Two English Girls

François Truffaut's Two English Girls is a moving, haunting, subtly powerful film, a drama of alternating repression and release, sexuality and restraint, purity and excess. It is adapted from what seems to be a rather melodramatic novel by Henri-Pierre Roché, who had also written Jules and Jim, another novel about a love triangle that Truffaut had famously adapted. This second consideration of the theme reverses the situation. Where Jules and Jim was about a woman torn between two men, this film, like the novel it's based on, is about a man and the two women he loves. The film is full of melodramatic contrivances and over-the-top emotions: women faint dramatically while reading letters, lovers are torn apart by solemn pacts, there are hysterical pregnancies and illnesses that seem as much psychological and emotional as physiological.

Truffaut alternately revels in these intense emotions and keeps them at arm's length: like the characters, the film and its director seem torn between repression and release, unsure whether to give in fully to the madness and ecstasy and pain of these emotions or to hold back, to retreat into asceticism. The effect is enthralling and ambiguous, rendering these melodramatics affecting and overwhelming when seen, veiled, through the filter of Truffaut's uncertain distance, his hesitance to fully embrace the passions and excesses of this lurid, tragic romance. Claude (Jean-Pierre Léaud) is a typically fickle and promiscuous young man when he meets Ann (Kika Markham), a young English girl visiting France. He's drawn to her, but their relationship remains chaste and friendly, even though Claude is undeniably attracted to her; he calls her his "sister" but thinks about grabbing her hand, about kissing her. She takes him to visit her home in Wales, where she introduces him to her sister Muriel (Stacey Tendeter), who she's clearly pushing towards Claude despite her own feelings for the young man.

Muriel is built up before her first appearance; at times it seems as though Ann can speak of nothing but her sister, who remains curiously out of view, her absence consistently emphasized in Truffaut's mise en scène. Her closed door, with Muriel sleeping inside, is lingered over. Her empty place setting at the dinner table becomes a point of fixation for Claude. When the girl finally appears, she's sitting stiffly at the table with bandages wrapped around her face, protecting the fragile eyes that she has strained reading. The glimpses that Claude gets of her eye as she lifts the bandage seem to provoke him and arouse his curiosity even more.

Throughout the film, this tension between Claude and the two sisters keeps erupting in different ways, their loves for one another warped and held back by both their own individual moralities and the societal conventions that keep feelings buttoned up. In many ways, the film is about the erosion of a hypocritical and artificial sexual morality that privileges virginity and "purity" in women while condoning the flighty affairs and indiscretions of men. Both of the sisters, in their different ways, strain against this hypocrisy, and it's the women in the film, not the inconstant and indecisive Claude, for whom Truffaut seems to have the most sympathy. Muriel throws herself into religion, finding an outlet for her feelings in devotion to God, denying sensuality and worldliness: at the peak of her devotion, she's moved to confess, in an astonishing journal that she sends to Claude, that she has a weakness for masturbation that was inculcated in her by a childhood lesbian fling with a friend. In spite of that, she is suspicious of the body, suspicious of physicality, and in that she's the opposite of her sister Ann, who initially seems as repressed and proper as Muriel, but soon reveals a more worldly side as she becomes a sculptor, a world traveler and, eventually, Claude's lover.


Their relationship mostly just exposes Claude's hypocrisy, as he introduces her to his ideas of "free love" but is then clearly heartbroken when she takes him at his word and begins seeing a second lover. Claude is a rather callow young man, and Truffaut is unsparing in his depiction of Claude's mistreatment of women. He has romantic ideas, but they mostly seem to be about himself, about the kind of romantic artist's life he wants to lead, rather than about the women whose love he takes for granted and whose passions he awakens and discards.

Truffaut deftly balances the extreme emotionalism of this story, with all its twists and turns and shifting loves, by alternating between bursts of emotional catharsis and stretches in which feelings remain as buttoned up as the exterior the characters present to the world, making it difficult to know what they're thinking or feeling. The effect is striking. Claude's initial time spent with the two sisters in their home is especially spartan and restrained, with Truffaut keeping his distance as Claude vacillates between the two sisters, while Ann is clearly pushing him towards Muriel. It's not clear at all what any of them are truly thinking or feeling, perhaps because they don't know for sure themselves.

This coolness and detachment is especially effective when it's followed by the occasional raw expressions of deeper feelings that punctuate the film. After Claude abruptly breaks off his engagement to Muriel, a decision that barely seems to affect him, Truffaut cuts Claude out of the picture to focus on the suffering of Muriel when she receives his cold-hearted letter. She writes a series of letters in response and never sends them, pouring out her heartbreak and pain on paper and in the film's voiceover, and then, after all this anguish has exploded messily across the film, Truffaut finally cuts back to Claude in Paris, receiving a cool, reserved, polite, understanding letter from Muriel in which she fails to mention any of the pain that he had caused her.

This is the heart of the film, this gap between the surface and the depths, between the polite face presented to the world and the secret turmoil and strong feelings and conflicted desires that lurk underneath. Truffaut deftly balances the two here, and in the process displays a far greater understanding of love, lust and loss than he ever did in Jules and Jim — that the earlier film is acclaimed while this probing, complex work is not is clearly an injustice. The tension is embodied also in the contrast between the film's literary source — the opening credits roll over images of Roché's novel, the pages dense with scrawled notations — and the cinematic, visual splendor of Nestor Almendros' images. The film is both dazzlingly cinematic in its sensuality and its visual beauty, and literary in its frequent reliance on voiceovers that alternately express forbidden feelings or lie to cover up those feelings. Sensual, emotionally rich, ambiguous and ultimately bittersweet, Two English Girls is one of this director's greatest statements on tragically denied love.

The Shiver of the Vampires

Jean Rollin's The Shiver of the Vampires is a wonderfully strange, clever piece of B-movie trash/art, a film that revels in its nakedly exploitative eroticism and lurid atmosphere. Set in the modern day, the film nevertheless swaddles most of its characters in clothes that evoke both old-fashioned fancy dress and hippie attire, which gives the film a very strange feel in terms of period, as though it's outside of time, somewhere that the modern era hasn't truly touched. Indeed, its foggy graveyards and crumbling, towering stone castles feel like remnants of an earlier time, and when the newlyweds Antoine (Jean-Marie Durand) and Isle (Sandra Julien) first appear driving a car, it feels like a radical intrusion into the film's strange period vibe. It's a sublimely ridiculous movie that tweaks its voyeuristic perspective by having its hapless hero, Antoine suffer through a baffling sequence of encoded sexual humiliations at the hands of his beautiful new bride.

For some reason, Isle decides that the creepy old castle owned by her strange cousins (Jacques Robiolles and Michael Delahaye) is the perfect honeymoon destination. That's only the beginning of the couple's troubles, as Isle repeatedly pushes Antoine away, refusing to consummate their marriage. Isle, it turns out, is much more interested in the erotic pleasures offered by the emaciated vampiress Isolde (Dominique), who appears to the virginal bride by popping out of a grandfather clock or leaping dramatically out from the curtains behind Isle's bed — this is a vampire who really knows how to make an entrance. After one night with Isolde, the next night Isle again turns her husband away, banishing him from the bedroom, then excitedly strips down and goes looking for the vampire. When she doesn't find her undead lover, Isle embraces the clock instead, languidly wrapping her naked body around its cold wood, so like a coffin, as a stand-in for the chilly body of the lesbian vampire.

The film is devilishly clever in its examination of sexual frustration, as poor Antoine is continually blocked from access to his new bride, who apparently prefers a feminine touch. When Antoine spends his wedding night alone, while Isle is seduced by Isolde, he lays in bed with a large phallic torch hilariously standing in for his erection, angled up from between his legs. Later, the castle's two sexy sapphic servants (Marie-Pierre Castel and Kuelan Herce) stand over him and argue about which one of them will slip into bed with him; giggling, they decide they both will, but as soon as he wakes up, exaggeratedly rubbing his eyes as if convinced he's still dreaming, they jump out of bed and run naked and laughing out of the room, disappearing so quickly that he's convinced he might not have seen a thing. Meanwhile, the two fey vampire cousins have been having their way with a local girl, and gang up to rape the man-hating Isolde, while the servants writhe around naked in bed together: everyone but Antoine is getting some action, as he's left out of both the nocturnal supernatural conspiracy and the sexual games that accompany it.


