10/10: Godard shorts; The Night of the Hunter

Jean-Luc Godard is certainly the one director whose work I keep returning to most often, and whose films are continually rewarding no matter how many times I may watch them. And there is no work of his that I return to more often, or get more out of, than his 15-minute short De l'origine du XXIe siècle (Origins of the 21st Century). This compact but powerful work is Godard's condensation of world history, from 1900 to 1990, into a stream of images from both cinema and newsreels (the latter mostly of war, which is for Godard the defining characteristic of our common history). Everywhere in Godard's oeuvre he has been concerned with history and war and the place of film in both, but nowhere else has he so concisely and poignantly summed up these concerns.

The film is a masterpiece of montage, both visually and in terms of audio, as the opening amply demonstrates. The film opens with a color-saturated video image of a country road, with a man playing a violin in the center of it, and an operatic aria playing on the soundtrack. Then the music abruptly cuts off, a woman screams, bombs go off, and Godard cuts to an utterly unforgettable, haunting shot of a refugee bus slowly gliding through the darkness. The soundtrack completely cuts off here, giving the bus an eerie quiet in which to carry its sad cargo into black. From there, Godard begins counting down the 20th Century, starting in 1990 and progressing in 15 year increments. As he counts down, he flashes the year on the screen in one of his usual intertitles, then assembles a complex montage of what he presumably believes to be representative images for that year. This is a history of the 20th Century in terms of death, war, and cinema — tellingly, it is only in film clips that Godard allows any hope or pleasant imagery to appear. At one point, he quotes the famous image of a child riding a tricycle from Kubrick's The Shining, blending it together with an image of a jeep full of refugees, with a young child bundled up in the back. The two images fit together remarkably well in terms of their unified sense of motion, but the contrast between them lies in the sense of freedom and childhood in the filmic image, whereas the refugee child is passive, a passenger in its own life rather than the driver.

This is just one tiny example of the rich levels of commentary working throughout Godard's short film. He repeats the idea — first articulated long before, in Alphaville — that the State is the opposite of love, and for Godard love is primarily a cinematic love, a love of images. It is in this sense that he most convincingly puts forward cinema as an opposing force to the cruelty and destruction that are everywhere apparent in this film. But in other ways, he is suspicious of cinema, allowing its images to blend in with the newsreel documentaries so that fiction and reality become indistinguishable. This too, he seems to be saying, is a legacy of cinema, a darker legacy, the legacy of forgetfulness and ignorance of the world outside. And there is no more powerful cure for such ignorance than a few minutes spent with Godard's powerful, thought-provoking essay-film.

Je vous salue, Sarajevo is even more concise, weighing in at just 2 minutes long, and its purpose is singular and extraordinarily focused. The whole of the film consists of a single photographic image from Sarajevo, which Godard at first presents only in segments, only showing the full photo at the very end of the short. The voiceover advances the idea of an opposition between art and culture. The latter, Godard says, is everywhere, and consists of the bland and meaningless ephemera of society: television, tourism, fashion. Art, for Godard, is comparatively rare, and he names a few practitioners of it in each medium (in film, Antonioni and Vigo). The film advances the idea, supported by the single image that makes up its visual component, that art is linked with living, with the plight of people in sites of ethnic cleansing like the Balkans. The culture, the monolithic commercial emptiness that surrounds us all, is the opposite of life; European culture allowed the atrocities of Sarajevo, while European art might provide a response, a solution, an idea about the atrocities. The photo, when it is finally seen in full, turns out to be a soldier poised above some refugees who are lying on the ground; he is about to brutally kick them. Nearby, two other soldiers walk by without even looking. In the course of the film's brief few minutes, Godard dissects this photo, focusing in on its details in an attempt to understand it. He zooms in on the faces of the two disinterested soldiers, who ignore the brutality going on just a few feet away. He zooms in on a rifle, a symbol of power and violence. He points out the cigarette in the hand of the kicking soldier. This is a very short film, but in this small timeframe Godard is able to craft an interesting examination of an incident of violence and its links to the world that surrounds it and created it.

