Fascination

Fascination is a very apt title for a Jean Rollin film. Rollin's ethereal horror oeuvre revolves around the idea of fascination: fixation, obsession, fetishism, the irresistible allure of danger and death, great beauty tangled up with supernatural horror. His cinema repeatedly examines the fascination of the director and, often, his protagonists, with the strange, unsettling, eerie occurrences that haunt his movies. From film to film, Rollin wove together increasingly familiar images and themes that constitute the subject of his fascination: beautiful women naked or dressed only in diaphanous see-through gowns, gothic rural settings, vampirism, seduction, ruined castles lit by candles, secret societies that seem to flicker on the edges of the material world, trapped between states, their exact nature uncertain.

Fascination embodies so many of these fixations that it feels like an ultimate statement of the director's vision; perhaps not his best film but definitely one of his most characteristic, which is why it's also become, within this unusual auteur's cult, one of his most iconic works. The story is, in the usual Rollin fashion, extremely simple, a bare sketch of a scenario used to set up the dreamy, vaguely menacing atmosphere that is the film's true substance. The thief Marc (Jean-Marie Lemaire) betrays the rest of his criminal gang and flees their revenge, arriving at a nearly empty rural estate where the only residents are a pair of girls, Eva (Brigitte Lehaie) and Elisabeth (Franca Maï). Marc holds the girls prisoner while fending off his gang's attacks, but it soon becomes clear that if this is a hostage situation, who's the hostage and who's the captor might be the reverse of what Marc thinks.


Certainly, Marc believes that he's the one in control here, but a driving theme of the film is the exploration of power's relationship to gender and sexuality. Marc is a sneering, arrogant jerk, dominating these two girls from his position of power, waving his phallic gun around as a symbol of his sexual and physical dominion over them. Eva and Elisabeth sometimes play their expected roles, cowering in fear before him, but soon their show of fear and submissiveness gives way to a much more playful, mocking attitude, skewering his belief in his dominance, suggesting that they're really the ones in control. While taunting him with the prospect of sex, they actually go to bed together, in a scene of sumptuous softcore eroticism that could've come directly out of one of Rollin's adult productions. When Eva does give in to Marc, she's quite open about her motives: she wants to keep him there until nightfall, using her sexuality to lure him into what increasingly seems like a deadly trap.

There's clearly something sinister going on here, even if the hapless, arrogant Marc laughs off all the premonitions and warnings about the fate awaiting him once midnight strikes. Elisabeth, who seems slightly less unhinged than her compatriot, warns Marc that he should flee, that something horrible is in store for him that night. Anyone who enters the orbit of these girls is trapped within "the universe of madness and death," she says, clutching the gun she's stolen from their guest. Later, the girls are joined by more members of what seems to be a blood-drinking, Satan-worshipping club of wealthy bourgeois women, but Marc still doesn't catch on. The audience is a few steps ahead of him anyway, having been warned more explicitly by the gorgeously morbid prologue in which these women daintily drank ox blood from goblets while standing in a slaughterhouse, their frilly dresses dragging in the bits of cartilage and bloody flesh strewn across the reddened floor. The leader of this club, Hélène (Fanny Magier), warns Marc, "Beware, death sometimes takes the form of seduction," but even then he treats this night like a game, so secure in his masculine superiority that it never occurs to him that he's not in control, that he's become the prey rather than the predator.


The film's most enticing predator is undoubtedly Eva, who is especially terrifying in a sequence where she methodically, ruthlessly kills the members of Marc's gang, stabbing one man in the side during sex and then prowling after the others with a black robe billowing around her naked body, a scythe held threateningly in front of her. She's a sexy, seductive grim reaper, blonde death with a vicious blade that easily outdoes Marc's puny gun as far as penetrative phallic imagery goes. Rollin had first featured Lahaie in one of his bills-paying adult film productions, then given her a small but unforgettably intense role in his moody zombie classic The Grapes of Death.

Here, she magnifies and extends the sexy insanity of her part in that film, killing with her mouth locked in a horrible/alluring rictus grin, baring her teeth and smiling as she slashes throats with her reaper's blade. There's something feral about her, an animalistic quality that somehow only makes her more appealing, and more unsettling. Rollin captures her in evocative closeups in the moments before the kill, her eyes above the blade, her lips below it. Rollin seems to be asking, which is more dangerous, the scythe or the girl who wields it? Her alluring lips, her piercing eyes, they're as deadly as a knife to the guts, and with her, one leads to the other — her beauty and sexuality are lures into death and oblivion.

The strange attractiveness of death and perversion are at the core of this film, which perfectly captures the fascination that these beautiful, deadly women hold for their victims. Rollin makes the girls and their surroundings ravishing: the mansion, lit by candelabra, is lavishly decked out with fancy furniture and paintings, the surfaces of which Rollin's camera frequently probes whenever it's not being distracted by the lovely anti-heroines. Sensual and chilling in equal measures, Fascination is a nearly comprehensive catalogue of Rollin's obsessions and themes, exploring the appeal of the macabre and the impotency of male power through this hypnotically languid horror tale.

Bush Mama

Bush Mama is director Haile Gerima's raw, potent depiction of poor black life in 1970s Los Angeles. Shot in grainy black-and-white, the film is a blend of near-documentary street scenes, raw amateur acting, and avant-garde techniques. The loose narrative focuses on Dorothy (Barbarao), a jobless woman who subsists on welfare to raise her daughter after her husband T.C. (Johnny Weathers) is sent to prison for a crime he didn't commit. With nothing to do and no hope of finding a job — she waits in the unemployment office for hours only to be told there's nothing for her — she simply wanders the neighborhood, reads letters from T.C., and talks with other neighborhood women. She's pregnant with her second child, but because she's on welfare and her husband isn't around, she's under constant pressure from government officials to have an abortion. The letters she gets from T.C. reflect his increasing radicalization and his desire to overthrow a system that seems stacked against blacks in so many ways. She hears some of the same ideas around the neighborhood, particularly from a woman who brings her radical posters from rallies, depicting an African woman with a baby on one arm and a gun in her other hand (the "bush mama" of the film's title) and another poster showing the hole-filled body of a man who'd been shot 25 times by the police.

