Ferdy on Films, etc.

Martin Scorsese: A Retrospective in Words

Goodfellas (1990)

By Roderick Heath

My clothes may still be torn and tattered/ But in my heart I'd be a king/ Your love is all that ever mattered/ It's everything.

– “Rags to Riches" by Richard Adler and Jerry Ross, performed by Tony Bennett

Knocked out in bed last night/ I´ve had my fill, my share of looting/ And now, the tears subside/ I find it all so amusing/ To think, I killed a cat/ And may I say, oh no, not their way/ But no, no, not me/ I did it my way.

– “My Way" by Claude François, Jacques Revau, Paul Anka, and Sid Vicious, performed by Sid Vicious

1990 was a vintage year for gangster films. Francis Coppola revisited old turf with the underrated, operatic The Godfather Part III; the Coen Brothers made a typically skewed visitation to the Hammett/Chandler subgenre with Miller’s Crossing; Stephen Frears tried Jim Thompson’s hardboiled milieu with The Grifters. But it was Martin Scorsese who laid down the template for a glut of gangland portraits with Goodfellas, creating surely the most stylistically influential film of the following decade. Goodfellas’ punchy aesthetic is reflected in films as diverse as Donnie Brasco (Mike Newell, 1997), Boogie Nights (Paul Thomas Anderson, 1997), Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, 1994), through to TV’s The Sopranos. Countless pseudo-indie confections made its tone-setting, narrative-driving voiceovers irritatingly popular.

After the cacophony that met The Last Temptation of Christ, Goodfellas must have felt like safe ground, and Scorsese was handsomely repaid with his most generally admired work. For most of its running time, Goodfellas is an experiment in sheer cinematic motion – a deeply expressive virtuosity, structured like a cocaine binge, all electric pulse and giddy thrills to begin with, concluding in sweaty paranoia and collapsed perspectives. It’s impossible to forget the impact of first watching the film and being instantly hauled along by its compulsive force, the giddy, dirty life story Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) narrates. We meet Henry during a moment of staggering brutality: his friends Jimmy Conway (Robert de Niro) and Tommy DeVito (Joe Pesci) shooting and stabbing a groaning, bloodied man in the trunk of their car. Henry slams the trunk shut, and Scorsese freezes frame on his pale, sweat-flecked face, to the immortal voiceover announcement, “All my life all I ever wanted was to be a gangster." In five minutes we know all there is to know about Henry and why he ended up confronting this, and why his expression looked like he was thinking, “Well, I knew there’d be days like this." As it happens to Henry, so the film happens to us; the logic is there, but shit happens so quickly you hardly know it.

Henry’s a half-Italian, half-Irish, blue-collar boy (played young by Christopher Serrone) whose working-class life of straitened circumstances and furious belt beatings looks like excellent training for the brutality, avarice, and lordly authority gangland life offers. Henry starts his underworld career as a gofer for local Mafia heavy Paulie (Paul Sorvino) and the vibrating network of hoods, stick-up artists, skimmers, and scammers he patronises.

In the arc of Scorsese’s career, Goodfellas was important not just for being a return to the criminal milieu underpinning Mean Streets and Raging Bull – although, unlike those films, Goodfellas is about the men on the far side of the invisible line that Charlie, Johnny Boy, and Jake La Motta danced on – but also as a return to his neo-realist inspirations. Goodfellas achieves its great impact by fusing the slickest of modern movie technical, editing, and storytelling techniques, with a carefully expostulated charting of a specific milieu utilising a flavorful verisimilitude straight from the neo-realist playbook by using real ex-mobsters in the cast and the casting Scorsese’s parents in key roles. Scorsese and Nicholas Pileggi adapted Pileggi’s nonfiction account of Hill’s life, Wiseguys, which was dedicated to analysing and describing just how the mob works in all its sleazy, entrancing details.

The film skews our perspective, not just with Henry’s incessantly nasal, quick-fire patter reproducing a high-pressure salesman’s enthralling seduction of the senses whilst numbing critical faculties, with his constant phrasings (“it’s just good business," “makes sense," etc.) ad nauseum. Scorsese furthers the effect with tunnel-vision framing, edits, and dizzying camera movements – most famously, the single-take tracking shot in which Henry, trying to wow girlfriend Karen (Lorraine Bracco), treats her to the alternative entrance to the Copacabana, passing through kitchens and hallways, greeting chefs, waiters, necking couples, and celebrities with easy flair, to a table summoned from nowhere especially for this VIP. She (and we) is knocked flat by the effect. Much later, as Henry descends into coked-up, paranoid hysteria, Scorsese, editor Thelma Schoonmaker, and cinematographer Michael Ballhaus (this is the film credit he’ll probably want carved on his tombstone) go all out – whip-pans, flash edits, zoom shots, dollies, tracking shots, distorted sound, jaggedly intercut musical cues – in a sequence as impressive to film makers, who have hailed it as an experimental film construction in itself, as it is to ex-junkies for whom the sequence is queasily accurate.

Goodfellas shows how crime families are just that – families consisting of people who spend all their time together, living, dying, raising families in each other’s laps. Henry’s vicious upbringing makes him drawn to the earned respect and familial trust of the mob. He and Tommy are virtual favourite nephews to Jimmy’s corrupting uncle when he’s the local dapper gent, god to all the two-bit punks. When Henry is busted for the first time, he is greeted by a celebration (“You lost your cherry!") as affirmation he has now passed the final rite of passage for a wiseguy. As Henry sells it, the Mafia life is the ultimate refusal to kowtow to moneyed authority and the deadening demands made on working-class men – befitting the Mafia’s roots in Sicilian quarrymen’s attempts at union-building (the Italian phrase “syndicate" that has come to refer to the Mafia, also means “union") – who earn with sweat and (literal) blood a life of luxury and authority that ordinarily would be denied them.

That Tommy is an explosive psychopath is only of concern to Henry and Jimmy when he turns it on them – otherwise he’s the kind of scary force you’re glad to have in your corner. Tommy casually shoots a lippy waiter (Michael Imperioli) and is willing to risk assassination by their Mafia overlords to get revenge on obnoxious Bill Batts (Pesci’s old stand-up buddy Frank Vincent, getting his second beating off Pesci in a Scorsese film), a made man who teases Tommy about his childhood job shining shoes. Pesci’s signature moment – which, according to legend, Scorsese let him write and direct himself, and which did most of the work in capturing him his 1990 Best Supporting Actor Oscar – is when, in joking over drinks, he suddenly seems to take offence to Henry calling him “a funny guy." Although he eventually realises it’s a put-on, Henry is momentarily a deer caught in Tommy’s headlights. It’s entirely possible, and he knows it, Tommy might shoot him for the perceived insult. But most of the time, Tommy’s their trouble-prone, motor-mouthed kid brother whose mother (Catherine Scorsese in her most indelible performance for her son) pesters him to get married, and who cheerfully takes the boys to her place and has them sit down for dinner with her whilst Batts is locked in the trunk.

Batts’ death echoes right through the film, both as the first true reality check and a narrative refrain at various points: when the dons look for their missing paisano, when the trio have to dig up the rotting corpse from its forest grave, right through to when Tommy gets a bullet in the brain when he’s expecting to be made a member of the Mafia fellowship he has insulted by killing Batts. It’s a thoroughly deserved death, but Jimmy and Henry weep for their comrade.

The film’s second narrative voice is Karen’s. Bracco arguably gives the film’s best performance, sublimely communicating in body language her arc from fiery young suburbanite to a middle-aged woman addled by cocaine and cynicism. Karen is no innocent victim or clueless neighbourhood wife. She readily admits, when Henry sticks a gun in her hand, that it turns her on. Initially volatile, having been thrown together on a double date neither wanted, Henry eventually cements their relationship by beating a neighbour who molested her. It’s instantly apparent to Karen that Henry achieves the things – hard revenge, wads of cash, universal respect – most guys promise, and she swiftly lets herself be seduced by it.

Her own ironic perspective on events – she’s middle class, Jewish, independent-minded – sees her aghast at the classless, foul-mouthed, violent mob wives like Rosie (Illeana Douglas) she’s supposed to hang with, the industrial-grade brutality, tackiness, and socially incestuous people she’s now surrounded by. But she’s fine with that as long as Henry’s handing her inch-thick bundles of bills (and not that Karen and Henry’s tastes are especially superior – when they give a tour of their newly furnished house, it’s an empire of kitsch). She loses her cool steadily in dealing with Henry’s institutionalised infidelity with Janice (Gina Mastrogiacomo), a lengthy imprisonment (she puts up with years of raising kids and struggling on her own without help – the moment he gets out, taking in their crummy house, he declares “We’re moving."), until one morning he awakens with her jamming a revolver in his face, interrogating him about his girlfriend. It’s catching, this violence thing. The pair reconciles on the orders of Paulie – the Mafia’s family values are more about the potential security breaches of busted marriages than actual emotional concern.

Henry, Tommy, and Jimmy make most of their money through robberies, especially hijackings and skims done from the freight terminals at Idlewild/JFK Airport which is on their turf; Henry also, whilst in prison, branches out into drug dealing, which Paulie has strictly forbidden him to do. The cosiness of their lives finally shatters when they pull off one of the biggest heists in history, ripping off Lufthansa of several million dollars. It renders them the most triumphant group of criminals in the country and the most paranoid. Soon Jimmy’s got Tommy and other thugs assassinating all the noncertifiably trustworthy partners in the heist, like Stacks Edwards (Samuel L. Jackson) and wig salesman Morrie Kessler (Chuck Low), whom Henry tries, ultimately unsuccessfully, to save from Tommy’s ice pick. Morrie’s the kind of guy who’s just born to be murdered, a clinging, cajoling, money-hungry schmuck; we, and Henry, cringe in defensive longing. The film’s almost unique in showing how truly dumb and loosely organised most of these people are – Henry’s drug posse includes his wheelchair-bound brother, his sexpot girlfriend (who leaves cocaine-glutted cookware around her flat), and his superstitious stoner babysitter. Only violence and codes of ethics keep this world in motion, and finally Henry realises even these don’t necessarily count for much.

Morrie’s TV spot is a superb recreation of cheap advertising style, cementing another of the film’s strong aspects. Scorsese, always sharp with cultural reference and satire, also provided a blueprint for the increased pop cultural awareness of ’90s filmmaking, with his vividly utilised retro soundtrack and constant refrains to ephemera, like Henny Youngman entertaining at the Copa and polka king Bobby Vinton (played by his son Robbie), continually providing cultural context for the events portrayed. Early in the film, Tony Bennett’s gorgeous “Rags to Riches" blares, a height of Italian-American jazz-pop both declaring a cultural ascendency and providing an ironic counterpoint of emotional riches with the gangsters’ greed.