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The Night of the Hunter is one of those strange, creepy, ineffable films that always lingers with me long after I've seen it. Revisiting it, I always get sucked in once again by its utterly unique atmosphere, and discomfited all over again by its unexpected tonal shifts. In actor Charles Laughton's one directorial turn, he ably blends elements of film noir, horror, fairy tales, and religious allegory into one of the most unique films ever to come out of Hollywood. Robert Mitchum is uncanny as the evil preacher Harry Powell, who travels the country looking for widows to rob and murder so he can continue preaching "God's word." Mitchum is a true terror, mostly because on the exterior he seems like such a good fit for the chirpy, apple-pie-and-church-meetings small-town community he finds himself in. When he arrives, looking for the widow of a man he met in prison, in search of the $10,000 he believes she has, the town embraces him as a true man of God and eagerly sets about getting him hitched to the young widow (Shelley Winters). This is a terrifying role for Mitchum, who inhabits his crazed preacher with a mix of creepiness and lunacy, exuding oily charm when he needs it, but otherwise speechifying with a self-righteous smoothness that always conceals a threat.

Mitchum's character is an avatar of Puritanical sexual repression and religious hypocrisy, a theme that Laughton returns to again and again in this film. On the wedding night, Winters goes to Mitchum to join him in bed, and he braids her down as corrupt, telling her that her body is meant only for procreation. Laughton emphasizes Winters' isolation in the bedroom scenes through the design of the room, which is tall and sparsely decorated, and the expressionist lighting that divides it into light and dark. When Mitchum gets up out of bed, he steps up into a shadowy area that bisects his body, turning his upper half black until he switches on a light. Winters is embarrassed, belittled, and when next time we see her it's in a remarkable revival scene where, framed by torches and sweating profusely, she extols an eager crowd to forgo sin as she has. Mitchum's sexual intimidation is frightening enough, but he really dominates in the scenes with the children, who are at the film's core. Indeed, in the second half, after Mitchum murders Winters and the two children escape, the film unexpectedly changes tone and becomes something quite different, a kind of grim fairy tale as viewed through the kids' eyes.

The kids set out on a raft, fleeing Mitchum, and in this segment Laughton amps up the already considerable stylization of the film. At this point, he utterly abandons any pretenses of realism, and embraces the children's point of view. The trip down the river away from Mitchum becomes a fantastical ride through an Edenic wonderland, complete with animals watching the youngsters float by. These animals are the only slightly realistic touch in an otherwise wholly constructed world, where the sets are blatantly cutouts with no physical presence, and the moon is a slice of paper hanging overhead. The no-budget fakeness of these surroundings is enhanced by the stark lighting, which makes the water glisten and sparkle but turns buildings and trees along the water's edge into pure black silhouettes. Even Mitchum, a foreboding presence giving chase, becomes a silhouette, glimpsed in the distance riding a horse and crooning a spiritual song that acquires menace when associated with his character.

In the final segment of the film, the tone shifts again once this fable-esque river odyssey, with its shades of Huck Finn, is completed. In this segment, Lillian Gish shows up as the saving angel who sweeps up the kids into her protective custody, guarding them against Mitchum's steady advance. Just as Mitchum's figure represents an exaggerated evil, so Gish is an exaggerated (and also religious) good. The film's good versus evil theme is epitomized in the scene where Gish sits with a shotgun across her lap, guarding against Mitchum, who sits outside waiting and singing. She sings back over him, drowning him out with her own religious melody, both of them bathed in shadows. It's an archetypical showdown, a collision of two opposing religious views — the sexually repressive, moralist authoritarian versus the loving, nurturing, forgiving realist. This is the central conflict at the heart of Laughton's film, though it's by no means the only theme explored in this unmatched classic. By fearlessly blending genres and even inventing a few of his own, Laughton crafted an enduring masterwork of the American cinema, although perhaps unsurprisingly it was received so poorly at the time that Laughton could never direct another film again. That's a true shame, but at least this film has survived its initial reception and been rightfully elevated to its true place as one of the most original films of its time, or any other time for that matter.

10/9: Meetin' WA; Stalag 17

As a follow-up to King Lear, I re-watched Godard's short film Meetin' WA, a very interesting short in which Godard interviews Woody Allen, who appeared briefly to recite a few lines towards the end of Lear. When I first watched this short, I hadn't seen much of Allen's work yet, and my focus was on Godard's distancing techniques, which are at their strangest and most distracting here. Watching it now, it's more successful than I at first thought, and extremely interesting for the way in which these two very different filmmakers keep slipping past each other without ever coming to terms. In Woody Allen on Woody Allen, Allen speaks briefly about appearing in Godard's Lear, and though he professes to be a great admirer of Godard and thrilled to have worked with him, he seems to have been largely baffled by the whole thing. He says that he never saw the finished film, but his work on it left him with the impression that it was going to be "a very silly film."

