Wild Reeds

In Wild Reeds, director André Téchiné dramatizes the moment right on the cusp between adolescence and adulthood, right at the moment when teens are struggling to define themselves, to cope with burgeoning sexual desires and decide what they want from life, where they're heading and what they'll be doing in the future. The film sets this awakening against the backdrop of the Algerian War, as so many French films have, juxtaposing the passage into adulthood with the loss of innocence represented by the violence and political turmoil of Algeria.

Téchiné renders this story with a wan and somewhat faded color palette, like an old photograph, worn and frayed by the nostalgia accrued in the decades between this 1962 summer and the film's production. Téchiné himself would have been 19 in the year the film is set, suggesting that he's drawing on his own experiences, his own memories of the discomfiting intimacy between his own adolescence and the background of war and confusion against which it occurred.

The film is elegant and delicate, the camera gently tracking around the quartet of teenagers at the story's core. There's François (Gaël Morel), who's starting to realize that he's gay, nursing an intense desire for his schoolmate Serge (Stéphane Rideau). François is also the platonic kind-of boyfriend of Maïté (Élodie Bouchez); they've been friends since childhood and are thought of as though they're dating even though nothing has ever happened between them. This neat triangle — Serge desires Maïté, who says she doesn't care about François' sudden realizations about himself, even though she's clearly shocked — is complicated by the presence of Henri (Frédéric Gorny), an arrogant and elitist youth who's immersed in the news from Algeria, where he lived until just recently.

Algeria and the politics surrounding it haunt the film, and political convictions are one of the things that these young people must come to grips with as they try to decide who they are. Henri is a far-right partisan of the French nationalist terrorist group the O.A.S., whose activities are mentioned frequently on the radio news reports that Henri's always listening to. Maïté, like her mother (Michèle Moretti), is a Communist, though one senses that she doesn't share her mother's absolutist conviction in the cause. Maïté's mother, a schoolteacher, is such a partisan that she hands out grades in her English class based on the political ideas expressed in papers, and there are references to Maïté's father leaving them because she was immersed in her cause to the exclusion of all else.


The film's dominant composition is the two-shot, as the young people pair off into different couplings, different combinations, as though experimenting to see what works. Téchiné captures them in intimate two-shots, their faces overlapping and close together, electric tension suspended in the scant space between them, their uncertainty and confusion passing between them in the glances they give each other, the hesitant intimacy of their dawning desires. For most of the film, Téchiné never even brings all of the characters together, restricting them to these alternating pairs and quasi-couples. Occasionally, Henri tries to horn in on the furtive intimacy between Serge and François, but not until the very end of the film do all the characters come together, first as a cheerful threesome that recalls Band of Outsiders or Jules and Jim, and then as a full quartet — though they quickly pair off again before the finale suggests that they're all heading in separate directions anyway.

The film is all about the contrasts and resonances between their fresh young faces. Serge, befriending François, tells him that they'll go well together because they're such different "types," and indeed they are, François delicate and boyish in contrast to the broad, tanned working class face of the farmer Serge. The sensuality between them is enhanced by the differences in their types, which is a way of saying the differences in their backgrounds, the differences in their economic class — and thus the differences in their likely futures, as Serge ultimately decides that all he wants is to stay on his family's farm, while François seems bound to graduate and head off to more intellectual pursuits.

This uncertainty about the future is what makes the film so poignant, so gently moving. It's a touching, emotionally complex film with a real sensitivity to nuance: in one scene, the confused François pays a visit to the only gay man he knows, the owner of the town's shoe store, and though the man seems uncomfortable talking about his sexuality and can't help François, Téchiné grants the man a parting closeup that is searing in its directness, capturing the expression of yearning, confusion, and recognition on his face as he watches François walk away. That shot makes it clear that the man desperately wants or needs to talk to someone, but can't find the words any more than François can.

Téchiné treats his themes with delicacy and grace, never forcing an epiphany or trying too hard to resolve the ambiguity of these relationships. Instead, the film is warm and sensuous, capturing with precision and understated emotion the time in life when everything seems hazy, when political convictions and sexual desires and ambitions about life and love and work are all up in the air, and anything might still be possible. The film, though, is about the closing of those horizons, the narrowing down of all possibilities to those few that seem appealing and likely.

Sátántangó

Béla Tarr's Sátántangó is an extraordinary film, gorgeous and haunting and full of unforgettable images. Even at seven-and-a-half hours long, the film is never less than enthralling, and each deliberately framed and choreographed shot is jaw-dropping, even when nothing much is actually happening within the frame. Though Tarr isn't very concerned with narrative, there is a story of sorts here, a loose one divided into twelve chapters that overlap one another chronologically and show the same scenes from different points of view as different characters' stories intersect over the course of a couple of days. The film is set in a tiny rural Hungarian village at the start of the autumn rainy season, which the villagers are now prepared to endure, miserably, until springtime. The town is grim and ugly, a few crumbling buildings spread out across the barren, dismal countryside. The place is soggy and knee-deep in mud, and it's constantly pouring, rain streaming down the grimy windows and soaking the villagers whenever they trudge through the muddy fields that surround their homes. As the film opens, the villagers have sold off their communally owned cows and are planning to split the money and abandon the village, all of them heading off to their own personal escapes.

Naturally, they're all scheming against each other, some of them planning to steal all the money and escape on their own, until their plans are all disrupted by the return of Irimiás (Mikhály Vig, who also provides the film's eerie, minimalist music), a messiah-like con artist who'd been reported as dead a year and a half ago, but who had really been in prison with his friend Petrina (Putyi Horváth). This duo's return to town disrupts all the villagers' schemes, filling them with mingled hope and fear: they know that Irimiás will have some grand plan for their money, but it's not clear if they welcome this opportunity to be shaken out of their ruts or mourn the likely loss of their long-awaited windfall to the rogue's latest brainstorm.

This tense anticipation dominates the film's first half. Irimiás and Petrina do appear in one sequence early on, but other than this, they're spoken of more than seen for the first several hours of the film. Tarr observes how the villagers await the arrival of the mysterious duo, going about their dull and listless lives in the meantime, boiling over with frustration and confusion as they wrestle with their feelings about the returning troublemakers. Tarr's preference for long, unbroken takes — either static or slowly tracking — enhances the elongated expectation. The film is "about" its duration as much as anything, about the way time passes, about the long dead moments and empty spaces that make up a day. The film's epic seven-and-a-half hour length places the viewer in the same position as the villagers, enduring long periods of stasis and nothingness, long temps mort accompanied only by the buzzing of a fly or the loud, repetitive ticking of a clock in a depressing local bar.


The film opens with a long shot of a field of cows, the soundtrack dominated by their mooing and a droning tone in the background. Eventually, the camera begins to track sideways, away from the field, gliding along past a long wall, examining the crumbling plaster and cloudy, filthy windows that offer no view into the rooms inside. The camera's movement is slow and steady, and when it finally reaches the end of the wall, it looks out again at the cows, milling around in a courtyard in the distance, watching until they all wander away, out of sight around the corner of a building, leaving behind only a chicken strutting across the muddy open space until the image fades to black. It's a fitting introduction to the patient, unshowy aesthetic of Tarr's epic, its careful observation of the minutiae of daily life and its attentiveness to the matter of time.

Later, Irimiás and Petrina wait in a town office, and Irimiás comments that there are two clocks, neither of them correct. He poetically connects this temporal confusion to the "the perpetuity of defenselessness," before adding, "We relate to it as twigs to the rain: we cannot defend ourselves." That's the essence of Tarr's perspective on time, this relentless forward flow that cannot be paused or halted, that is always charging onward regardless of what's happening in any individual life. The emphasis on the passage of time is so essential because one of Tarr's key themes here is stagnation: time passes, and yet nothing happens, everything remains the same, the people of this town continue to wallow in misery and boredom, to simply pass the time.

Futaki, dreaming of fleeing the town with his share of the money, wants only to rent a farm where he can do nothing all day, only watch "this fucking life" go by while he soaks his feet. When Irimiás and Petrina return to town, their young hanger-on Horgos (András Bodnár) fills them in on what the town is like now — which is to say, that nothing's changed, that everything is exactly as it was a year and a half ago when they left. In this context, Tarr's deliberately eventless static views and snail-paced tracking shots accentuate the numbing, narcotic pace of everyday life in a place where nothing happens, and where even the wildest dreams of the inhabitants are boring and routine.