After the ugly fallout from the heist, Tommy is brutally whacked; confronted with an empty room that should be filled with Cosa Nostra elders, he ejects “Oh no!" before having his brains sprayed over the tiled floor. Jimmy begins to make overtures to Henry that sound alarmingly like invitations to get whacked after he’s busted by DEA officers after his day-long crack-up. Karen calls him paranoid until she herself feels mysteriously threatened when Jimmy seems to be trying to set her up for a gang assault on the pretext of selecting some second-hand furniture. This convinces them both to flee for the cover of the witness protection program. Henry shops Paulie and Jimmy out for stiff stretches, whilst he lives out the rest of his life in squaresville suburbia, haunted by the image of a vengeful Tommy shooting at him, to the strains of Sid Vicious’ punk brutalisation of Frank Sinatra’s “My Way" – a logical end for a steady decline from glam to sham.

Made hugely famous by the film, Hill, now long divorced from Karen, got himself kicked out of the WPP for eagerly announcing his identity to anyone who’d seen the movie, went back to prison for a stretch, and now stars in every other cable TV documentary on the mob. (It’s an interesting job to compare the film with the TV-made film The Million Dollar Getaway (1991), about the Lufthansa heist, featuring John Mahoney as Jimmy the Gent. In the latter film, Jimmy is portrayed as a folk hero contending with the determination of his Mafia partners to kill all the good blue-collar boys who actually committed the crime and keep the dough for themselves.)

The final shot of Tommy blasting at the camera is a direct quote of The Great Train Robbery (1902), the first American narrative film, and western, and crime flick. As well as summarizing Henry’s final mood, it makes a statement about the history of filmmaking and American society, the long drift from Wild West banditry to suburban conformity, which Henry lives out in a particularly surreal, compressed version. Scorsese also puts in a shot of Karen watching The Jazz Singer (1927), the first sound film, which is both appropriate to her character – a Jewish kid alienated from her parents like Jolson’s titular hero – and another turning point in cinematic history, continuing Scorsese’s self-conscious motif. In the course of the film, he uses just about every narrative and cinematic trick extant, and these references seem to complement his awareness that in the 146 minutes of Goodfellas, he had found the perfect material to realise his own ideal of cinema’s potential. l

Away from Her (2007)
Director: Sarah Polley

By Marilyn Ferdinand

There is no anguish quite like that felt by the loved ones of a person who has gone missing. The much-vaunted “closure" that appears to make reconciliation with loss easier cannot occur in an atmosphere of uncertainty. When the missing person was much loved, the stalled grieving process can stop a person right in their tracks for the rest of their lives.

How much worse is it when the missing person is standing right there? Alzheimer’s disease swallows people alive, stealing their memories, robbing their futures, trapping them forever in a narrow, directionless now. Living in “the now" takes on an ominous meaning in this context, at least for the people the Alzheimer’s patient leaves behind.

This dark cavern of experience is explored by fiction writer Alice Munro in her 1999 short story “The Bear Came Over the Mountain". The story focuses on the final crisis of the long-married Grant and Fiona when Fiona is stricken with Alzheimer’s in her 70th year. The omniscient narrator stays well away from Fiona’s spider-webbing mind and focuses instead on how Grant understands and deals with this catastrophe. As with many stories that are grounded to a large extent in academia—Grant is a retired professor of Norse literature and legend who, of course, had myriad affairs—this one is riddled with sex (Grant’s) and a somewhat condescending regard for ordinary people and their native survival instinct that helps them remain pragmatic while their betters struggle.

Somehow, this story appealed to 27-year-old actress Sarah Polley, who chose it for her directorial debut. I dwelled on the literary background of this film to some extent because Polley, who wrote the screen adaptation, transcribes word for word most of the story’s dialogue while attempting to find a cinematic frame for it. I think she made a lot of rookie mistakes both as a screenwriter and a director, but ultimately succeeds in creating a vision that aging Baby Boomers can and should take to heart. Polley also was exceedingly lucky to get the semi-retired Julie Christie, with whom Polley has worked before, to play Fiona. Christie’s performance should garner her an Oscar nomination—and quite likely an Oscar—if anyone remembers this film at the end of the year.

Polley creates a visual metaphor for Grant (Gordon Pinsent) and Fiona in her opening shot—the pair are cross-country skiing across a frozen lake that backs up to their spacious cottage in Ontario. Their skis move in smooth parallels in established tracks they must have created themselves. It takes a lot of effort to break trail, so understand the work involved in creating this side-by-side harmony. At one point, Fiona starts making loops in the snow, breaking through fresh snow and disrupting the regularity of the trail. She returns and they head back home.

After this, Polley adopts a time-jumping narrative style. The present time has Grant narrating the story of his wife to the wife of another Alzheimer’s patient at Meadowlake, a facility with assisted-living and full nursing care. Grant’s memory of a young, radiant Fiona proposing marriage to him is gauzy and beautiful. This memory will recur throughout the film, as though it is the last, best way for Grant to hold on to a future full of promise with his rapidly deteriorating wife. Between episodic cuts to Grant finding and meeting this other wife, Marian (Olympia Dukakis), we see the scenes of Fiona and Grant’s life as her Alzheimer’s begins to take hold. A quizzical look as she tries to figure out what a frying pan is and then decides it belongs in the freezer; yellow Post-It notes labeling each utensil drawer in the kitchen; a dinner with friends during which she babbles incoherently.

The last straw is when Fiona goes out to ski alone and vanishes for hours. Grant finds her standing on a bridge staring down into a river. He approaches her; she doesn’t recognize him, but she accepts his lift home. She decides they are “at that point" when Meadowlake must be her new home. When Grant visits the facility, he gets the scripted tour by its director (Wendy Crewson) and is told that once Fiona is situated, he will not be allowed to visit for 30 days. He has never been away from her for this long, and somewhere deep inside, he knows this separation will cause her to forget him forever.

On their way to Meadowlake, Fiona recalls the previous summer when they discovered some yellow skunk lilies in a nature preserve—a rare recent memory. The more enduring long-term memory is of Grant’s infidelities, which we see again in Grant’s gauzy memory. The couple’s last moments together—nearly the last Fiona will ever remember of Grant—occur with the awkward dignity Fiona musters to accept her room at Meadowlake. This is a truly painful moment to watch—to see an elegant, intelligent woman giving up her life. Unlike Grant, however, she gets another—one less confusing, one with a companion named Aubrey (Michael Murphy), Marian’s husband, who is there temporarily.

As with the short story, we see this tragedy through Grant’s eyes. He desperately wants to hold on to Fiona, but she is already adrift. He turns to a sympathetic nurse, wonderfully played by Kristen Thomson, for some kind of assurances that Fiona, after all, will come back. She’s pleasantly evasive on that point. He even confesses that Fiona’s “infidelity" with Aubrey is poetic justice for his own affairs. He believes the shred of her that still remains is paying him back. His self-pity and narcissism are annoying, and the ends to which he will go to obviate his guilt—though some might see it as unconditional love—include sleeping with Aubrey’s wife to bribe her to bring Aubrey back to Meadowlake to soothe his pining wife. Grant really is a shit.

And perhaps he seems more the shit because Christie’s Fiona is so graceful, beautiful, resolute, and vulnerable. She grasps for memory like a falling cat grasps for a ledge. Her devotion to Aubrey is extremely touching and so unlike her relationship with Grant, even in her lucid moments. There seems a small cruelty to their marriage. I only wish Pinsent had been able to show that hard heart at Grant’s core. The film would have seemed more fleshed to me; now, Grant just seems rather faded, particularly in contrast to the regal Fiona.

Polley’s shooting choices seem a bit amateurish; the camera occasionally seems out of place, creating some awkward, empty spaces. Worse, her choice to leave all of Munro's dialogue intact makes this film far too literary; the words sound arch in an actor's mouth, though they might have worked on the page. She also doesn’t give us much of Grant and Fiona’s life before Meadowlake. Without Christie’s laser-beam performance, I probably wouldn’t have cared much about the tragedy that had befallen this couple. The intercutting of the conversation with Marian and Grant also left me impatient.

Nonetheless, for members of my generation, a fairly privileged lot to which much has been given, Away from Her shows just how easily much can be lost. This is a sometimes exasperating, but memorable, film. l

Once (2006)
Director: John Carney

By Marilyn Ferdinand

When the hubby and I came out after seeing Once, he insisted we go to the ticket taker and surrender the half of the ticket the theatre needed; we had taken in a double feature (Away from Her, more on that in the next review) and theatre-hopped at the multiplex. The ticket taker offered to dispose of the entire ticket, but we said we like to keep the stubs. “Movie geeks, huh?" “Yes. She’s a film critic," the hubby offered. “What did you think of it?" the young man asked. “Loved it!" “You going to review it? I guess it doesn’t need another good review. It’s got lots of those," he offered.

Well, I’m sorry to say, this film needs all the great reviews it can get. Here it was, opening weekend for the film, Saturday of a holiday weekend, and the movie was not sold out, not even close. WAKE UP, PEOPLE! Change your plans, get off your couches, go see Once. Then buy the DVD.

I can’t remember the last time I felt so thoroughly touched, entertained, and surprised by a film, and at the same time enjoyed a theatre filled with wonderfully memorable music from the opening to the closing credits. As has been said by other reviewers of this film, this is a musical for people who don’t like musicals. It is a musical that takes the creating and performing of songs out of the realm of fantasy and makes it a real endeavor by real people who love what they are doing. That is the central love affair of this film, made completely believable by pairing The Frames’ lead singer/guitarist Glen Hansard with classically trained Czech pianist Markéta Irglová and putting it all under the direction of former Frames member John Carney.

Our two main characters are a young man (Hansard) and woman (Irglová), both unnamed, who live in Dublin, Ireland. The opening scene shows the man playing a beat-up guitar on the street for change. He catches a young punk (Darren Healy) out of the corner of his eye standing near the alley. He’s sure the punk means to rip him off. This scene plays out in such a humorous and realistic way that the film grabs you instantaneously. You say to yourself, “I recognize these people." At the end of the scene, the man says to the punk that he didn’t have to steal the money; if he’d asked, the man would have given it to him. In a less honest film, this conversation would have made the punk regretful and behave better. In this film, the punk asks him for the money and, backed into a corner, the man gives it to him.

The young man meets the young woman one night when he’s out playing to a mainly empty street. She stops, listens, and tells him how much she likes the song he just sang. “Did you write it?" “Yes," is his answer. “I see you every day on the street, and you never sing songs like this." People don’t pay for original material, he says, and then complains that she only gave him ten cents for it. “People pay for songs they know." She asks him if he has a regular job. Yes, he fixes Hoovers—vacuum cleaners—at his father’s shop. Great, she cries. “I have a broken vacuum. If I bring it tomorrow, will you fix it?" Yes, he says, and they say good night.

