Paris vu par...

Paris vu par... is a portmanteau film from 1965, part of a brief vogue for such multi-director compilations in the 60s. Anyone who's made an attempt to go through the oeuvre of Jean-Luc Godard, in particular, will certainly have encountered their fair share of these films, since Godard seemingly contributed to almost all of them. And anyone who's seen a few will know that in general they're a terribly uneven lot, marred by many lackluster efforts, with maybe a gem or two (usually from Godard!) sparkling amidst all the muck. This film, in which six different French directors contribute six shorts about Paris, is no exception to the general rule. Each director focuses his short on a different neighborhood of the city, a conceptually slight idea that allows them pretty much free rein to choose their own stories. The results, though, are largely disappointing.

In Jean Douchet's Saint Germain-des-Pres, the American girl Katherine (Barbara Wilkin), gets involved with a French boy who's pretending to be an ambassador's son. She sleeps with him once, only to have him throw her out the next morning, telling her he needs to go to Mexico to see his father. Obviously, she sees him the next day and uncovers the ruse, then runs into the boy who he was pretending to be. All of this plays out with little enough visual flair, but worse still virtually no sense of the purpose behind it. Douchet's film is utterly dull and pointless, even though it obviously aspires to the witty boy/girl dynamics of Godard's seminal Breathless. Leaving aside the issue of originality, this short is missing several crucial components from its blueprint, namely the underlying sexual politics, playfulness, and inventive use of filmic formal elements that made Godard's film what it was. Douchet seems to have taken Godard's old catch phrase about a girl and a gun to heart, seemingly believing that all you need is a guy, a girl, and a camera, and then you've got a film. Not so, as this paper-thin trifle of a film proves.

Jean Rouch's Gare du Nord is a small improvement, a similarly flimsy premise which is at least teased out into a story of actual consequence, bringing out the subtexts and potential meanings of the material in a way that Douchet fails to even attempt. In Rouch's short, a married couple (Nadine Ballot and Barbet Schroeder) living in a lousy apartment adjacent to a construction site spend the morning fighting, until she storms out and says she won't be back anytime soon. At this point, Rouch interrupts the overexposed quality of the visuals from the apartment, where everything looked washed-out and glistening with harsh sunlight, with a very dark and moody shot as the wife descends in the elevator. This lovely shot provides an interlude, a point of stasis and contemplation, with Ballot's profile shrouded in darkness, the elevator grate casting moving shadows across her face, as her husband's voice grows ever fainter, echoing with a metallic ring from above. It's a beautiful moment, well worth the film's brief length for that alone.

In the second half of this film, Ballot walks towards work and is accosted on the way by a stranger (Gilles Quéant) who abruptly offers her nearly everything that she was just complaining was lacking from her life with her husband: material wealth, a comfortable home in a nice neighborhood, world travel. This is a film about discontentment, especially with class status. But this man, a metaphorical stand-in for the upper class, and also a parodic one — he is so rich he doesn't think twice about leaving his expensive car idling in the middle of the road while he walks with this girl — is also discontented. He has left his suburban rich neighborhood in search of something different for himself, finding his own life too quiet and dull. In fact, he threatens to kill himself unless Ballot goes off with on a vacation, but she refuses and he follows through on his threat. This puzzling ending to some extent defuses the short's potential, which until this melodramatic turn of events, had seemed quite good. Rouch raises some interesting questions in terms of the relationship between the working classes and the bourgeoisie, and the profound dissatisfactions that can affect both classes. But while the portrait of working class life here is firmly fixed in social realities and the ordinary, the stranger's depiction of the upper-class borders on fantasy, with no similar understanding of class pressures. And the story resolves itself in such a ridiculous manner that it's ultimately hard to take any of it too seriously.

Jean-Daniel Pollet's Rue Saint-Denis is quite possibly this film's weakest segment, a totally pointless vignette that goes nowhere and says nothing, in the dullest manner possible. A man (Claude Melki) hires a slightly aged prostitute (Micheline Dax), and takes her back to his cluttered and tiny apartment. The two of them awkwardly talk, eat dinner together, and read the paper. Pollet certainly captures the uncomfortable and impersonal nature of the prostitute relationship — well there's a news flash, huh? — but otherwise it's hard to figure out what exactly this is supposed to be. It's too minimalist and distanced for a character study, and we never learn anything about the characters anyway. But it's also too deadpan to be a comedy, too lightweight to be a social exposé, and too event-less to be a drama. It's simply a moment, captured for its own sake, but it's not substantial enough to justify a film, not even one barely longer than ten minutes.