Rollin's visual aesthetic renders this supernatural fantasy/nightmare in bright, unreal colors — the castle itself is often shown in cutaway shots where it's bathed in rainbow hues as though there are unseen spotlights shining up on it from the grounds — and shadowy, foggy haziness. The narrative is reduced to almost nothing: the newlyweds arrive at the castle, witness strange occurrences, wander through the moldy halls and decaying grounds, and Antoine occasionally makes half-hearted attempts to escape. It's a narrative perpetually suspended, and the whole thing has the texture of a dream, complete with its own loaded symbology. At one point, Antoine and Isle are strolling around the paths surrounding the castle, when Antoine abruptly shoots a dove. Isle, already transitioning into vampirism, is drawn to the dead bird and repeatedly brings it to her lips, finally resting its white body on the coffin of Isolde as an offering, bright red blood dripping over the wood.

This dreamlike film drifts along in this way, its images sensuous and erotically charged, really selling the draw of the undead, making the ease with which Isle is seduced away from her husband very understandable. There's a darkly comic vibe to the film, as well, particularly in the characters of the vampire cousins, who several times discourse in alternating lines on the history of their family, spouting pseudo-philosophical nonsense while trading lines, each one thrusting his head into the frame in turn. This film is a celebration of the surreal, the strange, the sexually polymorphous, as opposed to heteronormative marriage as represented, increasingly, by Antoine alone, without even his wife to support him. Even the servants, humans enslaved by the vampires, don't return to the normal, physical world after their joyful victory over the vampires: instead, in an extraordinary shot, Rollin holds a static view as the girls kiss and go dancing off in spiraling circles, disappearing into the darkness in the distance, their diaphanous gowns twirling around them, making them seem like spirits swallowed up by the night.

The climax is a showdown between Antoine and the vampire cousins, returning to the same bleak, apocalyptic beach that served as an otherdimensional realm at the end of Rollin's previous film, The Nude Vampire. Here, the beach, with the waves breaking against the rocky shore, serves as a grim backdrop for an anticlimactic conclusion in which Isle makes her choice and Antoine must watch as his wife engages in a suicidal, incestuous menage a trois with her cousins, while all he can do is impotently fire his pistol in the air, having no effect on these supernatural beings. The allure of the grave and of death ultimately wins out over the possibility of normality, marriage, a return to the ordinary world. Those things no longer hold any appeal for Isle; Antoine is the film's sole representative of normality, which is why in the end he's left alone and unfulfilled, shut out of the sensual, appealingly weird world of death and undeath. It's a neat trick that Rollin pulls off here: although humanity technically wins in the end, it's obvious that gay vampires just have so much more fun.

Duel

Duel was the first film of Steven Spielberg, made for TV and adapted from a short story by pulp author and screenwriter Richard Matheson. It's a remarkably simple, stripped-down film, a teeth-gritting suspense thriller that unrelentingly increases the pressure on the traveling businessman David Mann (Dennis Weaver) as he faces off with a vicious truck driver who seems intent on killing Mann. Spielberg slowly builds up the suspense, seemingly from thin air: the first time the truck appears, Spielberg's low angles and uncomfortable closeups of the truck's rusty grille and thick, rotted fenders already suggest something sinister. The film begins with innocuous jockeying for position on the road, as the impatient Mann, late for a meeting, passes the truck, only to have it pass him in return, promptly slowing down again as soon as it's in front of him. It wouldn't play as anything other than ordinary highway machismo if it wasn't for Spielberg's menacing camera angles, which make the truck loom over the much smaller car, its grille like a hungry maw, its whole surface grimy and rusted, its driver obscured so that the truck seems like an inhuman, mysterious threat. When Mann pauses at a gas station, the truck pulls up next to him, and Spielberg shoots from above, looking down over the truck's cab at Mann and his little red sedan, emphasizing how he's dwarfed by his adversary.

The subtext of this highway duel is masculinity, as suggested by Mann's phone conversation with his wife when he calls her from the gas station, before the action begins in earnest. They'd had an argument the night before because they'd been at a party where a friend or business associate had obviously been all over Mann's wife — "he practically raped me," she says, as the couple's two kids play innocently nearby — and Mann had done nothing to stop the harassment. With the incident behind them, she's willing to let it drop now, but it's obvious that it was a failure of masculinity for Mann, a failure to protect his wife and defend her honor, a failure to assert his strength and dominance as a man. (His name is even Mann: get it?) A sexual failure, too, the failure to maintain his exclusive sexual possession of his woman. This brief conversation colors the entire film, as does the radio program that Mann listens to during the introductory scenes, a conversation in which a man worries that he's not the "head of his household," that his wife really runs things. Mann, when a gas station attendant tells him, "you're the boss," makes a similar joke, wearily tossing off, "not at home," suggesting that he, too, feels like his masculinity is not entirely secure, that he's also not the head of his household.

These concerns are echoed in a later scene where Mann, during a respite from the truck's assaults, comes across a school bus that's stranded by the side of the road. The bus driver wants Mann to push the bus out of the dusty shoulder, but Mann simply gets their bumpers locked together and gets stuck himself, as the kids in the bus make faces at him and mock him, their laughing faces captured in uncomfortable closeups that emphasize Mann's humiliation. When the truck suddenly appears and easily pushes the school bus back onto the road, the symbolism couldn't be more obvious: it's a visualization of impotence, as Mann's car fails to have the power or vitality to do the job, while the big, powerful truck just charges in and pushes.


Maybe it's this psychological subtext, but there's something very Hitchcockian about Spielberg's debut. The film is populated with colorful Hitchcockian bit players — especially a vibrant old lady who runs a roadside gas station slash rattlesnake farm — and has moments of suspense and dark humor worthy of the master. At one point, at a café, Mann's reveries are interrupted by the loud clatter of silverware as a waitress tosses down a place setting and asks for his order, the woman seeming to loom over Mann as she's shot from a low angle: everything begins to unnerve the poor guy, who looks around the café trying to figure out which one of the men here with him might be the truck's hateful driver. More generally, all these wide open spaces, coupled with the general situation of a man pursued by a vehicle seemingly intent on his death, evoke the crop duster showdown of North By Northwest. But the film Duel resembles the most, in some surprising ways, is actually The Birds. Much as in the Hitchcock film, Duel is about senseless, incomprehensible violence, about something innocent turning on the protagonist and seeking his destruction without any apparent reason. Just as the birds have no purpose, no cause for their sudden violence, the truck driver in Duel remains inscrutable, his face always obscured — the most Mann ever sees of the driver is his boot and his forearm. This sudden violence makes no sense, it's a nightmare of helplessness, as inexplicable as it is terrifying.

Spielberg, even at this early stage, has a real feel for these scenes of suspense and action. The editing is crisp but not choppy, alternating between wide angles and long shots that show the car and the pursuing truck winding around twisty mountain roads, and closeups that capture the contrast between the implacable, monstrous facade of the truck and the sweaty human desperation of Mann in his car. Throughout it all, the sun beats down on the cars, bright and huge, spreading its white glow diffusely across the whole sky, refracting in the chrome and dirty glass of the dueling vehicles. The film feels hot and dusty, with Mann trapped between the steaming heat of the sun and the clouds of dust kicked up beneath the tires of his car.

That atmosphere, coupled with the mysterious, almost apocalyptic aura of the unyielding, unstoppable truck, makes Duel a consistently powerful debut film from the soon-to-be blockbuster director. The film does bog down during its middle section in the café, where Mann tries to grapple with what's happening to him. His internal monologue, delivered in voiceover, is awkwardly handled and doesn't add much to the film that isn't conveyed much more potently without words. This is a concept that requires few words and few adornments, and once Mann returns to the road, pursued by the unrelenting truck that haunts him, the film picks up speed again and never slows down until its fiery conclusion.