In the morning, the woman shows up at his spot on the street with her vacuum cleaner. Begging off repairs for lack of tools, the man agrees to accompany the financially struggling woman to a music store where she is allowed to play their pianos. So, vacuum cleaner in tow like a small, blue dog, they’re about to start their adventure. She plays a fragment for the man. He humorously asks if she wrote it. She laughs. “No, Mendelssohn." Almost apologetically, he offers, “It’s good." With slightly sarcastic good humor, she says, “Oh yes, it's good." She asks him to play with her. Reluctant at first, he pulls out his notebook of lyrics, gives her musical cues for the song, and they feel their way through the magnificent “Falling Slowly." The title signals the ties that are being forged between the pair.

After a rocky start, prompted by the man's invitation to the woman to spend the night with him, the relationship progresses. The woman invites the man to her home in a rundown section of Dublin. He is greeted by a little girl and an older woman—the woman's daughter and mother (Danuse Kretstova). He's plunged into a world of another language and bare-bones living that an Irish lad like himself might have endured 20 years ago but that is now foreign territory in an Ireland with a robust economy. He stays for dinner, hears a polite "No, thank you" from the mother to her daughter's plea that she try to speak English, and watches as three Czech men walk in the unlocked front door to watch the only TV set in the building.

The dramatic elements complement the musical scenes in which the growth of the collaboration between the man and the woman is beautifully realized. For example, the man gives the woman a CD of his songs, including one for which he can’t seem to write lyrics, and asks her to write them. She listens on a portable CD player he gives her that quickly runs out of juice. Breaking into her toddler’s piggy bank with a promise (“I’ll pay you back."), she goes to the nearest store, reloads with fresh batteries, and writes the lyrics in her head as she walks back home as we are treated to the lovely musical interlude, “If You Want Me." This is such a brilliantly orchestrated scene, true to real life, true to the creative process, and cinematically coherent.

A conventional musical would have the man and woman fall in love by the final frame. This film doesn’t exactly break that convention, but it puts it in its proper place. The man is still in love with a woman he broke up with when he caught her cheating on him. The woman is married—a marriage resulting from her pregnancy—but her husband is back in the Czech Republic. Nonetheless, the perfect harmony of the creative partnership the pair have forged leads to a kind of love affair, one in which they share their lives, private thoughts, and well of their creativity. One scene in which the woman plays a song she wrote for her husband is a genuinely gut-wrenching experience that left me breathless. The pair helps each other break through the blocks that have put their lives in a holding pattern and gives them a chance to pursue what is really important to them.

Most of the songs in the film were written by Irglová and Hansard, who collaborated previously on Hansard's solo album “The Swell Season," from which some of the songs on the soundtrack are taken. Many people consider The Frames—not U2—the great Irish band. I don’t know much about music, but I do know that I love these songs in a way I have never loved the music of U2. The fact that they are paired with a wonderfully realized film by a relative rookie director who clearly always loved movies (one of The Frames’ albums in named “Fitzcarraldo," after the demented masterpiece about opera by Werner Herzog) makes for a perfect experience.

This film would be a fine double-feature with the wonderful Alan Parker film The Commitments, in which Hansard also plays a street musician. Both give rich views of life in Dublin, with Once updating the scene to include immigrants to Ireland. There is so much to recommend this celebration of music and community that you’ll want to watch Once again and again. l

Trust (1990)
Director: Hal Hartley

By Marilyn Ferdinand

I love looking into the underexplored areas of film, mining for gold beneath the dross of mainstream movies. My offroad viewing habits are what made me start this website—to serve other people like me. I’ve found a great deal to admire among the independent filmmakers of every era, from silent-era giant D. W. Griffith to today’s David Gordon Green. Hal Hartley is another modern indie director that many film fans have embraced, but he’s a harder animal for me to accept.

The first Hal Hartley film I saw was No Such Thing, a truly original film about an eons-old, fire-breathing monster trying either to survive modernity or die in peace. I was captivated by the unfortunate creature and the nod to miracles in an unbelieving age. I couldn’t wait to see it again. My second viewing ended about halfway through the film. Even though I hate the word with a passion, the only way to describe the film at closer inspection was “twee."

When I got talked into watching Trust, I tried to reserve judgment. Unfortunately, the self-conscious, faux-naïve dialogue directed with a faux-ironic hand had me ready to revolt. In deference to the hubby, I stuck with it. I found myself being charmed once again by Hartley, but knowing full well that this film’s shadow would cast about as long as a toothpick.

The movie begins in an office in an abortion clinic where our heroine, pregnant teenager Maria Coughlin (Adrienne Shelly) is being asked the usual battery of questions by the faux-ironically named Nurse Paine. I was heartened to see that Paine was being played by one of my favorite, though highly underutilized actresses, Karen Sillas. Maybe this was going to be good. Alas, as soon as Maria communicates her disillusionment with the guy who knocked her up, I lost hope. After a promising opening of, “I realized what he saw when he looked at me," she started cataloging her physical features, ending with the inevitable “cunt." Perhaps it was used to have Maria denigrate herself with a word women can find terribly offensive, but it just didn’t ring true. Instead, I felt like I was deliberately being goosed. Maria, it seemed, was going to be just another type—to judge by her attire, a hooker in training. Or maybe it was just that Britney Spears thing going on, even though Britney was in her first year as a mouseketeer in 1990. Whatever.

Next we meet our hero, Matthew Slaughter (Martin Donovan), an unemployed computer technician who lives with his abusive father (John MacKay). We watch his father, wearing a lumberman’s jacket and cap, come home and punch Matthew a few times for leaving a cigarette on the side of the bathroom sink. Matthew walks around with a hand grenade in his pocket at all times.

Maria goes home to find that her argument with her father in the morning, during which she slapped him, resulted in his death from a heart attack. Her mother (Merritt Nelson), also abusive though always ready to invite her victim to sit down and have some tea or supper, throws her out of the house. Maria ends up on a bench in front of a convenience store commiserating with a lonely, mentally unstable woman whose baby died. A young woman comes by, leaves her baby, like a dog, in his carriage in front of the store and goes in. Maria goes in to buy some beer with $5 she cadged off the lonely woman. The store owner tries to rape her, she burns him in the eye with a cigarette, and exits, beer and all. The woman she had been talking to and the baby are gone.

Matthew and Maria hook up when he finds her in an abandoned building and brings her home. Dad isn’t home. When Maria gets up in the morning, she takes a shower, puts her clothes in the wash, and walks around in the kitchen in a towel, spilling things left and right. When Matthew’s father arrives, he becomes enraged by the mess and by Maria’s presence. He throws her wet clothes on the floor. When Matthew comes to her rescue, his father punches him again. Maria grabs a dress to wear out of a hall closet and takes Matthew home with her. She is allowed back in with the understanding that she will be her mother’s slave for the rest of their lives.

This film really is about growing up and getting out on one's own. Maria and Matthew act as catalysts for each other’s independence. In Matthew’s case, Maria may provide the mothering he needs to take responsibility for himself. Maria, it seems, has grabbed one of Matthew’s mother’s dresses, though the woman died giving birth to him. It’s farfetched, though not impossible, that some of her clothes would still be around. It is affectation to have Maria wear nothing else for the rest of the movie.

Matthew encourages Maria to wear her glasses, which she thinks make her look like a librarian. He says he likes librarians. Then he asks her to marry him, and she accepts. Having someone fight to take her away from her mother seems to galvanize Maria’s resolve. In the end, she has the abortion she was planning and decides that marrying someone she’s known for less than a week isn’t for her.

What kept me with this movie and engaged me was Maria. Adrienne Shelly managed to communicate so much about the inner struggle and thoughts of her character. Even though we can see some set-ups a mile away, we tend to believe that Maria is really rather innocent of the world. If we had had a real character(ization) from her mother and sister (Edie Falco), we might have seen their overprotective hand toward Maria a little more clearly. Shelly is out on that high wire alone. Her underutilization in films and television over the past 17 years is symptomatic of the dearth of good roles for women, even for the young and pretty (see Joey Lauren Adams' Come Early Morning), and led her down the same path Adams took—direction. Unfortunately, her tragic murder will prevent us from seeing her act or direct again.

Martin Donovan is an engaging actor who plays Matthew, a rebellious, immature man of uncompromising principles, with conviction. He and Shelly have chemistry, and we believe the depth of their alliance. Unfortunately, Hartley doesn’t seem to believe much about this movie and sabotages their characters’ real growth with a final scene that literally blows the good will Shelly and Donovan have created. Ultimately, Trust is a betrayal that communicates that honesty doesn’t pay. Hartley believes in his corrupt adults, not youth. l

La Cérémonie (1995)
Director: Claude Chabrol

By Marilyn Ferdinand

The Old World is a prisoner of history that the adolescent New World can barely grasp. Centuries of crimes against humanity and a highly stratified society with clear divisions between nobility and peasantry have made the transition of European nations to bourgeois bastions of commerce stormy. Although they might like to turn away from this history, European artists living with so many tangible reminders of a long-ago past—from medieval streets to centuries-old palaces—seem always to be caught in its web.

Claude Chabrol is credited with producing the first film of the French New Wave, Le Beau Serge (1958), signaling a movement that sought to tear itself away from convention and focus on the now, not the past, on the New World, not the Old. Chabrol continues to make films that challenge the social order, with 2006’s The Comedy of Power (La Comèdie du Pouvoir) his latest stab at the heart of French complacency and political mendacity.

La Cérémonie begins as a simple transaction between Catherine Lelièvre (Jacqueline Bissett), a wealthy woman in need of a maid, and Sophie (Sandrine Bonnaire), an applicant for the job. The women meet in a coffee shop, and Catherine insists on buying Sophie a cup of tea. This is the last time we’ll see Sophie served by Catherine. Sophie provides a written reference from her previous employer, whose move out of the country is the cause of Sophie’s joblessness, and answers all of Catherine’s questions satisfactorily. Catherine hires her and asks her to start in two days. Catherine will meet her 9 a.m. train. It is Sophie who brings up the question of wages; a flustered Catherine proposes an increase of 500 francs over her previous wages. Done.

At home, Catherine talks with her blended family over a dinner of mussels and wine—her second husband Georges (Jean-Pierre Cassell), a music lover; her teenaged son Gilles (Valentin Merlet); and Georges’ daughter Melinda (Virginie Ledoyen). Gilles thinks it’s degrading to call Sophie a maid. Georges defends the title as an honest and accurate one. It is easy to imagine philosophical conversations like this going on in posh households all over France, a very philosophical country with very bourgeois needs.

On the appointed day, Catherine goes to meet Sophie. The 9 a.m. train comes, but Sophie does not appear. Only when the train pulls out of the station does Catherine see Sophie sitting on another platform. Sophie says she took an earlier train. Catherine again seems flustered by another break in decorum. Sophie seems peculiar—blunt, remote, and unpredictable.