Eric Rohmer's Place de l'Etoile is one of his weaker efforts, even if in most of this company it winds up looking comparatively strong. The film opens with a documentary segment, in which Rohmer describes the area after which his segment is titled, a section of 12 streets arranged in a star pattern around the perimeter of the Arc de Triomphe. This area is carefully established in the opening minutes, particularly the way that the layout of streets leads to a situation where pedestrians circling the Arc are continually forced to cross busy intersections formed by the crisscrossing network of streets. This informative establishing material pays off when Rohmer's narrative reaches its climax, allowing the viewer to place the protagonist's movements within the context of the space he's moving in. It's a simple thing, but this is the only segment so far to truly establish a sense of location and spatial logistics for the neighborhood that gives its name to the segment. Despite the nominal theme of this project, most of the other directors chose stories that could take place anywhere, that use the neighborhoods they're located in as backgrounds at best. Only Rohmer, always detail-oriented, understands that character is at least partially defined by space. Just as in his features he always pays inordinate attention to the decoration of his characters' living spaces, here he takes great pains to set up the environment in which his character will be moving.

Once the narrative gets going, though, it's a simple enough little story, about a haughty and fastidious clothing shop clerk (Jean-Michel Rouzière) who believes that he's accidentally killed a bum who accosted him on the street. The payoff of the documentary sequence that opened the feature is Rouzière's mad dash away from the scene of the crime through the entire Place de l'Etoile, running across intersections filled with cars and weaving among the other pedestrians. The slow, leisurely tour of the opening minutes is now repeated at a much brisker pace, as the man runs frantically from his imagined pursuers. They never catch him, and months later he runs across the bum on the train, and thus realizes that he didn't kill him after all. It's a slight story, obviously, as minimal and pointless as many of the others in this compilation film. The only difference is that Rohmer's characteristic attention to mise en scène allows him to inflect even this undistinguished narrative with at least a hint of cinematic interest.

For his contribution to this film, Montparnasse-Levallois, Jean-Luc Godard enlisted the help of documentary filmmaker Albert Maysles, whose films with his brother David comprise one of the central bodies of work in the American cinéma-vérité movement. With Maysles handling the camerawork and Godard providing the scenario, direction, and editing, this short represents the meeting of two very different cinematic minds. The contrast results in a film that doesn't quite feel like a true Godard film, since it's very rare that Godard ever worked with another creative intelligence who could exercise this much influence over the aesthetic qualities of his films — even his collaborations with Jean-Pierre Gorin and Anne-Marie Miéville always feel very much like Godard films. Indeed, Maysles' dodging, shifting handheld camera defines this film, which follows Monica (Joanna Shimkus) as she mixes up the letters she sent to her two lovers, and goes to each in turn to try to straighten things out. Maysles keeps the camera almost constantly in motion, diving in for shaky closeups and snaking around within the confines of the cramped workplaces where Monica visits the two men. Even in relatively stable shots, the camera is slightly shaking from side to side, zooming in for closer views, and abruptly panning between the two people in a conversation.

The opening titles inform that this is an "action-film," and Godard has one of his characters indirectly explain what this means early on. Monica's first lover is an "action-sculptor," which he says means that he takes whatever pieces of metal happen to be lying at hand and combines them through improvisation. Obviously, this applies equally well to the loose quality of Maysles' cinematography, which seems to sample the images in front of it at random, arriving at semi-stable compositions only through continual adjustment and tweaking. This jittery, nervous energy in the camerawork is very different from the smooth, sinewy motion and dispassionate pans usually favored in Godard's work. Maysles' camera lends itself to the kind of psychological and emotional character identification that Godard usually disdains in favor of more formal and intellectual elements. For this reason alone, Montparnasse-Levallois feels very different from Godard's other work, and especially his work from this point in his career, when he was beginning his transformation into a truly radical filmmaker.

Camerawork aside, though, this isn't a particularly radical film to begin with, and it's perhaps the first throwaway film that Godard made since some of his pre-Breathless shorts. It's not a bad short by any means, and just in terms of the cleverness of the writing, the deft handling of the symmetrical plot, and the charming female lead, it elevates itself above some of the other dreck in this compilation, despite the similar romantic themes. The symmetry of the visits to the two men also brings up an interesting parallel in terms of the two men's occupations — one is a sculptor who welds metal in order to create semi-abstract statues of women, while the other is a mechanic who does bodywork on cars. Both are welders and molders of metal, both shape bodies made of steel. Godard doesn't go much further than that with the parallel, unfortunately, but it's an interesting formal echo at least, and a highly suggestive thematic subtext. Still, this is pretty neutered and empty for 60s Godard, a very minor entry in his most fertile and famous creative period.

