Between two worlds

Jacques Rivette and Gaspard, who plays Nevermore (click to enlarge)

Initially conceived in the early 1970’s with Leslie Caron and Albert Finney in mind for the lead characters, Jacques Rivette’s The Story of Marie and Julien (2003, but new to DVD) is a continuation of the themes and ideas explored throughout the director’s curious, obscure oeuvre. A founding father of the nouvelle vague, Rivette continues to plumb the depths of want and desire, unrequited love, and the very delicate balance sustaining personal relationships. He also has a justified reputation concerning length: his average picture runs over 180-minutes, with Out One (1971) a milestone clocking in at nearly thirteen hours. A mere 150-minutes, Marie and Julien seems a breeze, now with Emmanuelle Béart and Jerzy Radziwilowicz as the mature lovers trapped by time and destiny.

    Those who are unfamiliar with Rivette may not be so quick to go along for the ride. When it opened to favorable reviews in a limited but adequately-publicized release, Va Savoir (2001)—his most accessible, viewer-friendly work in years—the cultivated, upscale East Coast crowd I saw it with moaned an audible sigh of relief once the ending credits rolled and the houselights came on…and (most of) that picture was a romantic situation comedy! Marie and Julien isn’t entirely lacking in humor, though one wishes it had more because of that sly, impish wit Rivette let run free in Va Savoir and especially Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974). But he’s often been drawn to the mystical and supernatural, memory-haunted houses and romantics holding on to old ideals, or the trap of our facades we construct out of vanity; and dwells in scenarios which (temporarily) distrust love as an unsigned contract between fickle minds easily swayed by heat and passion.

    Apt to employ the MacGuffin to bond otherwise disparate characters, Rivette and co-writers Pascal Bonitzer and Christine Laurent (his frequent collaborators over the years) have created a hazy blackmail scheme to involve Radziwilowicz’s Julien with the ethereal ‘Madame X’ (played by Anne Brochet) and her truly ghostly sister, Adrienne (Bettina Kee). In the meantime, Julien is haunted by prophetic dreams of Béart’s Marie, an uncertain figure from his past who’s returned to fall in love with him after a year’s absence.

    As always, the enjoyment in Rivette comes from seeing between the lines and questioning those arbitrary props and images he’s so fond of using. Julien’s vocation, tinkering with the inner mechanisms of large, industrial clocks, provides the necessary metaphor for his control issues and self-imposed alienation, while his fear of loss and abandonment is made gradually apparent. Marie’s flighty demeanor, living out of suitcases (are they empty?) in rented furnished rooms, is his antithesis, a wraithlike figure beyond his possession.

    Opposites attract in Rivette—the painter, his wife and the model in La Belle noiseuse (1991), the titular figures running through Celine and Julie…, the students and teacher in Gang of Four (1988)—and the love shared between Julien and Marie begins in their sexual longings and make-believe scenarios, to wander the periphery of Madame X and Adrienne, as Julien becomes simultaneously au fait and hopelessly bemused.

    Whether this is “good” Rivette or not is inconsequential. As it appears to lack the motivational spirit of his best work, Marie and Julien is nonetheless a layered meditation that should repay through repeat viewings. Working once again with the underrated cinematographer William Lubtchansky (under a budget he places in the vicinity of “about three cents”), Rivette saunters along with his nouvelle vague compatriots Rohmer, Chabrol and Godard, each remaining true to their art and their radically different visions. Now in their seventies, they’ve been making pictures for over forty-five years, and represent a film culture and language—once so fresh and vital—that’s nearing extinction. That’s a warning signal for some of us, as my mind rarely comes alive at the cinema anymore. Except when in the presence of such a rare gift of dimension and substance and elegant romanticism as Marie and Julien.

At Amazon

Boxcar Burqa

There’s a moment some seventy-five minutes into Divine Intervention, a dazzlingly staged, choreographed, edited and scored digression concerning Israeli gunmen at target practice, confronted by an unstoppable Palestinian ninja action figure, animated and absurd like tasty, fattening, nutritionally vacant kung fu movie junk food. So lively and striking, it nearly earns the film a recommendation. (It’s what they used to sell the picture in the trailer.) But those first seventy-five minutes—ouch!