To some extent, that impression seems to have been carried over here. Allen frequently looks bemused and mystified by Godard's probing and esoteric questions regarding the influence of television and the processes of editing and filming. When Godard says that certain scenes in Hannah and Her Sisters seem to have been influenced by the rapid pace of TV aesthetics, Allen can only muse, "It's possible, I don't know." With Godard switching back and forth between English and French (with a translator on hand), the language barrier is clearly an issue, but a more profound gulf exists between the filmmakers in terms of their ideas about film and filmmaking. The most obvious example comes early on, when Godard brings up the use of on-screen titles, which Woody had just recently done, at that time, in Hannah and Her Sisters. Woody correctly points out that, while for Godard such titles are a cinematic device, an image to be used in exactly the same way as an image of a person or a place, in Allen's film the titles were purely a literary device, used much like chapter titles in a novel. This distinction sets the tone for the rest of the conversation, in which it becomes obvious that while Allen thinks of writing as the foremost component of film, for Godard the image must always come first. Even their thoughts about the ideas in their films are diametrically opposed. Allen expresses his regret that the finished film has never, for him, quite lived up to his intentions or his original idea; he is always disappointed by the result because the idea is, to his mind, imperfectly expressed. Godard rebuts him by saying that he used to think this way, but that now he is convinced that he can never know the idea of his film until it is finished. This is the collision of two totally opposite perspectives on filmmaking. For Allen, a film expresses an idea or ideas. For Godard, it is much more complicated: the process of making a film is the process of forming and exploring ideas.

This central disjunction keeps the two filmmakers from ever reaching a real rapport, but it doesn't keep Godard's short from being interesting. He captures, to some extent, the frustrations of communication between incompatible minds, and the half-understood exchange of ideas that results. This idea is enhanced by his fragmentary editing and the mixing in of stills from Allen's films (he seems particularly fascinated by Diane Keaton, who he once wanted to play the love interest in his proposed film about Bugsy Siegel). Ultimately, the film doesn't provide any deep insights, but it's a worthwhile curiosity for fans of either director — though, preferably, both directors. Once again, the only way to see it is a rather shady BitTorrent VHS rip, but it's certainly better than nothing, and image quality isn't too crucial here anyway.

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Billy Wilder's Stalag 17 is an interesting but not entirely successful film that, as the opening voiceover declares, sets out to be an unconventional war movie, one that looks at the sad fate of POWs rather than heroics on the frontlines. Set in the eponymous German prison camp during WW2, the film centers on a group of American sergeants in one barracks of the camp. After an escape attempt by two prisoners is foiled by the Germans, the soldiers begin to suspect that there's a spy in the camp. They naturally set their sights on Sefton (William Holden), a cynical and hardened GI who openly trades cigarettes and assorted goods with the German guards and his fellow prisoners in order to enrich himself. Sefton's nakedly self-serving ambitions are a stark contrast to his fellow soldiers' gung-ho idealism and sarcastic sparring with the Nazis. He further sets himself apart with some borderline socialistic remarks regarding a lieutenant from a rich family who shows up in the camp. It's subtle, as it had to be at the height of the HUAC hearings, but Sefton is clearly what could be called "class conscious," though ironically his sharp trading is capitalism at its most unrestrained. In this way, the soldiers' immediate identification of Sefton as the traitor — and the subsequent beating he gets — might be seen as a veiled (very veiled) commentary on McCarthy.

On the whole, though, the film strikes an odd and precarious balance between silliness and seriousness, with the silliness largely winning out for the bulk of the film. The soldiers are constantly goofing around in the camp when they're not plotting escape. They spy on the Russian women who are showering at the adjacent camp — a joke that gets way less funny when one stops to think what might really have happened when Nazis, Russian women, and showers were all in one place. They continually joke with the Nazi sergeant who comes around on rounds, and at one point all the soldiers don fake Hitler mustaches and salute their overseer, yelling out "kaput!" and other German phrases. Much of the rest of the humor is more innocuous, largely involving the characters of Animal (Robert Strauss) and Shapiro (Harvey Lembeck), whose dim-witted patter and slapstick gags are usually funny but never quite gel with the film's more serious side.

