Marlon Brando
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Monday, August 30, 2010
The Fire Within (1963)
****
Country: France
Director: Louis Malle
Louis Malle's The Fire Within begins in medias res when we meet the main character, Alain Leroy (Maurice Ronet), in a hotel where he has spent the night with a former girl friend. As the film unfolds, more is gradually revealed about Alain. We learn that he is a recovering alcoholic, a patient at what appears to be a very swank private sanatorium in Versailles, just outside Paris. The fees are being paid by his rich wife, who lives in New York and from whom he is separated. When his doctor tells him the cure is complete and it is time to leave, Alain insists he wants to stay at the clinic, that without its regimen to restrain him, he believes he will immediately begin drinking again. Alain's cryptic comments to the doctor about the futility of his life and about death suggest he is suicidally depressed, something which seems quite plain to the viewer but which his doctor dismisses with upbeat platitudes. Later, alone in his room, he opens his brief case, takes out a pistol wrapped in a handkerchief, and contemplates it before putting it back, then walks to the mirror, on which he has written the date July 23, and looks at himself. There can be little doubt about his intentions.
The rest of the film follows Alain through his last day, as he goes to Paris and looks up old friends before returning to the clinic. From these encounters we discover more about him—that he is a writer who is no longer able to write, has been involved in the war in Algeria, has led a dissolute life among rich bohemians, that he invariably rejects suggestions of ways he might repair his life. We also learn that he is well-liked by his friends and that quite a few attractive women—and even some men—find him sexually appealing, while others find his spiritual torpor merely pathetic. Yet even as these details about his life accumulate and our picture of him becomes more complete, one thing is unchanging: our sense of the hopeless, unshakable despair he feels.
While discussions of The Fire Within tend to stress the role of alcoholism in the film, I would say that this is more than a movie about the evils of alcohol. In fact, Alain consistently refuses offers of alcohol and is never shown drunk. In the entire film he takes only one drink, when he furtively gulps down one small glass of cognac that has been left at the next table in a sidewalk cafe. The only effect of the liquor is to make him violently ill. Alain's problems go beyond his dependence on alcohol, which may actually be as much a symptom as a cause—all the way to a pervasive disenchantment with life that colors every moment of the movie. His despair is quite different from both the intellectualized and rather rarefied ennui being explored at the time by Antonioni in films like L'Avventura and L'Eclisse and the almost celebratory alcoholic self-destruction of Nicholas Cage in Leaving Las Vegas. Malle depicts real mental pain here—not melodramatic agonizing, but the quiet resignation of a man whose life has been drained of all hope. The usual diversions that can pull a person out of such a depressive frame of mind or deaden the pain for a while—love, work, intoxicants—no longer have any effect on Alain.
The Fire Within is what might be called a dramatically level film, its lack of strong emotional highs and lows reflecting Alain's own emotional numbness. Rather than dramatic situations, the film presents a series of subdued encounters between Alain and people from his past. In these encounters, his every action makes it obvious that like many intended suicides, he is revisiting his old haunts to say goodbye. Yet only once—when he visits his friend Eva, an artist played with great sympathy in a cameo by Jeanne Moreau—did I feel any real connection between Alain and these people. For the rest, there seems to be an almost palpable sense of estrangement between them and Alain. At one point he figuratively demonstrates the isolation he feels by reaching out to touch the face of one of his friends but stopping with his fingertips just an inch or so away, explaining that he can reach out but can never actually touch another person. It is this terrible sense of psychic solitude that seems to be the genesis of his withdrawal from life.
From beginning to end, the mood of The Fire Within is one of melancholy. Director Louis Malle works in a muted, unemphatic style, avoiding obvious directorial intrusion as he objectively observes Alain's depression without overdramatizing or sentimentalizing Alain's situation. Interestingly, Malle began shooting in color but quickly switched to black and white, a prudent artistic decision that underscores the colorlessness of Alain's life. The sparing use of pensive piano music by Erik Satie also contributes a great deal to the picture's theme of Alain reflecting on his life before ending it.
But the greatest credit for
the the film's success must go to Maurice Ronet, whose deeply affecting performance is the movie's core. In a film of such intimate focus on his character that the camera would surely reveal the least trace of dishonesty in his performance, his Alain seems absolutely genuine. Ronet immediately establishes Alain's state of mind (and his state of mind is the movie), somehow externalizing and making visible what is essentially interior and invisible, and then sustains it scene by scene for the duration of the film, surely the most difficult thing for a film actor to do. Ronet completely disappears inside Alain, fusing so thoroughly with him that actor and character become one. Wholly internalized and without gimmickry or actorly mannerisms, this is film acting of the highest order.
Aside from a few flashes of dark humor at the clinic near the beginning, The Fire Within is an unrelievedly somber film. Yet Malle's low-key directing style and Ronet's unsentimental performance, entirely without self-pity, create enough emotional distance to make the movie bearable without making it seem cold or aloof. On the contrary, The Fire Within is a film that in its understated treatment of alcoholism and depression, subjects which could easily have become trite and overwrought, manages in its restraint to be all the more moving.
Country: France
Director: Louis Malle
Louis Malle's The Fire Within begins in medias res when we meet the main character, Alain Leroy (Maurice Ronet), in a hotel where he has spent the night with a former girl friend. As the film unfolds, more is gradually revealed about Alain. We learn that he is a recovering alcoholic, a patient at what appears to be a very swank private sanatorium in Versailles, just outside Paris. The fees are being paid by his rich wife, who lives in New York and from whom he is separated. When his doctor tells him the cure is complete and it is time to leave, Alain insists he wants to stay at the clinic, that without its regimen to restrain him, he believes he will immediately begin drinking again. Alain's cryptic comments to the doctor about the futility of his life and about death suggest he is suicidally depressed, something which seems quite plain to the viewer but which his doctor dismisses with upbeat platitudes. Later, alone in his room, he opens his brief case, takes out a pistol wrapped in a handkerchief, and contemplates it before putting it back, then walks to the mirror, on which he has written the date July 23, and looks at himself. There can be little doubt about his intentions.