At other times, though, Tarr finds strange beauty and even heroism in the mundane. A drunken old doctor's (Peter Berling) trip to refill a jug of fruit brandy becomes an epic journey across the wasted countryside of the village. He staggers and stumbles through the muddy fields, the rain pouring around him, the soundtrack composed only of his heavy breathing, his raspy coughs, his burps, and the plodding steps of his feet, sticking in the mud that covers both the roads and the fields. As it gets dark, the doctor's form is increasingly hidden in the unlit night, his silhouette occasionally highlighted against the distant lights of a house or the local bar. As the doctor approaches the bar, wheezing accordion music can be heard, the first hint of the drunken revelry that will play out in later scenes inside the bar. The doctor just passes by, though, staggering into the woods, glimpsing the dark trio of Irimiás, Petrina and Horgos purposefully walking by on the nearby road. Tarr makes this simple journey across a small distance seem epic, overwhelming, taking every ounce of will and strength from this unhealthy, unhappy old man. That's another aspect of Tarr's extended duration: this is an epic of the everyday, an epic of short distances, because this town and its muddy, pathetic territory is the full extent of what these people know, it is the setting for their entire lives and thus it must be epic, because everything they are and everything they do plays out here, and a trek to get some alcohol can seem as important as Odysseus' journey home, while a short cigarette break with some plump prostitutes takes the place of Odysseus' many detours and obstacles on his way back to Ithaca.

There is an obvious political dimension to the film, as well. Tarr had wanted to adapt Lázló Krasznahorkai's novel since the 80s, but he had been unable to do so because of the threat of censorship from the Hungarian Communist government. It doesn't take much reading between the lines to see that the film is a bitter satire of the failures of communalism, exposing the ways in which, while supposedly working communally towards a common purpose, people remain atomized and isolated, concerned far more with their own selfish interests than those of the group. Irimiás himself is the most obvious symbolic representative of Communist ideas. He calls himself "a servant of a great cause" and organizes people for his schemes, but the dreams of communal success that he stirs up in others are simply smokescreens for his cons and tricks. He says he's bringing people together but he actually tears them apart and scatters them, breaking up their community under the guise of rejuvenating it. The idea of working together for a common goal is a lie, a ruse, a distraction from the essential miserableness of these people's lives. They have no sense of real control over their lives — they are defenseless, a theme that percolates throughout the film — and Irimiás' grand rhetoric gives them an illusion of power, however misguided. Really, they are defenseless before him as well.


One of the film's most notorious extended scenes is the one where a young girl (Erika Bók) tortures a cat and then kills it by putting rat poison in milk. She feels hopeless, bored, abandoned, by a family that doesn't seem to care about her much, and she takes out her own torment on her defenseless pet before killing herself as well. It's an uncomfortable sequence to watch, and not only because of its implications for the characters and themes. Tarr insists that the cat was treated humanely and not truly harmed, but it's still discomfiting to see the girl flail around, swinging the cat around with her, then trapping it in a net and shoving its head into a bowl of milk. Such moments in a fiction film always shatter the illusion of a story being acted out. It's too real, and too cruel, forcing one to think not about the cruelty of this girl, whose feelings of impotence lead her to assert her power over a defenseless animal, but the cruelty of the filmmakers who demanded that the scene be shot in this way, that these things should be done to a real, defenseless living thing.

The penultimate chapter of the film resumes the commentary on the political dimensions of Irimiás' actions. This segment consists entirely of two bureaucrats translating Irimiás' vile, hateful letter about the townspeople into more discrete and official language. Nothing can be said directly, so they have to come up with euphemisms for everything, replacing "fat sow" with "overweight," and "wrinkled worm, filled with alcohol" with "elderly alcoholic, short of stature." This sequence is rich in bitter humor, mocking the bureaucratic circumspection of these office drones while also revealing the full extent of Irimiás' deceitfulness. At the same time, Tarr focuses on the humanity of the bureaucrats, whose work — cleansing language of its richness and idiosyncrasy, reducing words to a generic gray pulp — wears them down daily. They take a break from their work at one point, sitting down away from the typewriter to have a snack, eating in silence. While they eat, they drop their businesslike demeanors, and suddenly they are just men, requiring a break from the soul-numbing stupidity of their work. When they're done eating, unfortunately, they must return to the typewriter.


Tarr often enlivens the film with subtle, bittersweet humor like this. One key sequence is the lengthy drunken dance where the townspeople, anxiously awaiting Irimiás' arrival, clumsily dance and grope one another. The scene lasts around half an hour, with the repetitive accordion music wheezing out its incessantly bouncing melody, as the revelers sway and careen off one another awkwardly. The cast was really as drunk as they seem to be onscreen, lending an air of verisimilitude to their staggering steps and lunges at one another. They seem angry one moment, joyous the next, their minds clouded, erasing themselves in this celebration. In the chapter title that precedes this segment, Tarr deems the dance the "sátántangó" from which the film takes its name, and indeed there's something apocalyptic and desperate about everyone's flailing about, their wild abandon. But it's also amusing and powerful, a rare moment of celebration in the lives of people who don't often have much to celebrate. At one point, the camera pans around the room and finds one married couple eating from opposite ends of a cheese bread, devouring it like Lady and the Tramp romantically eating spaghetti together, a hilarious and ridiculous image, if also a grossly romantic one.

Petrina is also a rich source of comedy, playing a dopey comic foil to the messianic Irimiás, even in terms of appearance. While Irimiás is striking and foreboding in his dark trenchcoat, Christ-like beard and fedora, Petrina looks like a dumpy reject from the Three Stooges, a woolen snow cap pulled down tightly over his egg-shaped head. In a mysterious scene late in the film, Irimiás, Petrina and Horgos are walking along a road through a sparsely wooded area. Suddenly, Irimiás stops and falls to his knees in the middle of the road, staring forward as though overcome with sublime religious awe. He watches as a cloud of fog rolls past, obscuring a ruined building, then blowing away in the wind. Tarr never explains this moment or the image that prompts Irimiás' awe; it's left as a beautiful and eerie image of the huckster being overcome, momentarily, by seemingly genuine sentiment. Then Petrina breaks the mood, as the trio walks away, by irreverently asking, "you've never seen fog before or what?"

Irimiás is often associated with nearly mystical, awe-inspiring incarnations of nature. In one of the film's best shots, Irimiás and Petrina walk along a road through town as garbage flies along the ground around their feet, the wind whipping paper, cardboard boxes and other debris through the narrow path between houses. It's another somewhat apocalyptic image that's strikingly beautiful as well, capturing the stark, weather-beaten conditions of this town, but also making even this barrage of trash seem graceful and elegant.


The film is packed with gorgeous, unforgettable images like this, like the remarkable shot that keeps circling around the sleeping figures of the townspeople in the manor they've moved to at Irimiás' behest. As they sleep, and the camera twirls, the voiceover recites the dreams and nightmares of the villagers, haunted in their rest by strange visions, confused erotic fantasies, and fantastic hopes. It's a deeply affecting extended shot, because Tarr's film is all about the hopes and dreams of these ordinary, downtrodden people — and the ways in which those dreams are destroyed and corrupted by the cruel world they inhabit and the societal strictures that govern even their most secret dreams.

In the film's devastating final chapter, those dreams seem to take tangible form, writing a surreal nightmare onto the landscape of the territory as Tarr returns to the elderly doctor. He once again wanders off into the landscape, but this time, instead of stolidly plodding through the muddy fields in real time, he gets swallowed up by a strange vision, chasing the distant sound of bells to a wrecked church where a mysterious and cadaverous-looking man repetitively rings a bell and shouts. It's a strange and unsettling end to a remarkable film, and the final shot, in which the doctor slowly removes every trace of light from the image by boarding up his windows, chronicles the slow process by which the film disappears into the nothingness from which it came.

The Freethinker

By the time Peter Watkins made his massive, four-and-a-half hour 1994 video project The Freethinker, he was thoroughly outside of most conventional media structures. Watkins originally planned to make The Freethinker in 1979, as a companion piece to his 1974 masterwork Edvard Munch, but after working on the project for over two years, his funding was cancelled and filming never commenced. As a result, the film was only made many years later, as a collaborative experiment conducted with the assistance of a video production class made up of Swedish high schoolers. The students, all inexperienced with film and video before the class began, handled nearly every aspect of the production: set design, costumes, acting, camerawork, lighting, even at times writing and directing. This behind-the-scenes history informs the resulting film in very deep ways, feeding into the themes about mass media, art and social reform that Watkins' script explores.