Dorothy doesn't really understand these radical ideas, though she feels some sympathy for them on a gut level. However, she's often swayed by the brash Molly (Cora Lee Day), who has nothing but mockery and contempt for radical ideas about "togetherness" or African identity. Over the course of the film, in between scenes of ordinary domestic life, Dorothy grapples with this debate over radicalization, vacillating between those who want to do something to fight an oppressive system and those, like Molly, who can't think beyond the day-to-day. By the end of the film, Dorothy, facing the camera in front of the poster of the African mother, has been fully awakened — through a harrowing and horrific series of events — to the necessity of systemic change. She's been radicalized, and to reflect this transition she's finally removed the bushy wig that she wore throughout the film, revealing the sparse, tightly coiled dreadlocks hanging off her scalp underneath. The symbolism is obvious: she's no longer hiding anything, she's embraced her true self, which is why Gerima shoots her in closeup with the "bush mama" poster behind her. He racks the focus, so that first Dorothy's face is in focus, and then the poster is, and then he freezes the shot, while on the soundtrack Dorothy reads a passionate letter she wrote to T.C., telling him that she's finally ready to hear and understand what he's been telling her.

Gerima relates this tale of one woman's gradual awareness of her place within a larger societal struggle with a loose, eclectic style. The film has an elliptical collage structure in which conversations, monologues addressed to the camera, and everyday moments are stitched together with connective scenes of Dorothy walking around the neighborhood or sitting at her window, lost in thought. The soundtrack is also a collage, combining snippets of dialogue and music into an associative portrait of ghetto life: bits of dialogue or radio broadcasts are looped and repeated, and the occasional song with lyrics reflects the events of the narrative. The opening of the film consists of several minutes of slice-of-life footage from around the neighborhood — the police arresting a man, people walking, a purse-snatching kid — accompanied by a dense soundtrack of street sounds, pulsing music and loops of detailed questions excerpted from welfare interviews.


Throughout the film, there are sporadic bursts of violence — men being beaten or shot down right in the streets by the police — that seem as ordinary as anything else that happens in the streets. It's just another part of the backdrop, not exactly accepted but certainly expected. Again, Gerima shows some progress in Dorothy's reactions to these events, so that by the end of the film, the sight of a black man being gunned down in the street outside her home causes her to bury her head and sob, whereas earlier she'd shown little emotional involvement at all in these routine bursts of violence. These scenes are also setting the groundwork for the absolutely devastating final act of the film, in which the violence of the streets and the police directly infiltrates Dorothy's home.

This is an intense and emotionally draining film that's all about the toll that systemic racial oppression and poverty take on those who live within this system. Some of the most poignant, poetic moments come from T.C.'s letters to Dorothy, which he reads aloud while facing the camera, speaking to the audience as though addressing Dorothy. In one of these letters, he laments the way that prison is sapping the vital, lively parts of his personality that he once treasured: "every time I crack a joke, to test if that part of me is still alive, I never can make it." Even humor is destroyed by the injustice that families like T.C. and Dorothy's must endure. It's especially cruel that T.C. is arrested, early in the film, right before a promising job interview that they'd hoped would finally change things for their family. One moment, T.C. and Dorothy are enthusiastically talking about finally having some money, maybe being able to move somewhere nicer, and then Gerima cuts to T.C. being led through the prison by a guard. The circumstances of his arrest, which are predictably unfair, aren't explained until the very end of the film, which only enhances the sense of how arbitrary it all is.

Gerima's greatest accomplishment with Bush Mama is making a deeply political, angry, even polemical film that rarely feels like merely a collection of slogans. The film's politics are rooted in the circumstances of everyday life, in the injustices that occur daily in poor black neighborhoods. The film has a real political/social message to send, contained in its dialogues and monologues about black togetherness and radicalization, but it delivers this message primarily by focusing on the tangible emotional and physical effects of racial prejudice, police violence, and systemic poverty.

Love On the Run

Love On the Run is the final installment in François Truffaut's series of Antoine Doinel films. For this goodbye to his most famous character, and to the series that he inaugurated with his debut feature, Truffaut offered a recapitulation of everything that had come before, a self-conscious trawl through the highlights of Antoine's onscreen life. The film is littered with snippets of other films, scenes from the previous Doinel adventures that keep bubbling up from the thoughts of various characters. These scenes from other movies are presented as memories, an appropriate metaphor since they are memories, presumably, for the audience as well, memories of other movies seen, memories of this character's previous screen adventures, of what he and the rest of the cast looked like nine years ago, or eleven years, or seventeen, or a full twenty years ago, when the actor Jean-Pierre Léaud and the character he played were both only fourteen, a rebellious kid struggling with quarrelsome, inconsistent parents and the strict discipline of school. These films have always been about constantly building on the foundation of the past, and the previous films in the series already contained echoes of the earlier works, references to Antoine's previous adventures and to the audience's memory of his earlier screen incarnations. Here, the device is taken to its logical conclusion, the subtle echoes and parallels replaced by literal — and liberal — quotation.

When Truffaut last checked in with Antoine, in 1970's Bed & Board, he was married to Christine (Claude Jade), and that film ended, after some marital difficulties and infidelity, with the couple's moving reconciliation. It's thus purposefully jarring that Love On the Run opens with Antoine waking up with another woman, Sabine (Dorothée), who has the same slender, nice girl prettiness as Christine. The opening scene, in which the couple playfully banter and spar, until Sabine finally turns off the light and tackles Antoine, suggests that Antoine still hasn't changed, that he's still unsettled, flighty, always looking for something different and winding up with variations on the familiar. He's never quite grown up, and throughout the film he's being dissected, analyzed, his routines and follies mocked and prodded. Everyone has his number down by now: that he's a hopeless romantic until the moment when he gets what he thinks he wants, that he's still haunted by his past and especially by his unhappy childhood, that he has a rather pessimistic view of love and relationships. When the film opens, he's on the verge of getting divorced from Christine, he's embroiled in his latest in a long line of passionate affairs with Sabine, and he's ripe for a reappraisal of his life so far.