Of the major players, the only one who seems to truly grasp the film's duality is Otto Preminger, who turns in a rare acting role as the vicious camp commandant, Colonel von Scherbach. Preminger alone achieves the balance of silliness and toughness that Wilder was reaching for throughout the film. His performance mingles ambitious jealousy (he aspires to have more than a muddy prison camp under his command) with a real sadist streak and a Germanic campiness that makes him a sheer delight to watch even when he's at his most cruel. He tosses off his lines with a guttural snarl that makes even his most mundane pronouncements sound simultaneously threatening and hilarious. In his best scene, while in the midst of interrogating an American officer, Preminger stalks around in full dress gear and no boots, his white socks padding along the floor. When he prepares to receive a call from a higher-up, he puts his boots on so he can click his heels in a good Nazi salute, even over the phone, and takes them off again immediately afterwards. It's a hilarious scene, with all the humor contained in the smallest touches, handled fluidly so that Preminger's ludicrous actions subtly blend into the otherwise straight-faced interrogation.

Preminger's character most fully embodies the film's dual nature, its shaky balance between the ridiculous and the somber. Everyone else seems to be playing in one key or the other, and the film suffers because of it. There are numerous great scenes here, especially the comedic scenes between Animal and Shapiro, and Holden's glowering dramatic performance (for which he, probably rightfully, received a Best Actor Oscar), but the unevenness of the whole picture is fairly unsatisfying. Wilder's larger points about the scapegoating of outsiders and the value of cynicism in a dark world are largely swallowed up by the film's noisy plot and numerous gags. This remains, in spite of its flaws and incomplete feeling, an interesting and worthwhile film from Wilder. Its performances don't all quite fit together, but individually each one is fantastic, and there are some fine set pieces, both comedic and action-packed, to keep the film constantly entertaining.

10/8: Pale Flower; King Lear; In Harm's Way

Pale Flower is one of Masahiro Shinoda's best mid-60s genre deconstructions. Stylistically, it seems to have some connections to the French New Wave of the same time period, though it also bears the distinctive stamp of Shinoda's highly idiosyncratic style. The story follows the yakuza killer Muraki (Ryo Ikebe), who has just been released from prison following a stretch for murdering a rival gang member. Upon his release, he finds that not much has changed, except that his gang has formed a truce with their former rivals, and a new rival gang has risen instead. While gambling, he is attracted to the young girl Saeko (Mariko Kaga), who seems to be a rich socialite with a thirst for danger and risk; she throws down massive amounts of money gambling, but this is already getting boring for her and she wants more.

Shinoda's film is a stunning examination of the profound emptiness that leads these characters onto a path of self-destruction and thrills. The film opens with a rapidly edited montage of Tokyo's crowded streets and subways, as Muraki laments the sameness of his environment, the hollowness of his existence, and the worthlessness of human life in a place where it is so common. These characters are drawn in by darkness, perhaps because it's the only thing that provides them any glimmer of happiness. When Muraki and Saeko have had some close call or visceral thrill together, they throw their heads back and cackle joyfully, a momentary burst of laughter in the midst of their otherwise dull lives. They drag race, they gamble, they flee from the police, but none of it is able to forever postpone the feeling of emptiness that always returns to them when the thrill is over. Inevitably, then, Saeko begins seeking greater and greater thrills, first in drugs and the company of the cold killer Yoh (Takashi Fujiki), and then when Muraki offers her a look at the ultimate thrill: murder.

Shinoda presents this story in gorgeously moody noir visuals, with the characters almost always bathed in shadow and dim light. But despite the grimness of the story and its themes, he also allows plenty of black humor to creep in, especially in the form of the aging yakuza bosses. In one scene, Muraki visits his boss at the dentist's office, and the old man advises Muraki to fix his own teeth, while simultaneously instructing him with his new orders. In another scene, Muraki visits the old man at the hospital to congratulate him on his new son; the boss thanks him and talks lovingly of his wife and new baby, then gives Muraki an assassination order. This mingling of domesticity and hardness in these characters is just one of the film's subtle subversions of gangster conventions. At every turn, Shinoda turns the genre in on itself, making this perhaps the ultimate existential gangster film.