The rest of the film follows Alain through his last day, as he goes to Paris and looks up old friends before returning to the clinic. From these encounters we discover more about him—that he is a writer who is no longer able to write, has been involved in the war in Algeria, has led a dissolute life among rich bohemians, that he invariably rejects suggestions of ways he might repair his life. We also learn that he is well-liked by his friends and that quite a few attractive women—and even some men—find him sexually appealing, while others find his spiritual torpor merely pathetic. Yet even as these details about his life accumulate and our picture of him becomes more complete, one thing is unchanging: our sense of the hopeless, unshakable despair he feels.While discussions of The Fire Within tend to stress the role of alcoholism in the film, I would say that this is more than a movie about the evils of alcohol. In fact, Alain consistently refuses offers of alcohol and is never shown drunk. In the entire film he takes only one drink, when he furtively gulps down one small glass of cognac that has been left at the next table in a sidewalk cafe. The only effect of the liquor is to make him violently ill. Alain's problems go beyond his dependence on alcohol, which may actually be as much a symptom as a cause—all the way to a pervasive disenchantment with life that colors every moment of the movie. His despair is quite different from both the intellectualized and rather rarefied ennui being explored at the time by Antonioni in films like L'Avventura and L'Eclisse and the almost celebratory alcoholic self-destruction of Nicholas Cage in Leaving Las Vegas. Malle depicts real mental pain here—not melodramatic agonizing, but the quiet resignation of a man whose life has been drained of all hope. The usual diversions that can pull a person out of such a depressive frame of mind or deaden the pain for a while—love, work, intoxicants—no longer have any effect on Alain.
The Fire Within is what might be called a dramatically level film, its lack of strong emotional highs and lows reflecting Alain's own emotional numbness. Rather than dramatic situations, the film presents a series of subdued encounters between Alain and people from his past. In these encounters, his every action makes it obvious that like many intended suicides, he is revisiting his old haunts to say goodbye. Yet only once—when he visits his friend Eva, an artist played with great sympathy in a cameo by Jeanne Moreau—did I feel any real connection between Alain and these people. For the rest, there seems to be an almost palpable sense of estrangement between them and Alain. At one point he figuratively demonstrates the isolation he feels by reaching out to touch the face of one of his friends but stopping with his fingertips just an inch or so away, explaining that he can reach out but can never actually touch another person. It is this terrible sense of psychic solitude that seems to be the genesis of his withdrawal from life.
From beginning to end, the mood of The Fire Within is one of melancholy. Director Louis Malle works in a muted, unemphatic style, avoiding obvious directorial intrusion as he objectively observes Alain's depression without overdramatizing or sentimentalizing Alain's situation. Interestingly, Malle began shooting in color but quickly switched to black and white, a prudent artistic decision that underscores the colorlessness of Alain's life. The sparing use of pensive piano music by Erik Satie also contributes a great deal to the picture's theme of Alain reflecting on his life before ending it.
But the greatest credit for
the the film's success must go to Maurice Ronet, whose deeply affecting performance is the movie's core. In a film of such intimate focus on his character that the camera would surely reveal the least trace of dishonesty in his performance, his Alain seems absolutely genuine. Ronet immediately establishes Alain's state of mind (and his state of mind is the movie), somehow externalizing and making visible what is essentially interior and invisible, and then sustains it scene by scene for the duration of the film, surely the most difficult thing for a film actor to do. Ronet completely disappears inside Alain, fusing so thoroughly with him that actor and character become one. Wholly internalized and without gimmickry or actorly mannerisms, this is film acting of the highest order.Aside from a few flashes of dark humor at the clinic near the beginning, The Fire Within is an unrelievedly somber film. Yet Malle's low-key directing style and Ronet's unsentimental performance, entirely without self-pity, create enough emotional distance to make the movie bearable without making it seem cold or aloof. On the contrary, The Fire Within is a film that in its understated treatment of alcoholism and depression, subjects which could easily have become trite and overwrought, manages in its restraint to be all the more moving.
Friday, August 27, 2010
Jennifer Lopez Glamour US September Photos | Jennifer Lopez Picture
American actress and singer Jennifer Lopez on the cover page of the fashion magazine Glamour US for the month of September 2010. Jennifer Lopez is looking sexy in this photoshoot with kitty prints.
Monday, August 23, 2010
Men in War (1957)
***½
Country: US
Director: Anthony Mann
Anthony Mann's Men in War, which actually takes place during the Korean War, is aptly titled, for it's one of the finest movies about any war I've seen. The film opens on the morning after a battle between Communists and a small platoon of American troops—around twenty in number—led by Lt. Benson (Robert Ryan). Stranded, their supply truck destroyed, they must make their way back on foot to a nearby hill to rendezvous with the rest of their unit. Almost as soon as they start out, a Jeep comes careering out of the distance, and Lt. Benson commandeers it and its two occupants—the driver, Sgt. Montana (Aldo Ray), and his mute, shell-shocked passenger, his commanding officer whom he calls simply The Colonel (David Keith)—to carry the platoon's weapons and ammunition. The rest of the film details the journey, which lasts several hours, to their destination.
Propelled by a sense of great urgency, the plot is utterly simple, consisting largely of the perils the platoon must deal with in order to reach its goal. These include snipers, land mines, and artillery attacks. The landscape the platoon moves through, rocky and nearly devoid of vegetation, offers little cover, and the sense of being constantly in the open and exposed to attack creates a milieu of unrelenting danger. Mann expertly milks this rather basic story for its full potential, creating a film that even in its infrequent lulls in action still maintains an atmosphere of nail-biting tension.
With such a basic plot, Men in War relies on the interactions of its characters for depth. Mann avoids the common cliché of many war movies of portraying the platoon as an obvious cross-section of ethnic and personality types. As in real groups of this kind, most of the men don't seem that distinct from one another, although a couple—a patient, likable African American medic and the nearly catatonic, battle-fatigued young soldier he cares for—do stand out. Lt. Benson, however, is thoroughly fleshed out, and Robert Ryan, who worked with Mann in three films, fully inhabits the character in one of his most nuanced and sympathetic performances.