The film thus takes Antoine, and those around him, on a trip back through his life as it has unfolded on screen. Characters from Antoine's past return, revisiting earlier moments in his life. Most notably, Antoine again meets his first love Colette (Marie-France Pisier), the girl from the short Antoine and Colette, in many ways the template for all of Antoine's later romantic adventures even though she always resisted his amorous advances. She's now a lawyer, divorced like Antoine, and also mourning the death of her child. Her reunion with Antoine allows her, through reading his autobiographical novel, to reminisce about their pasts and to think about where their lives are headed now. Colette's story in this film parallels Antoine's, to the extent that she becomes a costar with him, two people with a shared past headed along similar trajectories. Just as Antoine struggles in his relationship with Sabine, unable to convey to the girl just how much he loves her, Colette has an on/off romance with the book store owner Xavier (Daniel Mesquich) who, it turns out, is Sabine's brother. Her story and Antoine's thus come together, as both of them are trying to shrug off their pasts and move forward with a new love. As Antoine tries to come to terms with his immaturity and his hang-ups, Colette is still haunted by the death of her child (a detail that's foreshadowed early on but isn't revealed until late in the film) and her uncertainty about her feelings for her lover. This film, mirroring Truffaut's second Antoine story, is about Antoine and Colette, but this time it's not about their failed romance, but about their parallel romances with other people.

This film is refreshing in that it abandons the cheesy humor of the last two Antoine Doinel installments, Stolen Kisses and Bed & Board, focusing instead on the pathos and emotion of Antoine the perpetual man-child, always just on the cusp of adulthood, always learning lessons that, one suspects, he may forget just as quickly. Love On the Run is moving because it provides a cathartic final look at Antoine's life, his mistakes and mishaps, and because it gives him a chance to correct some of those failings. At one point, Antoine runs into Lucien (Julien Bertheau), the man he saw kissing his mother in The 400 Blows, and apparently the man who went on to become her longtime lover. Lucien provides Antoine with a softer, more sympathetic view of his mother, conveying to the touched young man that even if she was never quite able to show it, she did love Antoine. Lucien takes Antoine to his mother's grave, and her face, preserved as she had looked in The 400 Blows, is briefly superimposed into the film, a ghostly projection from the cinematic past providing some closure to Antoine's unhappy childhood.

And also, of course, to Truffaut's, since Antoine's troubled childhood was so thoroughly autobiographical for the director. This is an especially autobiographical film for Truffaut, as evidenced by the liberal quotations from his own previous work, not just the Doinel films but Day For Night (which is evoked by a flashback of Antoine's affair with a woman played by Dani, with situations and dialogue derived from the earlier movie) and Une belle fille comme moi, which Truffaut lightly mocks by having his characters comment on it. He also nods to his fellow New Wave filmmaker Eric Rohmer by having Christine and Dani's Liliane draw sketches for Rohmer's Perceval le Gallois, thus acknowledging the more adventurous, experimental path traveled by some of Truffaut's New Wave contemporaries while he went on to make mainstream thrillers and comedies and love stories.


Love On the Run, of course, is stuck in the past, but it's not necessarily a bad thing. The film's relentless quotation is often moving, though at times Truffaut goes overboard, especially when he excerpts such long scenes from his previous films that one nearly forgets the surrounding present-day material that prompted these flashbacks. The story of Love On the Run itself is minimal, and the flashbacks often overpower the new material. But Truffaut makes interesting use of his structure, inserting several flashbacks to scenes that didn't exist in the previous films, scenes that might be excerpted from some never-made film that fills in the blanks in between Bed & Board and Love On the Run, like Antoine's affair with Liliane, and the death of Colette's child, and the start of Antoine's romance with Sabine.

The film's final act is especially moving and charming, built on a playful foundation of coincidences and contrivances, like Colette's meeting with Christine, which provides the impetus for one of the film's very best scenes. It's wonderful to see these two women who Antoine loved so intensely converge at the apartment of Antoine's latest love. The two women sit on a bench together and talk, sharing stories of heartache and humor, commiserating about the man they both knew at very different times in his life and in very different ways, laughing about his follies and his idiosyncrasies. It's a delightful and oddly emotional scene, a wry look at Antoine from outside his own self-involved bubble, and the women laugh together, intervene one last time in Antoine's latest romantic folly, and then move on to their own lives without him. This sets up the romantic finale, in which Sabine and Antoine, after reconciling — the way Antoine and Christine had reconciled at the end of Bed & Board — speak into a mirror, delivering lines that might as well be spoken directly to the camera, since they constitute the last word on Antoine and the implicit moral of this final film. It's an acknowledgment that nothing is certain, that life is a constant process of upheavals and changes, and that despite this lack of permanence the best thing to do is to approach each new adventure, each new love, each new career, pretending that it will last forever. What a great way to say goodbye to Antoine.