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Jean-Luc Godard's radical re-interpretation and "study" of King Lear is one of his least-seen and least-loved films, outside of his even more obscure Maoist period with the Dziga Vertov Group. In fact, though, this much-maligned film appears to be a masterpiece in its own right, and the culmination of Godard's masterful run of films in the 80s, from his return to cinema with 1980's Sauve qui peut (la vie) to Lear in 1987. The film is not so much a retelling of the Lear story (especially since Godard reputedly read only the first few pages of the play), but an attempt to examine the nature and essence of a work of art and the place of the past's masterpieces in the modern world. Godard sets his film in the time after the Chernobyl reactor explosion, with the premise that the world's artworks have all been lost and must be reconstructed in the wake of this destruction. The idea that the meaning and role of art can be altered by traumatic world events has long been a key concern for Godard, and is in fact the thrust of his video essay Histoire(s) du cinema, where he explores the Holocaust's effect on Western art. In King Lear, the task of re-discovering Shakespeare's plays is given to one of his ancestors, William Shakespeare Junior the Fifth (Peter Sellars), who sets off to find King Lear in the modern world.

Within this absurdist framework, Godard engages in a complex rumination on art and its meanings, all the while taking stabs at getting to the heart of Lear. Is the essence of an artwork in its words? In its characters? In the names of specific people and places? Can Lear's meanings and ideas survive the transition to modernity intact? Can they survive the transplantation to new characters, new situations, new contexts? And what, anyway, is the relationship between words, which Sellars meticulously copies down, and the things they are meant to represent? Godard is continuously asking questions of this type, indirectly, in the way he explores the characters of King Lear and his faithful and brutally honest daughter Cordelia. He frames the contest between the two in terms of power versus virtue; he re-frames it in terms of incestual desire. He also speaks extensively about the role of the image in interpreting the world. The relationship between reality and the image is a central theme here, as in much of Godard's work, and ultimately he comes down to the idea that they are in fact one and the same. For Godard, the image is reality, or becomes, for all practical purposes, the reality of those who see it. The image replaces reality once the image is shown. In much the same way, Godard seems to be saying, the "image" of the play King Lear is a stand-in for the realities of power dynamics, both in political situations and in sexual relationships. Cordelia is the dissenter, who refuses to be cowed by power, who will say nothing (or "no thing" as the intertitles continually remind us) rather than be untrue to herself and her feelings.

In this way, Godard both politicizes and sexualizes Cordelia's silence, re-contextualizing the play's meanings to new realities — realities which the film, as image, then replaces. This continual shifting of meanings and ideas is the beating heart of Godard's work, and it is at its apex here. The film is a complex, puzzle-like construction of possible interpretations and comments on Shakespeare's play, all arranged loosely around the documentarian figure played by Sellars. His efforts to rediscover the play in its literal rendering, word for word, are countered by Godard, in the role of the ludicrous Professor Pluggy, who believes that names and words are irrelevant, and the artwork must be rediscovered through images and ideas. The process of interpreting Lear thus becomes the process of making a film, assembling shreds into a whole through editing. Godard's film is ultimately about the incompleteness of art, an incompleteness that requires the artwork's audience to fill in its own meanings and interpretations. Throughout the film, Godard plays with flickering and momentary lights, illuminating only sections of images and obscuring the rest in darkness. A lighter flame flickers above a section of a painting; a sparkler hisses in the black; a bare light bulb swings back and forth; TV monitors glow with frozen images in a dark room. Always, only a part is seen, never the whole, and this, Godard seems to be saying, is the way we see both art and reality.

This is one of the most exciting and vibrant films in Godard's career, a high point of his already excellent 80s filmography, and unfortunately one of the last of his major works still unavailable anywhere on DVD. For those who are interested in seeing it anyway, for now you can download a BitTorrent VHS rip, which is of watchable quality but not much better. Even in this less-than-desirable format, it was very obvious that this film has the same careful attention to color and composition that is apparent in all of Godard's 80s works, and I greatly look forward to the day when I can see an optimal presentation of this visual brilliance. Until then, though, I'm just glad I've been able to see what is clearly a major and under-valued landmark in Godard's massive filmography.