    Intended as an homage to writer/director/star Elia Suleiman’s late father, the film (released in 2002, but new on DVD) endeavors to employ poetic license in its interpretation of the shell-shocked hotbed surrounding lovers from Jerusalem and Ramallah (played by the director and the Israeli actress, Manal Khader, pictured above). There’s a wealth of material to be mined from both the location and its characters, but Suleiman opts for the restrictive terrain of deadpan surrealism. If familiarity breeds contempt, then the streets of repetitious violence and its dulled denizens soon become as monotonous as one of the heated confrontations staged so meticulously for the camera. One rare prophetic, engaging touch is the figure of Yasser Arafat envisioned as a helium balloon, hot air and empty promises floating over the ravaged horizon.

    Stoicism in the midst of jack-in-the-box terrorism requires a dose of irony, but that’s been pummeled out of the script, or perhaps its writer—along with the sense of longing that would have given the lovers a little heat during their celibate clandestine meetings. (The film is blatantly awestruck and upstaged by Khadar’s beauty.) The decision to mount Divine Intervention as an oblique, interior observation requires more artistry than Suleiman appears to possess. Scenes which probably read well in the script—the hunt and extermination of Santa Claus; Khader’s seductive walk through a military checkpoint; a reference to a Dali portrait of Christ—are met by creative indifference in the direction, as hollow as those tears cried when Suleiman’s character chops onions, owing less to Fellini and Buñuel than music videos…and one explanation of why Suleiman’s face is set in eternal melancholia.


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Donkey skin

Anne Wiazemsky and Balthazar (click to enlarge)

When Criterion announced that it would release Robert Bresson’s Au hasard Balthazar (1966) on DVD, the internet was abuzz. Prior to home video, Bresson was virtually impossible to see outside of three, maybe four major cities in North America, and even then under severely limited conditions. Since VHS and DVD, he’s become accessible (though Mouchette [1967] is still circulating in substandard prints on tape), with Balthazar a late and highly anticipated arrival. In the wake of its Criterion release, however, many of those who were once champing at the bit have since fallen silent. Had they any previous experience with Bresson’s work? Were they dismayed by his patient, watchful style, coming from preconceived and erroneous notions of what it all might be like? Or has Balthazar proven itself to be a transcendental experience which defies quick and easy appraisal?

    He was once part of a school of dour, austere, enlightened (and woefully extinct) mavericks that included Carl Dreyer, Yasujiro Ozu and Andrei Tarkovsky—borderline manic depressives with Bresson the harshest critic of humanity. His surface techniques (close-ups of hands and feet, nonprofessional actors pivoting without expression, the free association between seemingly disparate subplots) appear simple to avoid shrouding his disapproval of sin and gluttony. His eternal underlying theme, purity is rarely so blatant as it is in Balthazar.

    Burdened with carrying the vanity and transgressions of man to his last dying breath, Balthazar is a saint encased within the body of a donkey. From the beginning, when he’s anointed with baptismal water by children yet to taste the fruit of sin (for even priests are tainted), the beast serves as a metaphor for humility and suffering in a world blinded by pride, self-gratification and vanity. The decades pass, the children become deformed by avarice, and the donkey endures hardship at the hands of the frustrated souls who’ve lost touch with their spiritual core.

    While fans generally choose between Diary of a Country Priest (1951) and A Man Escaped (1956) to name as Bresson’s best film, both Balthazar and Mouchette (the story of a young girl not unlike Balthazar) may emerge as his true masterworks. Both set in rural villages weathering change and modernization, they perceive deliverance as possible only through death. These are grim and troubling portraits in which basic human values are tested without regard to narrative conventions or viewer expectations. But the end surely justifies the means: the journey of Balthazar, from barnyard pet to useful farm animal; his descent in a world increasingly dependent on machines and its own morbid obsession with loss; and those final moments surrounded by the lambs of God—there is no greater gift than his lesson of compassion and tenderness. May he rest in peace.

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Eminence front

Above: Giancarlo Giannini, Lina Wertmüller and Mariangela Melato

In a recent discussion on the blog girish, readers were encouraged to contribute a word or two about their favorite female directors. While the list of names has expanded ever so slightly over the last few decades, it’s still regrettably short: Leni Riefenstahl, Agnès Varda, Claire Denis, Maya Deren, Jane Campion, Chantal Akerman, etc. But some omissions were a reminder of fandom’s tenuous nature: Dorothy Arzner, Lois Weber, Liliana Cavani and Stephanie Rothman, cult icons who would’ve topped such a list thirty years ago, were forgotten entirely by the blog generation. As was Lina Wertmüller.