The film is nominally a biography of the Swedish playwright and author August Strindberg (Anders Mattsson), who Watkins sees as a non-conformist thinker whose radical ideas about history, religion and class caused his work to be suppressed and critiqued by the conservative institutions of his time. Watkins explicitly compares this treatment with the marginalization of his own work. It's very apparent that this examination of Strindberg's life and the conditions of late 1800s Stockholm is meant to parallel Watkins' own life and art, and what he sees as the suppression of his ideas by a mass media that has little patience for this kind of intellectual engagement.

The film is thus about its own conditions of production as much as it is about Strindberg's life and work. This is obviously a work made on a shoestring budget, in amateurish conditions. It was shot on video rather than film, and the imagery is often rough as a result, the colors muted, a long way from the grainy beauty of Edvard Munch. The sets are sparse and minimal, often looking like a bare theater stage with a few props scattered around the empty space. The dramatic scenes, both those taken from Strindberg's life and those enacted from his plays, are stagey and claustrophobic, with the camera hovering close to the actors, utilizing simple compositions that place the emphasis on the raw, heartfelt performances. This parsimonious style belies the structural and ideological complexity of the film, which is, typically for Watkins, a clear-eyed and intelligent examination of the intersections between art, life and society. As in Edvard Munch, Watkins applies a non-chronological, associative editing style that juxtaposes scenes from Strindberg's life with excerpts from his plays as well as contextual material involving contemporary political and social affairs in the world around him.


At several points, Watkins diverts from Strindberg's story to focus on the testimonies of Swedish working class people. A man working on a construction site complains that there's housing only for the rich, while the women working beside him note that they don't earn as much as the men even though they do the same work. In another scene, a family waits for a ship that will take them away from the poverty and lack of opportunities they find in Sweden, to the United States, where they hope to do better. One young woman turns towards the camera, sobbing, her face red, already regretting the necessity of leaving behind her homeland and some of her family and friends.

Such interludes help to ground Strindberg's story within the larger societal context of poverty, inequality, and unfairness, conditions that much of his work polemically rails against. Watkins adopts, as he often does, a pseudo-documentary style that speculates on what it might have been like if documentary camera crews had been on hand to question Strindberg about his ideas, to document his life and his relationships, to interview young radicals and grizzled workers in the streets about their complaints and their hopes.

At one point, Strindberg returns from exile to Sweden, facing criminal charges of blasphemy, and finds the streets full of exuberant young people celebrating his return and the boldness of his anti-orthodox ideas about religion and government. Watkins stages the scene so that it looks like a modern protest, like any number of post-1960s student movements that have taken to the streets in a celebratory mood to declare resistance. The only difference is the way the protestors are dressed. To underscore the point, Watkins inserts a title that reads, "On the same day that we filmed these scenes in 1993, the Danish police in Copenhagen opened fire on a crowd of unarmed demonstrators." The film is continually drawing such connections between past and present, suggesting that the upheavals and social changes that have taken place in the intervening years have been largely cosmetic, doing little to truly disrupt an underlying dynamic of power and control that remains solidly in place.


In one of the most remarkable sequences, a group of radical Swedish writers discuss the problems of their time and try to come up with a plan to address gender and income inequalities, both in their writing, and as a broad social reform program. They debate methods and priorities, trying to decide how best to excite public interest in child labor, women's suffrage and the plight of the poor. During this scene, Watkins inserts shots that pull back from the table around which the young writers are gathered to show the cameras, microphones and film crew clustered around them in the room, revealing the cinematic context of this discussion. Soon Watkins goes even further by shattering the film's reality entirely, placing himself onscreen in a discussion with the actors playing the Swedish writers. The actors remain in costume, but now instead of debating conditions in late 1800s Stockholm, they're addressing the modern world, the problems of the mass media, the apathy and lack of belief in progress that prevents modern reformers from having a real voice with which to reach people.

This transition neatly displays the parallels and differences between the two times, suggesting that today's problems are extensions of those of the past, part of the same struggle for equality and justice that has gone on in so many forms over the decade without the need for the struggle ever going away. The issues of the present — class inequality and control over the media — are the same ones that the radicals of Strindberg's time were interested in. In Strindberg's time, the newspapers were battlegrounds for ideas about social reform, with certain papers being sponsored by the rich and the monarchy to attack the ideas of those papers on the left. Even history itself was a site of struggle, as Strindberg's The Swedish People, which for the first time focused on the lives of common people in different eras, represented a challenge to traditional histories which focused on successions of monarchies and governments, wars and treaties, big events and big men. Predictably, Strindberg's history received almost unanimous bad reviews, because the newspapers were largely controlled by precisely the entrenched conservative interests who were threatened by a book that refocused the eye of history so radically and dramatically.


Much of the second half of the film is concerned with the contradictions of Strindberg's life and personality, particularly his late-in-life repudiation of his earlier support for feminism, and his increasingly bitter and contemptuous feelings for his first wife, Siri (Lena Settervall). One of the central questions of The Freethinker is the relationship between life and art, including the paradox that Strindberg often expressed ideas of freedom and equality in his writing that he seldom put into practice in his angry, troubled personal life. Watkins' associative editing style creates linkages between childhood incidents — particularly the cruel punishments of Strindberg's stern, overbearing father — scenes from Strindberg's dramas, and incidents from his long relationship with Siri, with whom he stayed for 15 years. During the second half of the film, Watkins also explores Strindberg's private life through confrontational staged interviews with the playwright, in which a modern interviewer, a member of the crew, hounds Strindberg about his treatment of his wife and children, provoking the writer while Strindberg repeatedly protests that there's more to it, that no one understands.

Indeed, this is a project about understanding, but Watkins grasps that it is impossible to fully comprehend a subject so remote from our own time. The film's analysis of Strindberg can only be built on the writings he and others around him left behind, the incomplete records of their thoughts and feelings and the events that shaped them. Watkins stages a group discussion of Strindberg and Siri in which an audience of men and women of all ages talk about the relationship between the playwright and his wife, grappling with the questions about feminism, creativity, gender and psychology brought up by this story. As one older man says, as a postscript to his own personal take on Strindberg, "there must be many views of Strindberg," many ways of understanding him and his work, many perspectives on the ideas he explored and the kind of man he was during his life.

This is the essence of Watkins' multifaceted approach to his subject, dealing with the complexities of Strindberg's persona and art, and the many possible ways of thinking about his life. The filmed discussion sessions represent an attempt to contextualize Strindberg in a modern setting, and to suggest the kind of active engagement that Watkins desires for his films: the in-film discussion is a model for the kinds of discussions that the film as a whole might prompt in its viewers, so that the discourse and analysis started by the film might continue afterwards.


That spirit of discussion goes hand in hand with the intensely collaborative nature of the film. Watkins worked closely with the students from his class, and credits a few of them with writing and directing certain sequences of the film. The production process recalls the utopian collaborative spirit of 1960s radicalism, the student protests and communes, the attempts at creating art communally rather than individually. Those projects, like Godard's Dziga-Vertov Group, rarely lived up to the promise of true cooperation and communal creation that they espoused. But Watkins' work here is no mere leftist dream, he's actually putting into practice these ideals of collaboration, and the result is remarkable. The film employs a mix of amateur and professional actors, though most of the leads, notably Mattsson and Settervall, were not experienced actors; Mattsson was ordained as a priest after the film was finished. The performances are almost uniformly exceptional, especially since Watkins asks the actors to do more than simply play a role, but also to be present as themselves, commenting on the roles they're playing and the historical figures they represent. Mattsson and Settervall in particular often face the camera in intimate closeups, speaking about Strindberg and Siri in the third person, which makes it clear than in these sequences they are not "in character."

The Freethinker is continually working on multiple levels in this fashion, blending biography, literary criticism, sociopolitical commentary and media analysis. It's an amazing film that reflects Watkins' ideas about media hegemony and its connections to class imbalance, but most importantly its polemics are integrated into a larger whole that also wrestles with the nature of art and the relationship between the individual and his or her historical and social context. Even its cooperative production seeps into the film, providing an example of an alternative media model that skirts around the corporate mass media that currently dominates the distribution of information.