Ryan's Lt. Benson is a weary man but a purposeful one, his immediate purpose to complete his mission and report back to his unit with vital information about the situation. At one point he states that his objective is to get just one man back to headquarters. In the meantime, although he views those under his command as resources to be deployed to achieve his strategic goal, he seems not without concern for their welfare. It's just that he sees completion of the mission overriding any consideration of the safety or even survival of himself or his men. Benson is a man of great leadership ability, able to keep his soldiers united in their purpose and focused on the task at hand. A follower of rules and prescribed procedures, he is nonetheless a practical, level-headed person able to gain the cooperation of his men with his confident attitude and skills of persuasion—organized without being a martinet, authoritative without being authoritarian.
The only person this reasonable approach does not succeed with is Sgt. Montana, and it is the clash between the personalities and attitudes of these two that provides the conflict in the film. Montana is Benson's opposite in every way, a maverick dedicated to his own agenda—to get his psychologically wounded Colonel back to safety and medical treatment. When he remarks at one point that The Colonel is the only man who ever addressed him as "son," it becomes clear that a kind of transference between the two has occurred. That The Colonel has become in essence a surrogate father for Montana explains his fierce personal loyalty, which in turn explains his disdain for Benson's mission, his animosity towards Benson, and his defiance of Benson's authority at every turn.
Burly Aldo Ray is quite good at conveying the unsympathetic qualities of Sgt. Montana. Not only is Montana an insolent loner, but he is also an almost paranoiacally suspicious racist who refers to Koreans with derogatory racial epithets, the only person in the film who ever does this. In a key sequence, the platoon encounters several American soldiers in the distance calling out to them and racing towards them. Without warning, Montana opens fire and mows them down. When the astounded platoon reaches the bodies, they discover that the dead men are actually Koreans with uniforms and weapons taken from dead American soldiers. After Benson angrily points out that Montana fired before he could even see their faces and might easily have killed Americans, Montana replies,"I can smell 'em," and adds that his practice is to shoot first and find out who he has killed later. The appalled Benson responds by saying, "God help us if we need men like you to win this war."
David Thomson compares Men in War to Mann's Westerns in the way it "work[s] toward an ordeal by combat that defines honor." In a sense, that's indeed what happens at the end of the film when the group reaches the hill only to find it has been taken by the Communists. Desperate, Benson works out a risky plan to retake the hill, and at this point circumstances force the two adversaries to set aside their considerable differences and work together. In the end, only accommodation between Montana's extremism and Benson's moderation, between Montana's gung-ho machismo and personal hatred of the enemy and Benson's professional shrewdness and detached view of the enemy as just another obstacle to be overcome, allows the two to combine the forces of anarchy and order and move towards a common aim.
Men in War ends with a brief but powerful scene in which Benson and Montana together posthumously "award" to their fallen comrades Silver Stars Montana has been given by The Colonel, each man's behavior in the scene absolutely typical of his essential nature. As the two stand atop the hill they now control, Benson methodically reads off the names of the dead in alphabetical order from a notebook in which he records the details of combat, while Montana tosses the medals over the sandbag parapet of the hill, strewing them randomly over the bodies of the dead soldiers below. I would say that in this scene Men in War arrives at a conception of honor quite unlike the unambiguous moral choice normally found in Mann's Westerns. War, Mann seems to be saying, consists of equal parts method and chaos, of both selfless nobility and selfish ferocity, of great personal sacrifices made to achieve minor victories. In the face of this paradox, honor becomes such a relative term that it ceases to have any clear meaning.
You might also be interested in my post on Samuel Fuller's Korean War movie The Steel Helmet.
Country: US
Director: Anthony Mann
Anthony Mann's Men in War, which actually takes place during the Korean War, is aptly titled, for it's one of the finest movies about any war I've seen. The film opens on the morning after a battle between Communists and a small platoon of American troops—around twenty in number—led by Lt. Benson (Robert Ryan). Stranded, their supply truck destroyed, they must make their way back on foot to a nearby hill to rendezvous with the rest of their unit. Almost as soon as they start out, a Jeep comes careering out of the distance, and Lt. Benson commandeers it and its two occupants—the driver, Sgt. Montana (Aldo Ray), and his mute, shell-shocked passenger, his commanding officer whom he calls simply The Colonel (David Keith)—to carry the platoon's weapons and ammunition. The rest of the film details the journey, which lasts several hours, to their destination.
Propelled by a sense of great urgency, the plot is utterly simple, consisting largely of the perils the platoon must deal with in order to reach its goal. These include snipers, land mines, and artillery attacks. The landscape the platoon moves through, rocky and nearly devoid of vegetation, offers little cover, and the sense of being constantly in the open and exposed to attack creates a milieu of unrelenting danger. Mann expertly milks this rather basic story for its full potential, creating a film that even in its infrequent lulls in action still maintains an atmosphere of nail-biting tension.With such a basic plot, Men in War relies on the interactions of its characters for depth. Mann avoids the common cliché of many war movies of portraying the platoon as an obvious cross-section of ethnic and personality types. As in real groups of this kind, most of the men don't seem that distinct from one another, although a couple—a patient, likable African American medic and the nearly catatonic, battle-fatigued young soldier he cares for—do stand out. Lt. Benson, however, is thoroughly fleshed out, and Robert Ryan, who worked with Mann in three films, fully inhabits the character in one of his most nuanced and sympathetic performances.
Ryan's Lt. Benson is a weary man but a purposeful one, his immediate purpose to complete his mission and report back to his unit with vital information about the situation. At one point he states that his objective is to get just one man back to headquarters. In the meantime, although he views those under his command as resources to be deployed to achieve his strategic goal, he seems not without concern for their welfare. It's just that he sees completion of the mission overriding any consideration of the safety or even survival of himself or his men. Benson is a man of great leadership ability, able to keep his soldiers united in their purpose and focused on the task at hand. A follower of rules and prescribed procedures, he is nonetheless a practical, level-headed person able to gain the cooperation of his men with his confident attitude and skills of persuasion—organized without being a martinet, authoritative without being authoritarian.