    The first woman ever to be nominated for a Best Director Academy Award (Seven Beauties in 1975), Wertmüller was once an inescapable presence in the American media. The Seduction of Mimi (1972—her seventh picture), Love and Anarchy (1973), and All Screwed Up (1974), all made in Italy, were true sleeper hits in the United States, and simple enough to capture the attention of those middlebrow viewers bored or wary of the art house triumvirate of Fellini, Bergman and Truffaut. (This was back when a tolerance existed in the mainstream for foreign films, and the pictures played to sizeable audiences outside of major cities, albeit in dubbed versions.) Working from knee-jerk reaction rather than intellect, Wertmüller attacked sexual roles, religious dogma and political issues, confident that heat would eclipse the superficiality of her one-sided debates. In the process, she transformed leading man Giancarlo Giannini into the hunk du jour, and made a habit of tagging her pictures with longwinded titles, such as The End of the World in Our Usual Bed in a Night Full of Rain (1978) and Summer Night, with Greek Profile, Almond Eyes and Scent of Basil (1986).

    Her fall from grace was swift. After Seven Beauties, the balloon popped and the mainstream redirected its sights to the fluffier concerns of Star Wars, Wookies and prepubescent hyperactivity. Heavily advertised for its opening weekend (but limited to urban areas), A Night Full of Rain attracted more negative reviews than paying customers. A victim of the publicity machine, Wertmüller was only as good as her last hit. Today she couldn’t get arrested in America, and nearly everything she’s made since 1990 has been restricted to the screens of Europe.

    I was generally unmoved by her work when it was in fashion. Once all the rage, Seven Beauties seemed unfocused and insincere to these eyes in 1975; today I find it virtually unwatchable. But Wertmüller holds a special place for what amounts to a (not-so) guilty pleasure, Travolti da un insolito destino nell'azzurro mare d'agosto (1974), better known as Swept Away…, or Swept Away by an Unusual Destiny in the Blue Sea of August, the first of those mile-wide titles.

    Proposed as an examination of the economic and cultural rift separating southern from northern Italy (and, presumably, the proletariat from the bourgeoisie), its politics are artless and as rowdy as a barroom argument. Casting a low-income Communist deckhand (Giannini) alone on a desert isle with his employer’s pampered, shrewish wife (Mariangela Melato), Wertmüller reverses the roles of master and slave once the rich one can’t fend for herself. The film sides with the worker to the degree of sharing in his simpleton ideal, wherein slaps, punches, kicking and hair pulling possess the power to change interior attitudes and values.

    Bulldozing through the early ‘70s women’s movement, Swept Away persecutes easy targets (moneyed and opinionated girlie-girls) as its well-heeled (and slightly butch) writer/director makes long-distance alliances with the working class. While such a case of liberal charity sounds less than endearing, the film may be imagined (perhaps after a few drinks) as a demented romantic fantasy—which, ironically, may have been what the director had in mind from the start. Bored with Wertmüller’s grandstanding, this is what I took from it in 1974, when my lack of sophistication allowed for an unfettered appreciation of the film’s idealistic and cosmetic attributes. Its color, music and location photography are uniquely atmospheric. (We can only hope that any future attempts to “restore” it for DVD won’t result in neutralizing or hardening its deliberate, soft-focus pastel hues.) And as a predictable, straight, horny young guy, I fell for Melato’s tan, blonde thirtysomething yenta. And Wertmüller had me: maybe—not all that deep down inside—I felt that Melato’s Rafaella was getting what she so richly deserved.

The original soundtrack (mp3)
Music by Piero Piccioni



1. Travolti da un insolito destino nell'azzurro mare d'agosto (3:52)

2. Spirale d’Amore (2:48)

3. Vertigo (3:49)

4. Significa Amore (2:05)

5. Distesa Estate (2:27)

6. Andante Improvviso (4:22)

7. Las Encantadas (1:55)

8. Turquoise (2:07)

9. L’Isola Misteriosa (2:15)

10. Insolita Luce Azzurra (3:55)

Lina Wertmüller at Amazon

Wig Alley

In 1953, a no-budget distributor called Van Wolk-API released Dementia, a fifty-seven minute art film masquerading as a horror movie. It was the invention of rookie (and one-time) filmmaker John Parker, who based his screenplay on a nightmare had by his secretary, Adrienne Barrett. Likewise inexperienced, she got the lead role in a cast that included such recognizable Poverty Row character actors as Angelo Rossitto and Bruno Ve Sota. (Then unknown, the young Aaron Spelling appeared briefly as a drunk.) Parker shot it without dialogue (his cinematographer was William Thompson, Ed Wood’s d.p.), and then had avant-garde composer George Antheil write a score, with input from Ernest Gold (composer of the Exodus soundtrack), siren vocalist Marni Nixon (Gold’s wife, she dubbed the singing voices of Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady and Natalie Wood in West Side Story), and the jazz ensemble Shorty Rogers and His Giants.