Cold Water

The key sequence of Olivier Assayas' Cold Water is a lengthy party thrown by a large group of teenagers at an abandoned house (a scene that would recur in different form in Assayas' later Summer Hours). Assayas' camera winds through the party, democratically encompassing all of the action in long tracking shots that show the teens dancing, smoking drugs after meticulously arranging the materials to fill a pipe, setting a massive bonfire in front of the house and dancing in front of it. As the soundtrack collages together Janice Joplin, Alice Cooper, Creedence, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen and Nico — appropriate to the setting of 1970s Parisian suburbs — Assyas' camera weaves around, capturing seemingly off-the-cuff compositions in which no one ever stands still, in which everyone is perpetually in motion. Outside, he frames the teens dancing to Creedence in front of the bonfire, flailing their limbs as others pile on more twigs and branches from around the spacious grounds of the country home, and the record periodically skips, starting over with the rollicking opening riff of "Up Around the Bend" after a nasty scratching noise. Every so often, the camera captures the leads, the disaffected teens Christine (Virginie Ledoyen) and Gilles (Cyprien Fouquet), dancing or kissing in the midst of this frantic, beautiful teenage paradise.

Only Assayas could make this anarchic scene so beautiful, so graceful. He obviously appreciates the lyricism and poetry in this teenage wasteland, the sense of alienation that's palpable and unavoidable for these kids. The flames, bright and yellow in the background, cast a golden glow on the faces of the partying teens, and their party is equal parts celebratory and destructive. They take apart the house, throwing chairs and pieces of window frames into the flames, shattering windows, and they dance around the flames as though celebrating a pagan ritual. But their faces are mostly smiling; they're free and happy, if only for the immediate now, and the hints of danger and rage that periodically threaten to boil over mostly center around Christine, the disturbed young girl who's desperately acting out as a defense against a father who's uncaring and disciplinarian and a mother who's too busy trying to sort out her own troubled life to do much good for her daughter. Christine is always running away, always in trouble, and anytime her father catches her he simply sends her to a clinic where they drug her and confine her, trying to wear down her rebellious impulses.

Early on, after Christine is caught while shoplifting with Gilles (who, leading a more charmed life than his girlfriend, manages to escape), she faces a police counselor who clearly wants to help her, who looks at her with frustration in response to her insolent stare and refusal to answer his questions seriously. Assayas is always framing Christine in tight closeups that emphasize her young, beautiful face and the utter inscrutability of her expression. She's often seen through some kind of filter, with a blurry windowframe partially obstructing the view of her face, making it difficult to get close to her. When she's sent to the clinic by her father, she sits patiently waiting with her suitcase in her lap, arranging her hair in front of her face, closing herself off from what's around her as though constructing a defense. (Later, when she chops off some of her hair, her new shorter haircut makes her look more open, more vulnerable, as though she's lost some of the shields that had protected her.)

She is a mystery, locked up inside herself, unable to express what she wants or what's bothering her — when asked a question about herself, by well-meaning authority figures like this one, she responds with mischievous pranks or impenetrable silence, simply fixing him with that inexpressive stare. She's unable to articulate what she wants, or she knows it won't do any good. Her experience with authority figures like her parents or the clinic nurses who want only mute obedience has not suggested that anyone's listening to her when she expresses her own opinions and her own desires. She's a totally lost girl.


Gilles, on the other hand, has advantages that Christine does not: he's a middle class boy with a well-off family, and when he gets in trouble, as he inevitably does, his family bails him out and smooths things over. His situation is coming to a head as well — his parents, divorced like Christine's but without the same sense of instability, have decided to send him to boarding school — but his home life is not nearly as dire as Christine's. His father, at least, tries to understand him, to communicate with his son, and when Gilles is upset at the threat of boarding school his father comforts him. It's obvious that while Gilles' acting out could be merely a phase of teenage rebellion, the destabilization of Christine's life is much more enduring.

There's a gap between them, the gap of class, exacerbated by Christine's mother (Dominique Faysse), who has an Arab boyfriend named Mourad (Smaïl Mekki), which Christine knows very well is viewed as an additional mark against her by the custody courts. But Christine's mother and Mourad are the ones who actually care about the girl, who want to help her even though they're unable to; her father (Jackie Berroyer) barely even listens to her, and the first chance he gets he simply sends her off to a clinic. Assayas films her father at the clinic talking to a doctor, seen through a window, the words they exchange inaudible — it's far more than he ever says to Christine, anyway. Virtually his only audible dialogue in the film is in a scene where he scolds and implicitly insults one of his employees while giving the man an assignment; one can see quite easily the nature of this cold, petty man and what his relationship with his daughter must be like.

The heart of Cold Water is this gap between generations, as well as the gap of class. The film opens with Gilles' Hungarian grandmother telling stories, in Hungarian, about World War II, stories that can't possibly mean anything to the kids she's speaking to. They're barely listening, and when they finish their breakfasts they rush off; they've got their own problems, and the past of their parents and grandparents couldn't seem more remote. Later, Assayas inserts a shot of the grandmother silhouetted in the dark, quietly praying under her breath, ending with a hushed "amen" — it could be a prayer for her lost grandchildren, for the aimless younger generation she doesn't understand, for her own burdens that they could never understand. It's a sign that, though this is a film that is totally on the side of the kids, a film that intimately understands teenage suffering, Assayas is also sympathetic to older value systems, including a spirituality that's as foreign to Christine and Gilles' generation as World War II stories.

The option of prayer isn't available to Christine and Gilles. With no parents, no stable value system, no idea what they want or what's expected of them, they're wandering aimlessly through the fog, sometimes literally as in a haunting sequence in which Gilles sneaks out of his house into a foggy evening, walking through a multicolored autumn forest and then riding his bike into a gray cloud that soon swallows him, erasing him in the dense smoke curling around him. This image of erasure and nothingness is echoed in the film's unforgettable final image, a blank piece of paper that reflects the inability of these teens to communicate, to make themselves heard. They're not even sure what they could say, what they could write, how they could capture what they're feeling and thinking in mere words. The film's title refers to that final scene, set by the side of a cold river in the middle of winter; the world is cold, and these teens huddle together to keep warm, but even with each other they can't quite communicate. They don't want to be alone, that's all they know — anything else is mysterious, inexpressible, and a blank page might be the only thing they leave behind in the world.

Joan the Maid II: The Prisons

The second half of Jacques Rivette's epic treatment of Joan of Arc, Joan the Maid II: The Prisons, picks up right where The Battles (reviewed here) left off, following the successful siege of Orléans. But where the first film ended with Joan's (Sandrine Bonnaire) moment of triumph, this second film almost immediately introduces the steps backward, the uncertainties, the political intrigues that would eventually lead to Joan's imprisonment and death. Joan had been fighting for the king, Charles (André Marcon), but Charles is increasingly pulled away from Joan, despite his faith in her, by the more worldly and secular advice of his self-interested council, La Trémoille (Jean-Louis Richard) and Regnault de Chartres (Marcel Bozonnet). Although the film's title would suggest that it is concerned wholly with Joan's trial and imprisonment, it is actually concerned with the manner in which Joan's dominance and confidence were slowly worn away, her spiritual purity betrayed by the political machinations of those more wily and manipulative than she. Despite her victories, the king's advisers immediately begin questioning her, advising the king to make peace, to cease fighting, to work towards a compromise — ideas that are foreign to Joan, secure in the knowledge that she is doing God's will.

From the beginning of the film, Rivette shows how Joan is shaken in her faith by the king's wavering, as he changes course at the whims of his council and hesitates in granting Joan the continued power to fight for him. She is essentially being tempted: to give up her fight, to give up her men's clothes and warrior ways, to rest, finally, after so many months without sleep. It is a powerful temptation, especially since Joan's own unshakable belief in King Charles turns out not to be warranted as the king fails to heed her advice any further after her initial victories pave the way for his official coronation as king of France. Such temptations are at the center of religious belief, and if the first half of Joan's story is the tale of a woman driven by religious devotion to do things seemingly beyond her station or power, the second half recounts this holy woman's struggle to maintain her belief and spiritual convictions against those who were willing to go along with her when it was convenient for them, but want her out of the way when it ceases to serve their worldly ambitions.