At they prepare to drive to the house—which Catherine warned Sophie was quite isolated, though near a large town—they are waylaid by the local postal clerk Jeanne (Isabelle Huppert), who begs a ride to the post office. Jeanne and Sophie exchange investigative glances. Once Jeanne leaves, Catherine confides to Sophie that her husband Georges can’t stand the woman. Apparently, Jeanne was implicated in the death of her developmentally disabled daughter, but exonerated for lack of evidence.

We have all the elements of a conventional horror movie in place—isolated estate, odd servant, suspected murderer in town. Chabrol’s genius is in locating horror in everyday life and resentments, not in physically creepy environs underlined with foreboding music and menacing stares. He gives us a bourgeois family that seems fairly normal, comfortable with their privilege without seeming to be defined by it. We get an extremely competent maid who seems strange, almost autistic at times when she is around the family, but smiling and happy when she forms a friendship with Jeanne. Jeanne is immature, rebellious, envious, as would befit an average woman prevented by a teenaged pregnancy from making more of herself. She admits to being very jealous of the Lelièvres, spotting Catherine as a former model and then telling of her own, certainly fictitious, chance to model that was spoiled.

Georges represents the seemingly tough, but fair patriarchy that rules the world. He bans Jeanne from the house for opening his mail—a charge he can't prove—and Sophie must accept this because he is her employer and this is the way the world works. Chabrol is a rebel, however, and he doesn’t leave his “anarchists" without their defenses. Sophie has been one step ahead of the Lelièvres by her willingness to act blatantly in her own self-interest. Sophie walks out on an impromptu party, infuriating Catherine, but in full justification because she had already arranged to be off that day. She doesn’t wait in polite forbearance for favors to be bestowed. She can’t afford to.

There is a hint of lesbianism in Jeanne and Sophie’s relationship—note how Jeanne sits playfully on her bed when she has Sophie over for tea, and how Sophie jumps on her and tickles her. Some commentators have mentioned that Chabrol has a negative attitude toward homosexuality, and certainly he plays into a large, negative stereotype about lesbians in this film. Nonetheless, Sandrine Bonnaire and Isabelle Huppert are the best French actresses of their generation and know how to bring a rainbow of colors to their characters that tend to deaden the cliché into which they are written.

Ultimately, Chabrol has an explosive period of French history repeat itself in the denouement of this film, ironically, as the Lelièvres watch a live broadcast of an opera by Mozart, the musician who brought opera to Germans in their own language instead of the elitists' preference, Italian. Chabrol reserves judgment on the morality of both sides of the battle of the classes. The menace remains, and that’s the real horror. l

Martin Scorsese: A Retrospective in Words

The Last Temptation of Christ (1988)

By Roderick Heath

Whilst making Boxcar Bertha in 1972, Barbara Hershey gave Martin Scorsese a book, The Last Temptation of Christ by Nikos Kazantzakis, the Greek author whose novel Alexis Zorba became the famous film with Anthony Quinn. The novel of the Christ led to Kazantzakis’ excommunication, and the work was often banned. Last Temptation remained lodged in Scorsese’s imagination until he began developing the project in the early 1980s.

Nervousness pervaded all stages of bringing the film to realization. Paramount, which had agreed to bankroll the film, pulled out before shooting began. The production went ahead in Morocco on a $7 million budget provided by Universal and Cineplex/Odeon. The early hand-wringing proved justified by the film’s reception. Christian organizations lobbied for its banning. Some offered to buy the negative for the production cost and destroy it. Picket lines attended screenings. French zealots threw Molotov cocktails at a Parisian showing. Wildfire controversy accompanied the work wherever it went. If it was a grindhouse film, its video cover might still boast “Banned by Bulgaria and Blockbuster!"

All this from a guy who came close to enrolling in the seminary? You’d think Marty had portrayed Jesus as joining in a threesome with Mary and Judas and voicing support for Michael Dukakis. Rather, The Last Temptation of Christ is merely a vivid, strident, intellectually curious work. It is also possibly Scorsese’s greatest film—not that it’s ever likely to win that consensus from fans of GoodFellas—and one of the most vigorous and original religious films ever made.

Kazantzakis’ written prologue establishes the spiritual territory; the disturbing, incomprehensible struggle of a man who is also divine to reconcile the struggles between the flesh and godliness. The Jesus thus conjured is not a beatifically smiling savior assured of his own rectitude and sublime purpose, but (as embodied by Willem Dafoe, dedicated to the role with hypnotic effort), instead chased by restless dread and unseen torments, filled with self-loathing and hate for the God he knows wants something great and terrible from him. He struggles through deadly stigmatic fits and phases of doubt, fear, anger, despair, and human longing.

Spurning the lamentable history of Jesus flicks, Last Temptation dedicates itself to a portrait of the beginnings of Christianity as it sprang from the brute soil of Roman-occupied Judea—this raw, dirty, poverty-stricken landscape on the edge of both the Empire and the realms of the human psyche; beyond here is only the bone-cracking desert, playground of Yahweh and Satan. Judea’s native culture has been reduced to ineffective theatre. It’s a multicultural crossroads, infused with Bedouins, Arabs, Persians, and Africans, tough and vital. The land has turned its attention to wandering preachers and soothsayers like John the Baptist. Guerrilla resistance simmers; the Zealots, including Saul (Harry Dean Stanton), act as paramilitary enforcers, searching out traitors both religious and secular. Jesus has made himself a pariah by being the only carpenter willing to manufacture crosses for the Romans. He even participates in crucifying a seditious prophet, anticipating his own hideous fate. “God loves me…I want him to stop! ... I make crosses so he’ll hate me. I want him to find somebody else!"

Jesus determines to pursue his fate, and leaves his home and mother (Verna Bloom). Walking the shores of Galilee, he senses himself being followed by an invisible thing that strikes him with pain before directing him to the house of Mary Magdalene (Hershey – Scorsese made her audition so she wouldn’t think he was just returning the favor of the loan of the book in casting her). He watches the degrading sensual spectacle of Mary with her clients for the day. At the crucifixion he helped perform, Mary, amongst the jeerers, had spat in his face. Jesus begs her forgiveness; they were childhood sweethearts, but Mary lost Jesus to his crisis, which caused him to reject the possibility of marrying her. Broken-hearted and out of suitors, taking up a whore’s life was her only option, and she taunts him sexually and emotionally with forlorn rage. And yet a powerful friendship still holds them together.

Jesus reaches a remote, rugged, desert monastery. He is greeted by the spirit of the recently deceased Abbot, who states that he knows who Jesus is. Jesus confesses his purposes and weaknesses to young monk Jerobeam (Barry Miller), who tries to advise him on the tasks that confront him. When two black cobras emerge from a hole in his cell and speak with Mary’s voice, Jerobeam recognizes it as a sign Jesus’ impurities have been cast out, and he can return to the world.

The film’s greatest twist on the traditional story is Judas, embodied with great force and emotional complexity by Harvey Keitel. Taking a cue from the Gnostic texts, Judas is Jesus’ angry doppelganger, another childhood friend who has become an agent of the Zealots. Jesus takes Judas’ knock for whatever it is that dogs him, and indeed, he is the incarnation of Jesus’ merciless responsibility. Judas kicks at Jesus’ tools and wood for the cross he’s building, and when Jesus plaintively explains, “I’m struggling," Judas ripostes, “I struggle. You collaborate!" When Jesus returns from the desert, Judas holds a knife to his throat—the Zealots have ordered his assassination. Jesus accepts the knife if it’s what God wants for him, but, stirred by Judas’ hesitance, suggests, “Perhaps He didn’t send you here to kill me. Maybe He sent you to follow me."

Judas walks with Jesus back to civilization, stating “If you stray this much from the path, I’ll kill you." A righteous opportunity quickly presents itself; the pair comes upon Mary being stoned by a mob, scapegoat for festering frustration. Jesus intervenes, facing down the righteous hypocrites, accosting wealthy Zebadee (Irvin Kershner—yes, the one who directed The Empire Strikes Back) with a telling count of his sins: “He’s seen you cheat your workers! And what about that widow you visit, what’s her name?" Jesus leads them instead to deliver the Sermon on the Mount, except that both the crowd and the impact of his words aren’t what they’re cracked up to be. Jesus is too crippled by the conflict of his ideas and impulses to trust himself as a preacher: “God is so many miracles. What if I say the wrong thing? What if I say right thing?"

Jesus gives a parable of a farmer sewing wheat, some of which withers, some of which finds no soil, and some of which grows and feeds a nation, and then explains, when he’s met with stony looks, he’s the farmer. His parable proves immediately true; some declare him an idiot, some take him for a provocateur and bay for blood, and some, the most intellectually and spiritually curious, are intrigued. Jesus’ band of adherents swells. Taking a leaf from Roberto Rossellini’s The Flowers of St Francis, Scorsese uses the Apostles for gently, highly human, comic relief as they fight for sleeping space by the fire. Judas finds them silly and useless, whilst Jesus ponders the purpose-sapping contradictions of his efforts. His return to Nazareth is met by mockery and stones.

Judas suggests they go to see John the Baptist (Andre Gregory), who condenses the spirit of the Old Testament in his scrawny, wild-haired body. He rants prophesies of judgment, brimstone, godly wrath. “Now he sounds like the Messiah!" Judas croaks. They have come upon The Baptist at a ceremony, surrounding by religious ecstatics; women dance naked, drums bang, chants sound. As Jesus comes toward John from behind, John turns abruptly, just as Jesus had with his own unseen pursuer, and demands, “Who are you?" The noise of the ceremony dies, leaving only the sound of rippling river water, and does not return until John anoints Jesus’ head.

This is a scene that captures Scorsese’s jarring approach at its finest. Scorsese achieves a vivid sense of the past by spurning pure historical detail; he emphasizes the raw remoteness of time and place by mixing Judaic scenery with multicultural tropes. Roman soldiers are dressed in stylized garb that might have come from a punk staging of Jesus Christ Superstar. Isaiah visits Jesus in a bleached Darth Vader costume. With dashes of ’80s New Wave and punk aesthetic, right down to Peter Gabriel’s gorgeously weird score and casting alterna-music figures like David Bowie and John Lurie, Scorsese reinvents history with a melding of modernist dance, art, and film styles. Partly enforced by the low budget, there is a complete rejection of epic plush; this is a desert world.

“The God of Israel is a God of the desert," John the Baptist tells Jesus, and that is where he must now go for his first confrontation with Satan, a pillar of flame with an elegantly mocking English accent (voiced by Leo Marks, writer of Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom). The miracles, visions, and apparitions are starkly simple, in contrast with Mel Gibson’s setting in the The Passion of the Christ, where the only angels one could sense Gibson’s God trying to hold back were ten-thousand CGI artists (one could write another essay comparing these two films).