Who's Who

Who's Who is one of six TV films that director Mike Leigh made for the BBC television series Play For Today. It's an acerbic, biting class comedy, nastily funny in its portrayal of the class divisions between employees of different social levels at a stock firm. Leigh satirically observes the profound disconnect between the low-level workers in their middle-class lives and the upper echelons with their full social calendars. Alan (Richard Kane) is one of the lower workers, but he's obsessed with the British royal family and the upper classes. He writes letters to anyone he can think of — the royals, various celebrities, politicians, even famous doctors if they're connected to the peerage — asking for autographs and inscribed photographs, and he files the results in a cabinet where he stores these treasured artifacts. He's infected with a profound class envy, worshiping those with an upper class name or even the slightest whiff of class status. It's his way, perhaps, of coping with what seems to be otherwise a very unsatisfying life, with his staid office job and his dowdy wife April (Joolia Cappleman) who's obsessed with her copious cats. While he sits at work listening to the upper-class managers talking about their busy weekends, their dates and dinner parties, his idea of an important engagement is a TV program he wants to watch, so it's no wonder that he idolizes the upper class and gathers any scraps he can get from that arena of privilege and fame, as though his drawer full of autographed pictures could convey some of that classy aura to him by proximity. He even keeps, in a place of privilege, pinned on his wall, the letters of rejection from the highest members of the royal family: it's obvious that he's deeply impressed by the implication, in these letters from secretaries and royal functionaries, that to sign a letter for a "fan" would lower the queen or the duke or whoever. Even his rejection by the upper class is a reason to celebrate them, to venerate them even more.

Mostly, though, Alan sees those above him in a very rosy light. Speaking about one of his superiors at work, he tells his wife, "he's a very charming man, once asked me the way to the office toilet." In fact, in an earlier scene, the man obviously couldn't wait to get away from Alan, answering his nosy questions with strained politeness and then hurrying away as soon as possible, which doesn't stop Alan from presenting the whole incident to his wife as though he'd had a lovely chat with the man while walking to the train station together. Leigh clearly sees Alan as a hopelessly pathetic character, ridiculous for his aspirations, for his desire for any least contact with those above him socially. He's laughable because he ascribes some kind of sacred importance to the idea of class, buying into the heavily stratified British society with its sharp divisions between different levels.

One of the film's most painfully funny scenes is the lengthy sequence where a society woman visits Alan and April's house to buy a kitten from April. While the woman is there, a photographer named Desmond Shakespeare (Sam Kelly) is also bustling around, setting up his lights and camera equipment for a photo shoot of the cats. In the midst of this chaos, Alan sees the opportunity to present himself as a man of culture, and he hurriedly puts on a dressing gown and fancy accoutrements, then tries to engage the woman in polite conversation even as the photographer keeps scrambling around them, setting up, and April keeps telling the potential buyer about problems with litter boxes, diet, spaying and defecation, despite the obvious fact that the woman couldn't care less, that she knows that she is certainly never going to personally deal with the animal, that it will be her servants who do all that work. The woman nods and laughs with badly feigned politeness at Alan's conversation, and when she leaves he pronounces her "charming," his favored word for the representatives of the upper class, even though in fact she'd been far from charming, even though she'd actually been looking at the house, and Alan, and everything around her as though she was disgusted, and winced whenever she was offered a drink. The whole scene is absurd and funny in its dark, embarrassing way. When Alan asks the photographer, "by the way, you do know there was a famous writer called Shakespeare?" it's just another sign of Alan's desperation for any hint of contact with something beyond his pitiful life, his pitiful desires. The photographer simply deadpans, "yes, I've heard of him," and then later, when he's leaving, is stunned and exasperated by Alan's request for an autograph, disgusted, much as the society woman herself had been, by this particularly blatant and ridiculous starfucker.


To juxtapose Alan's social ambitions with the lives of those he wishes he could be, Leigh intercuts Alan's story with scenes from a dinner party held by the socially connected Nigel (Simon Chandler) and Giles (Adam Norton). The pair invite Anthony (Graham Seed), a boss at the company where Giles and Alan both work, along with two girls, Samantha (Catherine Hall) and Caroline (Felicity Dean). The dinner party provides another study in social divisions, as even within the upper class circles that these people all travel in, there are obvious hierarchies: Nigel, Giles' roommate, is more like a servant than a friend, preparing dinner for everyone and generally getting treated with polite distance. The conversation at the dinner table is shallow and pointless: these people have nothing to say except where they've been on vacation, what other socially connected people they've seen or not seen, whether they like to hunt or ride horses or ski. They talk about who they know, who they've met, where they've been — in that, they're not so different from Alan, who's similarly obsessed with namedropping.

The only point at which the conversation actually touches on something real is when these upper class snobs discuss punk. Samantha, it seems, is a punk sympathizer, at least in her shallow way: she's adopted some of the dress of the punk style, and she giggles at the provocations of the movement. She likes to shock, and in her circles probably the best way to shock is to make some gestures towards a populist movement of noisy provocateurs. She wears a jacket with a few buttons pinned to it, and when she walks in Nigel asks her, "what is it, punk? Where are the safety pins?" Everyone laughs: these people, only a few years into punk's peak period, have already grown accustomed to the movement enough to see it as just another fashion trend, a costume to be appropriated, tossed on lightly. It doesn't seem to be much more than that to Samantha. She likes that it offends people, that it shocks; it fits with her giggly, sexually suggestive persona, her garish makeup and leering smile. It never occurs to her, or to any of the other partygoers, that there might be a class component to it, that the anger and provocation of the punks were in part responses to the very class inequities chronicled in this film. The others only see it as "offensive," parroting Anthony's word for it, none of them seeming to have any clue what punk even is.

Leigh's eye for this milieu is acute as ever. He's always been a potent observer of class, of how people live their lives. His aesthetic here is unobtrusive, alternating between slightly aloof, distanced observation — as in a sequence where Leigh's camera sits at a quiet distance, watching the absurdity of these upper class buffoons trying to iron out the proper seating for a dinner party — and abrupt, in-your-face closeups like the one that pushes uncomfortably up against the shrill, desperate face of April as she tries to impress her potential buyer. This is a darkly funny film about the ugly and pathetic facts of life within a restrictive class system that cleaves people from one another, sectioning them off behind "codes" like the one that Anthony says governs his behavior. If this is control, if this is order, one thinks, then the chaos and anarchy of punk that Anthony so fears starts to look more and more attractive.