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In Harm's Way occupies something of an axis point in director Otto Preminger's career. All of his generally acknowledged masterpieces were behind him, and he was right on the precipice of a critical and commercial decline that would last pretty much until the end of his career. This well-made WW2 picture doesn't exactly fall neatly into either category. It's not as complex or as deep as Anatomy of a Murder or Bonjour Tristesse, which are among my top picks for A-grade Preminger, but it's by no means a bad film. It's a solidly crafted entertainment, enhanced by the strong characterizations, fluid camera, and subtle attention to detail that have always been among Preminger's hallmarks as a director. Preminger's sweeping film, weighing in at close to 3 hours, takes in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, its immediate aftermath, and a series of counterattacks in the Pacific by the American naval forces. It's a big field to play in, but Preminger wisely never allows the proceedings to become too epic or grandiose. He keeps the scale focused squarely on the human dramas at the story's heart.

The opening scenes set the tone right from the start. The film opens on an officers' dance taking place on the eve of Pearl Harbor, with one of the officers' wives, drunk and out of control, treating everyone to an extraordinarily sexy dance. It's an incongruous start to a war film, and it signals immediately that this is a Preminger war film. The woman turns out to be the wife of an officer (Kirk Douglas), who's at sea while she's out partying. She leaves the party with another officer, goes down to the beach and strips, and wakes up the next morning in time to see the Japanese planes flying over. Preminger gently sneaks into war through sex, suggesting from the very start that he's as interested in the people here as he is in the grand gestures of battle and strategy. He's blessed with a great cast in that regard, and the performances carry the film. In addition to Douglas, who's his usual volatile self, there's John Wayne, Patricia Neal, Tom Tryon (back for more after the harsh treatment Preminger gave him as the lead in The Cardinal), Burgess Meredith, and Henry Fonda in a cameo as a high-ranking admiral. Clearly, there's a lot of acting talent on tap here, and Preminger uses them to good effect in stories that verge on melodrama, but are nevertheless engaging and entertaining.

And Preminger's attention to detail keeps the film from ever seeming too superficial or bland. His characters are fleshed out to great effect, but he captures them best in small moments and visual touches which illuminate their characters. The scene when Patricia Neal and John Wayne discuss their love for each other without ever bringing up the word or anything like it is a perfect example of Preminger's ability for circumspection and nuance, and the scene ends with a perfect touch when Neal lets her shoes drop to the rug as an implied prelude to lovemaking. These kinds of witty small touches in the characterizations keep the film interesting, as does the camerawork, always a strong point of Preminger's films. His distinctive fluid panning is as effective as ever here, especially when he deploys it in the cramped quarters of the navy ships. Several shots follow Wayne from room to room, fluidly zipping through doorways and around corners, keeping close to the action and establishing a sense of motion that drives the scene. In this way, Preminger is able to carry over the action of battle into scenes of strategizing and preparation by commanders aboard the ships. The battle scenes themselves are economically achieved, with a minimum of smoke and gunfire and a lot of suggestion. In the opening scenes of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the film barely even shows a Japanese plane, but the effect is just as powerful and convincing.

This is undeniably a light and somewhat minor effort from Preminger, who at his best could transform such grand and melodramatic epics into something much deeper and more interesting. Here, he mostly stays on the surface, observing his characters with finesse and following the action plot with great energy, but never really taking the material to another plane as he so often did. Still, it's a solid blockbuster with some great scenes, and just a cursory comparison to the execrable Pearl Harbor should provide a hint of the difference a competent and original director can make to standard material.

10/7: Talk To Her; Vincent and Theo; The Shop Around the Corner

Pedro Almodóvar's Talk To Her delicately handles some potentially very creepy and bizarre subject matter in order to create some genuine sympathy for its pair of unlikely heroes. The story focuses around Benigno (Javier Cámara), a hospital orderly who is obsessed with the ballet dancer Alicia (Leonor Watling), who practices at the studio across the street from his apartment. When Alicia gets in a car accident and goes into a deep coma, Benigno becomes her private nurse at the hospital, caring for her with a personal touch, talking to her, massaging and bathing her daily, and continuing to indulge his unhealthy obsession for her. Meanwhile, Almodóvar weaves in the initially separate story of Marco (Dario Grandinetti), a reporter who falls in love with his latest subject, the bullfighter Lydia (Rosario Flores). The two stories converge when Lydia too succumbs to a coma, after a fight in which she is gored by a bull.