The only person this reasonable approach does not succeed with is Sgt. Montana, and it is the clash between the personalities and attitudes of these two that provides the conflict in the film. Montana is Benson's opposite in every way, a maverick dedicated to his own agenda—to get his psychologically wounded Colonel back to safety and medical treatment. When he remarks at one point that The Colonel is the only man who ever addressed him as "son," it becomes clear that a kind of transference between the two has occurred. That The Colonel has become in essence a surrogate father for Montana explains his fierce personal loyalty, which in turn explains his disdain for Benson's mission, his animosity towards Benson, and his defiance of Benson's authority at every turn.
Burly Aldo Ray is quite good at conveying the unsympathetic qualities of Sgt. Montana. Not only is Montana an insolent loner, but he is also an almost paranoiacally suspicious racist who refers to Koreans with derogatory racial epithets, the only person in the film who ever does this. In a key sequence, the platoon encounters several American soldiers in the distance calling out to them and racing towards them. Without warning, Montana opens fire and mows them down. When the astounded platoon reaches the bodies, they discover that the dead men are actually Koreans with uniforms and weapons taken from dead American soldiers. After Benson angrily points out that Montana fired before he could even see their faces and might easily have killed Americans, Montana replies,"I can smell 'em," and adds that his practice is to shoot first and find out who he has killed later. The appalled Benson responds by saying, "God help us if we need men like you to win this war."David Thomson compares Men in War to Mann's Westerns in the way it "work[s] toward an ordeal by combat that defines honor." In a sense, that's indeed what happens at the end of the film when the group reaches the hill only to find it has been taken by the Communists. Desperate, Benson works out a risky plan to retake the hill, and at this point circumstances force the two adversaries to set aside their considerable differences and work together. In the end, only accommodation between Montana's extremism and Benson's moderation, between Montana's gung-ho machismo and personal hatred of the enemy and Benson's professional shrewdness and detached view of the enemy as just another obstacle to be overcome, allows the two to combine the forces of anarchy and order and move towards a common aim.
Men in War ends with a brief but powerful scene in which Benson and Montana together posthumously "award" to their fallen comrades Silver Stars Montana has been given by The Colonel, each man's behavior in the scene absolutely typical of his essential nature. As the two stand atop the hill they now control, Benson methodically reads off the names of the dead in alphabetical order from a notebook in which he records the details of combat, while Montana tosses the medals over the sandbag parapet of the hill, strewing them randomly over the bodies of the dead soldiers below. I would say that in this scene Men in War arrives at a conception of honor quite unlike the unambiguous moral choice normally found in Mann's Westerns. War, Mann seems to be saying, consists of equal parts method and chaos, of both selfless nobility and selfish ferocity, of great personal sacrifices made to achieve minor victories. In the face of this paradox, honor becomes such a relative term that it ceases to have any clear meaning.
You might also be interested in my post on Samuel Fuller's Korean War movie The Steel Helmet.
Monday, August 16, 2010
Bay of Angels (1963)
***½
Country: France
Director: Jacques Demy
"Of all the New Wave directors who once professed their joy in cinema, Demy remained most faithful to the delights of sight and sound and to the romance of movie iconography."
Bay of Angels opens with an iris shot of Jeanne Moreau striding purposefully down the seafront promenade at Nice early in the morning, the camera tracking in front of her and slowly away from her. After a few moments the iris opens out to a full-screen shot, lush piano-and-orchestra music wells up on the soundtrack, and as the credits begin, the camera speeds away in a burst of surging momentum that matches that of Michel Legrand's theme music until Moreau disappears in the distance. The whole shot, which lasts a little more than a minute, is one of those that makes you ask yourself even as you watch it, "How did they do ever that?" (My best guess: the camera operator was in the back seat of a convertible with the camera mounted on the trunk of the car as it raced down the promenade.)
After this opening credit sequence, the tone of the film changes completely as the location shifts to Paris, where we meet Jean Fournier (Claude Mann), a staid young man in his early twenties who works as a bank clerk and lives a sedate life with his widowed father. After a co-worker confesses to Jean that he is a compulsive gambler and invites Jean to accompany him to the casino at Enghien near Paris, Jean sees a means of escape from his dull, conventional life. When his vacation comes up, he seizes his chance to "break out" by defying his father and heading for the Riviera and its casinos for a gambling holiday. In the casino he meets Jackie Lemaistre (Jeanne Moreau), a chain-smoking, careworn-looking denizen of the casino who appears to be in her early thirties, and for the next two weeks the two embark on an impromptu love affair and gambling spree that takes them from Nice to Monte Carlo and back again.
Like many of the early French New Wave films—Breathless, The Lovers, Jules and Jim, Pierrot le Fou—Bay of Angels is about what the French call l'amour fou—crazy, wild, impulsive love. Here it's a case of the sexual attraction of opposite personalities. The difference in their natures is apparent from their behavior in the casino, Jean quietly observant and methodical in contrast to Jackie's fervent concentration and capricious spontaneity. It's easy to see the appeal of the impetuous Jackie to a strait-laced, inexperienced young man like Jean, but less easy to fathom the attraction Jean holds for her. Is he simply a docile protégé? A companion in her folly? A convenient source of betting money when she runs out?
He may be all those things at first, but as the film proceeds and we learn more about Jackie, we begin to see that she might actually have a deep emotional need for him. In her life Jackie has lost all: she has sacrificed her rich husband, her young son, her friends to her all-consuming passion for gambling. Demy has said he wanted to make a film that showed gambling as an addiction, like alcohol or drugs. It is true that Jackie seems to have no control over her obsessive need to gamble, yet like much addictive behavior, her gambling seems not so much a weakness of character or a disease as a kind of self-medication, a desperate attempt to erase life's pain by immersion in some sort of compulsive behavior.
The more she tells Jean about her
self, the more we see that despite her vivacity, she seems to be trying to escape something—a sense of failure and inadequacy, an inability to achieve any sort of stability in her life, or perhaps the haunting possibility that her life has no significance outside the casino. Highly strung, mercurial, irresponsible, Jackie is all hyperkinetic emotionalism. You can see this in the way she walks down the promenade in that opening shot. Her whole approach to life is like her walk: she moves with the purpose of a person on her way to an important rendezvous, yet she is obviously heading nowhere.