Graduate First...

Maurice Pialat's Graduate First... is an incisive portrait of small town life for a group of young friends waiting to take the bac, the test that's necessary to get a degree and, in theory at least, greater job opportunities. In practice, this last ritual of youth seems like a formality, increasingly meaningless in an atmosphere where there are few jobs, few real opportunities, for these kids who have no idea what comes next. As usual, Pialat's offhand realism gives the impression of real intimacy with these characters; the cast is large, but each of these young people comes across as complex and vibrant, each coping in his or her own way with the frightening onset of supposed maturity, the end of youth marked by a portentous test, after which no one's quite sure what to do next.

Élisabeth (Sabine Haudepin) is well-known for going around with all the guys, but she finally settles down when she meets Philippe (Philippe Marlaud), who becomes her first "real" boyfriend. Bernard (Bernard Tronczak) is similarly promiscuous; he loves all the girls and sleeps with all of them, never quite letting go even after he's broken up with them. There's also Bernard's best friend Patrick (Patrick Lepcynski), who's always trying to smooth things over for his friend, and who's never quite able to get a girl of his own, and Patrick's sister Valérie (Valérie Chassigneux), who wants to be a model. There's also Agnès (Agnès Makowiak), one of Bernard's former girlfriends who clearly still loves him, and who he still feels real affection for, even though she's marrying Rocky (Patrick Playez) instead. It's the kind of circle of friends where everyone has slept with everyone and remains friends afterward. Pialat's observational style, lingering around the edges of these friendships and love affairs and loose groupings, captures the uncertainty of youth, the sense that these young people are making decisions that will affect the rest of their lives, and yet they have no real guidance, no real idea of how to proceed.

Couples break up and reform, the girls move from guy to guy, and at times the whole group seems like one big amorphous pile — literally in a scene where they rent out a hotel room to smoke joints, and they all lie on the beds, tangled up together, a few couples forming within the general crush of bodies but mostly just existing as a group of friends, all intimate with each other. Pialat captures snatches of the individual stories playing out here — Élisabeth's uncertainty about whether she wants the safe, comfortable existence the likable Philippe offers her; a café owner's (Christian Bouillette) lecherous pursuit of the young girls; Agnès' unhappiness in her marriage and longing for the perpetually unfaithful Bernard; Patrick's desire to move to Paris to be on his own; Philippe's jealousy of Élisabeth's semi-innocent flirtations with other men — and moves deftly from one story to the next within this milieu. The kids have the example of their parents to look to, none of whom seem too happy, or too unhappy either, but the younger generation isn't sure they want this preordained path to maturity. They see in front of them only boring jobs and boring marriages, even if they do pass the bac and get their degrees.

Pialat is a profound chronicler of working class life. These struggles, these uncertainties, seem real and potent. There is no exaggeration, no melodrama, only the quiet realization that life, which seems so limitless and fun as a child, is somewhat tougher and sadder once one progresses into adulthood. No wonder these kids — and they still seem like kids, all so young and fresh-faced — want to prolong their immaturity as long as possible. Love is exciting, of course, and Pialat captures beautifully the fresh wonder of love, the breathless exchanges of kisses, the wonder of being close to another person. He also captures, with equal candor, the way such exchanges quickly become routine, the way these young people are constantly searching for something new once the spark dies down. There is nothing sadder than the way Pialat subtly, without any explicit words, depicts the settling of Élisabeth and Philippe's initially fervent relationship into something much calmer and tamer. They love each other, and she's proud that he's the first guy she's ever wanted to take home to meet her parents — but then she seems to be annoyed by the fact that her mother (Annick Alane) takes so completely to Philippe, who's eager to please and begins doing chores around the house. Élisabeth wanted Philippe to be accepted but didn't want to feel like her mother preferred him to her own daughter, treating him as though he was Élisabeth's brother rather than her boyfriend. It's a paradox that Pialat never makes explicit but portrays entirely through the subtlety of the way Élisabeth looks at Philippe, initially with desire but soon enough with a kind of subdued affection, occasionally tinged with annoyance.


Despite the sadness of many of these stories, Pialat's sense of humor is apparent throughout, and there's charm and joy in these characters as well as trepidation and insecurity. They like to have fun, and Pialat's camera has fun watching them, whether it's the two girls taking turns sliding down a banister in the background of one shot, or the nearly sexual enthusiasm with which Agnès devours a pastry, or the clamor of conversation and joking that takes over the soundtrack whenever the whole crowd gets together. The character of the aging café owner is another rich vein of humor, as his out-of-touch attempts to fit in with the younger crowd only make him seem so awkward and strange. At one point, he picks up two girls and buys them lunch, and is nonplussed when the whole group of friends joins them without even asking, and he's more or less forced into paying for the whole table. While the girls dance, he watches anxiously, eyeing their asses as they shake and shimmy, and his eyes are all but popping from his head with cartoonish excitement. When he joins in, comically trying to be hip and dance along, it's even funnier. Later, he goes shopping and trails along behind a middle-aged woman with a prodigious rear in tight jeans, and again he's hypnotized, so much so that he grabs a woman in a wheelchair to push along instead of his shopping cart. It's the kind of broad humor that occasionally bursts out of the naturalistic surface of Pialat's film, surprising in its willfully goofy comedy.

One also gets the sense of Pialat winking at his characters in the scene where Bernard seduces a sweet churchgoing girl (Frédérique Cerbonnet) and is thrilled when she takes off her sensible clothes to reveal a one-piece with a tiger's face stretched across her torso. It couldn't be a more on-the-nose metaphor: the girl who's sweet and innocent on the exterior but a tiger in the bedroom, the girl who's demure when Bernard meets her on the beach but asks him if he only fucks young girls as soon as she gets him back to her place. Pialat trains his camera for a moment on the girl's torso with the tiger's face snarling, its eyes on her breasts, its teeth bared on her hips, threatening to devour her mate. There's something pure and joyous about this moment, about this slightly absurd touch: it's whimsical and sexy and silly all at once.