Claude Chabrol's La Muette is the most visually striking of the films here, dominated by odd camera angles and disorienting setups that turn a simple domestic space into something cold, alien, and even frightening. A young boy (Gilles Chusseau) is traumatized and aggravated by the constant bickering of his parents (Stéphane Audran and Chabrol himself), as well as his father's unsubtle dalliances with the family's sexy maid (Dany Saril). The family is obviously upper class, and their life is presented as a rhythmic and unvarying series of similar events, especially centered around the dinner table, where they all stuff their faces and fight. Chabrol rhythmically returns to the same or similar images again and again, panning around the dinner table to show each member of the family shoving food into their mouths and chewing exaggeratedly. Then a cut, and the pan sequence repeats, maybe with subtle differences, but with the same basic emphasis on eating and mastication. This cycling quality of domestic life is both numbing and painful, and Chabrol expertly draws out the obvious anguish, boredom, and antagonism lurking beneath the surface.

When the boy has had enough, he unleashes a rampage around the house — curiously unpunished and unmentioned afterwards, which makes me wonder if he just fantasized it — and discovers that he can dampen his hearing with some ear plugs he steals from his mother. From then on, the boy walks around his house in a curtain of total silence, not hearing the petty arguments of his parents. Chabrol obliges by shutting off the soundtrack as well, cloaking the viewer in that same eerie stillness and silence. It's an effective (and affecting) portrait of alienation and isolation, whether self-imposed or not. The segment's ending leaves a lot to be desired, resorting to cheap shocks in order to bring the situation to a quick close, but Chabrol redeems the film by inserting a final shot of the boy out on the streets, in the center of a crowd, totally silent, looking confused and lost. It's a haunting final image of desperation and loneliness, as the boy is very much alone even in the center of the crowd of people from whom he's sealed off by a wall of silence.

As a whole, Paris vu par... is a flawed and mediocre collection of shorts, with even some of the more well-known directors here turning in subpar efforts. With the exception of the completely worthless Douchet and Pollet shorts, all of these films have at least moments or aspects of interest, and fans of Godard, Chabrol, or Rohmer would certainly want to fill in their knowledge of those directors' key 60s period with the shorts included here. Otherwise, this is a disappointing collection of utterly average films, and the periodic moments of interest and engagement don't do too much to elevate it above this low level.

Stereo/Sylvia Scarlett

Stereo is an early student film project from David Cronenberg, an hour-long feature made almost entirely on his own, on such a shoestring budget that he decided to entirely forgo sound recording. The result is a film that, even in its extreme minimalism and obvious amateur nature, is pure undistilled Cronenberg, an early indication of the themes and obsessions that would continue to haunt him throughout his later films. The film's central conceit is that the footage shown here is documentary material from something called the Canadian Academy for Erotic Enquiry (only in Canada!), where the mysterious Professor Stringfellow is conducting strange experiments in telepathy and sexuality with a group of eight young men and women. The bulk of the film is entirely silent, with the only sound being provided by an occasional voiceover, reading clinical and scientific descriptions and analyses in a detached, objective tone. Otherwise, the film plays out in a dead silence. This eerie stillness may have been necessitated by budgetary constraints, but it is nevertheless a perfect aesthetic complement to the film's inquiry into sensory deprivation, human communication, and the objective/subjective divide, especially as regards scientific research.

This divide between objective and subjective is most present in the gulf between image and sound in this film. While the voiceover impassively discusses the nature of telepathy and describes the theories and experiments of Stringfellow, the images present a messier world of social interaction and sexuality, far removed from the dry, textbook-style readings on the soundtrack. This gulf is almost never bridged, and as a result the sound and image seem to exist on different planes, commenting on and feeding into one another, but rarely coming completely into sync. The voiceover rarely ever seems like it's actually talking about the events of the images, which it purports to describe.

The best way to capture the film's mood is perhaps to quote from one of these lightly absurdist but earnest monologues: "We understand that the unique way in which an individual perceives and reacts to his environment is a function of his own experiential space continuum," the narrator says halfway through the film. "When object events enter the experiential space continuum of that individual, they become an integral, organic part of that space... But we are now feeling with telepathists, in theory, the interior space continua of two or more telepathists can merge, can blend together to an extent far beyond the range of normal human experience. What would be the organic nature of communal experiential space, shared among eight psychosomatic entities?"