For Jackie, life is lived completely in the moment. Win or lose, risk is all. Every moment of her life is simply a temporary stop on her way up or down, and her destiny is never to arrive anywhere. What she seems to be avoiding even at the peril of self-destruction is stasis. Tellingly, her preferred game is roulette, the wheel pausing only briefly before it resumes its perpetual spin, for in Jackie's world, the only thing of importance—both literally and metaphorically—is the next spin of the wheel. Jackie quickly becomes the center of the movie, and Moreau seizes the role for all it's worth, giving a fierce performance reminiscent of those by the most intense American actresses of the studio era such as Bette Davis and Barbara Stanwyck. Like Davis and Stanwyck at their most incandescent, Moreau suggests that although Jackie is a damaged woman life-hardened on the outside, she still harbors deep within her a vulnerability that can be reached by a naïf like Jean.
Moreau's real co-star in the film is her director, Jacques Demy. Unlike some New Wave directors, though, Demy never tries to upstage his actors and his story with self-indulgent stylistics. Demy dedicated his first film, Lola (1961), to Max Ophüls, in part for Ophüls' renowned use of tracking and crane shots. Although he clearly favors such shots, Demy uses them in a more restrained, less baroque manner than Ophüls, who specialized in period pictures. Still, the key characteristic of Demy's visual style is the sensuous, balletic fluidity of his camera. In a single shot Demy holds the camera in place, pans, and tracks for as long as possible, finally cutting only when absolutely necessary. These lengthy, precisely choreographed shots result in a flowing narrative technique of hypnotic beauty, the whole film in a sense a nearly continuous pas de deux between the camera and the actors.
The other inspiration Demy takes from Ophüls is devotion to the belief in both the destructive and the redemptive power of love. Bay of Angels ends abruptly and rather ambiguously, with Jackie storming away from Jean in the casino after an argument. Jean hesitates briefly then follows her outside and takes her in his arms, and after resisting a moment, Jackie surrenders to his embrace. The film ends with no clear indication of the future course of the relationship. Will Jean's love act as a calmative on the erratic Jackie, or will his placidity be overwhelmed by her galvanic energy? Demy leaves it entirely up to the viewer to decide what comes next. But for the moment at least, Jean's love seems to have subdued the chaos in Jackie.
Country: France
Director: Jacques Demy
"Of all the New Wave directors who once professed their joy in cinema, Demy remained most faithful to the delights of sight and sound and to the romance of movie iconography."
—David Thomson, The New Biographical Dictionary of Film
Bay of Angels opens with an iris shot of Jeanne Moreau striding purposefully down the seafront promenade at Nice early in the morning, the camera tracking in front of her and slowly away from her. After a few moments the iris opens out to a full-screen shot, lush piano-and-orchestra music wells up on the soundtrack, and as the credits begin, the camera speeds away in a burst of surging momentum that matches that of Michel Legrand's theme music until Moreau disappears in the distance. The whole shot, which lasts a little more than a minute, is one of those that makes you ask yourself even as you watch it, "How did they do ever that?" (My best guess: the camera operator was in the back seat of a convertible with the camera mounted on the trunk of the car as it raced down the promenade.)
After this opening credit sequence, the tone of the film changes completely as the location shifts to Paris, where we meet Jean Fournier (Claude Mann), a staid young man in his early twenties who works as a bank clerk and lives a sedate life with his widowed father. After a co-worker confesses to Jean that he is a compulsive gambler and invites Jean to accompany him to the casino at Enghien near Paris, Jean sees a means of escape from his dull, conventional life. When his vacation comes up, he seizes his chance to "break out" by defying his father and heading for the Riviera and its casinos for a gambling holiday. In the casino he meets Jackie Lemaistre (Jeanne Moreau), a chain-smoking, careworn-looking denizen of the casino who appears to be in her early thirties, and for the next two weeks the two embark on an impromptu love affair and gambling spree that takes them from Nice to Monte Carlo and back again.
Like many of the early French New Wave films—Breathless, The Lovers, Jules and Jim, Pierrot le Fou—Bay of Angels is about what the French call l'amour fou—crazy, wild, impulsive love. Here it's a case of the sexual attraction of opposite personalities. The difference in their natures is apparent from their behavior in the casino, Jean quietly observant and methodical in contrast to Jackie's fervent concentration and capricious spontaneity. It's easy to see the appeal of the impetuous Jackie to a strait-laced, inexperienced young man like Jean, but less easy to fathom the attraction Jean holds for her. Is he simply a docile protégé? A companion in her folly? A convenient source of betting money when she runs out?
He may be all those things at first, but as the film proceeds and we learn more about Jackie, we begin to see that she might actually have a deep emotional need for him. In her life Jackie has lost all: she has sacrificed her rich husband, her young son, her friends to her all-consuming passion for gambling. Demy has said he wanted to make a film that showed gambling as an addiction, like alcohol or drugs. It is true that Jackie seems to have no control over her obsessive need to gamble, yet like much addictive behavior, her gambling seems not so much a weakness of character or a disease as a kind of self-medication, a desperate attempt to erase life's pain by immersion in some sort of compulsive behavior.
The more she tells Jean about her
self, the more we see that despite her vivacity, she seems to be trying to escape something—a sense of failure and inadequacy, an inability to achieve any sort of stability in her life, or perhaps the haunting possibility that her life has no significance outside the casino. Highly strung, mercurial, irresponsible, Jackie is all hyperkinetic emotionalism. You can see this in the way she walks down the promenade in that opening shot. Her whole approach to life is like her walk: she moves with the purpose of a person on her way to an important rendezvous, yet she is obviously heading nowhere.For Jackie, life is lived completely in the moment. Win or lose, risk is all. Every moment of her life is simply a temporary stop on her way up or down, and her destiny is never to arrive anywhere. What she seems to be avoiding even at the peril of self-destruction is stasis. Tellingly, her preferred game is roulette, the wheel pausing only briefly before it resumes its perpetual spin, for in Jackie's world, the only thing of importance—both literally and metaphorically—is the next spin of the wheel. Jackie quickly becomes the center of the movie, and Moreau seizes the role for all it's worth, giving a fierce performance reminiscent of those by the most intense American actresses of the studio era such as Bette Davis and Barbara Stanwyck. Like Davis and Stanwyck at their most incandescent, Moreau suggests that although Jackie is a damaged woman life-hardened on the outside, she still harbors deep within her a vulnerability that can be reached by a naïf like Jean.