There is, certainly, an element of anti-feminine sentiment in Joan's fall. One recurring theme of the film is the distrust of women, especially in religious contexts. When Joan is captured by the enemy duke Philippe (Philippe Morier-Genoud), he tells her that his own religious leaders tell him that all women are monsters and temptresses, that they are not to be trusted. He claims to disagree, but in fact the reason that Joan seems to inspire so much fear — and why she is constantly insulted as being a witch, or a whore, or the Antichrist itself — is because she is a woman who refused to remain in her place, to live the simple life as a country seamstress that seemed to have been destined for her. Even the kindly women in the duke's castle, who wish only to help Joan, advise her to shed her man's clothes, to put on a dress, to let her hair grow long. At best, Joan is seen as resisting the proper place and role for a woman; at worst, her actions are seen as heretical, contrary to the church's emphasis on the behavior appropriate to men and women. The church thus assumes the task of enforcing gender roles as well as mediating spiritual matters. That's why, when Joan is tried, so much of the outrage directed at her seems to be because she is a woman, and that's also why, when she is imprisoned, one of the primary humiliations inflicted upon her is the constant threat of rape and abuse at the hands of her leering guards. She is placed back in her "proper" place, which is to be dressed in woman's clothing again and made an object of sexual desire.


Appropriately enough, this second film is more austere than its predecessor; darker, shadowier, with far fewer of the lovely outdoor vistas that so poetically set the pace in The Battles. Instead, much of the action here takes place indoors, and is enacted with words alone: words of smooth diplomacy, bargaining, backpedaling, betrayal, rather than the forceful clarity of Joan's pronouncements. Despite this, it is not a colder film; at every point, Rivette seems attuned to the human reality of his noble protagonist, to her suffering and indecision and desire to do the right thing even when confronted with those who clearly intend harm for her.

Nor does Rivette entirely abandon the streak of humanistic humor inherent in his treatment of Joan and her milieu. When Joan is with the soldiers, she is portrayed as truly one of them, despite her diminutive stature and a feminine body that no man's clothes can ever truly disguise. She laughs and jokes with them, and smiles with genuine cheer when she tells the men that they will be attacking Paris, that she wants to get close enough to see the city walls for herself. She has a disarming way about her that Bonnaire plays as a kind of innocent, childlike delight in the business of war. Rivette is also in touch, though, with other aspects of Joan's personality, especially with her gentle, quiet spirituality, reflected in the confidence she projects when she believes that she is doing God's will. In one of the film's loveliest, saddest images, Joan genuflects before an altar where she has placed her sword and armor, relinquishing them following the king's decision to agree to a truce. Joan kneels to pray, the flames flickering in the background on the tips of the candles, forming a little halo of fire around her head. It is a gorgeous image, at once spiritually inspiring and melancholy, as Joan acknowledges that her mission is being prematurely brought to an end by circumstances beyond her control.

Rivette's approach to the pomp and grandeur of organized religious ceremony is different; whereas Joan's private spirituality and whispered prayers are genuine and moving, the ritual of the church is absurd and overblown. When Charles is crowned king, in a grand ceremony within a church, each gesture is portentous and slowly drawn out, as the bishops and priests go through their elaborate rites of coronation while the organ and voices provide periodic musical punctuation. Rivette can't help but make a few humorous observations on the fringes of the scene, subtly tweaking these pompous proceedings. As the grandiose choral music soars, Rivette zooms in on the back of the church, where a line of soldiers are just barely holding back a crowd eagerly jostling for position, craning their necks to see the king get crowned, like spectators at a race track trying to get the best view. Rivette mixes the sacred and the common, contrasting the overblown religiosity of the music against the ordinary folk crammed into the church, smiling and agape as they watch this grand spectacle. The punchline comes when, at the end of the ceremony, a church official in his rich garments apologizes to some visitors that this rite wasn't more elaborate; they had to throw it together so quickly.

A darker punchline arrives when Joan's trial becomes a similarly showy affair, marked by more grand speechifying and religious rhetoric. As Joan tells the bishop who first informs her of the trial, if she's already been judged in advance, why go through with the artifice of the show trial? Just skip straight to the punishment, she spits with contempt. But that would be missing the point: to these people the artifice, the show, the ritual, the ceremony, is the essence of religion rather than mere ornamentation. Whereas Joan presents a vision of absolute faith shorn of pretension, the officials of the organized church are beholden to various political factions, possessed of various biases and ideas, enamored of ritual and procedure. Once again, the film's central conflict comes down to the tension between the worldly and the spiritual, although this time even the church itself is revealed as being on the worldly side, too tied up in politics and traditions to consider whether Joan has committed any crime besides being a woman with ideas of her own. Rivette's film, across its two halves, chronicles the tremendous strength of this woman, and her betrayal by a world not yet ready for her feats, for her will, for her daring refusal to adhere to tradition or received authority.

Joan the Maid I: The Battles

Joan the Maid is Jacques Rivette's five-hour, two-part portrayal of the life and death of Joan of Arc, in which Rivette strips away much of the epic legend surrounding this figure and makes her a quieter, more graceful kind of hero. As played by Sandrine Bonnaire, Rivette's Joan is a simple country girl, raised far from the centers of power, unable even to read or write; she says that she would be more content sewing at home with her mother than having to thrust herself into battle in service to God and country. She is a simple girl driven by something mysterious within her, a power and force that emanates from her during every second of Bonnaire's tremendous performance. Bonnaire's Joan is quiet, reserved, and self-assured, at least in public, though in private moments she often struggles with God's will, utterly confident that she has a purpose but not always sure exactly how to go about it. It is no mystery, though, why she motivates people, why she is so eagerly accepted as a savior, as a woman of God: her eyes flash with reserves of inner strength, and her hard peasant's face is a mask of determination.

The first half of Rivette's two-part epic is The Battles, an account of Joan's ascendancy to the right hand of France's king, the dauphin (André Marcon), leading France's army to lift the English siege on Orléans. Despite its secondary title, this film is primarily concerned with battles of words rather than battles between physical armies. Joan must fight every step of the way: to convince the local captain to provide an escort for her to go see the king, to convince the king and his advisers to trust her, to convince a council of holy men that she is inspired by God and not the Devil, to convince the army's leaders to stop delaying and follow her advice. Rivette thus presents a Joan who's very much worldly, prosaic, ordinary in so many ways. She is dressed simply and exists in a very stripped-down, minimal world, captured in Rivette's simple but somehow beautiful images: images that show the real world as it is, without adornment, a physical shell for the hard spirituality of Joan.

She makes grand pronouncements but is constantly confronted with worldly barriers: her army has no supplies, there are delays, when they finally attack they do so without informing her first. She is therefore constantly proved wrong in her predictions about when the English will be routed, when her army will at last be victorious. She cannot help it; she is limited by the men who are with her, by mere flesh and blood, by the need for food and arms. Her spiritual war must be joined to a physical one in order to mean anything of substance. Rivette, too, is every bit as much concerned with physicality. He dedicates numerous scenes to matters of the simple, the routine. These people are concerned with budgets, with provisions: even the king must borrow money from his wealthy backers. In one lengthy scene, a military commander haggles with a town official over the money that the army must borrow to pay for the town's defense; it comes down, ultimately, to bargaining from 300, to 250, to 275. Simple things, small amounts of money, a few coins here and there.

Simple things, too, like sex, like the way two soldiers in Joan's army stop to discuss having their way with her at night, then regret even talking about it later, moved by her angelic countenance and her graceful way of convincing everyone she meets, eventually, that she comes from God. Later, Joan will be subjected, offscreen, to the proddings of women assigned to determine if she's really a virgin or not. She will be tested, her physicality probed and deemed pure, and it's telling that Rivette does not omit such details. He's concerned with the routine, with the sequence of events: how does this myth play out, not as a myth passed down from generation to generation, but as something happening in the moment? How does Joan go from a simple country girl to the leader of an army? By slow progression, by hesitant steps forward and major setbacks and diversions. Along the way, Rivette is constantly stopping to observe what else might be going on, what might be happening at the fringes of a story like this. So while Joan meets with one of her commanders, discussing the budget, Rivette follows another soldier out the door, pursuing a townswoman who he flirts with and kisses and promises to visit later as she giggles and flirts back. Another scene presents an image of Joan not often seen: smiling and cheering as she watches some of the army's pages engaged in a mock battle by a riverside; she joins the male soldiers in cheering on her favorites, a wide grin on her usually somber face for once.