Obviously, this psychological mumbo-jumbo points forward in many ways to Cronenberg's own Scanners, just as the film's clinical exploration of sexuality would later be taken up in Dead Ringers and Crash. This film is concerned, as many of Cronenberg's films would be, with alternative modes of human society and interaction, the creation of a new "experiential space." This expansion of human capability is located, as it usually is in these films, in the human mind itself, in expanded use of brain functions usually left undeveloped. Just as the community of telepaths in Scanners represented a new human social unit, tightly knit together within their own minds rather than through sensory or verbal interaction, the experiment depicted in Stereo is an attempt to reach a similar new paradigm in human society. The obvious subtext in these scenarios is an awareness of the inadequacy of society as it is now, and Cronenberg's films often represent imaginative recreations of social functioning in order to create a new and better society. That these transformations inevitably necessitate tremendous psychological and physical violence can be seen as a byproduct, an indicator of the rigidity and strength of the social norms being broken.

These themes are less developed in Stereo, really just a skeleton of the ideas they would later blossom into, but the film is nevertheless interesting, especially for Cronenberg admirers. The imagery of the film consistently belies the objective tone of the narration, as the camera (handled by Cronenberg himself) fluidly glides through the distinctive, angular corridors of the CAEE (actually the University of Toronto). While the voiceover maintains a clinical distance, the camera swoops in on the telepathic volunteers at the institute in even their most intimate moments. As an early sketch in the career of a director who would later fill in this broad outline with much richer details, Stereo is perhaps most worthwhile as a beginning, a starting point. But it is by no means worthless on its own merits, and its coolly detached examination of human subjectivity and relationships is a seminal example of David Cronenberg's keen eye for such subjects.

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George Cukor's Sylvia Scarlett is a deliriously strange and unsettling mess of a film, an irreconcilable collision of gender-bending sexual mutability with old-fashioned Hollywood normative romance and melodrama. The film casts Katharine Hepburn as young Sylvia, who disguises herself as Sylvester in order to help her father (Edmund Gwenn) escape an embezzling charge in France. The duo flee to London in disguise, as father and son, and along the way pick up the lowlife smuggler and thief Monk (Cary Grant). Together, the trio attempts to make a dishonest living by pulling cons. There are a great many twists and turns after that, especially when the trio is joined by a Cockney maid (Bunny Beatty) who the father falls for, and the quartet starts up a traveling vaudeville-type show performing for the rich all across the countryside. But the narrative is largely unimportant to the film's successes, and its increasingly baroque machinations are clearly not where Cukor's interests lie. Rather, the first half of the film is a clever inquiry into gender and sexuality, as the cross-dressing Hepburn charms both Grant and the upper-class artist Michael (Brian Aherne) with her boyish ways, while also seemingly attracting several women.

This bisexual play animates the film as long as Hepburn remains in drag. She is, it should be added, an almost totally unconvincing man, but it doesn't particularly matter, since the film as a whole is so unconcerned with being convincing in any regard. It starts with the accents, which are uniformly horrid and in any case keep slipping away and then back again at random. Grant is supposed to be sporting a lower-class Cockney drawl, which is bad enough, but he constantly forgets and falls into his standard Cary Grant persona — it's to his credit that he's such a natural that the shift is often barely even noticeable. It's harder to figure out quite what is going on with Hepburn's accent. She's supposed to be half French and half English, so I guess in some sense her all-over-the-place melange of accents and voices might represent her mixed heritage and upbringing, but it's still distracting, especially in the more melodramatic scenes. In lighter moments, she allows the accents to fall away, forgotten, and that's a relief, since her voice and natural comic poise go hand in hand, as in her more conventional screwball comedies. She's especially good at projecting her character's awkward attempts to sound like a man, as well as the moments when she forgets and slips up. This babble of voices, faked and put on, results in a meta-layer in which it's difficult to tell when the characters are meant to be faking a voice, and when it's the actors who are faking and forgetting. The scenario complicates things further by having the group pose as rich society folk for one of their scams, with Sylvia's father affecting an upper-class British whine for the ruse. It's a film about "passing," in terms of gender, sexuality, and class, and the emphasis is always on the voice as a marker of identity — one reason that the actors' missteps with their accents are so galling and ironic.