Facing down Satan’s taunts finally gives Jesus the warlike purpose he lacked; he returns with an axe he finds in the sand, ready for revolution, and pulls his heart from his body to display his newly granted capacity for miracles and to awe his followers. He passes through the landscape determined to heal and cast out demons; madmen and cripples slither out of crevices like he’s dragging the disease out of the flesh of the earth. Lobbied to raise Lazarus (Tomas Arana), brother of Mary (Randy Danson) and Martha (Peggy Gormley), who sheltered Jesus when he returned from fasting, Jesus bids the stone on his tomb rolled away, at which point everyone covers their face from the stench. Yet Lazarus still claws his way out of his tomb, numbed and covered in green rot.

Jesus enters Jerusalem and throws out the moneylenders from the Temple in fiery indignation in a scene met with the shock and anger of a rabbi (veteran character actor Nehemiah Persoff), who perceives himself as stalwart defender of Judaic tradition in a time of assault by foreign mores and Gods. Saul and the Zealots, seeing Jesus’ influence and that Judas has joined him, visit Lazarus and murder him, eliminating the proof of Jesus’ greatest miracle. When Jesus leads a mob to assault the Temple again, he is stricken by stigmata; God telling him he will not die a quick, heroic death, but with the ignominious cruelty of crucifixion, and there’s no way out of it. Jesus collapses and is helped away by Judas as Roman soldiers slaughter the mob.

Jesus already expects his end, told to him by a visitation of Isaiah. He tells a grief-stricken, conflicted Judas that he needs him to give him up. When Judas asks if he could give up a man he loves to such an end, Jesus replies, “No. That’s why God gave me the easier job." In short time, Jesus writhes in doubt at Gethsemane before being dragged off to see Pontius Pilate (David Bowie), a calmly intellectual appraiser (“You’re just another Jewish politician.") who swiftly diagnoses Jesus as being more dangerous to the Zealots. “It’s one thing to change the way people live, but you want to change the way they think, the way they feel," Pilate explicates, as embodiment of Pax Romana logic. “It simply doesn’t matter how you want to change things. We don’t want them changed." Jesus is beaten, crowned with thorns, and led to his bloody consummation on Golgotha. Jesus screams forlornly as a grimly apocalyptic dust-wind rises.

As it had with The Baptist, the clamor of the scene dies, and a golden-haired girl (Juliet Caton) approaches through the crowd. Tugging the nails from his feet and hands, she tells Jesus she is his Guardian Angel, and that God has granted a reprieve—he’s not the Messiah, and he can lead the rest of his life in simple ease. Led into a newly verdant Israel, Jesus is married to Mary and living in sublime peace with her before God appears to her and kills her. Jesus is enraged, but the Angel assures him, with her honey-toned, oddly psychopathic rhetoric, it was simply her time, that all women are the same. She encourages him to take a new wife, Lazarus’ sister Mary, and eventually also to bed her sister Martha. He fathers children and lives to a ripe old age, where he’s ashamed to think of his self-abnegating, egotistical, religious mission. He encounters Saul, now calling himself Paul, preaching in a public forum, of his conversion to Christ’s teachings and of the legend of his sacrifice. Jesus angrily declaims his death and mocks his own legend. Paul ripostes, “I’m glad I met you…my Jesus is far more powerful." Paul is popularizing Jesus’ legend, arguing that humanity needs Jesus’ message of universal love and redemption.

Jesus is dying as Jerusalem is laid waste in the wake of rebellion, and his Apostles emerge from hiding to gather at his side. “Be careful, he’s still angry!" they warn of Judas, who enters, blood staining his hands from fighting the Romans. Judas erupts, accusing Jesus for not following his path, then lifting the veil on the Angel as Satan; this has been his most powerful, bewitching assault on God’s plan. Jesus, horrified and appropriately penitent, crawls out into the fire-stained, scream-riddled night and cries to return to the cross, which he promptly is, muttering “It is accomplished!" before dying. The movie literally dissolves, sprocket holes, scratches, and strips of film showing like the reel has broken.

The Last Temptation of Christ affirms Christ’s sacrifice; although Jesus wants earthly fulfillments—and those earthly fulfillments are twisted as Satan slyly draws away from the singular purity of his ardor for Mary Magdalene into a more ego-fulfilling threesome—he recognizes its insignificance before his great task, which is to reinvent the religion of his forefathers and humankind along with it. The film, scripted by Paul Schrader with contributions from Jay Cocks, is built around symbols, with sensitivity—as perhaps only a filmmaker can be sensitive to them—to the meaning that can charge images.

The film charts one of the Jesus myth’s strongest contributions to modern religious thought—the substitution of the physical for the symbolic. In the Last Supper sequence, Scorsese cuts betweens the rivers of blood spilt in Temple sacrifices— wasteful and grotesque in a starving country—and Jesus reinventing the idea in drinking “his blood." “God is not an Israelite!" Jesus shouts on the Temple steps to an outraged crowd, losing their sympathy. His specific condemnation of nationalist self-love continues the film’s study of Jesus recreating the hard concepts of old Judaism into the symbolist thrust of Christianity—from real blood to transubstantiation, from Promised Land as a physical state to Promised Land as a spiritual promise. Stanton embodies Paul, the greatest convert to Jesus’ worldview, with whacko, shifty fervor; the symbolism is crucial. He doesn’t care whether Jesus really died on the cross or not for he recognizes the force of the idea and its appeal. The symbol is more powerful than the deed.

This leads to one of the film’s most forceful subtexts: the strong suggestion, dimly perceived by, and thus perhaps explaining, the rage of the film’s attackers, of a pointed rejection of the '80s ethos of monumental greed (Scorsese stages the ejection of the moneylenders forcibly and repeatedly, making the film seem like an historical prequel to Wall Street) and the fatuous posturing of Moral Majority-era figures like Jerry Falwell, Jimmy Swaggart, and Ronald Reagan. “God is not an American!" Jesus might as well be shouting. Simultaneously, by portraying the Zealots as religious terrorists as theoretically rebellious, but really tools for power, the film engages with the troubles that engulf present-day Israel and drive many of the contradictions of current terrorist movements. The film’s Jesus, pained, morally questioning, tempted, and dedicated to multitudinous truth, stands at a vast distance from absolutist hypocrites of all stripes. Scorsese and Schrader, essentially unbelieving men but obsessed with the religious grounding of their perspectives, attempt with the film to recreate Jesus for themselves.

Scorsese’s most stylistically rigorous film, Last Temptation evokes the spiritual terrors that chase Jesus with a hungrily mobile camera (Michael Ballhaus behind it again). Having a blonde little girl as the harbinger of Satan was a touch directly inspired by Mario Bava’s Operazione Paura, and cunningly, during the alternate reality of the last temptation, it’s the only time Scorsese recreates the sun-kissed, twee atmosphere of standard Jesus portrayals. Finally, Scorsese had confronted the root source of many of his fixations head-on. For his next feature, Scorsese headed home again. l

Léon Morin, Priest (Léon Morin, Prêtre, 1961)
Director: Jean-Pierre Melville

By Marilyn Ferdinand

In the pantheon of female erotic fantasies, seducing a priest sits near the top. The female adventurer requires a challenge, and bedding a celibate who probably is a virgin is one of the biggest challenges of all. Stealing him from no less a rival than God bestows on the victorious woman a thrilling sense of power as well. Léon Morin, Priest is based on an autobiographical book by a woman that might not have been the bodice ripper this film seems to be. Nonetheless, Jean-Pierre Melville’s screen adaptation manages to generate an erotic charge that perhaps the author would have approved of.

The film is set in a small town in occupied France. Our narrator, Barny (Emmanuelle Riva, a sensation after her appearance in Hiroshima, Mon Amour), introduces us to her world—a town filled with Italian soldiers in bright uniforms with feathered caps and an office filled with women. Barny’s husband was killed in fighting, and a lonely and sexually frustrated Barny has formed a crush on Sabine Levy (Nicole Mirel), an elegant, androgynous woman who is assistant to the company’s director.

Barny is a communist and atheist who decides to have some fun one day at the expense of the Catholic Church. She chooses St. Bernard’s as her crime scene and selects the priest taking confession who has the most proletarian name—Léon Morin (Jean-Paul Belmondo, fresh from his star turn in Breathless). Once inside the confessional, she carries on a challenging, irreverent conversation about her atheist, beginning with the classic Marxist line, “Religion is the opiate of the masses." Despite her scorn for his beliefs, the priest assigns her a penitent’s task—to kneel and pray for forgiveness. “On the soft cushions at the pews?" she asks sarcastically. “No, on the flagstones," Morin instructs. He invites her to come to his chambers for further discussion. As Barny exits the confessional, she looks back toward where the priest sits hidden from her, walks toward the exit, and kneels very briefly on the stone floor.

On her first visit to Morin’s chambers, Barny confesses that she has done very little reading about Christianity. She explains her atheism by her need to see with her own eyes that God exists. The priest counters that with proof, the world loses faith, which he seems to think it needs. After a bit more verbal sparring, he sends her home with a thick book, and asks her to return three days later. Although Barny says she’ll never finish reading the book by then, she spends every spare minute with her nose buried between its covers. She can’t wait to return. Of course she can’t. She’s meeting Jean-Paul Belmondo!

It’s pretty funny watching Barny pursue God, eventually becoming a believer like a flash of lightning while cleaning out her attic, without realizing—at least not all at once—that God isn’t what she’s after at all. She interprets Morin’s questions and actions as sexual provocation. For example, when he asks in confession if her hand is clean, she unashamedly admits to masturbating. He tells her she has been without a man for too long; she says she uses a stick. He’s not put off by this boldness, but rather only asks her if it hurts. When he seems to make a point of coming behind her in church and brushing her sleeve, she’s sure that her feelings are returned. Naturally, when she asks him if he’d marry her if he were a Protestant minister, he jokingly answers, “Of course." When she shows she is serious, he takes the axe he has been using to cut some wood for her stove—taking over this job she had been doing quite capably herself—and angrily embeds it into the chopping block.

Aspects of the war intrude on this hothouse, such as obtaining baptism certificates for a number of the half-Jewish children, including Barny’s young daughter, hiding these children from the Germans who supplant the Italians in the village, and watching Sabine age rapidly and lose her appeal when her brother is arrested by the Gestapo. Fortunately for Barny, her regard has turned elsewhere.