Indeed, though Joan's story is presented with the utmost seriousness and import, Rivette doesn't sacrifice his sly sense of humor to this legend's solemnity. Instead, he fills in the earthy, human details at the fringes of the myth. At one point, Joan is staying with a rural couple who are awed and maybe a little mystified by her holiness and her habit of remaining in unmoving prayer for hours or days at a time. They watch her from the next room as she prays and the wife describes, with hushed reverence, all the signs of Joan's spirituality: her flushed cheeks, her glowing eyes, her otherworldly serenity. But when her husband asks if light is emanating from her, his wife gently chides him to be reasonable: "no, it's just the lamp light." That's the way it is: miracles only go so far, and the rest is up to men, to flesh and blood. Joan's miracles are all small matters, sleights of hand that might easily go unnoticed. She changes the wind direction when the men are complaining that their boats can't bring supplies across the river, and she signifies the miracle by pointedly looking up at her banner, which is suddenly blowing in a favorable direction. Later, her primary "miracle" is to roust an exhausted army into battle by sheer force of will, by the power of her voice and example as she doesn't so much charge towards the English defenses as stumble that way, fumbling with a banner she's trying to take from a resisting footman. It's funny, even, the way a bet between two soldiers leads indirectly to Joan, almost by accident, encouraging the army to take Orléans. The footman, before rushing towards the castle, turns back and asks that his part in all this not be forgotten; he's saying it to his comrade but it might as well be directed at the camera, at Rivette, who obliges by recounting the way two soldiers goofing around helped get Joan into place for her historic moment.

There's a similar sensibility at work in other moments where Rivette lets the seams of history show. His playfulness with this material is given a self-conscious wink in the scene, tossed-off as a bit of peripheral business, where Joan's priest lifts up his robes to show that his feet are well-protected, in response to a passing soldier's mock expression of concern. When even the priest is capable of a goofy joke, Rivette is acknowledging his irreverent perspective, his emphasis on the silly, the profane, the ordinary, over the overtly mystical: it's why even his ghost stories (The History of Marie and Julien) and his magic films (Duelle) are so rooted in the everyday. His crude counterpart here is the gruff, violent soldier La Hire (Stéphane Boucher), a man renowned for his brutality in war. Before battle, he has a special private prayer to God, a plea for God to act towards him as God would like La Hire to act if their positions were reversed; it's a very personal understanding of "do unto others as you would like them to do unto you." La Hire talks to God as though they're just two guys who can maybe come to some sort of mutual understanding, and it's this disarmingly offhand approach to the spiritual and the sacred that informs Rivette's film at nearly every moment.

Even so, there's a sense of grace and beauty in his images that naturally brings the spiritual back into the film. Rivette's landscapes are awe-inspiring in a quiet, unassuming way: foggy, slightly hazy, their colors muted rather than garish, but still somehow sumptuous and beautiful. His images don't call attention to themselves, but are instead gently insistent: the blue midnight aura around Joan as she calls to her allies during a nighttime ride; the castle doors closing into blackness behind the riders as they leave on their mission; the snowy ground with patches of brown showing through; the bare, desolate rooms of sacked castles stripped of their trappings by the English invaders. So many of these images are empty or nearly empty, bathed in silence; Rivette often begins a shot before any characters have entered it, and ends it by panning away to an empty space, lingering there for a few pointed moments, preventing the narrative from ever assuming the forward momentum of the preordained. Instead, every moment is a struggle for Joan; the outcome always seems uncertain. And yet she confronts every setback with her beatific, knowing smile, a look of serenity that suggests the depth of her absolute faith. Rivette's film ends, as it must, with her victory, leaving her further travails for the second half of his epic, The Prisons.

Crumb

There is no artist in comics more confounding and fascinating than Robert Crumb. He is a central figure to the artform as it has developed in the last fifty years; arguably, he is the central figure without whom comics would not have developed in quite the same way that they have. His work is inescapable for those interested in all sorts of strains within modern comics: he popularized autobiographical storytelling, particularly of the nakedly confessional kind; he was a driving force behind the development of underground, independently published books; he influenced several entire generations of cartoonists with his combination of pristine draftsmanship and an untethered id, fearlessly exploring sexuality and perversions of all kinds alongside pointed political and social satires. And yet his work is simultaneously a challenge to the very concept of good taste; Crumb could always be counted on to draw and write about the things that no one else would even think, or if they did, that they would never dare to let out in public. His work is a catalog of his often grotesque and horrifying obsessions, his fetishized sexuality, his broad misanthropic tendencies, his ranting intolerance for most of his fellow humans, his rage and depression and ugly emotions. There are few artists in comics who draw as well as Crumb — as realistically or as expressively — and there are few whose subject matter is so frequently off-putting and offensive. His work is both thought-provoking and queasiness-inducing.

It might be expected, with such an unrepressed and confessional artist, that there would be nothing left to document. Why make a film about a man who has essentially poured his deepest, darkest thoughts and most potentially incriminating ideas out onto the page, then published it all for anyone to see? And yet Terry Zwigoff's remarkable documentary Crumb manages to be startling and revelatory even for those intimately familiar with its subject's body of work. Zwigoff is a sympathetic but relatively objective biographer, clearly fascinated by Crumb's art and yet also in some sense grappling with it, trying to understand it and the man behind it, with all of his contradictions and openly unpleasant characteristics. Zwigoff never flinches away from Crumb or his disturbing, complicated art. He seems to be circling around his subject, trying to see him from as many angles as possible. There are interviews with art critics and fellow cartoonists who have various wildly contradictory perspectives on what Crumb is doing with his art. There is, of course, a great deal of time spent in the company of Crumb himself, watching him draw, walk the streets and people-watch, or interact with his wife (and sometimes collaborator) Aline Kominsky-Crumb and their daughter Sophie (who has since grown up to be a cartoonist herself). There are interviews with several of the artist's ex-girlfriends, usually while Crumb himself is awkwardly, uncomfortably sitting nearby, and candid conversations with his first wife Dana and their son Jesse. Most importantly, though, and most revealingly, there are the scenes that take up the bulk of the film, dealing with Crumb's complex and tortured relationship with his mother and his two brothers, Charles and Maxon.


To see Robert, Charles and Maxon Crumb speaking about their childhood is to understand, in a sudden, unavoidable flash of insight, exactly the forces that conspired to create the artist that Crumb has become. The three of them grew up almost unnaturally close together in rotten, abusive household. All three slept in the same bed until they were sixteen, and they were virtually inseparable, playing imaginative games (mostly concocted by the domineering Charles) and even drawing comics together, creating an elaborate fantasy world centered around the Disney movie Treasure Island. They grew up with a depressive, perpetually scowling and occasionally abusive father and an amphetamine addict mother, prone to wild mood swings and violent, manic behavior. In this atmosphere, the three brothers seem to have retreated into art for as long as their childhoods lasted. What is striking, though, is the different paths they took once they grew up.

Charles, who says he was possessed by constant homicidal urges — he describes suppressing the desire to stab Robert in the head with a butcher knife, as Robert laughs uncomfortably — essentially withdraws from the world after a brief period of wildness. He sits alone in his room at home, still living with his mother, self-medicating with tranquilizers and compulsively re-reading the same books that he had once read as a child. His art, so expressive and vital even in the childhood comic books that Robert has saved, was confined to his pre-pubescent years, tapering off and then ceasing altogether as he grew older. In one of the film's most poignant scenes, Robert flips through one of Charles' old books, admiring the dark beauty of the drawings in these bastardized Treasure Island tales, the weird textures that Charles layered over everything he drew. Towards the end of the book, as Charles became less and less interested in drawing, more isolated in his own hermetic world, the drawings become smaller and the word balloons larger, until finally there are just pages of cramped, tiny text that verges on unreadability; Robert sadly closes the comic.

Maxon is an equally interesting case. He speaks with casual honesty about the "phase" in his life when he liked to molest women in the streets, though he insists that he stopped short of rape. When Zwigoff and Robert speak to him, he has become involved in a strange quasi-spiritualism that involves sitting on a bed of nails and ingesting a long rope of cloth intended to clean out his insides. Unlike Charles, he still makes art, creating warped, Cubist paintings that bear some obvious relationship to the styles of his two brothers, but are nevertheless inflected with his own frightening sensibility. It is like the odd, unsettling savant work of a mental patient, and the interviews with Maxon — who is inexplicably missing one eyebrow and has an unbalanced appearance as a result — do little to dispel the sensation of barely modulated insanity. Zwigoff's primary accomplishment in this film is to put the most famous Crumb into the context of his familial life, making it clear that Robert, however deviant and unfettered his art can often seem, is the sane one in his family, the only one of the three equally troubled brothers who has managed to successfully sublimate his sexual hang-ups and instability into art while maintaining a hold on the real world.