Despite this sometimes awkward execution, Hepburn's adventures as a man are riotously fun, and the closeted gay Cukor was clearly having a ball with this resonant scenario. From the moment Hepburn and Grant meet, there's a weird chemistry between them that clearly hints at some underlying (homo)sexual tension. At one point, getting ready to bunk up on a cold night, Grant tells Hepburn that "he" will make "a nice hot water bottle" to cuddle up next to. In another scene, Hepburn is kissed on the mouth by her father's lover, and later the lover of the man she wants (Aherne) can't resist giving her a peck on the cheek either. She seems to gather attention almost without regard to conventional sexuality, as though the confusion of gender roles serves to make her attractive to all genders and sexualities at once. Cukor stretches this material as far as it will go, and presumably as far as the strictures of 1930s Hollywood would allow; it's hard to imagine him getting away with much more, and even the obvious innuendo here considerably stretches the boundaries of the Hollywood romance. Nevertheless, this obviously couldn't be sustained for the whole picture, and the film inevitably has to unmask Hepburn and return her to her proper sex role, which is precisely the point when it ceases to be exciting and begins to drag and falter.

The plot complications necessary to affect this role reversal quickly descend, in the second half of the film, into trite melodrama — the kind where characters run out into the rain and scream, or jump to their deaths in the ocean — and it's obvious that Cukor loses much of his interest in the plot once Hepburn sheds her suit for a dress. There's a delightful moment, when Hepburn reveals herself as a girl to Aherne, when he simply cackles and yells out, "So that's why I was talking to you the way I was!" It's a telling line, suggesting that even before he knew she was a woman, Aherne was feeling the stirrings of attraction for her, and that while her revelation might sanction those feelings, make them acceptable, it doesn't substantially change the feelings themselves. This understanding of sexuality as a universal fact not always bound by traditional male/female dynamics is quickly discarded by the narrative, however, in favor of some much more conventional Hollywood theatrics. Cukor is so disinterested in this fluff that at one point he obviously dubs in a whole conversation of exposition while no one on screen is moving their lips at all. Sylvia does briefly change back into Sylvester during the second half, though, and Cukor takes the opportunity to insert a prison sequence with a knowing wink, having the two "men" spend the night in a jail cell together on the flimsiest of pretexts.

What all this adds up to, ultimately, is a totally confused and uneven film that's nevertheless a joy to watch, messiness and all. There are plenty of moments of great fun and pleasure, and the handful of rioutous party scenes look forward to Cukor's own later Holiday with their celebratory free spirit. The second half's melodrama often drags, and the conventional romantic resolution is something of a disappointment, if only because the film's first half promised such freshness, candor, and originality with regard to the Hollywood treatment of romance. That the film doesn't quite deliver on that promise doesn't diminish the sloppy, sporadic brilliance of much of this film, which in fits and starts serves to question and undermine the whole heterosexual, upper-class foundations of the Hollywood cinema.

Early Spring/Duck Soup

The mood of Yasujiro Ozu's Early Spring is best encapsulated in a line delivered towards the end of the film by a disillusioned old salaryman in a bar. "I've worked 31 long years," he says, "to find that life is just an empty dream." This melancholy lament, reflecting the wish for something different than life has turned out to be, is common in Ozu's films, and especially in this one, which captures the milieu of the salaried worker with an attentive eye for detail and a keen sense of the loneliness and ultimate meaninglessness of this kind of life. And yet in the midst of this gloom, Ozu injects his film with such richness of detail, moments of fullness and celebration, that the sadness is leavened by hopefulness. As with almost all of Ozu's films, what would normally be called the plot is at best incidental to what's really going on here. In this film, the main storyline concerns the salaryman Shoji Sugiyama (Ryo Ikebe) and his wife Masako (Chikage Awashima), who are suffering through a discontented marriage. Shoji flirts with, and then finally has a brief affair with, a co-worker, a girl nicknamed Goldfish (Keiko Kishi), and this momentary dalliance (really, just a single night) drives away his wife when she learns about it.

This, at least, is the ostensible "plot" of Early Spring, the narrative engine of the film. Ozu, though, characteristically obscures and mutes this storyline, situating it firmly within the larger context of Tokyo's suburbs and the many working men who commute into the city from there every day, as well as their families. Ozu signals his concern with this wider context very early on in the film, as the first few scenes cut back and forth between several different families living in adjoining houses in a single neighborhood, as they wake up in the morning with the men preparing for work and the women bustling around the house getting ready for the day as well. In these opening scenes, it's not at all clear who the central family of the film will be, and Ozu further diffuses such narrative interest by inserting a very early scene in which crowds of commuters walk towards the local train station, all dressed identically and carrying bagged lunches. This communal impression of a "type," rather than the individual, is Ozu's starting point, and he moves from here into the individual stories and characters who make up this crowd.

