Films I Love #41: Safe (Todd Haynes, 1995)

Todd Haynes' Safe is a creepy, oblique horror movie about the horror of the "normal" life. It's a horror film in which there is no creeping monster behind the sedate suburban façade, no locus of evil that preys on the frazzled housewife Carol (Julianne Moore). The suburbs themselves are the source of the horror here: the ornately empty houses, the bored chatter of housewives with no real interests and nothing to talk about, the antiseptic routines of daily life, the lack of connections even to her own family. For the gay Haynes, straight existence itself is terrifying, a hellish, deadened nothingness with few escape routes. The first half of this film, in which Carol is isolated within her own palatial home as though stumbling in a narcotic daze, is a kind of warm-up for the pastel-colored Sirkian mise en scène of Haynes' Far From Heaven, in which he channeled Sirk's brightly colored vision of suburban Americana and the social ills lurking underneath. Safe is more oblique than both Sirk himself and than Haynes' later Sirk pastiche. There's something chilly and suffocating about this film, in the weirdly distanced interiors, so carefully set-decorated and lit, their precise geometric contours and patterned colors isolating Carol within a space where nothing betrays a hint of life or motion or vitality. Haynes' camera simply sits at a distance, observing stoically as this ordinary woman comes apart at the seams, becoming convinced that her very environment is trying to poison her.

The second half of the film largely abandons this stylized suburban crypt as Carol checks herself into a New Agey treatment facility that deals with amorphous illnesses caused by environmental factors. There, the urbanely sinister guru Peter Dunning (Peter Friedman) dispenses a variety of arcane "cures" and self-help advice to his patients. Haynes is not-so-subtly mocking the various charlatans and hippie commune-type facilities that exist on the fringes of this kind of Californian lifestyle, and especially the empty promises and rhetoric of so-called AIDS "cures." Carol, fleeing from the monotony of her zombified home life, winds up somewhere even worse, alienated even from her family, truly alone. By the film's end, she's locking herself up in a containment chamber where she can retreat from the world and try to come to terms with whatever her mysterious illness might be. With its halved structure, Safe asks whether the cure might sometimes be worse than the disease, or whether there is really any escape from the kind of soul-numbing existence depicted here, the deep existential emptiness that Carol feels eating away at her from within.

TOERIFC: The Merchant of Four Seasons

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

Rio Bravo

[This review has been cross-posted at Decisions At Sundown, a blog started by Jon Lanthier and dedicated exclusively to the Western genre. From now on I will be cross-posting all of my Western reviews with this blog, where I am one of several contributors.]

Howard Hawks' Rio Bravo is the pinnacle of the director's late style, in which he increasingly stripped his films down into ambling, nearly plotless examinations of his signature themes and the interactions of his characters. Hawks' cinema was always more about relationships than stories: relationships between male friends, between men and women getting to know one another, between professionals working on dangerous jobs together. Rio Bravo is about all these things, and as in much of Hawks' other late work, all the extraneous stuff, like the narrative, is pared away to focus more directly on these relationships as they develop and change. The plot itself is utter simplicity. Small-town sheriff John T. Chance (John Wayne) arrests Joe Burdette (Claude Akins), the brother of the notorious outlaw Nathan Burdette (John Russell). Chance holds Joe in the town's tiny jail, while Nathan schemes to break his brother out. The film was famously inspired by Hawks' well-known hatred of Fred Zinnemann's High Noon, in which Gary Cooper's small-town sheriff must plead with the unwilling townspeople to help him face off against an outlaw who's coming for revenge. The macho Hawks obviously despised this show of weakness, and conceived of Chance as standing virtually alone against the encroaching outlaws, aided only by a motley assortment of true friends: the drunken former deputy Dude (Dean Martin), the old cripple Stumpy (Walter Brennan), and eventually the quick-shooting young Colorado (Ricky Nelson).

From this slight material, an archetypal white hat/black hat story, Hawks developed one of the great works of cinema. His patient pacing allows plenty of time for the character arcs to develop naturally. Dude was once a proud, tough man, brought low by a woman and reduced to a pathetic drunkard, memorably introduced in the opening scenes stooping to pick up a coin that a man throws into a spittoon for him. Throughout the film, he struggles with his alcoholism, trying to regain control of himself, to reassert his dignity and intelligence and bravery, as well as his formidability with a gun. Chance is, in comparison, a bedrock of stoic self-confidence and moral rigor, though Hawks emphasizes that he's merely human too by including all of the fumbling, awkward love scenes with Angie Dickinson's ambiguous bad gal Feathers. These scenes play off of Wayne's own obvious discomfort in romantic scenes, infusing a layer of metafiction into each of them: is Chance thrown off balance by Feathers, or Wayne by Dickinson? Seemingly the only thing that can ruffle Wayne's drawling onscreen persona, pushing him out of his comfort zone, is the presence of a pretty girl, a fact Hawks would take advantage of again in Hatari!, to equally amusing effect.

There's a lot more going on in this film, too, even as virtually nothing actually happens. The film simply rambles along, the connective tissue between set pieces often consisting of lengthy scenes where the characters just sit around and shoot the breeze. Much of the film takes place in the tight, constricted space of the jail, where Hawks is comfortable filming tight, constricted compositions crammed with people. The joy of the filmmaking is palpable in every frame; there are few Hollywood movies that are so relaxed, so carefree. Watching Rio Bravo feels like spending a few hours on the set with Wayne, Brennan, Martin and Nelson, hanging out, cracking jokes, sparring sometimes in jest and sometimes in earnest, shifting between the two so smoothly that it's hard to tell when the characters' jokes bleed over into genuine hurt. The film is packed with incident, but somehow it never seems to add up to a real forward-moving plot, perhaps because the whole film is based around stasis: it's a waiting game. That's what gives it its unique charm.