Pialat's very first feature, L'enfance nue, had been about a young boy being passed from foster home to foster home, all too aware of how limited his life was. Graduate First..., with its title's ellipses referring obliquely to Yasujiro Ozu's early films about youth life, seems like a sequel to Pialat's debut, capturing these young people slightly later in life than the protagonist of L'enfance nue, but every bit as uncertain about what comes next. It's a question that Pialat answered many times over in his other films, of course. What comes next? Betrayal and disaffection (Police). Cyclical infidelity and romantic questing (Loulou). Mortality (The Mouth Agape). For the characters of Graduate First..., perched on the cusp of adulthood, it seems like everything that comes next is sad and disappointing, the end of the playfulness and freedom they'd enjoyed in youth. Still, Pialat leaves hope alive by the end of the film, the dim possibility that at least some of these characters can prolong their happiness, can find something beyond adolescence worth celebrating.

The Tempest

Derek Jarman's film of The Tempest, William Shakespeare's final play, challenges the idea of the "faithful" literary adaptation. Jarman's marvelous, light-hearted, visually evocative film is, for the most part, true to the text of Shakespeare's play, but the director builds around the text in ingenious ways, creating a dense patchwork that melds his own punk sensibility with the Bard's mystical ode to romance, revenge and redemption. The film is true to the story and structure of the play, which concerns the bitter, exiled sorcerer Prospero (Heathcote Williams), whose lordly title was stolen from him by his conniving brother Antonio (Richard Warwick) and the King of Naples (Peter Bull). Sent away with his young daughter Miranda (Toyah Willcox), Prospero becomes lord of a nearly uninhabited island, where he quickly enslaves Caliban (Jack Birkett), the animalistic son of a witch, and Ariel (Karl Johnson), an elemental spirit of the air who does Prospero's bidding in the hopes of one day earning his freedom. The play opens twelve years after Prospero's exile, when he summons a storm that causes his betrayers, Antonio and the King, to shipwreck upon his island, along with the King's son Ferdinand (David Meyer) and several retainers.

Jarman not only follows this plot fairly closely, but has his characters speaking much of Shakespeare's dialogue without alteration, in all its intricate, stylized poetry. Despite this fealty to its source, The Tempest never feels like anything less than a personal expression of Jarman's vision: a mystical, erotic, visually sumptuous work in which the sensual quality of the imagery is as important to its overall effect as the language of Shakespeare. Filled with flickering candles and ornate decorations, Prospero's island stronghold has a kind of dilapidated grandeur that's matched by the ragged period costumes of the characters. Miranda especially is the film's spirit, a sprightly nymph with a mischievous smile and the dirty beauty of a street urchin. She is the proper heiress to a kingdom but has been raised in cluttered squalor amidst Prospero's dusty libraries, in rooms where elegant furniture sits in a chaos of filth and garbage. She wanders through the castle, and through the film, with her billowing gowns strewn haphazardly around her, playing at being a princess. Her playful spirit and charm animate the film. In one great scene, she practices at descending a staircase while demurely greeting imaginary guests on each side of her — halfway down, she stumbles and falls into an abrupt sitting posture on the steps, her dirty bare feet sticking out from beneath her gown at askew angles.

It's through performances like Willcox's turn as Miranda that Jarman subtly worms his way into this old, well-known material. The acting has a spirit of play and winking slyness about it, a flippant attitude that's not disrespectful towards Shakespeare's text but rather especially attuned to the comic possibilities of these characters. Caliban is an important figure in this respect, and Birkett plays the monstrous slave with leering intensity. His introduction is unforgettable, sitting in front of a fire and eating whole, uncooked eggs, spitting out the cracked shells and letting a dribble of yolk run down his face as he does so. With his blackened teeth and wide, popping eyes, he is a ridiculous figure, a grotesque caricature. Birkett's campy performance finds its match in the duo of drunken sailors who Caliban soon finds himself involved with: Stephano (Christopher Biggins) and Trinculo (Peter Turner). Together, this comic trio attempts to lead a revolt against Prospero, but instead mostly just stumble drunkenly through a series of games of dress-up: their flamboyant performances and proclivity for donning dresses and makeup brings a homoerotic component to their conspiracy.


Jarman's wildly original perspective on this material is equally apparent in the visualization of the flashbacks involving Caliban and his sinister mother, Sycorax (Claire Davenport), who is depicted as a naked witch breast-feeding her adult son and living in a state of savagery. Many later critics have viewed Shakespeare's Tempest in terms of colonialism, with Prospero as the colonial conqueror who takes control of a native land, enslaving its inhabitants with his more sophisticated means, which they tend to view as magic. Jarman's interpretation acknowledges this modern, deconstructionist reading of the play in these scenes, in which Prospero describes himself as redeeming the island from its wild nature. He uses the language of a liberator but only offers a new kind of slavery, freeing the air spirit Ariel from Sycorax's imprisonment but forcing the spirit to obey a new master instead. Despite this nod to the interpretation of The Tempest as a colonialist text, Jarman's own vision of this material is much more in line with the playful sensibility of Shakespeare than with the political shadings layered over the text by subsequent interpreters. He's simply having fun, reveling in the myriad possibilities this play affords for striking imagery. Ariel's assault on the shipwrecked King and his party is in particular a visual tour de force: the spirit appears to them accompanied by a pair of midgets in drag, who claw and howl at the prisoners while the room spins, and Ariel weaves a spell around the group in the form of cobwebs clinging to a chandelier.