The film is equally interesting for the way it grapples with Crumb's sexual perversity and what the artist himself has described, in a famous story, as his "troubles with women." Crumb has often been labeled a misogynist, someone with a great deal of aggression and negative feelings towards women, and it's difficult to completely deny the charge. The film goes into great depth in documenting one of his most offensive and hateful stories, in which the manipulative guru character Mr. Natural decapitates a woman and walks her body around to be used as a sexual toy; it could not be any more blatant in its depiction of women as sex objects and its disregard for female intellect if it was an illustrative example in a feminist textbook. Not all of Crumb's work is so nakedly aggressive and creepy, but he returns again and again to his fetishized depictions of female bodies, his repetitive fantasies about powerfully built, muscular, Amazonian women. The weedy, nerdy, buck-toothed Crumb is a Freudian's dream patient, a bundle of psychosexual neuroses with obvious mommy issues: he wants to be simultaneously dominated by a powerful female archetype, and to dominate her in return.

Crumb makes no excuses for the blatantly sexual and exploitative nature of his art, and neither does Zwigoff. The film is not an apologia for the misogynistic elements of Crumb's work, and Zwigoff does an excellent job of situating these comics in multiple critical perspectives. These range from the gushingly admiring to the cautiously conflicted to feminist distrust and disgust. At times, the film even seems to be poking fun at those who attempt to intellectualize and rationalize Crumb's profoundly irrational art. When Time magazine art critic Robert Hughes, the most consistent Crumb admirer in the film, is told that Crumb masturbates while looking at his own work, he launches into a lengthy and somewhat tortured monologue trying to find an artistic justification for this behavior, grasping at explanations for the artist's treatment of his own work like pornography. Once he finally runs out of steam, he laughs nervously and then looks into the camera, earnestly asking, as though he doesn't really believe it, "does he really do that?" Well, yes, he does, at least if you believe the perpetually over-honest Crumb, and in any event it's obvious that on some level these stories are sexual fantasies translated onto paper. They're already a form of masturbation. Zwigoff also gives ample time to two women critics who have more conflicted views of Crumb's work, for obvious reasons. While cartoonist and critic Trina Robbins is openly disappointed that Crumb abandoned his earlier lighthearted, jokey work and dedicated his tremendous artistic talent to what she sees as disgusting material, Deirdre English seems more torn between the aesthetic qualities of the work and its status as satire, and its less defensible components. Zwigoff never lets the film come down too hard on the side of any of these critical interpretations, instead letting the disagreements stand as evidence of the severely divisive nature of Crumb's idiosyncratic genius.


Even considering the film's depth and breadth of inquiry into Crumb's life and art, Zwigoff still can't manage to encompass the full extent of Crumb's prodigious range as an artist. The perverse sexuality of his comics naturally makes for the best, most vibrant material — like former girlfriend Dian Hanson's hilariously deadpan insistence that Crumb "is endowed with one of the biggest penises in the world" — but it means that the other aspects of Crumb's work often get short shrift. It would be easy for someone unfamiliar with the full range of Crumb's gifts to conclude that he's simply a dirty-minded pornographer, as there's little discussion of his propensity towards social satire, his work illustrating the restrained autobiographical writing of Harvey Pekar, or his more serious-minded, non-sexual material. Zwigoff does provide a nod in this direction towards the end of the film when he animates, panel by panel, Crumb's famous strip "A Short History of America," which documents the progression of a single plot of land from an empty field to a modern street corner. It's also disappointing that Zwigoff doesn't engage more fully with the nature and roots of Crumb's use of racist caricatures and stereotypes. There are some passing references to this aspect of his work, including a walkthrough of a segment from the always shocking "Angelfood McSpade" strip, but the film never really deals in-depth with Crumb's racial views the way it does with his sexuality and treatment of women.

Still, these are minor complaints in the context of a film that deals intelligently and fairly with one of the 20th Century's most controversial and divisive artists. Crumb not only delves into the nature of its subject's art and life, but explores the crucial questions of the ways in which experiences and obsessions can be channeled into art.

Don't Drink the Water

Don't Drink the Water is a detour in the 90s filmography of Woody Allen, who with this film takes a rare opportunity to revisit his past, to take a look back at the material that he ironically dubbed, in Stardust Memories, "the early, funny ones." This film, made for television in 1994, at a time when Allen was perhaps at his most prolific, was originally based on a play he wrote in the late 60s, which was both produced for the theater and made into a film by Howard Morris, with Jackie Gleason starring. Allen had long disowned these earlier versions, in which he had no hand, declaring the film version in particular to be "a disaster." Thus, Allen's production of this story can be seen as a chance to finally do it right, to knock off a quick, fun project (it was shot in just two weeks) made for a different medium, a change of pace for the endlessly restless director. Allen himself plays the part that formerly went to Gleason, as an American tourist in Soviet Russia, mistaken for a spy when he innocently snaps a picture that turns out to contain some potentially damaging information. He and his family, including his wife (Julie Kavner) and his daughter (Mayim Bialik of Blossom), flee to a nearby American embassy seeking sanctuary. Unfortunately, they're thrust into the hands of the ambassador's incompetent son (Michael J. Fox), who is in charge while his father is in Washington.

The result clearly shows the signs of its hasty production and its humble origins. It's a much simpler film than anything else Allen was making by this point in his career, composed mostly in very long, unshowy takes that allow the actors the time and space to simply perform, to develop each scene's humor organically through the dialogue and their interaction as they deliver it. The camera is mostly utilitarian, often static or following the actors when it needs to keep them in frame, as it does most noticeably in a nice shot where Allen and Kavner are walking and arguing, the camera in front of them gently tracking along as the two actors gesticulate wildly. This inconspicuous style, born of necessity to keep the production flowing, gives each scene a refreshing, spontaneous feeling, sometimes even verging into improvisation. In one scene, Fox clearly flubs a line and simply rolls with it, treating it as a spontaneous mistake by his character; this far into a very long, dialogue-heavy take, Woody probably felt it worked fine. This kind of stuttering, doubling-back way of speaking is of course the natural way to spit out Woody's fast-paced dialogue anyway. These are lines that seem to invite stutters, awkward pauses, and digressions into unrelated subjects in the middle of a sentence. Given this distinctive dialogue, Fox occasionally falls into the familiar trap of becoming just another Woody imitator, especially in his first few scenes, but he resists it admirably. In fact, with Fox the usual Woody neuroses and insecurity are rendered in a new light, made more poignant. When he delivers the kind of self-deprecating line that Woody might've just as easily written for himself, there's a sadness to it that's not there with Woody — Fox seems genuinely disappointed in himself for failing his father again and again. It's always interesting to see a younger, more conventionally handsome actor take on a Woody-esque persona, as Fox does here and John Cusack did in Bullets Over Broadway. The result is that lines that might have seemed simply funny from Woody, part of his nonstop pattering, take on more weight coming from an earnest younger actor, even in the context of a total farce like this.

Even though the film's visual style is relatively simple, befitting a TV production, this isn't to suggest that the aesthetics are uninteresting. The frame is frequently quite active even if the camera isn't, and the actors' frantic rushing about and hilarious conversations more than make up for the long takes. This could easily seem like a much more briskly edited film than it is, purely because of the energy in the performances. In a hilarious scene where Allen and Kavner disguise themselves in burkas — a gag I was waiting for from the very moment an Arabian emir and his harem were introduced — the frame comes alive with the entire cast flailing around, alternately revealed and obscured by Woody's waving black-clad arms. This is just one of many wonderful scenes here, and though there's plenty of Woody's trademark verbal wit, there are also some delightfully frantic bits of madcap physical comedy cropping up here and there. A few of these are too predictable, especially nearly every gag involving the emir who Allen continually insults and soon begins to injure grievously over and over again. There are one too many unfunny jokes on the injuries sustained by this visiting prince. But Dom DeLuise is a real treat as the Russian priest who's been hiding in sanctuary within the embassy for over six years, locked in his room and, as it turns out, practicing his magic tricks. The scene where he puts on his startlingly inept magic act for Woody and his family, while the embassy's gourmet chef makes off with his rabbit, is a classic bit of comedy leading into another delirious madcap explosion.