Formally speaking, Ozu's distinctive static camera makes up the vast majority of the shots in the film, nearly all of them taken from his signature low angle. This restraint and stasis gives an especial significance to the few moments when the camera does move, even if the rationale for the movement isn't always clear. In this film, the camera moves in just two circumstances. During a hiking trip that many of the workers organize, the camera laterally tracks with them as they walk, traveling in pace with them as they walk. The result is a tension between stasis and motion, as the people remain in frame while the scenery seems to move behind them. This scene, with its bright white sky and open framing, perfectly captures the airy, carefree quality of this nature walk, in contrast to the crowded living spaces and hurried commuting of Tokyo. The object of the moving camera is less clear in a handful of transitional scenes, set in office corridors, in which the camera creeps slowly forward down the hallway, never quite reaching the other end before Ozu cuts away. These short scenes are inevitably used as bridging sequences between a scene set at the office and one set elsewhere, so that Ozu cuts from these interludes directly to a new setting. The camera's creeping forward motion thus subtly suggests the shift of scene, so that even without overtly signifying anything in itself, once it's been used once or twice it comes to have its own meaning in the context of the film's formal language.

These moments of camera movement are the exceptions, though, set off against a style that overwhelmingly favors stasis, a fixed angle of observation within each individual shot. This fixedness allows Ozu to carefully compose each shot, and he especially favors the use of internal framing, further subdividing the frame by filming through doorways and creating layers within the image. In one scene towards the end of the film, after Shoji's wife has left him and he's just had an angry encounter with his mistress as well, he's packing to leave for a new job he's just been transferred to. Ozu had just filmed his conversation with Goldfish mostly in close medium shots, and after she storms out, the next shot is a much longer view, in which Shoji is isolated within the frame. The doorway of the room he's in forms an additional frame, further distancing him, and behind him multiple screens, windows, and doors subdivide the frame into layers of boxes and geometric shapes. The image is further cluttered, the hard lines softened, by the unpacked clothes and the mess all around him. A pair of suits, overlapping each other as they hang in the upper righthand corner of the image, provide an illusion of depth, seeming to recede into the distance. The power of Ozu's static framing becomes clear in shots like this one, in which every inch of the image seems to build up into a cumulative impact that drives home the shot's point without seeming too obvious. The images in this film speak much louder, with much greater clarity, than the usually bland and stoically delivered dialogue.

This formal rigor in Ozu's work is always in service to such expressions of the film's themes and characterizations. In writing about this film, I'm realizing that Ozu is particularly resistant to the process of criticism, because while all films resist to some extent the translation of visual meaning into written language, the effect of an Ozu picture seems especially difficult to describe or analyze. The magic and poetry of this film is inscribed in its simple visual aesthetic, its equally minimalist story, and its characters who subtly express themselves in even the most prosaic of conversations. With its underlying message that family bonds and affection should not be forgotten in the pursuit of economic success ("a company can be a cold thing," says Chishu Ryu as Shoji's older mentor), this film is somewhat more socially engaged than most other late Ozu, in which the domestic unit was usually more self-contained and such messages are usually excised. This isn't quite up to the heights of Ozu's best few films, perhaps because of this overt message, but it is nevertheless a strong mid-level work in a career that seemingly saw few low points and many high ones.

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My great temptation in reviewing the classic Marx Brothers farce Duck Soup is simply to construct my review entirely from quotes, so rich and hilarious is the zinger-laden dialogue in this crisply paced comedy. I'll resist the temptation, though, not only because it would be a cheap way out of a review, but because the brothers' fast-paced patter doesn't translate easily into print, with so much of its impact relying on the performers' flawless comic timing and gift for accents and delivery. It would take a similarly talented comic (like, say, Dave Sim, whose Lord Julius bears more than a passing resemblance to Groucho Marx) to get across in mere words the distinctive rhythms of these performers — and let's face it, I'm not a very talented comic. So the best I can do is try to approximate the feel of this film, which catapults along through just over an hour of ludicrous situations, crammed with so many sight gags and so much quick-witted banter that it both breezes by and feels like it has to be so much longer than it actually is.