Does Morin know what he is doing? It’s hard to believe that someone so acutely aware of human foibles could be completely unaware of his seductiveness. Perhaps he thinks brusqueness and philosophizing will be his shield, but this brusqueness and intelligence are fatal charms for Barny. They both enjoy the intellectual stimulation of their conversations. He seems to feel comfortable manhandling and bossing Barny throughout this film, pushing her out of the way when he has an elderly parishioner approach him with a question and patronizingly choosing books for her to read until he decides to let her choose for herself. In fact, many of the women in this film approach the young priest for advice, with one mankiller giving her seduction her all, only to have Morin pull her tight skirt over her exposed knees. His youth, good looks, manly command, and unattainability make him irresistible. It’s clear that Belmondo is having a blast playing the forbidden fruit, both complicit and clinically outside the game. This type of character not only is a favorite for Belmondo, but also for his director, Jean-Pierre Melville.

For her part, Riva builds her obsession patiently. She’s an intelligent and subtle actress who helps us sympathize with her character even as we see how foolish and blind she is allowing herself to be. We’re used to seeing people react to the tension of Nazi occupation in the movies, but this type of reaction is something quite different. Wartime is supposed to make individuals throw caution to the wind, and Barny certainly does, from giving up her communist/atheist beliefs to declaring her feelings for Morin and praying to God that He will, just once, grant her desire to have sex with the priest. Morin, however, throws the cliché of surrender out the window.

The war finally ends, and Barny, separated from Morin since he stormed out on her, finally goes to visit him. Her employer is returning to Paris, and Morin is off to become a country priest. She surveys the room in which her lust grew, seeing outlines of the furniture on the bare walls and those precious books sitting in crates. Morin appears, and they say their good-byes. The wartime madness recedes, and life goes on. l

Conversations on a Sunday Afternoon (2005)
Director: Khalo Matabane

By Marilyn Ferdinand

I was having lunch with my 80-something Greek neighbor, who told me her story of coming to America. She was asked during her citizenship class if she was loyal to the United States or to Greece. Her answer was, “Greece is my mother. America is my mother-in-law. How can I choose?" I was reminded of this snippet of conversation after viewing Conversations on a Sunday Afternoon.

It was indeed a Sunday afternoon when Facets Cinematheque, again host to the Human Rights Watch Traveling Film Festival in Chicago, screened this compelling and unique movie. Conversations, which has a fictional main character whose search for a woman results in documentary interviews with real people, manages to communicate the scope of the refugee experience beyond the numbing frame most of us are used to seeing and probably have learned to tune out—a refugee camp overrun with bloated-bellied children swarmed with flies and worried women with bony hands and faces. In doing so, it is possible for audiences to reconsider just what a refugee is and find a new, more engaged response.

Keniloe (Tony Kgoroge), a black South African poet living in Johannesburg, carries his favorite bench to a city park, reads the novel Links by Somali writer Nuruddin Farah, and tries to overcome his writer’s block to “make sense of the world." Over several Sundays, Keniloe struggles, rain or shine, to unlock the door of perception. Before Keniloe takes notice, we are made aware of a black Muslim woman dressed in blue satin sitting in the same park, writing letters of inquiry to the Somali government about her missing mother. It is only after several Sundays that Keniloe goes over to her to ask who she is and why she comes to the park each week. The woman, Fatima (Fatima Hersi), relates her harrowing story of watching her young brother and father being shot dead before her eyes during the civil war in Somalia, being shot herself and left for dead, and waking up in a hospital in Nairobi, Kenya. She repeats this story three times, tears running down her face, her hand pushing at her nose to clear it. How she ended up in South Africa is anyone’s guess. Keniloe is next seen sitting in a tree composing a poem about Fatima into his tape recorder. He wants the whole story, but Fatima does not return to the park.

He sets out to try to find her, feeling that the coincidence of reading a Somali writer and encountering a Somali woman who has experienced tragedy has great significance for him. However, as tracking Fatima down proves difficult (using the ineffectual approach of asking random people in the streets where Somalis live if they know her doesn’t help), the film shifts to a general exploration of the refugee experience. Keniloe decides he wants to understand the experience of seeing people killed or killing people. His wanderings through Johannesburg turn up some surprising stories.

We meet a Ugandan who fled his country 10 years before. He says he’d like to go back, but he has no family left—they’ve all been killed. We meet another Ugandan, a young woman who left when she was a child and has been living in South Africa for 20 years. Keniloe asks her if she considers herself South African. She hesitates to answer. Eventually she says that she does, but that she also feels Ugandan, moreso every year. It’s interesting to see this identity crisis play out much like an adopted child who wants to find his or her birth parents.

In a decayed underground garage, Keniloe meets with an entire family who relocated to Johannesburg from a Palestinian refugee camp in the Gaza Strip. Several children silently flank the father, who does all the talking, while the mother keeps their toddler occupied in the background. When asked if living in a war zone their entire lives—including 30 years for the parents—has changed them, the father says, incredulous, how could it not.

A young white woman from Yugoslavia—or as she says, now the Union of Serbia and Montenegro—living in a Jo’burg slum is another refugee. She fled Sarajevo. When she walks the streets of Jo’burg at 2 in the morning, her friends are horrified. Her reply is that it is safe because there are no bombs falling and bodies in the streets. A refugee from the dictatorship of South Korean president Park Chung-hee, whose English is immaculate after several years in New Jersey, says she doesn’t miss Korea at all and doesn’t intend to go back. Her bitterness over the oppression of women and university students, a dissident group to which she belonged, will keep her an exile for the foreseeable future.

Keniloe also encounters a former soldier from the Congo (formerly Zaire) who received a machete blow to the head before ordering his troops to gun down his assailants. He doesn’t even remember being shipped to South Africa, but he had refugee status forced upon him by the South African government for his own protection. He shows us the scar on his head beneath his red military beret.

Finally, through twin sisters, one of whom is named Fatima, Keniloe finally finds his Fatima. She lives with her husband and children like many residents of Jo’burg—in a house fortified with a barbed-wire-topped gate and burglar bars on every window. She won’t answer Keniloe’s knocks on the door, but comes to the window and talks through the glass. He tells her he has been looking for her to finish her story. She says she’s not interested in talking about it anymore and disappears behind the drapes. A nonplussed Keniloe stands outside as the film fades to black.

This film has a street theatre quality to it. The lively byways of Johannesburg’s black district of Hillbrow, with their hair-weave, notions, and produce stands, are the scene of most of the interviews. The undoubtedly cheap, handheld equipment produces serviceable pictures enlivened by the surroundings as well as plenty of suspicious stares from people on the street. It doesn’t surprise anyone to learn that raids on illegal immigrants may be producing those stares; indeed, director Matabane takes us into a deportation center where defiant deportees sing that they’ll be back. Occasionally, as with the Palestinian family and the Congolese soldier, decaying surroundings are deliberately chosen as backdrops. Are we to suppose that all refugees live in substandard areas, or are these settings a reflection of the experiences these people have faced and still deal with, in reality or in memory, every day?

Conversations on a Sunday Afternoon is a timely film for Americans and Europeans alike who are clashing over the status of illegal immigrants. It concentrates mainly on political refugees, but does not go so far as to entirely separate economic refugees who illegally reside in a country from foreign victims of war and civil rights abuses. It illustrates in very vivid terms that displacement is a universal problem that many Americans and Europeans view in racial terms. The fight over territory and legitimacy is often caused by war. When the people who are caught in the middle must flee for their lives, they find they must fight the same battle again. If they are lucky, like my Greek neighbor, they will find easy acceptance. If they are unlucky, they may be wanderers, in fact and in spirit, the rest of their lives. l

The Human Rights Watch Traveling Film Festival is being presented in Chicago at Facets Cinematheque, 1517 W. Fullerton, through May 17. New York will host the festival June 14–28. Check locally to see if your city is hosting this festival.

The Men (1950)
Director: Fred Zinnemann

By Marilyn Ferdinand

The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) was a landmark Hollywood film. It marked the first time a widely popular film explored the realities of World War II combat veterans returning to life at home. Following three men from different backgrounds, the most touching was the story of young sweethearts Homer and Wilma. Homer, played by real armless veteran Harold Russell, must help Wilma (the always sweetly effective Cathy O’Donnell) understand how deformed his body is and how helpless he can be without his artificial arms. Wilma takes each revelation like a trooper, and we foresee a happy future for them because of their steadfast love and devotion. The film deservedly won seven Oscars, including the Best Picture Oscar.

The Men takes up a story similar to Homer and Wilma’s at an earlier point. Marlon Brando plays Ken “Bud" Wilcheck, an officer who becomes a paraplegic when he is shot in the spine. We see him prostrate on the ground, bullets whizzing around him but missing, and an interior monologue in which he relates that he can’t feel his legs. When next we see Bud, he is in a private room in a military hospital, feeling depressed and refusing to see his fiancée Ellen (Teresa Wright). He is in the care of Dr. Brock (Everett Sloane) who decides that he needs to get motivated to work toward discharge. Brock gives orders to move Bud into the general ward.

We’ve already been introduced to some of the denizens of the spinal injury ward. Wisecracking gambler Leo (Richard Erdman) spends much of his time on the phone with his bookie, placing bets on the horses and smoking cigars. Angel (Arthur Hurado) works out constantly so that he can return home and help support his mother and siblings. He’s got a build like a boxer and a heart like a champion. Rounding out the trio is Norm (Jack Webb), a college graduate with a mordant sense of humor and a bleak outlook on all of their prospects for attracting a wife and living normally in society at large.

When Bud arrives on the ward, he’s mainly interested in being left alone. Leo instantly starts in on him, turning his radio up to an ear-splitting level. Angel tries to call Leo off and encourage Bud. Norm simply cracks wise and wicked. This initiation seems to cut through Bud’s isolation, and he starts to consider his options.

At the same time, Ellen persists and finally succeeds in getting in to see Bud. He tries to send her away, but she insists that she still wants to marry him. With a goal of marriage and home in front of him, Bud starts to train alongside Angel with consistency and determination.

The Men was filmed at the Birmingham Paraplegic Hospital in Van Nuys, California, and includes real patients and caregivers. The film doesn’t shy away from some of the physical realities of paraplegia, such as incontinence, impotence, pain, and death. So, too, does it deal with the outside world in a fairly believable way—staring patrons at a restaurant to which Bud and Ellen go, the lack of ramps for Bud’s wheelchair, Ellen’s terror when she realizes that marriage to Bud will mean a lifetime of compromise and accommodation. The Men performs a public service by openly depicting the world of the injured veteran. Unfortunately, the subjects are discussed in a fairly antiseptic way by the mainly B-list cast, and the entire film has the air of noble blandness that you might expect from a Department of Defense educational film.

