that have been haunting his conscience.

The story of Martha Beck and Raymond Fernandez, a.k.a. “The Lonely Hearts Killers,” was made for the movies. Not merely because of the tabloid punch of a criminal partnership that led to three murders and likely many more, but because the details of the case are so bizarre and endlessly fascinating. Before meeting Beck, Fernandez was a con man, trolling the personal ads for lonely, desperate older women of means and seducing them out of their cash and jewelry. Beck was one of his marks, a rotund nurse supervisor from Mobile, Alabama who fell hard for his charms, got bilked out her money just like the rest of them, and yet—here’s where the mystery begins—would not let that dissuade her from loving him. When the pair continued Fernandez’s scheme, Beck would pose as his “sister,” but her jealousy, possessiveness, and nasty temper manifested itself into violence, turning their cons in murders.

This week, Fabrice Du Welz’s Alléluia hits independent theaters and VOD, effectively reimagining the case as a grisly, genre-jumping tale of obsession, set in the same murky Belgian countryside where Du Welz staged his breakthrough film, Calvaire. But Du Welz is smart to get an ocean’s distance from the 1969 cult favorite The Honeymoon Killers, which remains the definitive telling of Beck and Fernandez’s killing spree, and a case of nearly equal mystery. None of the key players involved with The Honeymoon Killers had any experience making a movie: Not its financier, Leon Levy, who handed over $150,000 to a producer, Warren Steibel, who had never worked outside television. Not its screenwriter and eventual director, Leonard Kastle, an opera composer and librettist who pieced his script together out of trial transcripts and took over behind the camera after two other directors, including a young Martin Scorsese, left the project. And not its two stars,  Tony Lo Bianco and Shirley Stoler, who had only acted for the stage.

The Honeymoon Killers thrives on the strange alchemy between Beck and Feranadez’s story and the big-screen novices who bring it to life. Shot in newsreel B&W that occasionally pops with noir expressiveness, the film looks like the B-movie undercard of an old drive-in double feature, like something the lovers might have watched between killings in the late ‘40s rather than typical late-60s exploitation fare. It’s not surprising to learn that John Waters is a fan: The film anticipates the blunt, provocative outsider art of Pink Flamingos and beyond, with Stoler resembling a slightly more put-together Edith Massey, minus the eggs. The actors in The Honeymoon Killers don’t look like actors, and the black-and-white photography adds a texture of documentary truth that legitimizes their performances as color never could. This is a middle American story that appears completely untouched by the Hollywood system, which would have surely buffed out the rough edges that so effectively pierce the skin.

Trumpeting the Beck/Fernandez case as “perhaps the most bizarre episode in the annals of American crime” in the opening credits, The Honeymoon Killers then sets about backing it up with little hesitation. At the hospital, Martha seethes with anger over the romantic indiscretions of her charges and her fury doesn’t abate at home, where she kicks a child’s wagon off the sidewalk on her way to the door. She’s equally ticked when her mother suggests she place a personal ad, and she only softens a little when Ray, a suave Spanish importer, flatters her in a series of letters, even after receiving a rather grim portrait shot.

Martha and Ray hit it off on their date, which already suggests perversions to come, as she angles for private time with him by filling her mother’s liquor glass until she passes out. Following through on his usual scheme, Ray bilks her out of her available cash and sends her his regrets via mail, but an undeterred Martha tracks him down to continue their affair and commence a criminal partnership. Martha agrees to legitimize his scam by posing as his sister—though the resemblance between the trim, accented lothario and his coarse, portly sibling is the opposite of uncanny—but under the condition that his relationships never reach the honeymoon stage. For Ray, who often marries his victims and whose sexual appetites run deep, this proves to be an impossible arrangement.

The essential fact, and central mystery, of The Honeymoon Killers is that it’s a love story. That’s what makes the whole affair so marvelously inexplicable. When Beck and Fernandez were executed at Sing Sing on March 8th, 1951, after being sentenced for three murders between 1947 and 1949, both used their last words to profess their love for each other. (Beck even requested to sit on Fernandez’s lap on the electric chair!) The Honeymoon Killers smartly emphasizes Ray and Martha’s relationship as l’amour fou (“crazy love”) at its most extreme rather than attempting to account for it. Why does Martha continue to love Ray despite his record of betrayal, from the “lonely hearts” scam on her to his inability to abide by the terms of their arrangement? And perhaps more curiously still, why does Ray allow Martha into his life? It’s possible that he loves her for accepting him as the scoundrel he is, but she’s a needy, joyless romantic partner and incompetent criminal one. Her jealousy runs so hot that it often sabotages his operations before he can abscond with the loot. There’s some other force that explains their connection and it’s not the film’s responsibility to account for it, other than to make their collective psychosis feel plausible. We cannot know why they love each other, only that it makes sense on some perverse wavelength.

For a film made of many hands, none of them seasoned—even Scorsese had only directed Who’s That Knocking On My Door? before his week at the helm—The Honeymoon Killers isn’t as artless as it seems. Kastle’s script has a nasty streaks of black comedy running through it, most notoriously in a scene where Martha, furious at her Jewish boss riffling through her love letters, spits, “I’m not so sure Hitler wasn’t right about you people,” or when she cuts down one of Ray’s women by saying, “You sigh a lot. In nursing school, they taught us that people who sigh a lot are unstable.” The young cinematographer Oliver Wood, the only alumnus beyond Scorsese to have a distinguished career in Hollywood (he’s Adam McKay’s regular DP), keeps the camera moving and chooses his spots for dramatic, expressive angles. When Martha and Ray turn to violence, time seems to slow down and the film fully registers their victims’ terror as a once-heady romance takes a dramatic turn. One murder is reflected chiefly through a pair of widened eyes.

ETHAN HAWKE & JULIE DELPY WANT YOU TO STFU

“what do you think this is, “Purple Rose of Cairo?”