The film's plot is the barest whiff of an excuse for what is to follow, but the opening few scenes nevertheless set things up with considerable pomp and circumstance. The setting is the imaginary country of Freedonia, and the wealthy widow Mrs. Teasdale (Margaret Dumont) has agreed to bail the country out of financial trouble only if they appoint her beloved friend Rufus T. Firefly (Groucho, of course) to be the new president. They agree, and Groucho's grand introduction as the new leader is accompanied by the singing of Freedonia's national anthem and a lovingly choreographed musical number, which Groucho ruins by sneaking in through the back, sliding down a fire pole and inconspicuously joining the row of soldiers awaiting his arrival. This opening, which defuses governmental ritual with Groucho's slouching entrance and side-of-the-mouth quips, sets the tone for the film as a whole. With the Marx Brothers running the government, legislation, diplomacy, and war become games of escalating absurdity and illogical wordplay. At one cabinet meeting, an advisor stands up and asks to speak about tariffs, to which Groucho responds that this is new business, and they're still covering the old business — but by the time he moves onto the new business seconds later, he tells the same advisor that unfortunately the tariffs have become old business already, and that it's time for the new business now.

This kind of twisting logic is a Marx Brothers signature, keeping everyone on their toes with constantly changing rules. In this warped world, Groucho can grow angry from an insult that he has himself imagined and acted out, just as he can get offended by a story his brother Zeppo (as the straight man, royal advisor Bob Roland) whispers to him, only to be informed that he was the one who originally told poor Zeppo the story. This unsteady grounding is even more true of Chico and Harpo, who provide perhaps the film's funniest scenes as a pair of inept spies for the opposing country of Sylvania. In a meeting with Sylvania's ambassador, Trentino (Louis Calhern), this ridiculous duo runs circles around their hapless employer, the combination of Chico's thick Italian accent and Harpo's silent miming somehow creating a perfect comic alchemy. Again and again, Chico sets up Trentino's expectations, building up, only to totally disrupt expectations by revealing the total irrelevancy of the information they've gathered about the enemy leader. "Well, you remember you gave us a picture of this man and said, follow him?" Chico asks, and Trentino eagerly affirms it. "Well, we get on-a the job right away, and in-a one hour — even-a less than one hour..." The expectation is built up, and Trentino leans forward, and then: "We lose-a the picture. That's-a pretty quick work, eh?"

This destruction of expectations is the essential form of the Marx Brothers joke, a close relative of their tendency to rely on word games and misunderstandings of meaning. There are rarely any jokes here that don't work, and when they don't it's mainly because they fail to surprise or reverse expectations. An example would be the recurring gag involving a motorcycle and sidecar, which is funny the first time it happens, but its iterations are overly predictable and go exactly as the viewer would expect them to. These moments are rare, though, and in the fast-paced flow of this film, they're over very quickly while the brothers race on to the next setup and payoff. This verbal dexterity is matched in a willingness to engage in physical comedy as well, especially from the mute Harpo with his honking horns and the scissors he uses to snip off anything he can get his hands on. But all the brothers occasionally get in on the physical comedy game from time to time, and the climactic mirror scene in which Groucho faces off against his "reflection" (actually Harpo in disguise) is a hilarious mimed sequence worthy of the best silent comedy, especially once Chico gets in on the act as a third Groucho. It's played completely silent, with not even any music, to allow the emphasis to fall where it naturally should, entirely on the movement and the body language of the two actors.

Director Leo McCarey, later known for much more personal comedies, here completely bows to the Marx Brothers, stepping aside and simply making whatever creative choices will best showcase their work. The result is a utilitarian mise en scéne that sometimes even verges on the sloppy, especially during some of the musical numbers, where the choppy editing seems indifferent to any sense of continuity or resonance between disparate shots. This kind of careless editing and construction crops up periodically in the course of the film, but it's hardly important in the context of this looney quartet's antics. The Marx Brothers rightfully dominate the film, and in comparison to them even the medium of film itself begins to seem inconsequential. That's why, for the most part, McCarey's decision to lay low directorially is a wise one, and the Marx Brothers are able to take center stage as they fire off their best material.

Cassandra's Dream

Critics have long been accusing Woody Allen of repeating himself, of retracing the same ground over and over again in his films — fatalistic, death-obsessed, pessimistic to a fault. With Cassandra's Dream, his latest film, these accusations have never been more true. This film is more than familiar ground for Allen, a virtual retread of Match Point, the dark, coolly moralistic drama that put him back on many people's radars after a decade of notoriously uneven and unsuccessful films. Even then, Match Point wasn't wholly new territory, recycling much of the plot and underlying themes from Crimes and Misdemeanors, with a few new wrinkles thrown in. Cassandra's Dream returns to the formula once again, and by now it's starting to get stale and predictable, though Allen's craft is as assured as ever, and taken on its own merits the film is every bit as exacting and precisely calibrated as its predecessors.