TOERIFC: The Merchant of Four Seasons

[This post is prompted by The Oldest Established Really Important Film Club, which will be spotlighting a different blogger-selected film every month. This month's selection is courtesy of Fox from Tractor Facts. Visit his site to see Fox's thoughts on the film and to join the main discussion.]

The films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder often tread a fine line between stylized melodrama and blunt naturalism. His characters act in exaggerated ways, stumbling and falling in a weeping heap, pounding violently on tables, taking long, meditative walks. Their emotions exist right on the surface, overwhelming them like characters in a soap opera. And yet, within the bleak worlds that Fassbinder constructs such maudlin melodramatics are not unwarranted; his characters are not overreacting but rather doing the only thing possible in the face of a cruel, suffocating existence. The Merchant of Four Seasons is a typically relentless Fassbinder film in this respect, telling the story of the fruit vendor Hans Epp (Hans Hirschmüller), a man who takes as much as he possibly can from an unfair and unrewarding life before finally giving up. Hans is a pathetic man, a man who's made all the wrong decisions whenever he had a choice, and who at other times has had choices cruelly taken away from him. His domineering mother (Gusti Kreissl) refused to let him pursue his chosen career as a mechanic, viewing it as beneath her family's station, and she ignored Hans' distaste for the school she forced him to attend instead. In the film's opening scenes, Hans has returned after running away from school to join the Foreign Legion; instead of greeting him, his mother treats him with contempt, ending with the searing put-down, "once a no-good, always a no-good."

That pretty much sums up what's in store for Hans. Once back, he settles into a life as a fruit vendor with his wife Irmgard (Irm Hermann), though he's predictably miserable: the couple are constantly bickering, and Hans responds to these arguments by running away, going off to bars for drinks. Throughout the film, flashbacks fill in the details about Hans' life that had led him to this state. He had once been a policeman, but in a moment of weakness gave in to the seduction of a prostitute and was caught, thus losing his job. He had once loved another woman (Ingrid Caven), who throughout the film goes unnamed, referred to only as "the love of Hans' life." He had planned to marry her, but she rejected him, saying that her upper-class father would never accept her marrying a fruit vendor. Both through his own fault and through the simple combination of circumstances, Hans' life was a series of one disappointment after another, a series of compromises and settling for second best, never getting what he really wanted. He is an utter loser, a nothing, and he knows it and hurts from it.

Even when a heart attack after a bout of drinking and violence seems to give Hans a second chance, it all quickly falls apart again. Before the heart attack, Irmgard had been ready to leave him because of his violence, but afterward she decides to stay with him after all. Since he can't do the heavy work anymore, they decide to hire a worker and set up a stationary stand as well, and the new approach to the business makes them more successful than ever before. Hans briefly seems rejuvenated, but when he hires a man named Anzell (Karl Scheydt) to help with the business, his wife is horrified: she had slept with this man during a brief flirtation with becoming a prostitute. So she schemes to get him fired, and succeeds. Fassbinder stages the sequence where her treachery becomes clear to Anzell as a taut exchange of glances between the three protagonists, their eyes veiled, filled with understanding and restrained rage. It is a decisive moment, though Fassbinder never makes it clear just how much Hans actually understands about what has gone on here.


In any event, Hans' downward spiral resumes after this, only temporarily interrupted by a joyous reunion with his old Legion buddy Harry (Klaus Löwitsch), who takes over Anzell's job as fruit hawker. The film's final stretch is a funereal procession in which it's obvious that Hans is preparing for death, saying goodbye to a life he never enjoyed. He visits the people in his life one by one, reaffirming his disconnection from them, even from the love of his life, who no longer excites him, and from his affectionate sister Anna (Hanna Schygulla), the only person who ever stood up for him. When he goes to visit her, however, she's distracted by work, and Fassbinder accentuates how little attention she's paying to Hans' depression by placing her in the foreground, reading and writing, while her brother quietly mopes in the background, saying little, virtually ignored.

This is Hans' fate, to be ignored and mistreated, and Fassbinder never misses an opportunity to emphasize his protagonist's pathetic life with stylized touches. After a drunken, miserable Hans beats Irmgard one night — a harrowing, horrifying scene, with the couple's daughter struggling to protect her mother — Irmgard runs away to Hans' family. When he shows up, contrite and begging for her back, his family reacts with almost comical horror, freezing into gothic poses right out of a silent melodrama; they all but sweep their hands across their brows as their eyes pop out of their heads. Only Anna reacts with calm and patience, treating the situation with adult restraint and sympathy for everyone involved, comforting the couple's weeping daughter while everyone else projects their emotions in shrill upper registers. These people are so wrapped up in their own lives, their own emotions and worries, that they have no empathy for anyone else, and certainly not for poor, pathetic Hans.

Fassbinder contrasts these outsized, melodramatic emotions against the mostly quiet suffering of Hans. He has only one real outburst, and it's enough to completely destroy his heart; otherwise, his life is a slow, sad descent, with little struggle or attempt to change things. Like many of Fassbinder's protagonists, he seems to have accepted his fate, making the final scene, in which he commits suicide by drinking himself to death, inevitable. Fassbinder stages this sequence as a series of formalist closeups: as Hans raises a glass to each person in his life in turn, Fassbinder cuts away to direct, intimate closeups, as each person looks silently on, doing nothing as Hans destroys his life for good. This final scene is a metaphor for the entirety of Hans' self-destructive, unlucky life: no one cares, no one does anything to help him, and Fassbinder's constricting mise en scène forces the audience into a position of numbing complicity, as we also watch this man destroy himself. It's a typically tough, unflinching film from Fassbinder, an inquiry into the ways in which people place limits on their own lives and those of others.

Films I Love #37: Little Murders (Alan Arkin, 1971)

Alan Arkin's adaptation of the Jules Feiffer play Little Murders is a harsh, acerbic masterwork, an unflinching satire of a society spiraling out of control. The film's main character, Alfred (Elliott Gould), is a spineless, neurotic photographer whose work consists almost entirely of photographs of dog shit: he walks around the city with his eyes continually pointed down, focusing his perspective on the sidewalk and the waste that stains it. This is, to him, the only rational reaction to a rotten world, at least until he meets the relentlessly cheery Patsy (Marcia Rodd), who rescues him from attackers in the opening scene and then becomes enraged when he simply wanders away, disinterested, leaving her to get assaulted herself. Naturally, it's the blossoming of a romance, mainly because Patsy just cannot countenance someone as bland and cynical as Alfred, so she makes him her latest "project," a hopeless guy who she can rehabilitate into enjoying life.

The film is structured like the theater piece it's based on, with little attempt to get beyond the stagebound nature of the play. Fortunately, this is some of Feiffer's strongest, angriest writing, and his set pieces and monologues are never less than stunning. An encounter with Patsy's family is especially hilarious, as Alfred is forced to cope with her leering, authoritarian father (Vincent Gardenia), her stereotypical unflappable 50s housewife mother (Elizabeth Wilson), and her creepy brother (Jon Korkes), with whom she shares a borderline incestual camaraderie. What's brilliant about these scenes is that Alfred's nihilism is presented as a fairly logical reaction to the insanity of this society, certainly more than the almost pathological optimism of Patsy, who reacts to even the complete trashing of her apartment with a kind of teeth-gritted determination to make the best of things. The film really soars, however, in a pair of lengthy monologues that take up a large portion of the middle section. The first of these is delivered by the pompous Judge Stern (Lou Jacobi), who harangues Patsy and Alfred with a rambling discourse on his hard life as the son of working class parents, and the importance of God in his life. When Jacobi's bellowing, hilarious oration proves too big for the small room where he's met the couple, he simply walks away to find a courtroom where, backed by a tremendous American flag, his rhetoric more comfortably fills the space. This scene is quickly followed by Patsy and Alfred's wedding, performed by an unconventional hippie reverend (Donald Sutherland), whose speech is inflected with a shrugging, anything-goes indifference to marriage, fidelity, divorce and drug use: this wedding ceremony acknowledges right up front the likelihood that it will all end in divorce. Later, Arkin himself appears in a cameo turn as a jittery, flinching police detective, while Patsy's family hunkers down behind steel shutters, driven mad, fending off society's collapse with a sniper rifle. This bleak — and bleakly funny — film is Feiffer's most uncompromising statement on societal disintegration, and Arkin's adaptation memorably translates this satire for the cinema.