Only Marlon Brando, in his first screen appearance, makes this film a felt experience that's worth your time. Everything Bud goes through is written on Brando’s face, from the first realization in the opening sequence that he can’t feel his legs, to the contained happiness that he might be regaining some feeling in his legs, to the conflicted anguish as he tries to go against his feelings and send Ellen away. His legendary ability to build emotion internally to a well-timed crescendo is visible in virtually every frame. Compare Brando’s anger in the TV room where he rebuffs his fellow patients who ask him why he isn’t with Ellen on their wedding night and finally smashes the windows with a crutch, with Dr. Brock’s explosion at his patients who feel he has let them down. Sloane’s looks like a drama school exercise of his “big moment," whereas Brando’s tears your heart out. It is no wonder his first screen outing was a starring role, and his next film, A Streetcar Named Desire, a reprisal of his Broadway triumph, made him into an international star.

In a recently premiered documentary, Brando, produced by Turner Classic Movies, many of today’s stars, including Al Pacino and Jon Voight, commented on how Brando completely changed their lives and determined the trajectory of their careers. It’s exciting to be able to see this force of nature emerge, fully formed like Athena from the head of Zeus, to change movies forever. l

Martin Scorsese: A Retrospective in Words

The Color of Money (1986)

By Roderick Heath

As Scorsese himself put in the documentary Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, his kind of pre-indie film artist seemed to have no place once the era of the blockbuster began. Through the early ’80s Scorsese’s oeuvre was still interesting and provocative. The sweat-inducing pop-culture satire of The King of Comedy (1983), along with Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, could be said to have closed the curtain on an unofficial trilogy studying the intersection of the celebrity media and the sociopath. After Hours (1980), a picaresque, absurdist comedy featuring Griffin Dunne as an office drone whose momentary lapse into frightened anger at loopy date Rosanna Arquette is punished to the point where he seems to have an entire city out to get him. The film gained Scorsese a Best Director award at Cannes. Yet The King of Comedy, though sickly brilliant (and brilliantly sick), is borderline unwatchable in its sourness, and After Hours is formless and cartoonish, inferior to the Elizabeth Shue vehicle Adventures in Babysitting (1987), the Disney rendition of the same idea. Satire was not Scorsese’s thing, and his eruptive visual sensibilities had been tamed almost to flatness.

The Color of Money was both a ticket for Scorsese back to the mainstream and a return to his cinematic roots in the pungent milieu of bars, pool halls, wiseguys, and girls. It also presented a daunting challenge in that it was a star vehicle for Paul Newman returning to his greatest role in one of the great American movies – one that had paved the way for filmmakers like Scorsese – Robert Rossen’s The Hustler (1961). In Rossen’s film, based on a novel by Walter Tevis, eponymous hero “Fast" Eddie Felson (Newman) challenged the world’s greatest pool player, Minnesota Fats (Jackie Gleason) twice. He lost the first contest because of his emotional volatility. He won the second when all that had been scoured from his body, in the intermediate process of romancing and losing to suicide the self-destructive, bottle-abusing bohemian girl Sarah (Piper Laurie). Both the suicide and the rematch were thanks to Eddie’s sharklike backer Burt (George C. Scott). Finally, Eddie, unlike, it is suggested, Fats, refuses to sell himself out to this nocturnal life, walking out on Burt and the life with a bag full of cash, to Burt’s jocular threat, “Don’t play anymore big-time pool halls!"

Walter Tevis’ follow-up novel The Color of Money touched the expected bases, such as reuniting Eddie with Fats. For their adaptation, Scorsese and screenwriter Richard Price (a fine author whose The Wanderers had been lovingly filmed by Phillip Kaufman) reduced references to the first film to a cryptic line from Eddie, when he recalls that “somebody retired me," in explaining why his titanic skills on the green felt have gone to seed. We rediscover Eddie smooth-talking his girlfriend, bar owner Janelle (Helen Shaver), but being distracted by the sounds of the pool tables in her joint, most specifically the “sledgehammer break" of Vincent Lauria (Tom Cruise), who is kicking the ass of Julian (John Turturro), Eddie’s own stakehorse. Eddie is now a wealthy liquor salesman, but he longs for the adrenalin-factory that is high-stakes pool playing, betting, and hustling.

Times, of course, have changed. Nine-ball is now the game of choice, and the young players are all cokehead punks rather than boozy sharpies. Vincent is an horrendously talented player who prefers his abilities at computer games and doesn’t give a fig – yet – for money. His femme fatale girlfriend, Carmen (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio), met Vincent at the police station, when she drove getaway for her previous boyfriend who robbed Vincent’s parents’ house. She shows her necklace to Eddie; it belonged to Eddie’s mother’s, and Vincent remarks that his mother “has one just like it...Vincent’s sweet – Vincent’s real sweet." Therese mutters, adoringly awed by this royal schmuck. Vincent works as a quick-talking toy salesman in a hideous suburban retail barn. Eddie, carefully soaking in these details, begins with equal care to manipulate them. His master plan is to take Vincent on a full tour of East Coast pool halls to teach him the arts of hustling in a carefully plotted campaign to win a major nine-ball championship in Atlantic City.

Eddie must extricate Vincent from his work-a-day life. He establishes his grandee abilities in a memorable dinner table scene in which he explains that Vincent has, in his gauche, the overeager style a “natural character…you’re an incredible flake," that is, a perfect persona for entrapping the greedy, self-impressed types who engage in the almost mystically charged macho challenge of the pool hall. Eddie appeals to Vincent’s enormous ego and pride by giving him a Balabushka cue, the most perfect instrument of pool. “John Wayne carries ’em like this!" Vincent gushes. Eddie also works on Vincent’s insecurity over keeping Carmen with his low wage (“She don’t dig the allure of this place," Eddie assures Vincent, regarding the toy store), a game Carmen eagerly buys into in. “We got a racehorse here! You keep him happy, I teach him how to run," Eddie urges, and the pair tie Vincent’s ego in knots until he signs on.

Eddie is leaving behind frayed relationships with an aggrieved Julian, and with Janelle, fuming at his almost adolescent inability to commit. Vincent and Eddie’s relationship evolves, part father-son, part jealous admiration on Eddie’s part (“Like watching movies of myself thirty years ago"). Vincent is driven by a young egotist’s need to establish dominance, which leads him to brazen shows of skill and spectacles, all of which cuts against the grain of Eddie’s efforts to teach how to be an actual hustling champion, the guy who makes the big scores by sucking in money players. Returning to Chalkie’s, a pool hall run by its one-time sweeper Orvis (Bill Cobb), Vincent’s insistence on caning Eddie in a warm-up match and then the local quickdraw Moselle (Bruce A. Young) costs him the chance to play the desired opponent, a numbers chieftain who always plays with $5,000 in pocket. Eddie walks away cringing and berates Vincent later. Asking how much he won, Vincent announces “One-fifty!" Eddie retorts; “You walk into a shoe store with a hundred and fifty bucks, you come out with one shoe!"

Carmen, trying to manipulate Eddie, teasingly flashes him. Eddie irritably puts paid to this when he drags her in the bathroom: “I like it in the shower!" “Child care!" is how he describes handling this pair. Eddie teaches Vincent a vivid lesson of the harsher aspects of the game. When Vincent won’t bring himself to beat a man whose esophagus has been removed, Eddie tells him to lose on purpose and then leaves him without any money to pay up just long enough for Vincent to be roughed up. When Eddie returns to rescue him, pretending to be his angry father, he’s made his point: nice guys finish last. Slowly, Vincent learns to temper his showiness with Eddie and Carmen’s carrot-and-stick approach, and in a marathon match with the fatuous reigning champ Grady Seasons (Keith McCready), after a sexual threat from Carmen, dumps the game, setting up the perfect scenario for Atlantic City.

Eddie, on a high, takes the Balabushka out for a spin, and gets caught in a match with a weird young player, Amos (Forest Whitaker, positively screaming “star potential"), who eventually proves to be a sublime hustler. It’s a humiliation Eddie finds crippling. He tells Vincent and Carmen to do the rest by themselves, giving them the stake money, a rejection to which Vincent reacts with howling filial rage, tearing a rail off the wall and throwing the cue after Eddie. Eddie determinedly sets about rehabilitating himself as a player, first acknowledging his weakened eyes by getting a pair of bifocals and then retracing steps, refining his style, and taking down all of Vincent’s opponents and a few more (including a noxious punk, played by Iggy Pop, the epitome of everything Eddie’s at war with), before arriving at the championship. Scorsese’s merciless eye for kultur evokes the town’s faux-classy aura with such touches as presenting the pool hall using a soaring crane shot and a blast of organ music, suggesting it’s a cathedral for spivs, and highlighting a lacquer-haired singer killing the exoticism of “The Girl From Ipanema."

When Eddie encounters Vincent and Carmen again, she is goggle-eyed in stating “Vincent’s changed!" Vincent is now hard, critical, and voracious. Instead of being tempered by Eddie’s lessons, he’s absorbed them into his narcissism. In the championship, Eddie destroys Julian, and Vincent breaks Seasons, bringing them to a quarter-final face-off. But Vincent has devised an intricate revenge on Eddie; he deliberately loses to him. Eddie is, of course, overjoyed, and reunites happily with Janelle in his hotel room, until Vincent and Carmen knock on the door, presenting him with a cut of the money they won betting on him. Janelle dismisses Vincent: “Little prick!" But Eddie stews until he uses Carmen to bait Vincent into a private rematch. “All I want is your best game," Eddie requests. “You can’t handle my best!" Vincent spits. But he relents. “If I don’t beat you this time I’ll beat you next month," Eddie says assuredly, and declares, before the film’s concluding freeze frame; “Hey, I’m back!"

AMPAS agreed, and awarded Newman his belated Oscar for the role; in ’61, Newman had bewilderingly lost to Maximillian Schell’s excellent, but more limited supporting turn in Judgment at Nuremberg. Advised by Scorsese to play the film’s comic scenes as if they weren’t comic, Newman delivers an often sublimely sketched performance as a man who seems light years removed from his youthful, volatile, suffering self, but still has him lurking inside, along with a large dash of Burt’s master manipulator. Eddie is still fighting his worst side, trying to age gracefully without losing his zeal – he’s still shy of commitment and complacency. But Newman occasionally hits beats too heavily, like his berating of Mastrantonio in the bathroom scene, which degenerates to pure Oscar-clip gravitas.

The film contains perhaps Tom Cruise’s best performance. Scorsese uses Cruise’s trademark persona – blithe embodiment of a yuppie-masculine ideal of unleashed hubris, athletic grace, and emotional vacuity – and drags it down quite a few social levels. Vincent is as antiseptically charming a wunderkind as his Top Gun character. Vincent partly hankers to go to West Point (he believes his video games will, in a few years, make him a qualified push-button warrior), but soon heartily embraces the vicious, venal qualities of a great pool shark. Mastrantonio keeps pace with both men in her flinty, charged performance, and she masterfully manages the bitterly amusing shift of her character from dominant witch to terminally confused backseat driver.