The easygoing pace also allows Hawks the time to examine his themes and characters in depth, with subtle touches rather than broad gestures. There's surprising nuance and emotion in set pieces like the one where Stumpy nearly blows off Dude's head when the latter enters the jail unexpectedly. On its face, its a comic bit of action, a near-miss that the men can laugh about because it wasn't a hit. But it also lays bare some of the deeper emotions at the core of the story. Stumpy doesn't recognize Dude to begin with because the former drunk has cleaned up and gotten sober, has taken a bath and donned some new clothes, replacing his old threadbare, filthy rags. He looks like a real man again, and Stumpy, accustomed to seeing him as a ragged beggar, doesn't even realize it's him. It mirrors the earlier scene where the rancher Pat Wheeler (Ward Bond) doesn't recognize Dude because he'd never seen him sober before. Underneath the violent humor of the incident, there's this poignant undercurrent, as Dude is reminded yet again of how far he'd fallen, while Stumpy, behind his ornery chatter, is horrified by what he almost did to his friend.


Hawks treats these complex emotions seriously, but he never allows them to truly overwhelm the film's surface charm, its low-key wit and humor. After all, this is a film in which, at a pivotal moment, the characters decide to take a break and have a good old singalong, showcasing the star voices of Nelson and Martin. It's a wonderful moment, a perfect indication of the film's total commitment to its anti-narrative languor: when the tension is at its peak, the final showdown approaching, the characters break out into not just one but two folksy songs in a row, as though they had all the time in the world. Dude is lying on a cot with his hat shading his eyes, Colorado plays the guitar, and Stumpy hollers and plays the harmonica, all while Chance looks on, smiling benevolently, too stiff to join the fun but not to enjoy it. Indeed, one would have to be pretty stiff not to enjoy this film, which encourages the audience to revel in the sparkle of the dialogue and the ways in which the charming personalities of these likable actors blend seamlessly into their characters. Hawks, though he appreciated fresh faces too, was always adept at using star personalities in interesting ways, zeroing in on the essence of an actor and channeling that into his or her onscreen persona.

Here, the confined space of the jail allows Hawks to play these personalities off of one another, ricocheting Brennan's manic grouchiness off of Martin's slouching, half-speed delivery, while Nelson's boyish confidence resonates as a nascent version of Wayne's mature persona, his unflappable manliness. The film juggles these different personalities admirably, and the film's tone shifts smoothly between comic patter, hesitant romance, slow-building suspense, and action. Indeed, despite the laidback pace, Rio Bravo boasts some exceptional action sequences, not only the justifiably famous final shootout, in which Chance and his allies finally defeat the bad guys with dynamite, but also an earlier scene in which Chance and Dude track an assassin to a saloon filled with Burdette's men. This scene is formally precise, rigid in its geometry and use of the bar's space. It's through angles that Chance and Dude control the room, lining up the men at gunpoint in a straight line on one side of the room. The way Hawks frames this scene emphasizes how the two heroes remain on opposite sides of the room, both angled towards the disarmed bad guys, forming a triangle with the bar at its base and its point balancing on the line of criminals. The scene's denouement, in which Dude discovers the hiding assassin by noticing the man's blood dripping down into a glass of beer from above in the rafters, is similarly precise in its formal mastery.

For all these reasons and many more, Rio Bravo is one of Hawks' most sublime achievements: it's more like an old friend than a film, a familiar place to visit and revisit over and over again, always enjoying the company and the ragged charm of its storytelling.

Films I Love #40: 9 Variations on a Dance Theme (Hilary Harris, 1966)

Hilary Harris is a nearly forgotten avant-garde filmmaker, though he won an Academy Award (for best short subject) in 1962 and is generally acknowledged as a pioneer of time-lapse photography, particularly for his admirable 15-year time-lapse vision of New York City, Organism. His earlier dance film 9 Variations on a Dance Theme is even more obscure, but it's a potent examination of both the human form and of film form, and how the aesthetics of the camera can interact with the human body. The film is as simple and direct as its title suggests. In a bare, undecorated studio, a young woman (Bettie de Jong) in a cloth leotard enacts a simple series of dance movements, starting and ending in a reclining position on the wood floor, and in between gracefully flowing through an elegant, slow-motion set of pirouettes and fluid turns. She repeats this dance nine times, and each time Harris varies his filming methods to capture her movements in subtly different ways.

In the first variation, his camera simply twirls in a slow circle around the room, its graceful arc mirroring the dancer's own swirling motion. With the second variation, he places the camera at ground level with de Jong, watching her from a more intimate perspective. From there, the variations in Harris' technique become more elaborate and complex, while the dance itself retains its pared-down simplicity with each iteration. Harris introduces stuttering jump cuts and repetitions, he has the camera crawl along the surface of the dancer's body, he focuses on abstracted images of textured cloth or hands and feet seemingly disconnected from a body, hovering in the air. He filters and tints the image into a washed-out blur. Harris is investigating different ways of filming the human body as it repeats a series of motions, an inquiry that yields surprising depths considering the basic concept. He captures the quivering in the dancer's legs as she holds a pose, or the way the fabric of her leotard stretches and folds with her body as she moves, or the way the pure white light pouring in from the studio's windows wraps around her body, encapsulating her in a milky aura. Each "variation," each repetition, reveals more about the dance, starting with a fluid whole observed from a distance and then methodically breaking it down into its constituent parts and movements. It's a mesmerizing and beautiful film, a prolonged appreciation of the body in motion.