Juste avant la nuit

[This is a contribution to the Claude Chabrol Blog-a-Thon currently running at Flickhead from June 21 to June 30. For ten days, Flickhead will be dedicated to the works of the French New Wave master, and I'll be following along with many reviews of my own.]

Claude Chabrol's Juste avant la nuit is a suffocating psychological study of a man who is overwhelmed by guilt, and who, more than that, is devastated by the discovery that what he had thought to be a stable system of justice and morality was actually a paper-thin veneer, easily destroyed. In the opening scenes of the film, the respectable businessman and family man Charles Masson (Michel Bouquet) accidentally kills his lover during a sadomasochistic game of playacting that goes too far; he strangles her and leaves her corpse behind. It is a horrible crime, but what eats away at Charles is not necessarily the guilt he feels, but the realization that he is going to be able to get away with it. The murdered woman, Laura (Anna Douking) is the wife of his best friend François (François Périer), who he meets at a nearby bar not long after the murder. But his friend does not suspect a thing; the thought never even crosses his mind, even after learning of what happened. He never imagines that his wife's mysterious and murderous lover could be his own best friend, who he met in the same neighborhood so soon after the crime had taken place. Charles is trusted completely. He is loved and respected by everyone in his life. His wife Hélène (Stéphane Audran) also has total faith in him, total loyalty and quiet love, and together they have two obedient and good-spirited children.

Charles, however, is devastated by what he has done. He soon understands that he will never be caught, that the police have no clues, and his best friend refuses to say anything to the police even after a witness tells him that she saw Charles and the murdered woman together, that Charles was her lover. François simply cannot believe it, and protects his friend without ever saying a word. So it is not a question of being afraid of the police, of fearing punishment. Charles actually begins to fear the lack of punishment, because he comes to understand that his ideas about the foundations of society were perhaps mistaken. If a man can commit murder and get away with it, never even coming under any serious suspicion, then something must be broken in the system: he cannot understand why justice is not served to him, why he is not punished for his crime. This begins to weigh on him to the point that he must confess, must tell somebody the truth.

So Charles begins to drop hints, almost as though hoping to excite suspicion, hoping for justice to be set into motion. He first tells his wife that he was having an affair with Laura, but that it ended before she died. It is almost as though he is hoping for Hélène to accuse him, to get angry, to grow suspicious of the man she loves so unconditionally. Instead, after barely a moment's shock and sadness, she forgives him, able even to laugh about it, to tell him that it doesn't hurt at all — and she takes at face value his insistence that the affair ended before Laura showed up dead. This confession satisfies Charles only for a short time, and soon he wants to tell more. So he tells his wife everything, and again she forgives him, eager to make excuses for him, insisting that it must have been an accident, that he shouldn't feel guilty, that he should try to forget. Frustrated, Charles decides that he must now tell François, but his friend's expression doesn't even waver when he confesses to the murder; it is as though he has known all along, or else he simply doesn't care. Not only does François tell Charles not to turn himself in, that he doesn't feel any desire for revenge, but he insists that they should remain friends, that they should try to forget this and not let it come between them — what's the murder of a wife between friends, after all?


Charles, though, is only driven mad by all this forgiveness and understanding. He wants justice, indeed needs it, in order to feel like the world is in order. His worldview is so thoroughly bourgeois, so "civilized," that he cannot cope with the revelation that sometimes life is unfair, that the guilty can walk around free, that crimes can go unpunished and unsolved without the social order disintegrating. He has killed someone, and nothing happened: the police ignore him, his wife and children still adore him, his friend embraces him, his confessions elicit only sympathy and compassion. He is a murderer, but no one seems to care, and this is intolerable. Chabrol examines Charles' slow unraveling with his characteristic clinical eye. This film is quiet and distant even by Chabrol's standards, with much of its substance happening beneath the surface, implied in Bouquet's increasingly pale, worn visage and the puppet-like interactions of this family man with the comfortable, stereotypical trappings of his life.

As usual, Chabrol's style is observational and indirect; he hints at the internal pressures pressing outwards from within Charles, but the surface of the film remains placid, rarely disturbed by anything resembling anger or true emotion. If anything, this only makes Juste avant la nuit all the more disturbing. It suggests, ultimately, that there is no justice, there are no moral absolutes: we only fool ourselves into thinking there are. Instead, our morality is an illusion, as easily overcome as the few seconds it takes Charles, only half-realizing what he's doing, to strangle his lover to death. If this boundary line is so fragile, so easily crossed, and these crimes so easily forgiven, then what really is holding this bourgeois society together? If the rules of society have such large exceptions and blind spots, then what good are the rules in the first place? These ideas, questioning the most basic assumptions of modern civilization, are what really disturb Charles, who is ill-equipped to cope with the loss of everything he had thought to be true, everything he had thought he'd known about good and evil, right and wrong, innocence and guilt. This is a tragedy, really, not of murder and confession, but of the loss of one's moral bearings, the realization that morality is as fragile as a woman's neck.

Business Is Business

Business Is Business was Paul Verhoeven's feature film debut, and it definitely proves that, if the controversial and notoriously raunchy auteur's aesthetic was not quite developed from the start, then at least his signature themes and concerns were there all along. This rough-edged but entertaining debut clearly points the way towards Verhoeven's later work, which would continue dealing, in deeper ways, with this film's themes of sexuality, exploitation and the pressures placed on male/female dynamics by society. Verhoeven's satirical wit would be sharpened in subsequent films, as would his ability to carve compelling, multi-layered characters out of the material of cliché and melodrama. Here, his talents are more raw, less focused, and his humor is broader. Usually, the laughs in a Verhoeven film are double-edged, always threatening to stick in one's throat; he tends to lace his humor with a touch of bitterness and rage. But this story of a pair of prostitutes doesn't really delve beneath the surface in this way. Verhoeven seems content to simply mine the situation for as much humor as he can, treating it as a series of anecdotes loosely strung together.

On these broad terms, the film is certainly enjoyable. If nothing else, Verhoeven was always a consummate entertainer, and even his first feature is never less than a blast to watch. It opens with a hilarious race from the airport as a man, newly returned from a long stint in Africa, away from female companionship, rushes to the home of the prostitute Greet (Ronnie Bierman). Once there, he's in a desperate hurry to get started, and eagerly agrees as she keeps adding to the price for every little concession she makes — want my coat off? that'll be another 50. After all this build-up and haggling, the deed itself finally lasts all of a second, and Greet immediately goes to the closet, where she mechanically ticks off his bill on an adding machine and prints him a receipt. It's a great introduction of the film's central character, this staunchly capitalist prostitute for whom her job is really just another business, with little connection to her sexuality. Greet is fortunate that she can be this cavalier about her profession. Her friend Nel (Sylvia de Leur) seems to be less cut out for this line of work, and she additionally suffers at the hands of her abusive, domineering boyfriend Sjaak (Jules Hamel), who takes her money and goes fishing all day while she sells herself.