Even better is the film's climactic scene, in which Jarman definitively departs from Shakespeare for the staging of the grand ball where Prospero forgives his enemies and announces the impending wedding of his daughter to the King's son Ferdinand. Jarman surrounds this scene, the romantic climax of the film, with a dazzling array of homoerotic imagery, including a sped-up dance featuring a galloping troupe of sailors, exchanging partners and twirling in circles around the throne room. Finally, the singer Elisabeth Welch appears, shimmering in gold like a sun goddess, weaving through the room soulfully singing an upbeat variation on "Stormy Weather," smiling with grace and passing by everyone in turn, putting smiles on their faces with her beautiful voice.

It's a wonderful moment, Jarman's campy, irreverent replacement for Shakespeare's finale, in which Prospero, having used magic to forgive his enemies and send his daughter off into the world with a new husband, gives up his magic arts for good. Jarman elides these scenes, perhaps unwilling to give up magic. Shakespeare's finale has been widely interpreted as the playwright's farewell to the theater, so it's fitting that Jarman, so early in his career, should be unwilling to say his goodbyes to film in the same way. Instead, his film ends in the aftermath of a colorful party, in a room whose floor is littered with multicolored flower petals. It's a fitting closing to a film that celebrates the visual magic of the cinema as thoroughly as the magical arts of Prospero.

TOERIFC: The Tin Drum

[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 film was chosen by Jonathan of Cinema Styles. Visit his site to see his thoughts on the film and to join the main discussion.]

Volker Schlöndorff's The Tin Drum is an allegory for Eastern Europe in the period between the end of World War I and the end of World War II, a crucial period in world history that also serves as the historical setting for this dark fantasy. Young Oskar (David Bennent) is born into this troubled time, and on his third birthday, after having had enough of watching the adults carouse and act like fools — and having finally acquired the tin drum he was promised from birth — abruptly decides that he will no longer grow, will not progress from his current state for the rest of his life. Curiously enough, he actually achieves this objective, and from his third birthday on he remains exactly the same height, never varying from his tiny, bug-eyed perspective on the world, even as he grows older and the world disintegrates around him into the collective madness of Nazism.

Not that one can really blame Oskar for his purposefully arrested development: even before fascism begins developing in earnest in Germany and spilling over into its neighboring countries, the adults around this boy don't exactly provide a shining example of the life he might have to look forward to by growing up. His mother Agnes (Angela Winkler) conceived the boy with one of two men with whom she maintained a complicated love triangle throughout her life. Her cousin, Jan (Daniel Olbrychski), is passionate and sensitive, a Pole journalist with a voracious sexual appetite. But though Jan is likely Oskar's true father, Agnes winds up marrying the brutish fascist sympathizer Alfred (Mario Adorf) instead, condemning herself to an unhappy life even as she continues to cheat on her husband with her cousin. Oskar watches all this going on with a wide-eyed stare, dispassionate and intense. Oskar's voyeuristic habits and seeming disconnection from his surroundings are incredibly creepy, and Bennent's performance is a big part of this effect. Even before his vow to stop growing, he is an eerily adult little boy, with an unsettling and possibly evil quality within him. The mischievous smile that plays across his lips never quite reaches his bulging fish eyes, and there's something oddly mechanical about the way he attaches himself to his tin drum, banging on it with a clumsy but insistent rigidity. His nonstop banging forms a large component of the film's jarring, dissonant soundtrack, which is matched by the shrill, high-pitched whine of Oskar's voiceover, and by the sine-like scream he emits periodically, a scream so violent and unique it shatters any glass within range.

On its most superficial level, Oskar's decision to remain forever a child is a symbolic escape from the horrors and responsibilities of adulthood that seem so overwhelming from his child's eye vantage point. In this sense, if Oskar is a representative of the people under a developing fascist regime — childlike, ignorant, selfish, oblivious to consequences — then the film's message is obvious. Because Oskar is increasingly a petulant, nasty, self-centered little brat, almost evil in his single-minded insistence on getting his own way. He winds his rotten little path through the horrors that lead up to World War II, and along the way drives Agnes and Jan (and eventually Alfred too) to their deaths, always concerned more with his tin drum and his own contentment than in anything else that's going on around him. He's like a grim little harbinger of death, his drum beating out a funeral march for everyone around him.


And yet, if the symbolism of Oskar's condition is obvious in some ways, Schlöndorff carries the conceit through so rigorously that it ensures that the film will be much stranger, and much more difficult to grasp, than its seemingly straightforward allegorical implications would imply. Ultimately, it remains apparent that the film is an allegory, but what precisely it's allegorizing is rather hopelessly muddled. One of the film's most disturbing components is its treatment of sexuality, particularly once the voyeuristic Oskar, always appearing to be three even once he reaches the age of sixteen, begins developing a crush on Alfred's second wife Maria (Katharina Thalbach). It is, to say the least, profoundly disturbing to see young Oskar in blatantly sexual situations with this lovely young girl. The uneasy sexual charge between them progresses from the bizarre sensuality of the scenes where Oskar licks sugar from his stepmother's outstretched palm, to the even more grotesque scenes where Oskar seemingly performs oral sex on Maria and then crawls under her covers to straddle her. These scenes are disturbing in the context of the film, and even more so from the point of view of child welfare, when one inevitably wonders what the young actor might have thought or felt about all this bizarre simulated sexuality. It's unsettling in ways that stretch well beyond what's onscreen into the imagined conditions of the production itself.

It's also never quite clear how the film's twisted vision of sexuality fits in with its political allegory. The film presents sexuality as irredeemably tangled up in the miserable conditions of life, especially in the scenes between Agnes and Jan, for whom sex seems to be an escape of their own from the rigors of life. There's a joyous, passionate scene between the two of them when they meet for one of their weekly rendezvous, but when Oskar witnesses this coupling, it looks sordid and ugly in his eyes: his child's point of view is warped, distorted, with no real knowledge of adult relationships or adult sexuality. By the same token, Oskar seems ignorant of the political events happening all around him. In the film's best scene, he unwittingly disrupts a Nazi political rally by hiding under the bleachers and tapping out a rhythm on his drum. His drumming throws off the fascists' own band, who soon lose track of their rigid martial marching beat and begin deviating into flights of improvisation and independent playing, various instruments shifting out of tune with the rest of the band until they've all abandoned the march for a freewheeling medley of popular and classical songs. The rally loses its rigidity along with the music: the precisely ordered lines of saluting fascists begin breaking apart as everyone starts to dance and sway in time with the music, at first upholding their outstretched arms as they dance, but soon completely abandoning the rally's purpose and just having fun instead. It's an extraordinary, electrifying scene, a tribute to the hopeful possibility for free-spirited fun and childlike play to overcome intolerance, hatred and militaristic nationalism.