    Downbeat magazine was right on the money when they called it “The first foreign film ever made in Hollywood.” While it’s unlikely that Hitchcock or Welles ever saw Dementia, you can see and feel reverberations of it in Touch of Evil, The Wrong Man, and Psycho. Van Wolk-API paired it with a documentary about Picasso for a limited run. A couple of years later, Parker added narration, toned down a gruesome little dismemberment scene (which had the New York censors in a lather), and retitled it Daughter of Horror for extra mileage.

    While Dementia is the superior of the two versions, Daughter of Horror is perfectly capable of knocking first-time viewers for a loop. Both are available on a single DVD from Kino, or you can watch Daughter of Horror in its entirety online, compliments of the thoughtful folks at the Internet Archive.

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Daughter of Horror online

Flickhead review

Who was Elga Anderson?

Click to enlarge.

Above: Elga in Coast of Skeletons (1964); click to enlarge.

Above: Elga in A Global Affair (1964); click to enlarge.

Elga was fifty-nine when she died of cancer on December 7, 1994. At the time, she was married to Peter Gimbel, who made headlines in the ‘80s when he launched the Andrea Doria Project, an effort to locate the sunken liner’s bank safe. But during the ‘60s, she was an international star whose beauty was relegated to minor films.

Elga Anderson at the IMDb

Sex Power, a film she made with Jane Birkin and Bernadette Lafont.

Udder nonsense

Half-hearted ‘Mother’: Less worthy of an assessment than a warning, Pink Floyd: Atom Heart Mother—The Ultimate Critical Review is an awkward and unauthorized profile cum documentary. Although it benefits from the participation of Ron Geesin, who worked on Pink Floyd’s experimental “Atom Heart Mother” suite recorded in 1970, the members of the band are not directly involved. (A vintner of sour grapes, Geesin believes he deserves more credit for his work, some thirty-five years after the fact.) Instead there are ancient, barely-visible clips of them performing, interspersed with mediocre cover band interpretations of the music. A poseur curmudgeon calling himself ‘Krusher’ serves as the DVD’s ‘ultimate critic,’ but his abrasive demeanor is ridiculous and had me thinking of Ken Russell in his sweaty Gothic period. Informative chats with a musicologist and producers (typically myopic in their read of the album’s unfairly maligned second side) should’ve been edited down to brief digressions rather than fleshed out to fill for time. Perhaps after seeing the excellent Classic Albums: Pink Floyd—The Dark Side of Moon, our hopes were too high. But under any circumstances, Atom Heart Mother—The Ultimate Critical Review is a droning disappointment, taxing and overlong at seventy-five minutes.

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—or—
Get Pink Floyd's original recording

Music from RUN, LOLA, RUN

I wish I was a stranger who wanders down the sky
I wish I was a starship in silence flying by
I wish I was a princess with armies at her hand
I wish I was a ruler who'd make them understand

Listen to the Run, Lola, Run soundtrack online (mp3)

Buy the soundtrack

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Art by Robert McGinnis

Above: Illustration for Playboy magazine

Above: Portrait of Raquel Welch for The Biggest Bundle of Them All

Above: Kooky kitsch—Audrey Hepburn and Peter O’Toole, How to Steal a Million

The quality of movie poster art in the 1960’s often eclipsed that of the films they represented, as a new vanguard of magazine, comic book and book cover illustrators took to the Left Coast. Frank Frazetta, Mort Drucker and Jack Davis were instrumental in making the decade swing, while among the lesser-known talents lurked Robert McGinnis, a cheesecake artist par excellence. His work (with Frank McCarthy) on the ads for the James Bond films Thunderball, You Only Live Twice, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, and Diamonds Are Forever are vibrant; while paintings for Playboy and other men’s magazines encapsulate a time, attitude and lifestyle of the post-WWII nouveau riche. Think: women wearing elbow gloves and men in tuxedos downing martoonies in a salmon-and-teal universe, mindful of manners and poise, void of children and McDonald’s.

Robert McGinnis at The Painted Anvil

Thunderball poster art

You Only Live Twice poster art

On Her Majesty’s Secret Service poster art

Diamonds Are Forever poster art