The subject naturally lends itself to social commentary of a sort, but for the most part Verhoeven doesn't seem to be interested. There are hints of themes he'd develop more substantially in his later work, like the ways in which men and women use sexuality as a weapon against one another, and the double bind of the woman's place in society, where she is punished for being a sexual creature but punished in different ways if she refuses or holds back her sexuality. Mostly, though, this is all very surface level, and there's barely even much of a plot. Nel yearns to escape from Sjaak, and from the life of prostitution in general, and eventually she finds her escape route in the form of the cleaning salesman Bob (Bernard Droog) — she's not much happier as a mundane housewife with this boring schlub, but it's a life anyway. Meanwhile, the seemingly unflappable Greet finds the same desires stirring in her, and briefly believes that she's found love with the married Piet (Piet Römer), who she sleeps with without even charging him. The film's melodrama all seems a little undigested, especially in comparison to what Verhoeven would achieve just two years later with his masterful second feature Turkish Delight, in which he twists and warps melodramatic conventions into an epic of sexual perversity and societal dysfunction.


In Business Is Business, Verhoeven's aims are more modest. Mainly, he produces a parade of eccentrics and sexual deviants to mock and satirize. The film's anecdotal structure mostly consists of one visit from a "client" after another, with each john stranger and goofier than the next. One guy likes to dress up like a schoolboy and get lectured (and spanked, naturally) by the teacher and schoolmistress. One guy likes to get naked and then have the girls scare him by donning a creepy witch mask, screaming and banging on things. Another wants a fake surgery performed on him. Another has a thing for dressing up in high heels and a maid's outfit and cleaning Greet's apartment, with her berating and spanking him for not doing a good job. Most memorably of all, one odd duck comes with a suitcase full of feathers, covering his own body with them and giving some to the girls, who proceed to run around clucking like chickens. What all of these clients have in common is that almost none of them seem to want actual sexual intercourse of any kind — they get excited by debasing themselves, by being humiliated, and all the girls have to do, generally, is play along with the game. They're as much actresses as prostitutes.

This succession of oddities and bizarre fetishes are trotted out one by one simply for Verhoeven to make fun of; each of these guys is so exaggerated, so caricatured, that there's no possible response but to laugh. And indeed the film is frequently funny, even if Verhoeven's swinging at the easiest possible targets to hit. The humor is goofy and light, not at all what one expects of a director who, though always working in debased genres, often burrows deep into the heart of clichés and conventions in order to get at the deeper essences lurking within generic stories. This is not the case here. Even when the story integrates more dramatic material — the fights between Sjaak and Nel are truly harrowing and disturbing, and Nel's meek returns afterward are a startlingly true depiction of domestic violence's ugly cycle — Verhoeven doesn't generate the tension he usually sparks from juxtaposing his films' trashier elements against the more emotionally volatile moments. Instead, the two elements within the film simply sit uncomfortably together: the emotional impact of scenes like this is undeniable, but never bleeds over into the funnier scenes, which dominate the film.

On the whole, Business Is Business is an interesting but uneven debut for Verhoeven, who would quickly progress beyond this shaky dark comedy into much more sophisticated explorations of similar territory. This film remains relevant primarily for Verhoeven fans looking for a glimpse of the Dutch auteur's roots. As such, the seeds of his later work are clearly visible, but no more; it would take until Turkish Delight for these seeds to bear real fruit.

Two Lane Blacktop

The drivers in Two Lane Blacktop, men behind the wheels of powerful muscle cars, racing one another for money and pride and just for the hell of it, are true outcasts, existing in a strange world somewhere outside proper society, lingering on the fringes wherever they go. They seemed to have formed their own private world and their own language, an obscure lingo of car parts, numbers, makes and models, speeds, transmissions. They speak entirely in the language of cars, seemingly incapable of talking about anything else. Their whole way of living, their way of thinking, is centered around cars: driving them, racing them, scratching together money to fix them or upgrade them, setting arbitrary destinations just so that when they get there, they can drive some more, race some more, come up with a new destination. They don't even have names, not really; they're credited simply as "the driver" (singer James Taylor), "the mechanic" (Beach Boy Dennis Wilson), "G.T.O." (Warren Oates), the latter synonymous with the make of the car he drives. The hitchhiker they pick up along the way is called simply "the girl" (Laurie Bird), and none of them seem to know her name either, though she flits between them, bored and trying to find someone who thinks about more than cars.

She's mostly out of luck with this crew, though. Taylor and Wilson pick her up while driving around the West looking around for races in their grey '55 Chevy. She goes to bed with Wilson when they first pick her up, but most of the time she's simply sprawled out in the back of their car, a quiet presence on the edges of their vision, crowded out by their laconic shop talk and engine tweaking. During their travels, the two young men run across the somewhat older Oates, who's not a car guy in the same sense as they are: he bought his way into this scene through his supercharged yellow G.T.O., while they more or less constructed their ride from scratch. He only knows as much as is available in his owner's manual, and even then he can mostly just recite the figures without understanding them. What he shares with the Chevy's crew is an aimless wanderlust, a constant need to be on the road, on the move, never settling into one place. He may have been settled at one point — one of the many stories he tells is about having a wife and family who he left behind — but now he's as thoroughly outside society as they are.

Taylor and Wilson challenge Oates to a cross-country race, with the winner taking the pink slips to both cars. But the actual race proceeds only by fits and starts, as the three men actually wind up spending a lot of time hanging out together, sharing meals together, helping one another when one of the cars has some trouble or they need a rest. They seem to spend more time parked by the side of the road or huddled around a table in one of many greasy small-town diners than they do racing. This only confirms that the point, for these men, is not the race, not the destination, but simply finding a way to pass the time. They're competitive, they have to be to exist within this milieu, but at the same they don't really care about the race, and Wilson and Taylor are just as happy to stop and help Oates rather than leaving him in their dust when they see an opportunity.


Director Monte Hellman captures this dusty, meandering cross-country trek with a sharp eye for the subtleties and details. This is a film of small gestures, a minimalist ode to people who exist within their own private, roving pocket of Americana, nomads drifting around on the outskirts of civilization. Of the four main actors, Taylor, Wilson and Bird had never acted before, and their untrained performances are naturalistic and quiet. They're iconic figures, blank-faced and ordinary, with not much to say to one another. Their speech is halting and minimal, often verging on a whisper or an incoherent mumble. Wilson and Taylor are not used to conversation, not used to people outside of their own insular subculture, people who don't speak about carbs and valves and hemis. The girl simply gets into the back of the Chevy one day, without a word, while the guys are inside having lunch, and when they come back and find her there they show no surprise and don't even say anything to her: they simply get in and drive away.

Hellman contrasts these minimally defined characters against the larger-than-life Oates, who relentlessly devours the scenery whenever he appears. If the other characters are rootless wanderers without clear personalities, Oates' "G.T.O." is a man who tries on new personae, new identities, as though changing suits. He's a storyteller, weaving a past for himself out of a patchwork of stories whose truth is dubious at best: according to various versions of his life story, he's a Korean war vet, a former airplane test pilot, a businessman, a family man who left his wife behind. All of these stories might be true, but more likely none of them are, especially since he displays a cheerful willingness to invent more stories on the spot, as he does when he briefly poses as Wilson and Taylor's "manager" and concocts an elaborate history for them as well. He's a man in search of an identity, desperate for some roots, some connections, something to hold. He clearly has no place within mainstream culture, which can't calm his wanderlust or his desire for novelty, but he doesn't fit comfortably within the parameters of the car culture, either. He's an outcast's outcast, and Oates breathes an undercurrent of sad pathos into this gregarious loner. When he looks at the girl, it's obvious that he sees in her an opportunity for salvation, and just as obvious that she won't be able to provide what he needs.

This is the tragedy of this film, in which these wanderers can barely see beyond the confines of their front windshields, a restrictive view that Hellman frequently highlights as a frame within the frame. There's a dangerous undercurrent to this adrenaline-jockey life style, most apparent in the scene where the guys come across an accident, a bloody, stylized highway tableau derived from the pile-ups in Godard's Week End, still the ultimate deconstruction of the modern fetish for fast-moving cars, the allure of the highway. These drivers are on a race to nowhere, speeding towards an amorphous ending, a speed-blur that Hellman represents with an abrupt non-ending. He cuts from Taylor's intense, blue-eyed stare, the car shaking and roaring around him, to a view out the front windshield, at the expanse of grey pavement stretching out to the horizon and beyond, a blacktop wasteland that is then devastated by the disintegration of the film itself, in the form of a bubbling acidic ooze that eats away at the celluloid of this final shot. It's a fitting ending to a film where nothingness hovers constantly beneath the surface, a threatening presence from which these racers and drifters are desperately trying to escape.