And yet so much of the rest of the film seems dedicated to squashing that very same hope. Elsewhere, Oskar's drumming provides little hope, and he is often monstrous, a hateful little beast who even contemplates stabbing Maria when she becomes pregnant (possibly with his own child). Schlöndorff packs the film with vivid, bracing, often frightening imagery, images that sear into the brain with the quality of a horrifying memory: a fisherman who uses the grisly method of casting a decaying horse's head into the ocean to catch eels; the midget circus troupe who are enlisted by the German Propaganda ministry, and who dress up in tiny Nazi uniforms, hideous doll-like caricatures of fascist officers; the hard-to-watch scenes where Agnes devises the bizarre self-punishment of methodically eating copious quantities of rather sickly-looking fish; and of course Oskar himself, pounding away at his drum with his eyes staring wildly and his mouth open wide in a shattering scream. These images are potent and unforgettable, but the film as a whole is confused and uneven, never quite adding up to more than the sum of its ill-fitting parts.

12/13: The Brood

David Cronenberg has made a great number of disturbing films in his career, but perhaps none more viscerally affecting than The Brood, a horror film that aims not so much to scare you as to turn you inside-out, to make you squirm and recoil in disgust. In most of Cronenberg's films, he aims to take internal mental and emotional processes and give them an external physicality, a presence in the world to match their invisible importance in shaping the individual's psyche. The Brood is a film of tremendous physical impact. Its climactic horror scenes elicit none of the jumpy, jittery scares that most horror films resort to in order to provoke reactions, but Cronenberg's horror is no less physical, no less manipulative. It's a creeping, crawling psychological horror, enhanced by the fact that he keeps his little beasties off-screen for so much of the film, and when they finally appear, their awkwardness only accentuates their basic wrongness.

The monsters in question are the mentally generated spawn of Nola, who's played by Samantha Eggar, in a jaw-dropping performance that vacillates from vulnerability to utter creepiness, with a third act transformation that reminds me of Ashley Judd's recent turn in Bug. Nola is being counseled by the controversial psychologist Hal Raglan (Oliver Reed), who believes that negative emotions can be channeled out of the body and manifest themselves in physical form. As it turns out, he's right, and Nola's anger grows into a brood of vicious "children" who respond to the vagaries of her mood by turning on the people she's angry with and killing them. So, basically, it's a horror film about PMS. And in some ways, it's also a viciously misogynistic portrait of motherhood and the parasitic relationship between mother and child. The film reflects a man's fear and distrust of feminine bodily processes and the uniquely privileged mother/child relationship, which is here warped into a nightmarish mockery. The horrors of childbirth, in particular, are explored in brutal detail in the final sequence, which I won't "spoil" for anyone who hasn't seen the film yet — suffice to say, it's one of the most bracing and stomach-turning scenes in cinema. In fact, Cronenberg admits that the film was directly inspired by a rather nasty divorce battle with his ex-wife, and consequently it's a film about the scars, mental and physical, imparted on us by our families and loved ones. Nola was physically beaten by her own mother as a child, and now that she's a mother herself, the suppressed rage bubbles over into her own new family.

It's a fascinating film, precisely because it couches Cronenberg's usual obsession with bodily transformation and the externalization of emotions in a much more straightforward horror context that he would create in his later films. Of course, all of Cronenberg's films might, to one degree or another, be called horror films, but few of them are rigorously scary. Most of his films are too pensive, too withdrawn from the horror of the situations or the characters involved, to really generate the frisson of sympathetic fear that good horror demands from its viewers. Perhaps because this film is so personal, and Cronenberg presumably identifies more closely than usual with its everyman hero, The Brood truly lives up to its billing as a horror flick. The film builds up a slow-burning terror that, strangely, has little to do with the monsters themselves or their actual violent actions. The creatures, though creepy in an alien sort of way, are small and child-like, and can also look faintly ridiculous bundled up in bulky children's coats with thick mittens, waddling around like overstuffed little penguins with hideous faces. So they're not scary in the way that, say, Freddy Krueger is scary. That is, they're not scary just because they're physically intimidating, or because they pose such a horrible threat — though they do rack up quite the body count for such little beasts. The terror in the film arises more from the very idea of these creatures, the knowledge that they are the external representation of ugly human feelings, that they are essentially birthed from the mind. They evoke a squirmy, almost metaphysical dread, the sense that they're somehow filthy, like thoughts that should never be aired so publicly.

This kind of uncomfortable feeling is a typical component in virtually all of Cronenberg's work. His films are not only images of people in the process of externalizing their inner worlds; he wants his audiences to question and think about their own inner worlds. His images are so provocative and over the top precisely in order to spark these examinations, to draw powerful associations between the visceral disgust he's eliciting and the primal human emotions and ideas that are linked to this disgust. In this case: motherhood, childbirth, sex, familial bonds. The film's complex psychological subtext is intimately interwoven with its images of transgressive birthing and warped motherhood, with the frightening idea that children are just the amalgamation of their parents' neuroses and anguish. In that regard, it's telling that the film ends with an image of Nola's daughter (her real one) as her father drives her home. Maybe the film's real horror is the idea subtly buried at its core, that Nola's monstrous "children" are just physically deformed variations on the internal warping of Nola's real child, who is being shaped and hurt by her parents in the same way that Nola was by her own.