The film centers around two brothers, Ian (Ewan McGregor) and Terry (Colin Farrell), who are in dire financial straits but dream of a much better life, inspired by the example of their rich Uncle Howard (Tom Wilkinson). As with Match Point, this is a film about class envy and the desire for mobility and wealth, with working class men aiming to rise above their class strata. In this respect, at least, the new film is much superior to its predecessor, in that it marks perhaps the first time in his career when the notoriously upper-class Allen has managed to present a convincing portrait of working class struggle. At this point, I'm sure any real Londoners out there can step in and inform me that Allen's depiction of working class British life is far from realistic, and I'm sure they'd be right — Woody has never been about realism, even in his own country, and I doubt he's managed to capture British life any more authentically. Nevertheless, what's real (and universal) are the emotions and the desperation of the two brothers in their desire to make new lives for themselves, to escape the cycle of poverty where everything they want seems just out of reach. In Match Point, the blank-faced Jonathan Rhys Meyers never convincingly portrayed this yearning in his character, and despite the great lengths he ultimately goes to move up in social status, his character never seemed desperate enough or hungry enough for the success he was going after. Farrell and McGregor are definitely hungry, and in this sense Allen's helped tremendously by casting these two earthy, emotive actors as opposed to the chilly Meyers.

The script takes great pains to take advantage of this empathy for the two leads, establishing their brotherly camaraderie right in the first shot, which shows them running down to a boat by the docks together, side by side, looking like two boys engaged in innocent play rather than the grown men they are. The first half of the film traces, virtually without real incident, the brothers' average lives: their gambling and attempts to improve their lots, McGregor's burgeoning relationship with an actress (Hayley Atwell), and their trips on the boat they went into debt to buy. This all changes with the arrival of their rich Uncle Howard, who in an extraordinary scene lets the cracks in his seemingly idyllic existence show through, and he asks his nephews to commit the unthinkable act of murder in order to prevent his carefully ordered life from falling apart. After this explosive and brilliantly handled climax, the rest of the film delves into somewhat predictable territory for Allen, exploring the questions of morality, the existence of God, and the extent to which we impose upon ourselves the punishments for our crimes. After the deed is done, McGregor remains stoic and happy to accept the rewards, while Farrell quickly falls apart. Allen drops references to Bonnie & Clyde and the Greek tragedies, indicating his touchstones this time around, but ultimately there isn't much difference from his approach to this kind of material in Crimes and Misdemeanors and Match Point, when Russian tragic literature was his central reference point.

This film does differ crucially from its predecessors in the extent to which it is a wholly male-centric film, with little place for the women, an uncharacteristic decision from a director who has always focused much of his creative energy around his female characters. Atwell's character has little enough to do here, as does Sally Hawkins as Farrell's longtime girlfriend. In one sense, this is a relief, as her character had potential to become another version of Scarlett Johansson's simplistic femme fatale from Match Point, where Allen's vision of the woman leading to the man's downfall bordered on misogyny. Here, the story is solely about brotherhood and especially the strength of familial bonds, which Allen depicts with compassion, sympathy, and complexity, but also with a healthy distrust and even a darkly comic bite. The scene where the uncle first outlines his request for a favor to his nephews is a case in point, played with a deadpan irony and subtle humor that often comes out, perversely, in the film's darkest moments. When the brothers initially refuse to kill for him, the uncle throws a wild temper tantrum, storming off and yelling, "I guess your idea of family is very different than mine." As for Allen, his view of family seems to be somewhere between the two poles, infused with equal parts darkness and love.

This dark drama plays out with a cool, distant tone that should be very familiar from the never-sentimental Allen. These characters have their moments of warmth and sympathy along the way, but their inevitable downfalls creep ever closer without a trace of editorializing or commentary. This is undoubtedly a replay of Match Point and other Allen dramas, but it's also a step forward from its predecessors in several key ways, and I suspect that if this hadn't been just the latest in a long line of such films, I would have liked it much more than I did. As it is, it seems obvious that Allen has taken this particular strain of his filmmaking as far as it can go, that he has milked these themes and these types of situations for all he can get out of them, and that he will have to start exploring fresh territory if his films are to remain interesting.