Vladimir and Rosa

Vladimir and Rosa was in many ways the last true product of the experimental revolutionary filmmaking cooperative the Dziga Vertov Group: the final film produced under the group's banner before Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin went on to make the feature Tout va bien and the short Letter To Jane under their own names, before parting ways for good. Taking its title from Vladimir Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg, this film is typical of Godard and Gorin's late 60s/early 70s collaborations. That is to say, it's shrill, antagonistic, messy and often intentionally grating, as dense and complex as it is difficult and polemical. But it is also wickedly funny, aesthetically restless and inventive, and truly committed to considering every angle, every variation, on the ideas and situations it discusses. It is quite possibly the best film to emerge from the Dziga Vertov collective, the film where (prior to Tout va bien at least) the political ideas of Godard and Gorin are most cogently (and entertainingly) presented.

Although most of the DVG films are aesthetically and thematically catholic, broad in their consideration of various elements of capitalist society, Vladimir and Rosa narrows its focus to the trial of the Chicago Eight, the famous group of radical activists (including Abbie Hoffman and Black Panther Bobby Seale) who were tried in connection with the riots and protests at the 1968 Democratic Convention. Predictably, Godard and Gorin play fast and loose with the facts, staging the trial as a symbolic conflict between representatives of various left-wing factions on one side, and the bourgeois establishment on the other. Thus, the eight defendants in the film do not correspond exactly to the real activists; only the extreme pacifist Dave Dellinger (Claude Nedjar) and the Black Panther Bobby X refer to real people. The rest of the eight are filled out with archetypes in order to present a cross-section of radical politics: a hippie commune member (Juliet Berto), a proponent of women's rights (Anne Wiazemsky), a factory worker and "individualist" agitator (Larry Martin), a student revolutionary (Yves Afonso), and others. Against these diverse radicals and Marxist thinkers are arrayed the forces of the pompous, oppressive judge Julius Himmler (Ernest Menzer) — a fascist parody of real Chicago Eight judge Julius Hoffman — and a jury comprised entirely of blank-faced bourgeois housewives and office drones.

The trial in the film plays out very similarly to the one presented in Peter Watkins' contemporaneous Punishment Park, which must have been in production in America at roughly the same time as Godard and Gorin were making their own film in France: tapping into the zeitgeist on both sides of the Atlantic. In Watkins' film, sequences from an obviously unbalanced and unjust trial are juxtaposed with images of the punishment, a torturous race through a desert wasteland pursued by heavily armed police. In Vladimir and Rosa, the trial itself is the sole focus, staged in a minimally designed courtroom with ancillary sequences about the defendants' attempts to hone and understand both what they're fighting for and how they should fight. These segments are further interspersed with meta-commentary from Vladimir Lenin (Godard) and Karl Rosa (Gorin), who debate and discuss how best to represent the story of the Chicago Eight as a film. As with all of the DVG films, Vladimir and Rosa is as much about the process of making the film as it is about the subject itself. Godard and Gorin were not concerned only with the Chicago Eight and the unjust nature of their trial — they were equally concerned with the question of how to tell this story, how to use the cinema as an ideological tool for understanding the meaning of the Chicago Eight trial.

To this end, Godard and Gorin's characters engage in a series of loosely comic skits in which they attempt to come to terms with the limits of cinematic representation. At one point, they stalk back and forth down the center of a tennis court as a pair of white-clad couples try to play around the pacing filmmakers. As they traverse the court, they speak into audio apparatuses that simultaneously amplify and distort their voices, creating disorienting echo effects that make their conversation difficult to follow. And yet this effect is precisely what they're talking about: the difficulty of making themselves understood, the imprecision of language and images in dealing with complex ideological matters. This segment is an acknowledgment that their filmmaking equipment is both a gift and a curse. Just as it amplifies their voices, allowing them to spread their message further and more easily, it also distorts what they have to say, ironically blurring the message even as it is disseminated. Later, the filmmakers show up in disguise as bourgeois oppressors, Godard in a fetishistic cop uniform and Gorin draped in judge's robes, the two of them playacting as authority figures. Playfully perverse as ever, Godard pulls a lengthy nightstick out of his unzipped fly as a demonstration of violent oppression (and its unspoken sexual component) in action.


Scenes like this counter the typical impression of Godard's Dziga Vertov period as joyless or humorless. Indeed, in this film his gnomic sense of humor is especially lively, expressing itself in the form of blunt and pointed satire. Judge Himmler is a nasty but hilarious satirical concoction, living up to his fascist name with his cartoonish screech of a voice and his knee-jerk tendency to deny all of the defense's requests and grant all of the prosecution's. He seems to be on the verge of falling asleep whenever one of the defendants delivers a lengthy polemical speech, he pounds repeatedly for silence with his gavel until the wooden block on his desk goes flying through the air, and he doodles absent-mindedly on the Playboy spreads strewn across his bench. He's an absurd caricature of corrupt authority, an editorial page cartoon who might as well have a label hung around his neck to complete the picture. Godard and Gorin are painting in primary colors here, but it works because their actors are fully engaged in this broad satirical project, especially the fiery Menzer and the always enjoyable Juliet Berto, who even casts knowing glances at the audience from time to time, as though to include them in on the joke. There's a level of self-awareness about it all that rescues the film from its own polemical excesses, like its repeated reliance on Nazi comparisons.

This is, of course, one of the primary goals of the Dziga Vertov Group, to make films that question themselves, that engage with economic and social conditions at every level. Throughout the film, they question the commitment of various groups to radical revolution, asking what separates a hippie commune from the way its members lived outside of the commune, or how a supposedly radical lawyer like William Kuntsler, who defended the real Chicago Eight, can reconcile his radicalism with the comfort of his economic existence, his nice apartment and car. There's a real potential here for Godard and Gorin to come off as sanctimonious, as self-righteous posers placing themselves on a higher intellectual plane than their subjects. But it's obvious that they're not exempting themselves from these inquiries, they're not pretending that they have achieved any kind of revolutionary perfection. Their film is susceptible to the same failures, the same limitations, as any other project that attempts to exist outside of an all-pervasive system. What they're after, more than anything, is a recognition of those limitations, a continual process of investigation and, above all, careful thought.

The film also engages directly with questions of race and gender, particularly in the characters of Bobby X and Anne Wiazemsky. The former, like his real-life counterpart Bobby Seale, is marginalized even at the trial, separated from the other defendants, continually denied his right to defend himself or speak for himself. He is, like Seale, chained to a chair, bound and gagged in court, a gesture of extreme restraint that robs him of his rights. He is, eventually, in the film as in life, excluded from the trial altogether, shuffled off into a separate trial so that the Chicago Eight became the Chicago Seven. The film dramatizes this absence in two ways: first, visually, through the use of an empty red chair that calls attention to Bobby's absence, and second, abstractly, with the use of black frames. Throughout the DVG period, Godard frequently used black leader to convey absence and to separate images from one another, and here his voiceover self-consciously states that these interjections have finally achieved their purpose as a way of indicating the disappearance of a black revolutionary. Bobby is, alone among the film's subjects, held up as exempt from Godard and Gorin's commentary on revolutionary limits: because of his race, he is truly outside bourgeois society in a way that privileged whites like the filmmakers and other actors have to struggle and fight towards.

The film also acknowledges the differences in male and female understandings of oppression and class, and one scene attempts to bridge the inevitable gap by having Wiazemsky and Afonso take turns reading from a treatise written by an African woman. This is a film about trying to understand other ways of viewing the world: just as Godard and Gorin are approaching the experience of American activists through the story of the Chicago Eight/Seven, the film incorporates various attempts at understanding how issues of class, race, sex and violence might be seen differently by different kinds of people. As the climax of the Dziga Vertov Group's ongoing project towards a revolutionary cinema, Vladimir and Rosa is a dense, confounding and strangely engaging work. The witty, dialectical reversals of Godard and Gorin drive the film, dealing intelligently with the various contradictions, oppositions and paradoxes at the heart of capitalist society.