Moreau's real co-star in the film is her director, Jacques Demy. Unlike some New Wave directors, though, Demy never tries to upstage his actors and his story with self-indulgent stylistics. Demy dedicated his first film, Lola (1961), to Max Ophüls, in part for Ophüls' renowned use of tracking and crane shots. Although he clearly favors such shots, Demy uses them in a more restrained, less baroque manner than Ophüls, who specialized in period pictures. Still, the key characteristic of Demy's visual style is the sensuous, balletic fluidity of his camera. In a single shot Demy holds the camera in place, pans, and tracks for as long as possible, finally cutting only when absolutely necessary. These lengthy, precisely choreographed shots result in a flowing narrative technique of hypnotic beauty, the whole film in a sense a nearly continuous pas de deux between the camera and the actors.
The other inspiration Demy takes from Ophüls is devotion to the belief in both the destructive and the redemptive power of love. Bay of Angels ends abruptly and rather ambiguously, with Jackie storming away from Jean in the casino after an argument. Jean hesitates briefly then follows her outside and takes her in his arms, and after resisting a moment, Jackie surrenders to his embrace. The film ends with no clear indication of the future course of the relationship. Will Jean's love act as a calmative on the erratic Jackie, or will his placidity be overwhelmed by her galvanic energy? Demy leaves it entirely up to the viewer to decide what comes next. But for the moment at least, Jean's love seems to have subdued the chaos in Jackie.
Monday, August 2, 2010
Aparajito (1956) / The World of Apu (1959)
Aparajito
****
Country: India
Director: Satyajit Ray
The World of Apu
****
Country: India
Director: Satyajit Ray
Satyajit Ray's Pather Panchali (1955) is one of my favorite movies of all time. Based on the autobiographical first novel by the Bengali writer Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay (Banerjee), it is the story of Apu, a young boy living in the impoverished countryside of Bengal in India in the early part of the twentieth century. Pather Panchali is one of the great movies about childhood, a film that at the same time graphically depicts a land and way of life wholly alien to most Americans and that also introduced the music of Ravi Shankar to the West. "Beautiful, sometimes funny, and full of love, it brought a new vision of India to the screen," wrote Pauline Kael about the film. I've waited for years to see the two sequels to Pather Panchali based on Bandopadhyay's second novel, Aparajito, films that pursue the story of Apu into his teenage years and young adulthood. I was recently able to see them at last, and the wait was certainly worth it, confirming my intuition based on seeing only a handful of his movies that Ray (1921-1992) was one of the greatest of all film directors.
Pather Panchali ends with the departure of Apu and his parents from their home in the countryside for a new life in the city. Aparajito picks up the story with their arrival in the holy city of Benares. Here Apu's father, a poet and priest, hopes to have greater opportunity to practice his profession, and spends much time on the banks of the Ganges teaching religion and reciting his poetry. Life is not much better for the family in Benares than it was in the country, though, as they continue to struggle against adversity and poverty. Apu's father has many competitors in the holy city, and his mother does not really seem at home in her new urban environment. The city does, however, prove to be an exciting place for young Apu, giving him many opportunities to observe people more colorful, and to visit places more exotic, than those of his former rural life.
The young Apu explores Benares
But not long after their arrival in Benares, Apu's father falls ill with a fever and dies, and Apu and his mother must return to the countryside. Here Apu develops a lifelong passion for education after he is allowed to attend the village school. At one point, he is presented with a tiny globe as a prize for his outstanding performance on his exams, a globe that he keeps with him always, a symbol of the craving for knowledge and experience that becomes the driving force in his life. An exceptional student, he is offered a scholarship to attend secondary school in Calcutta. The second half of the film details Apu's teenage years as a student in Calcutta, where he attends classes by day and works in a printing press at night to earn his living expenses.
The teenage Apu (with his globe) arrives in Calcutta to begin his studies
During this time, it is clear that Apu's mother is deeply affected by his absence and that Apu on his part experiences great conflict between his devotion to education and the concern he feels about leaving his mother. Trains become a recurrent reminder for both the boy and his mother of the hardships of their separation. Many times a train passes by in the background as his mother stands outside, and several scenes take place in trains as Apu travels between Calcutta and the country during his school holidays. For his mother the trains serve as both a hopeful image of Apu's infrequent visits and a melancholy portent of his inevitable departure, while for Apu they come to represent his divided existence, in the country as a dutiful son and in Calcutta as an independent, ambitious young man. Aparajito ends with two nearly simultaneous events that determine the direction of Apu's future—the death of his mother and his graduation from secondary school. He is now free to leave his former life completely behind and begin a new life as a permanent resident of Calcutta and student at the university there.
The World of Apu is a less diffuse film than Aparajito, most of it taking place in a relatively brief span of time. Apu is now a grown man, a university student. (Apu is brilliantly played by 24-year old Soumitra Chatterjee, in his first movie role. He would go on to appear in fourteen more of Ray's films.) Forced by his financial situation to quit school just before he graduates, Apu is a dreamer, a young man who habitually avoids responsibility and can't seem to focus on the mundane, practical side of life, like getting a job and paying his rent, preferring instead to work on his novel. When his best friend and university classmate Pulu gets in touch with him and takes him out for dinner, on the way home Apu breaks into an exuberant ode to freedom and spontaneity. Pulu tells him he acts like he has been drinking, and Apu is in a sense drunk—on the simple joy of being alive.
Pulu's friendship becomes instrumental to Apu's future when he invites Apu to come with him to the countryside where his wealthy family lives, for during this visit Apu meets his future bride, Pulu's cousin Aparna. The marriage is a sudden one, essentially an arranged marriage, and at first the newlyweds barely know each other. In time, though, as they develop a deep love for one another, Aparna becomes the catalyst for profound changes in Apu's casual and self-indulgent attitude to life.