What this film demonstrates, coming at this point in Woody's career, is the sharpness and endurance of the director's comedic talents. This film is unmistakably of a piece with the films Woody started making in the early 70s, not long after this play was originally written, although it is missing the visual surrealism and disregard for realism that those early features were often based around. The film also looks backward in the way it contextualizes these events very much in the Cold War setting in which it was originally written. There is no attempt to update the story in any way, and in fact the opening minutes of the film consist of a deadpan montage of documentary images from this time period, accompanied by a serious narrator who is describing the taut situation between East and West. There's an expectation here that at any moment, the narrator's seriousness will be undermined, that the straight-faced Cold War images will transition into some utterly ridiculous scenario, but it doesn't happen. The old Woody might've gone for just that kind of cheap joke — there are plenty of similar ones in Bananas — but instead the narrator is allowed to simply set the time, the place, and the broad outlines of the historical situation, with no hint of irony undermining his objective commentary. The humor is allowed to develop naturally then only after this contextualization is complete, organically bubbling up in Fox's first conversation with his ambassador father, before the introduction of Woody and his family truly throws the film off its rails into steadily escalating comic insanity.

The film's earnest commitment to its Cold War milieu, as well as the broad strokes of the humor, definitely brand this as one of the "early, funny ones." And yet, Don't Drink the Water doesn't necessarily seem out of place when set against more recent films like Bullets Over Broadway or Manhattan Murder Mystery, which are undeniably more sophisticated, more visually sumptuous, and more complex, but which have in common with this film a real verbal acuity and an eye for drawing out character detail through an excess of dialogue. It's not a perfect film, and there are subplots, like the romance between Fox and Bialik, that seem both unnecessary and insufficiently developed, even if it does result in some fun and uncharacteristically "cute" moments from Woody. The film has plenty to recommend it, though. Most importantly, it's just a very funny movie, which should certainly be enough sometimes. This isn't peak Woody, but it's an entertaining diversion, a curious leftover from his early period resurrected in the middle of the most controversial phase in his career.

Bullets Over Broadway

The temptation, in writing about Woody Allen's Bullets Over Broadway, is to simply start quoting lines of dialogue from it, and never stop. It's just that kind of film, though it's probably for the best that I resist the temptation here — writing about comedy is never even nearly as funny as actually seeing and hearing it done well. It's certainly done well in this film, too. As in its predecessor, Manhattan Murder Mystery, Woody is at the peak of his comedic gifts, writing with a crackling ease that makes the jokes detonate like depth charges. By the time you start laughing, the jokes are already past you, tucked smoothly into the flow of conversation. Woody hasn't been this purely, naturally funny, making pure unvarnished comedy, since Broadway Danny Rose, a film that not incidentally bears some similarities to this one both in its (overly?) broad Italian caricatures and its focus on a vulgar mobster's moll causing problems for a nebbishy intellectual. In this case, John Cusack is the intellectual in question, taking on the kind of role that Woody would usually inhabit himself, as the struggling playwright David Shayne. Cusack is a very different kind of nebbish, and he avoids the pitfalls of too many actors who think that being in a Woody Allen movie means you have to fully inhabit the Woody persona. Instead, Cusack brings his own earnest energy to the role, making David less a bundle of neuroses than a young man struggling to figure out his own place in the world. His nervous energy, his tics, his stammering, are not merely attempts to channel the film's director, but genuine outgrowths of the conflict in this character between ambition, guilt, and integrity.

In the film, set in Jazz Age 1920s New York, David is forced by economic necessity to get his wordy, darkly psychological play bankrolled by the gangster Nick Valenti (Joe Viterelli), who stipulates that his girlfriend Olive (Jennifer Tilly) should have an important role. This is the first of, it turns out, many concessions that David will be required to make in order to get his play seen, since for Woody this story is a perfect vehicle for the eternal debate about art and commerce. In that respect, Woody doesn't miss the chance to take quite a few potshots at his own work, and he places the words of some of his harshest critics into the mouth of the mob hitman Cheech (Chazz Palminteri), who's assigned to bodyguard Olive and consequently winds up observing the play's rehearsals. Cheech's main criticism is one that has too often been lobbed at Woody's own writing: "real people don't talk like that." Considering the parodic nature of the dialogue in David's play — tortured psychobabble in purposefully obscure language, peppered with strings of adjectives that sound like they're being read from a thesaurus — it's hard not to agree with Cheech, who at first is positioned as a plebeian enemy of art but soon becomes the perverse voice of reason in the film.

Also in the play's cast is Helen Sinclair (Woody favorite Dianne Wiest), channeling Norma Desmond from Sunset Boulevard in an absolutely hilarious and unforgettable performance. She calls to mind Norma right from her introduction, throwing a fit when she first reads David's play, outraged that she's being asked to play a frumpy housewife and not a glorious starlet, storming down a staircase done up in a 20s flapper outfit and looking glamorously enraged. She is Norma without the creepy, vampiric side — or perhaps only Norma before things have degenerated quite that far. She's the glamorous Norma, Norma the way she'd like to think she's seen by her public, the Norma who descends the stairs in a dreamy daze at the end of Sunset Boulevard, imagining the adoring throngs below. Helen is more than just a tribute to Billy Wilder's aging silent movie goddess, though. She's one of Woody's great creations, a larger than life figure who is compelled to transform every moment of her offstage life into a drama worthy of the hammiest theater. Her dialogue is as tortured and wordy as David's play, and she turns David's hesitant overtures towards her into high drama — and high comedy — by overacting her response to him in the most ridiculous fashion. "Don't speak!" she shouts, a standard melodramatic line that soon takes on new significance because Helen takes it quite literally, as an order, even an imperative. When David still struggles to express himself to her, she drowns him out with a chorus of, "Don't speak," and when that doesn't work resorts to physically restraining him and covering his mouth with her hands. In one hilarious scene, she's trying to gag him with her arms and shawl, and, in what seems like a bit of ad-libbed accidental humor, Wiest realizes that she still has her cigarette holder in her other hand, jams it into her mouth at a jaunty angle, and proceeds to cover Cusack's mouth with both hands.

Wiest also gets one of the film's best lines, when she's describing to David just how big of a success he could be. "The world will open to you like an oyster," she says, then pauses, as though realizing that she's being too subtle. "No, not like an oyster. The world will open to you like a magnificent vagina." It's brilliant, not only because it finally lays bare the sexual implications of that clichéd catchphrase, but because it fits her character so perfectly in its plain-spoken vulgarity. Wiest is able to make lines that would never come off for another actor seem absolutely right coming from her mouth. She nails the hammy, life-is-theater mentality of Helen right from the scene when she first arrives at the theater and delivers an epic, ridiculous speech about all the roles she's played in the past. The shot is framed so that Helen is the only character in the foreground, gesticulating wildly and throwing her head back with feigned emotion as, behind her, the other characters cluster to watch, the perspective making them all look blurred and tiny behind the impressive figure of Helen.

Helen's obsession with carrying art into life is mirrored, in a distorted way, by the struggles of David to find a balance in his own life between art and reality. For David initially, and certainly for his principled artist friend Sheldon (Rob Reiner), who proudly declares that his art is misunderstood and will never be seen in public, art is a privileged and sacred trust that imbues the artist with rights and responsibilities outside of normal society. For Sheldon, artists create their own "moral universe," a phrase of such casually stated moral relativism that its sinister implications only become clear over time. Sheldon applies this edict in his own life and suggests that David do the same, disregarding conventional ideas about morality to the extent that when they pose the question of being able to save either the works of Shakespeare or an "anonymous" person from a burning building, both of them choose the plays without hesitation. Woody viciously mocks the self-serving moral rationalizations of these self-declared artists, who deign to place themselves above the rest of humanity, as though to be a great artist one needn't trouble oneself with people at all. But it is precisely because David does not concern himself with how real people act that his play is so devoid of genuine feeling, and so awkward in its language. He does not seem to realize the difference between dialogue that is purposefully stylized for some artistic purpose (as it is here and in most of Woody's films) and dialogue that simply strains the credibility by putting the actors through unnecessary contortions of speech. The unstated implication is that, in distancing himself from society's moral standards, the artist also risks losing touch with the humanity that is essential to any work of art. David's morality is put to the test, in fact, by the mobster Cheech, who literally puts into practice the idea that Sheldon and David approved of in the abstract: that art is more valuable even than individual human lives.

Although, as usual, Woody is obviously exploring deeper themes through this material, Bullets Over Broadway is first and foremost another smart and substantial pure comedy for him, coming hot on the heels of Manhattan Murder Mystery and certainly matching the previous film for sheer laughs. And even if the film works best as pure verbal comedy, it's also a stylishly shot period parody with touches of noir, melodrama, and gangster pictures. Not to mention an inquiry into the artist's connections to society and morality, and on the difference between abstract ideas and the reality of the way the world works.