Vanishing Point

Vanishing Point is the ultimate ode to the need for speed, a ferocious white-line race dedicated to "the last American hero to whom speed means freedom of soul," the driver Kowalski (Barry Newman), making a high-speed run from Colorado to San Francisco with the police in pursuit. The film pulsates and revs in time with Kowalski, who simply swallows handfuls of pills and takes off, shuttling back and forth across the Western states as a delivery driver of some kind. On his latest trip, for obscure reasons, he jumps into a white 1970 Dodge Challenger, barely pausing between runs, and sets off on a propulsive journey through the desert nothingness of the West, barreling down the highways at impossible speeds and hardly ever taking his foot off the gas. The film never explains why. His delivery is not due for two days and he has plenty of time, and the hints of his troubled past are insufficient to explain this speed-fueled cross-country spree, which leaves a wake of shattered and exhausted police cruisers behind him. He doesn't even seem to enjoy it very much, driving with a stoic concentration and his knuckles white on the wheel. He simply does it because he can, because he has this compulsion for speed and the intense experience of the road.

Director Richard C. Sarafian knows this obsession for the road, and he makes this film an ecstatic celebration of Kowalski's journey, his stubborn and purposeless defiance of authority, his super-charged odyssey across the plains. The bulk of the film takes place on the road, in the car with Kowalski or looking out the window at what he sees, panning across the motion-blurred landscapes of the West or staring down into the white lines speeding past like tracer bullets, seeing no further than the few feet of concrete in front of the car's nose. The film's first half-hour or so is near-perfect, getting so close to the subjective experience of Kowalski's motion addiction that one can practically feel the bumps and the roar of the powerful engine up front. This is the action movie chase scene stretched out to feature-length, and Sarafian has a real feel for the form, whether he's right in the cockpit with Kowalski or pulling back for long shots that take in entire sweeping vistas where the Challenger and its pursuers are just specks in the landscape. These are action scenes that never sacrifice a sense of beauty. Heavy clouds and pale blue skies always seem to be hanging over the action, infusing the film with a majestic scope that stretches beyond one guy and his half-crazed mission.

Indeed, there's a spiritual, mystical component to Kowalski's journey, mostly provided by the pattering commentary of the radio DJ Super Soul (Cleavon Little), who learns about Kowalski and the cops in pursuit and begins providing bulletins and updates on the radio. It's Super Soul who seems to grasp the importance of Kowalski's escape, who lends a spiritual significance and a political undertone to what is, for the driver himself, an inexplicable act. But Super Soul sees it as an act of resistance, and his gospel-like incantations about "the big blue meanies" and "the super driver of the golden West" give the film much of its potency, stretching it beyond just another car chase into an epic expression of freedom and the power of the individual. He calls Kowalski "the last beautiful free soul on this planet," which may be hard to reconcile with the blank-faced Newman, who hardly ever expresses any emotion during his long drive, but he's talking about an ideal rather than a person. The film is about the idea of speed, the idea of the road granting freedom, rather than about just some guy and his souped-up car.


Because of this, the film falters whenever it tries to get anymore specific about Kowalski himself. The sporadic flashbacks that cut away from the main action to various incidents in the driver's past are unwelcome, extraneous back story that only pull us out of the immediacy of the film's present. These flashbacks fill in stories about Kowalski's time as a failed race car driver and motorcycle racer, his career as a cop who left the force after stopping a fellow officer from sexually assaulting a girl, and his romance with a woman who drowned in a surfing accident. This detail is unnecessary, and it's awkwardly shoehorned into a movie that doesn't need it. Whereas the scenes of Kowalski driving have a timeless intensity and raw physicality, the flashbacks are saccharine, badly acted, vaseline-lensed affairs that date the film in its early 70s era. The flashback to Kowalski's time as a cop, the most puzzling of all, feels like an attempt at hamfisted social commentary, an incoherent statement about the mistreatment of women or the brutality of the police, with no attempt to integrate it into the film in any meaningful way.

The film's treatment of racism is more potent, perhaps because the attack on Super Soul's radio station by local authoritarian bigots actually deals with a character who the film develops and makes us care about. Super Soul may be exaggerated, an icon more than a person, but he has more personality and specificity than anyone else in the film. Elsewhere, Sarafian curiously undercuts his overall progressiveness by including a completely unnecessary scene in which two gay men attempt to rob Kowalski. This is a rather nasty anti-gay caricature that's curious in a film that otherwise seems more aligned with those outside the mainstream of society — there's real empathy for blacks, women, hippies, drug burnouts and outlaws, but it seems like in the 70s homosexuality was the last "safe" target for mean-spirited attacks, even among the counterculture.

Despite these flaws, though, Vanishing Point remains a powerful, explosive film. It slows down slightly after its opening half hour, beginning to encompass more detours from the road, with Kowalski encountering some eccentric locals along the way. He runs across a desert snake-handler (Dean Jagger) who sells rattlers to a group of faith-healers, and a hippie whose uninhibited girlfriend rides a motorcycle in the nude. There's a surreal quality to these encounters that seems to point forward to David Lynch's Americana road movie Wild At Heart: damaged and bizarre people who one can meet simply by surrendering to the lure of the road, driving through this strange territory called America. Still, the film is at its best when there are no characters, no dialogue, no attempts at story, nothing but the roar of the road, the propulsive rhythms of the vibrant soundtrack, and the endless landscape of road and desert stretching out across the screen. At these moments, this is the ultimate American road movie, an amphetamine trip with the road as its soul.

Carnal Knowledge

Carnal Knowledge is the kind of comedy where the laughs increasingly stick in one's throat; this is dangerously barbed comedy, laughter laced with poison. In fact, the film is often incredibly uncomfortable to watch, its raw-nerve examination of sexual gamesmanship and strife continually crossing the line from satirical observation to overpowering psychological reality. As a stark satire of the games that men and women play with each other, and the unreasonable expectations and competing ideas that each gender brings to relationships, there is no better or harsher film. Of course, this kind of psychological acuity is exactly what one should expect from the auspicious pairing of Village Voice cartoonist Jules Feiffer, who originally wrote this as a play, and director Mike Nichols, who adapted the script for the screen.

Split into three acts, the film follows a pair of men from their college days, to their middle age, to their aging decline, all the while tracing the ways in which these two very different men seek some ill-defined "something" from the women in their lives. In many ways, Jonathan (Jack Nicholson) and Sandy (Art Garfunkel), are direct descendants of their prototypes in Feiffer's long-running Voice comic strip: the macho tough guy Huey, and the sensitive, gentle, perennial best friend Bernard. These two characters developed naturally in Feiffer's strip from the two "types" who would continually crop up whenever his satirical pen touched upon sexual politics and the gender war. Jonathan, like Huey, is basically an asshole, a guy who cares about little besides sex, who views each woman as an opportunity for a conquest and fears being trapped in a relationship for too long. Sandy is more the Bernard type: he's sensitive, caring, an intelligent conversationalist, someone who women naturally gravitate to as friends rather than lovers. Ironically, Sandy would like to be a Huey instead, and he takes advice from his more aggressive friend, advice that surprisingly enough seems to work even when it seems like incredibly bad advice.