This is a complex film, an examination of love, loneliness, and the power of memory and imagination in bridging that gap, told from a specifically masculine viewpoint. It's a film about the formation of couples, a fact that Almodóvar announces by shooting a title on-screen with the couple's names every time a new pairing forms. Benigno and Marco are both somewhat scarred characters, haunted by their pasts and the emotions they still carry with them. Benigno is a sheltered and sexually ambiguous virgin who spent the bulk of his life caring for his ailing and apparently domineering mother until she passed away. Everyone around him thinks he's gay — one of the reasons he's allowed to care for Alicia so intimately — but more than anything he simply seems naive, unaware of what the realities of sex and relationships are like for most people. Marco is equally scarred, by the specter of his last relationship, with a volatile and beautiful blonde who continues to haunt him ten years after their break-up. It's only with Lydia that he finally begins to forget, and then she too is taken from him.

Almodóvar shows great care in examining the depths of both men's feelings, an especially delicate operation since Benigno winds up being a potentially very unlikeable character. But despite his actions later in the film, he remains sympathetic and entirely understandable; more sad than reprehensible. He is clearly a man damaged by his mother, with something of an incomplete view of life. His reverential and confused feelings for Alicia are best summed up by a scene in which he describes to her a silent film that he recently saw. As he narrates the film's plots, Almodóvar shows scenes from the film, which is of course invented for the occasion. It concerns a man who loves a scientist who is somewhat indifferent to him. To prove his love, he consumes her latest invention, a diet formula which unexpectedly makes him shrink, eventually down to very tiny size. The final scene which Almodóvar shows is the man watching over his now much larger love while she sleeps; he pulls away the covers, climbs all over her mountainous naked breasts and down the valley of her stomach, and finally to between her legs, where he strips and climbs inside of her.

It's a remarkable scene, and Almodóvar milks it for equal parts pathos and kitsch. The black and white, slightly sped-up presentation of the silent film clearly gives the scene a comedic vibe, as does the patently rubbery appearance of the poor special effect used to achieve this lurid fantasy — doubtless an intentional gesture to the days when effects were plastic rather than computer-generated. But the scene contains poignant echoes of Benigno's own emotional fixation on his helplessly sleeping Alicia, who he elevates to tremendous proportions, and whose body he also explores while she sleeps. The silent film also provides a mirror of Benigno's dead and overbearing mother, both in the film's evil mother character, from whom the heroine rescues the tiny man, and in the potent image of a return to the womb. One of Almodóvar's greatest gifts is this ability to play a scene both for laughs and the deeper, often uncomfortable layers of emotional meanings beneath the laughs. This scene is both deliriously, ridiculously silly, and painfully raw in the way it lays bare the inner workings of Benigno's emotional life. And that's as good a summary as any of the film as a whole, as well. Marco's story is more understated than Benigno's, both less funny and less gut-wrenching, and he winds up as the younger man's stable friend and confidant. But even in Marco's much quieter storyline, there's room for another brilliant and beautiful scene, as Marco remembers an incident from his long-gone relationship and, sure enough, the scene materializes in the air around his head, a hazy vision of a long-ago night on the African plains. It's a gorgeous and affecting scene, with the shadowy image of this memory floating in the very air around Marco, like smoke exhaled from his mind. The film as a whole retains that feeling, with different emotions mingling together like tendrils of smoke: sadness, nostalgia, love, desire, loneliness, and sensuality.

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Vincent and Theo is a biography of Vincent Van Gogh and his brother Theo that largely ignores the great painter's artworks in order to focus on the man, his conflicts, and his relationships. Director Robert Altman is of course a perfect helmsman for such an idiosyncratic approach to an artist's life, with his preference for ragged technical qualities and a loose, flowing style that's much closer to life than the glossy schematicism of most Hollywood film. Altman chose to focus in on Van Gogh's tortured and even parasitic relationship with his brother Theo, an art dealer who always supported Vincent even though his paintings never made a penny during either of their lifetimes. The film is a subtle commentary on the transience of art and artistic values, of the influence of commerce on art, of the shifts in value which define the difference between a masterpiece and a piece of trash. The film opens with a modern-day auction in which the value of a Van Gogh painting for sale is escalating by the hundreds of thousands with each bid. Altman then cuts away to a shot of Vincent (Tim Roth), lying in bed with dirt on his face, as the sound from the auction continues in voiceover, with the painting's value finally ending up above £22 million. This tension between history's later estimation of artistic worth and the reality of the life that made it is at the center of the film.