Apu's life undergoes another radical change when Aparna dies giving birth to their son, Kajal. Overwhelmed by grief, Apu rejects his newborn son, leaving him with Aparna's family, and spends the next several years wandering India in a state of intense depression. He even gives up writing the novel he has been working on for so long and one day on the top of a mountain impulsively tosses its pages into the wind, and watches impassively as they flutter away, an evocative reminder of the way youthful dreams and ambitions can be so drastically altered by time and circumstance. Five years later Pulu locates Apu working in a coal mine in an isolated mountain community and persuades the reluctant Apu to return to Bengal with him and finally meet his son. The reunion is an uneasy one for both father and son, but when Apu sees how little love Kajal receives from Aparna's aged parents, he leaves, taking Kajal with him. Recognizing that his son's needs are more important than his own sense of loss, Apu at last grows beyond his despair and finds in his role as a father a new meaning to his life.
Apu and Kajal embark on a new life together
So many powerful themes are concentrated in the Apu trilogy that it's difficult to know where to begin a discussion of them. Perhaps a good place to start is with the universality of these films. Taken together, they cover nearly three decades in the life of one man, telling the story of one individual set in the context of a specific time—the early twentieth century—and a specific and quite distinctive culture. Yet it is a story whose essentials transcend the boundaries of place and time, for it is largely a story of change and growth, what psychologists call individuation, or the development of a person's unique and individual identity. It is the story of the transitions in Apu's life—from a rural agrarian way of life to a modern urban life in a commercial economy, from following the traditional family vocation in the priesthood to finding a new role in life as a scholar and writer, from innocence to knowledge, from childhood to adulthood and eventually parenthood, from the self-absorption of immaturity to the selflessness elicited by the transformative power of love.
Yet concurrent with the idea of the constant flux of life is the theme of its continuity. Water, that simple and archetypal symbol of life's flowing continuity, is an image that appears time and again in these films. One of the most memorable sequences in Pather Panchali occurs when the monsoon finally arrives and ends the drought, as torrents of rain drench the parched landscape. The holy River Ganges is a vivid image in Aparajito. In The World of Apu, Aparna's family lives near a large river, and the last scene in the film is of Apu leaving Aparna's family home with Kajal on his shoulders and a smile on his face, walking beside that river as he follows its current towards the sea.
Another important element in these films is the notion of the cyclical nature of life and the way opposing forces in life tend to balance each other, concepts found in many Eastern religions and philosophies. The films are punctuated by birth and death, departure and return, separation and reunion, alienation and reconciliation. In each of the three films death is a significant event, yet loss is always balanced by regeneration: The deaths of Apu's sister and his elderly aunt in Pather Panchali are balanced by the prospect of a new beginning for the family that concludes the film. Aparajito is framed by the deaths of Apu's father at the beginning and of his mother at the end, yet in this film Apu's appetite for knowledge is awakened and he begins the process of forging a new identity for himself. The World of Apu is dominated by the devastating loss of Aparna, yet it also includes the birth of Kajal, with whom Apu is reunited at the end of the movie as he begins yet another phase of his life. By the end of the cycle of films, life has come full circle: one small boy has grown to manhood, and the story continues with his own son, now about the same age as Apu in Pather Panchali.
Satyajit Ray—like John Ford, Akira Kurosawa, Yasujiro Ozu, François Truffaut, and Jean Renoir—is often called a humanist filmmaker. It's a designation that seems wholly justified, for Ray shares with those other esteemed directors a set of traits that I would say are characteristic of that rather nebulous label: the universality of his themes, the emphasis on characters and how they relate to nature and the world around them, his fascination with the ways in which people in specific circumstances react to those circumstances and interact with one another, and his dispassionate acceptance of the fact that both the noblest and the most petty drives coexist in human nature. All of these traits are plainly displayed in the Apu trilogy, as glorious and moving a celebration of the complexities of human experience as can be found in all of cinema.
****
Country: India
Director: Satyajit Ray
The World of Apu
****
Country: India
Director: Satyajit Ray
Satyajit Ray's Pather Panchali (1955) is one of my favorite movies of all time. Based on the autobiographical first novel by the Bengali writer Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay (Banerjee), it is the story of Apu, a young boy living in the impoverished countryside of Bengal in India in the early part of the twentieth century. Pather Panchali is one of the great movies about childhood, a film that at the same time graphically depicts a land and way of life wholly alien to most Americans and that also introduced the music of Ravi Shankar to the West. "Beautiful, sometimes funny, and full of love, it brought a new vision of India to the screen," wrote Pauline Kael about the film. I've waited for years to see the two sequels to Pather Panchali based on Bandopadhyay's second novel, Aparajito, films that pursue the story of Apu into his teenage years and young adulthood. I was recently able to see them at last, and the wait was certainly worth it, confirming my intuition based on seeing only a handful of his movies that Ray (1921-1992) was one of the greatest of all film directors.
Pather Panchali ends with the departure of Apu and his parents from their home in the countryside for a new life in the city. Aparajito picks up the story with their arrival in the holy city of Benares. Here Apu's father, a poet and priest, hopes to have greater opportunity to practice his profession, and spends much time on the banks of the Ganges teaching religion and reciting his poetry. Life is not much better for the family in Benares than it was in the country, though, as they continue to struggle against adversity and poverty. Apu's father has many competitors in the holy city, and his mother does not really seem at home in her new urban environment. The city does, however, prove to be an exciting place for young Apu, giving him many opportunities to observe people more colorful, and to visit places more exotic, than those of his former rural life.
The young Apu explores BenaresBut not long after their arrival in Benares, Apu's father falls ill with a fever and dies, and Apu and his mother must return to the countryside. Here Apu develops a lifelong passion for education after he is allowed to attend the village school. At one point, he is presented with a tiny globe as a prize for his outstanding performance on his exams, a globe that he keeps with him always, a symbol of the craving for knowledge and experience that becomes the driving force in his life. An exceptional student, he is offered a scholarship to attend secondary school in Calcutta. The second half of the film details Apu's teenage years as a student in Calcutta, where he attends classes by day and works in a printing press at night to earn his living expenses.