The film opens in the college years, when both Sandy and Jonathan are virgins looking, more than anything, to get their first score. Right from the start, the film establishes its approach with the credits, which are accompanied by the unseen friends chatting about what they'd like from a woman — a contradictory and impossible laundry list that spans from huge breasts to being bright, but not too bright. Despite these high expectations, Sandy soon meets and begins dating the pretty, intelligent Susan (Candice Bergen), who likes him but is reluctant to make their relationship too physical; she has no passion for him, and he's trapped in the Bernard cliché of the best friend. On the other hand, when Susan meets the deceptive, sneering, but oddly charming Jonathan, she definitely feels something for him: contempt for his cheerful willingness to go behind his friend's back, but also an animal attraction for him that makes her go to bed with him before she ever does with Sandy. As a result, Susan becomes trapped between the two men and their expectations for her, even as the men are wounded by her indecisiveness about them and what she wants from them. For Sandy, Susan is a revelation, a woman who opens up to him and tells him about "thoughts I never even knew I had," while with Jonathan she seems much different, more sexually open but intellectually closed-off. In a self-fulfilling prophecy, both of these self-absorbed men find in Susan exactly what they were looking for and nothing more — they certainly don't find Susan herself, only the sides of her that reflect themselves. Eventually, and absurdly, even though he's the one going behind his friend's back, Jonathan becomes the jealous one, lambasting Susan for not giving more of her inner self to him, the way she does with Sandy. Their relationship essentially ends with Jonathan screaming, in childish exasperation, "Tell me my thoughts! Tell me my thoughts!"

Susan is a victim here of Jonathan's momentary, and as it turns out fleeting, realization that there can be more to relationships than just sex. His interest in her was purely prurient at first — indeed, he only pursued her after he heard about her willingness to go further than kissing with Sandy — but she must have awakened something in him that wanted more. It's possible to read Jonathan's character throughout the rest of the film as his unconscious denial of that realization, especially in light of the scene after their breakup where Sandy and Susan get ready to go camping. Throughout the scene, Nichols keeps the camera in a tight closeup on Nicholson's face, shrouded in shadows, as in the foreground the blurry forms of the two newly recommitted lovers shift back and forth, preparing for their trip. Jonathan is silent throughout the scene, even when one of the others addresses him, and his eyes are going steely and cold; it looks like a full retreat into the Huey persona, a decision to seek nothing more than sex from women.


This kind of closeup, so potent in this scene, is a crucial aspect of Nichols' approach to the film in general. The closeup is perhaps the film's signature shot, especially tight closeups that put the focus squarely on the nuances of the performances. There is also a gender element to these closeups, in terms of the way they're used differently for the men and the women in the film. For the most part, the men are the only characters who are allowed to speak freely in these intimate closeups. Each of the two friends deliver lengthy monologues on their inner states, desires, and dissatisfaction, spoken while looking directly into a camera that seems to be just inches away. These shots place the spectator in the position of the other friend, the other half of a conversation, listening in on the most private thoughts of these people who come to seem like familiar friends even if they're both often pitiable and unlikeable. In contrast, the women's closeups are silent, impassive, revealing nothing, largely because these women are seen almost entirely through the eyes of their lovers. Neither Jonathan nor Sandy ever tries to see a woman for herself, for a complicated person with her own thoughts, ideas, desires, and human emotions. Where Jonathan sees only sex, Sandy sees an idealized, transcendent other, so far from his own sphere that she might as well be an alien; neither man sees a fellow person or equal. The closeups reflect this disparity. Susan is seen in a striking, very long closeup where she simply laughs, turning red and howling with delight at the mostly unheard banter of the unseen men offscreen, throwing her head back, squinting her eyes, looking at times like she's on the verge of crying. It's a remarkable shot, sustained for so long that there is no choice but to contemplate the essential impenetrability of this woman. What is she thinking? What does she feel for these men she's with? What does she want? They're questions that barely occur to the two men, a point that Nichols makes with understated economy simply by keeping Susan's inscrutable face onscreen for so long, without allowing her to launch into the kind of inner monologue that lets us understand the men so fully.

Later, Jonathan's lover Bobbie (Ann-Margret) gets a similar closeup, revealing nothing in a scene where she seems to be deep in thought, her mind moving in ways we can barely imagine, and which Jonathan never seems curious to find out. Bobbie is a pure sex kitten to him, with the "huge breasts" he always wanted, wild in bed and endlessly fun to be with, but somehow this still isn't enough, and he makes every effort to avoid getting "trapped" in a marriage with this fun, sexy woman. Jonathan never seems to realize that he is continually looking for women who he wants only sex from, and then growing dissatisfied with them when they don't give him more than sex. In fact, Bobbie very well might have had more to offer, but she seems cowed and discouraged by a long series of relationships very much like this one; at one point, she tells Jonathan that after the abuse she's endured he seems positively gentle. She's reduced here to speaking in an entirely generic, neutered way, a far cry from the bluntly honest monologues that the men deliver to each other. The only way she knows how to express what she wants is to say she wants to get married, an idea that seems to hold more meaning for her than its obvious connotations, and which is almost entirely abstracted from the realities of her actual relationship with Jonathan. Certainly, when she plaintively tells him this in the midst of an argument during which he has done nothing but berate and insult her, it seems absurd to think she'd actually want to marry this man. The unspoken subtext, unspoken because these men never give the women a chance to express themselves, is that marriage represents for Bobbie a stability and fulfillment that is completely lacking from any of her relationships with men. It's the same urge for an undefinable and probably unrealistic "more" that powers both male leads; the difference is that the men never allow her or any other woman they meet to express this urge. All of this is present wholly in Ann-Margret's phenomenal performance, which manages to convey both the fun-loving male fantasy and the inner turmoil of this character. In her closeup, she simply sits against a blank white wall in bed, naked and photographed from the shoulders up, slightly off-center in the frame as she thinks, her mind churning through unknown thoughts glimpsed behind her eyes.


The closeup is the film's most rigorously applied formal device, but Nichols alternates this intimate shot with, basically, two other kinds of shots which define the film's aesthetic in more subtle ways. The first of these is the two-shot, usually used in Hollywood films for romantic couples but here mostly reserved for shots of Sandy and Jonathan together. The second is a tableau-like long shot that is very theatrical in its effect, a quality that has often been cited as a knock against Nichols, who is a theater director in addition to his involvement in films, but is here used in very effective ways. This is particularly apparent in a scene between Bobbie and Jonathan, after they've had a vicious argument, and Nichols pulls back to show the couple separated by the uncrossable gulf of their own bedroom, using the full extent of the widescreen vista to emphasize the distance between the couple. In the background, the phone rings unanswered, a nagging presence on the soundtrack contributing to the scene's unresolvable tension. It's a striking use of the fusion between cinematic and theatrical modes of treating space, with the viewing angle and the spartan sets suggesting a theatrical viewpoint even as Nichols utilizes the cinema's sense of negative space to communicate his characters' alienation.

This is a dark, even angry film, especially for a comedy. There's something about Feiffer's writing that seems to translate in especially bitter, sardonic ways to the screen. In his comics, his humor often seems more tempered, more wryly satirical, with the darker undercurrents more subdued. There are darker touches in his cartooning, like the famous Voice strip where a woman goes into the country to smell the flowers, only to be killed by a shotgun that's growing there instead, but even his darkest strips aren't quite as pointed and unfiltered as this hate-filled relationship comedy or the even more bitter Alan Arkin-directed Little Murders. It may just be that Feiffer's satire is easier to take when it's abstracted, when it's being delivered by his casually sketched cartoon figures, who seem more like whimsical pen strokes than actual people. The emotions and ideas and, yes, the humor, being expressed simply hit much harder in the context of the film's stark realism. In fact, there are scenes here that are almost unbearable in their raw, awkward humanity, like the scene where Sandy attempts to convince an unwilling but naked Susan to sleep with him for the first time. The way he's pawing at her, his earnest neediness coupled with clumsy sexual predation, makes one wonder if Nicolas Roeg had this scene in mind when casting Garfunkel for the execrable Bad Timing a decade later. In any case, Garfunkel is far better here, because far more believable; he's a normal and fairly decent guy who wants to get laid and has to (or thinks he has to) become a bit of a bastard to get what he wants. This disparity between inner and outer personae, and the corruption of male/female dynamics by warped expectations and distorted desires, is the angry indictment at the core of Carnal Knowledge.