To this end, Altman's trademark darting camera moves around within the Van Goghs' lives, always providing an intimate view of the artist at work which eschews glamour for grittiness and even ugliness. Roth is phenomenal here, in one of his best roles. His portrayal of Vincent has a tinge of madness, but mostly just a willingness to get down and dirty in every way — with peasant people for subjects, with his impoverished lifestyle, and with the casual way he treats his paints and materials. Two of the most striking scenes are a pair in which Vincent smears paints on his own face in his impressionistic style, and later does the same to a prostitute in a bar. It's the ultimate symbolic expression of life and art intermingling, as Vincent attempts to transform his very life, his own being, into an artwork. In another scene, Altman shows Vincent in a field of sunflowers, painting the scenery, and the camera seems to take on the artist's point of view, zooming and darting around the field, focusing on a single flower, finding the few broken and wilting buds within the seemingly lush whole, then zooming back out as though the artist's eye were moving on to something else. It's an interesting approach, a divergence from the usual technique in artists' biographies of showing the process of the art as it progresses from raw material to finished. There is very little of that in Vincent and Theo, only a few scenes with very minimal detail shown; Altman prefers to get into the thought process, the sensual experience of making art, rather than the physical nitty-gritty of what it looks like.

This is prime Altman, a perfect example of a subject that seems to have been made for his style. The film's examination of a life dedicated to art without recognition might very well be a parallel to Altman's own career, during which he was often in danger of being forgotten and his films unseen. The film stresses the transience of art, as Vincent treats his artwork often with carelessness and even contempt. He's continually throwing canvases, breaking them, or smearing them over with paint. The fact that this work survived, that Van Gogh is still remembered today, is as much due to luck as talent. This wild, messy film is as fitting a tribute as any to that wild, messy man and his wild, messy art.

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Finally for today, I ended on a much lighter note with the 1940 Ernst Lubitsch comedy The Shop Around the Corner. Actually, comedy might be too strong a word, although there are certainly more than a few moments in the film that had me roaring with laughter. But overall, the film strikes more of a bittersweet, understated tone, never quite settling down for flat-out comedy but always keeping a rich, textured emotional palette in play. The story, set in a small shop in Budapest, is as simple as it gets. The store manager, Kralik (Jimmy Stewart), and the newest employee, the brash and outgoing Klara (Margaret Sullivan), clash with each other continuously, without realizing that at the same time they are carrying on an anonymous courtship with each other by way of love letters. The plot throws in the rich tapestry of the other shop employees and some work drama to complicate matters a bit, but the core narrative is relatively straightforward, and the resolution shouldn't be too surprising to anyone who's ever seen a romantic comedy before. But Lubitsch handles this material with such wit, charm, depth, and nuance, that it's virtually impossible not to be bowled over by this affecting and charming story.

It helps, of course, that the leads are great. Stewart especially is at the top of his craft, a first-class actor turning in one of his best lead turns. One of the film's themes is that everyone has many sides to them, and that we often conceal in one situation what we would exaggerate in another. Stewart's character embodies this layering of personality, with a sensitive and intelligent inner core that he often covers up with his sarcastic wit and straightforward manner. Sullivan doesn't have quite as much to do, or quite as subtle a range of emotions to traverse, but she is an apt sparring partner for Stewart's wit, and the pair crackles whenever they're on screen together. The rest of the cast is equally strong, from the hilarious wise-cracking errand boy (William Tracy) to the grandfatherly Pirovitch (Felix Bressart) to the peevish but ultimately good-hearted shop owner (Frank Morgan).

This is a warm, lovely, and unforgettable film in the classic Hollywood comedy tradition. Its style is understated, as is its story and its humor. Lubitsch has faith in these characters and the reality of this place, the comfortable confines of the little gift shop they all work in. He lets them really inhabit this space and doesn't rush the script in order to dive right into the heart of the plot. In the first half of the film, the romance takes a distant second to the banalities of work and the day-to-day existence of the working classes. The scenes of the characters all gathering outside the door, idly chatting and gossiping as they wait for the working day to begin, have a realism which belies the film's origins in the realm of glossy romantic comedies. It's only in the second half of the film that the romance storyline truly begins to develop, growing organically from the seeds already sown in the first half. It's this patience, this attention to details which fall outside the core romantic plot, that elevates Lubitsch's craft here above his peers. The film is such a delight because there's so much to it, so many layers built into its deceptively simple premise. It's an uproarious comedy, a sugary romance of opposites attracting, a wonderfully subtle look at working class life, and a parable on the multifaceted nature of humanity. It's also just a really great film.