The teenage Apu (with his globe) arrives in Calcutta to begin his studiesDuring this time, it is clear that Apu's mother is deeply affected by his absence and that Apu on his part experiences great conflict between his devotion to education and the concern he feels about leaving his mother. Trains become a recurrent reminder for both the boy and his mother of the hardships of their separation. Many times a train passes by in the background as his mother stands outside, and several scenes take place in trains as Apu travels between Calcutta and the country during his school holidays. For his mother the trains serve as both a hopeful image of Apu's infrequent visits and a melancholy portent of his inevitable departure, while for Apu they come to represent his divided existence, in the country as a dutiful son and in Calcutta as an independent, ambitious young man. Aparajito ends with two nearly simultaneous events that determine the direction of Apu's future—the death of his mother and his graduation from secondary school. He is now free to leave his former life completely behind and begin a new life as a permanent resident of Calcutta and student at the university there.
The World of Apu is a less diffuse film than Aparajito, most of it taking place in a relatively brief span of time. Apu is now a grown man, a university student. (Apu is brilliantly played by 24-year old Soumitra Chatterjee, in his first movie role. He would go on to appear in fourteen more of Ray's films.) Forced by his financial situation to quit school just before he graduates, Apu is a dreamer, a young man who habitually avoids responsibility and can't seem to focus on the mundane, practical side of life, like getting a job and paying his rent, preferring instead to work on his novel. When his best friend and university classmate Pulu gets in touch with him and takes him out for dinner, on the way home Apu breaks into an exuberant ode to freedom and spontaneity. Pulu tells him he acts like he has been drinking, and Apu is in a sense drunk—on the simple joy of being alive.
Pulu's friendship becomes instrumental to Apu's future when he invites Apu to come with him to the countryside where his wealthy family lives, for during this visit Apu meets his future bride, Pulu's cousin Aparna. The marriage is a sudden one, essentially an arranged marriage, and at first the newlyweds barely know each other. In time, though, as they develop a deep love for one another, Aparna becomes the catalyst for profound changes in Apu's casual and self-indulgent attitude to life.
The adult Apu and Aparna
Apu's life undergoes another radical change when Aparna dies giving birth to their son, Kajal. Overwhelmed by grief, Apu rejects his newborn son, leaving him with Aparna's family, and spends the next several years wandering India in a state of intense depression. He even gives up writing the novel he has been working on for so long and one day on the top of a mountain impulsively tosses its pages into the wind, and watches impassively as they flutter away, an evocative reminder of the way youthful dreams and ambitions can be so drastically altered by time and circumstance. Five years later Pulu locates Apu working in a coal mine in an isolated mountain community and persuades the reluctant Apu to return to Bengal with him and finally meet his son. The reunion is an uneasy one for both father and son, but when Apu sees how little love Kajal receives from Aparna's aged parents, he leaves, taking Kajal with him. Recognizing that his son's needs are more important than his own sense of loss, Apu at last grows beyond his despair and finds in his role as a father a new meaning to his life.
Apu and Kajal embark on a new life togetherSo many powerful themes are concentrated in the Apu trilogy that it's difficult to know where to begin a discussion of them. Perhaps a good place to start is with the universality of these films. Taken together, they cover nearly three decades in the life of one man, telling the story of one individual set in the context of a specific time—the early twentieth century—and a specific and quite distinctive culture. Yet it is a story whose essentials transcend the boundaries of place and time, for it is largely a story of change and growth, what psychologists call individuation, or the development of a person's unique and individual identity. It is the story of the transitions in Apu's life—from a rural agrarian way of life to a modern urban life in a commercial economy, from following the traditional family vocation in the priesthood to finding a new role in life as a scholar and writer, from innocence to knowledge, from childhood to adulthood and eventually parenthood, from the self-absorption of immaturity to the selflessness elicited by the transformative power of love.
Yet concurrent with the idea of the constant flux of life is the theme of its continuity. Water, that simple and archetypal symbol of life's flowing continuity, is an image that appears time and again in these films. One of the most memorable sequences in Pather Panchali occurs when the monsoon finally arrives and ends the drought, as torrents of rain drench the parched landscape. The holy River Ganges is a vivid image in Aparajito. In The World of Apu, Aparna's family lives near a large river, and the last scene in the film is of Apu leaving Aparna's family home with Kajal on his shoulders and a smile on his face, walking beside that river as he follows its current towards the sea.
Another important element in these films is the notion of the cyclical nature of life and the way opposing forces in life tend to balance each other, concepts found in many Eastern religions and philosophies. The films are punctuated by birth and death, departure and return, separation and reunion, alienation and reconciliation. In each of the three films death is a significant event, yet loss is always balanced by regeneration: The deaths of Apu's sister and his elderly aunt in Pather Panchali are balanced by the prospect of a new beginning for the family that concludes the film. Aparajito is framed by the deaths of Apu's father at the beginning and of his mother at the end, yet in this film Apu's appetite for knowledge is awakened and he begins the process of forging a new identity for himself. The World of Apu is dominated by the devastating loss of Aparna, yet it also includes the birth of Kajal, with whom Apu is reunited at the end of the movie as he begins yet another phase of his life. By the end of the cycle of films, life has come full circle: one small boy has grown to manhood, and the story continues with his own son, now about the same age as Apu in Pather Panchali.
Satyajit Ray—like John Ford, Akira Kurosawa, Yasujiro Ozu, François Truffaut, and Jean Renoir—is often called a humanist filmmaker. It's a designation that seems wholly justified, for Ray shares with those other esteemed directors a set of traits that I would say are characteristic of that rather nebulous label: the universality of his themes, the emphasis on characters and how they relate to nature and the world around them, his fascination with the ways in which people in specific circumstances react to those circumstances and interact with one another, and his dispassionate acceptance of the fact that both the noblest and the most petty drives coexist in human nature. All of these traits are plainly displayed in the Apu trilogy, as glorious and moving a celebration of the complexities of human experience as can be found in all of cinema.
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