Superbly scripted by Price, with endlessly quotable dialogue, The Color of Money is nowhere near as dramatically compressed as The Hustler or Scorsese’s best works, but it is one of his most purely watchable films. It is also in a different mould and predicts in some ways Scorsese’s next film, The Last Temptation of Christ, in that it is a drama of moral and personal regeneration, rather than a tragedy like em>The Hustler. It also charts, as precisely as other Scorsese works, like The King of Comedy without that film’s contempt for its characters, the often painful things men and women do to each other in situations charged with desire and ambition.

Scorsese slyly extends Taxi Driver’s motif of the iconography of the motion picture Wild West extending into and defining modern, unheroic existence. The pool artistes of The Color of Money pitch themselves as gunslingers – Moselle even wears a cowboy hat – trying to best each other. Eddie, as the aging gentleman of the game trying to leave behind a troubled past recalls one of Peckinpah’s aging heroes, or Gary Cooper’s Man of the West (1958), a man for whom the seediness of his past and the sorrows of the milieu he dwells in has a humanizing, sensitizing effect. In this way, Scorsese links together strands that swirled through his early films and through the American life he charted. The Balabushka cue, swapped back and forth by Felson and Vincent, is an Excalibur, like the weapon that is the focus of Anthony Mann’s Winchester ’73 (1950), loaded with suggestions of male sexual potency, as surrogate father and son jockey to see who is the most worthy to wield it. Eddie eventually retains the stick, and, in a hilarious touch, Janelle presents him with its vaginal counterpart, a cue chalk.

The film, Scorsese’s second with German cinematographer Michael Ballhaus, who paints the film with a gauzy, smoky appeal, was a real stylistic reinvigoration. The soundtrack is a careful layering of punchy original music by Robbie Robertson and rock classics, some re-recorded specifically for the film to blend them precisely into the film’s texture. In between the crisply caught evocations of seamy urban America, the pool sequences are dazzlingly filmed. Thelma Schoonmaker’s editing makes abstract whirlpools out of the skittling balls. When Vincent beats Moselle, the camera rapidly circles the table as Cruise strikes samurai poses and dances to Warren Zevon’s “Werewolves of London" between performing shots of supreme legerdemain – a perfect fusion of Scorsese and Cruise’s show-off voltage. l

Exotica (1994)
Director: Atom Egoyan

By Marilyn Ferdinand

Everybody knows that you’re in trouble/ Everybody knows what you’ve been through/ From the bloody cross on top of calvary/ To the beach of Malibu/ Everybody knows it’s coming apart/ Take one last look at this sacred heart/ Before it blows/ And everybody knows.

--“Everybody Knows" by Leonard Cohen

Grief is an emotion that many people find unbearable—unbearable to feel and unbearable to observe. Atom Egoyan, a Canadian director of Armenian ancestry, has an ethnic heritage of grief over the slaughter of 1 million of his Armenian brethren by their Turkish conquerors that seems to have informed his film explorations. The Sweet Hereafter and Ararat deal indirectly and directly with tragedy and its attendant guilt. Similarly, Exotica explores the amorphous boundaries of grief, weaving a web of connections and disconnections that brings its main characters face to face with their own illusions.

The film opens on an illusion—a two-way mirror through which customs guards observe passengers at Toronto’s airport and the guards who go through their bags. One passenger, Thomas (Don McKellar), moves directly to the mirror, seeming to examine himself, but perhaps aware that he is being examined. A customs officer being coached in how to observe (Calvin Green) moves forward, coming nearly nose to nose with Thomas, prevented from touching him only by the trick pane of glass. This motif of illusion, concealment, and barriers will play itself out not only in Thomas’ story, but also in the film’s central story.

That story’s crucible is Exotica—a gentleman’s club that trafficks in fantasy. Exotic dancers perform various types of fantasies for the audience, and for just $5 more, they will bring those fantasies to the privacy of a client’s table. Christina (Mia Kirshner), a dark-haired young woman who dances in schoolgirl clothes to Leonard Cohen’s “Everybody Knows" is the particular favorite of Francis (Bruce Greenwood), who comes to the club every other night and pays to have her dance at his table or just talk. The two are watched jealously by Eric (Elias Koteas), the club’s DJ/MC and Christina’s ex-lover. Artificial caverns run behind the client booths with two-way mirrors that Zoe (Arsinée Khanjian), the club’s owner, uses to watch for inappropriate behavior, specifically clients who touch the dancers. Eric frequently sits behind Francis’ table when Christina is there, watching and seething at their special relationship.

Through the use of flashback, we learn that Francis has suffered a tragic loss. His beloved daughter was murdered, and his wife died in a car crash a few weeks later, a possible suicide. Francis was implicated in the murder, but never charged. He keeps his grief in check by carrying on an illusion of normalcy. On the nights he goes to Exotica, he brings Tracey (Sarah Polley), his daughter’s babysitter, to his house where she practices on his piano, then brings her home and pays her. Tracey, disturbed by this arrangement, asks her father (Victor Garber), an old friend of Francis’, if she can stop going. “There’s no baby to sit."

Christina, Eric, and Francis have a creepy connection as well. Eric and Christina met while on the massive search for Francis’ daughter. Christina, too, babysat for his daughter and gained consolation from him for the lack of warmth shown her by her own family. There can be no doubt that Eric finds this eroticized father-daughter type of relationship unhealthy, possibly dangerous, and this feeling and his own jealousy cause him to drive a wedge between the pair.

Thomas enters this web when Francis comes to audit the records of his pet shop and blackmails him into trying to mend the rift with Christina and the Exotica management. Thomas, it seems, has been smuggling the eggs of exotic species of birds into the country. A method he stumbled upon to pick up men snags him, unwittingly, the customs guard who observed him so closely at the airport. After a night of sex, Thomas awakens to find the eggs have vanished.

Exotica weaves coincidence into meaning, reality into illusion and back to reality again. We become aware of the hurts each character in this film has suffered, but we also learn that we can’t trust anyone too far. Eric loves Christina, but he destroys a relationship that was special to her and then seems to take her place as Francis’ consoler. Thomas rejects one man who might have been good for him, but invites the wrong one home. And then there is Francis himself. He doesn’t seem as though he could harm his daughter, but his wife’s suspicious death and his visits to the Exotica cause us to wonder more than we should. Egoyan not only has dealt with dead children before, but also incest.

Exotica is an elliptical, but nonetheless, schematic film that some may not find satisfying. I like the atmosphere it creates; the suggestion that we can find what we need, at least for a time; and its linking of sex with death. These potentially dark elements of human experience carry a charge that many filmmakers have explored, but I can think of few who have done so with such sympathy, lack of judgment, and intrigue. l

Black Book (Zwartboek, 2006)
Director: Paul Verhoeven

By Marilyn Ferdinand

I like Paul Verhoeven’s style. I like his exuberance, his technical mastery and eye for beauty, his clear-eyed, rather pessimistic view of human nature, and his subtle, but insistent, political viewpoint. The fact that his films are like a lightning rod, provoking extreme hatred or backhanded compliments, shows just how challenging Verhoeven’s point of view can be. Now, I’m sure there are plenty of people who will say I see things in, say, Showgirls, that just aren’t there. They are entitled to their opinion. I say there are things in Verhoeven’s films that they fail to see or refuse to accept. I say that approaching Verhoeven with an open mind—which the vast majority of the moviegoing population seems to be able to do—can yield great rewards.

Black Book, one of the most exciting, entertaining, and politically rounded films of the past year, achieved a respectable 75% approval rating from the critics on Rotten Tomatoes. But many of those critics still saw fit to jab him again as though reliving their reaction to Showgirls and Basic Instinct. For example,

“Black Book does not aspire to historical accuracy. Instead, Black Book is pure entertainment, of the hollow variety. Verhoeven gives you your money's worth of titillation."

In fact, events in the films, including the murder of Jews and the theft of their property, Nazi collaborators and their humiliation following Germany’s defeat, anti-Semitism, and rationing are entirely factual. Whether the specific story of a Jew who kept herself alive and helped the Dutch underground fight the Nazis during World War II is entirely accurate in every respect, there is no doubt that the spirit of the day and details surrounding this tale are true. On the other hand, I find Steven Spielberg’s acclaimed Schindler’s List much less accurate in terms of the clean death victims in his film received, and a last-minute reprieve of Jewish women in a shower room that spews water instead of gas.

“Stout-hearted celebration of the Dutch Resistance or total smut? Try both."

Try neither. In this film, the Dutch Resistance is shown to be fairly ineffectual and rotten from within, and smut is in the eye of the beholder. I was expecting very graphic sex based on comments about the film; it has nothing of the sort—just nudity that works in context to illustrate moral decay, degradation, and a survival mechanism.

So just what have we got in Black Book? A memory film in which Rachel Stein (Carice van Houten), an émigré to Israel who is helping to build the infant nation comes face to face with her past when Ronnie (Halina Reijn), a woman she knew during the Nazi occupation of Holland, visits the kibbutz where Rachel lives. Rachel is taken back to the time when as a Dutch Jew from a rich family, she lived in hiding with a Dutch farmer who made her recite a verse from the New Testament from memory before he would feed her. He considered that Jews brought their current fate on themselves by not listening to Jesus in the first place.

Shortly after the story opens, we see Rachel spending some precious time outside, sunning herself near a lake and listening to American popular music on her portable victrola. Rob (Michiel Huisman), sailing on the lake, comes alongside her and chats her up. This lighthearted moment is shattered when a bomber flies above and drops a bomb on Rachel’s hiding place. This event sends her looking for a safe haven and in the process, becoming caught up in the Dutch Resistance.

I don’t want to give away too many details of how Rachel becomes Ellis de Vries and goes undercover, but suffice to say that greed for Jewish wealth lies behind it and most of the other events of this film. Once Rachel/Ellis does become involved in the Resistance at the behest of her employer Gerben Kuipers (Derek de Lint), she dyes her hair blonde and parlays a chance encounter with Gestapo officer Ludwig Müntze (Sebastian Koch) into a job at SS headquarters in Rotterdam.

Once inside, she befriends Ronnie, who is carrying on an affair with the odious Günther Franken (Waldemar Kobus), and becomes Müntze’s mistress. Müntze and Franken are at loggerheads over how to treat prisoners, with Müntze favoring a more humane negotiation with the “terrorists" to prevent mutual reprisals. He carries on these talks with notary Smaal (Dolf de Vries), who was entrusted with the Stein family fortune; Smaal, however, is a trusted member of the underground who gives Rachel/Ellis a bug to plant in Franken’s office. When a rescue of some of the resistance fighters, including Kuipers’ son, is planned, the bug is used to ensure success. Rachel/Ellis provides access to the building.

It is about this time that a series of crosses and double-crosses start making themselves apparent. We may have guessed some of them; others are more shrouded. Rachel/Ellis eventually doesn’t know whom to trust. What she needs is evidence of a conspiracy to prove that she is not a traitor, and this search leads to the denouement and a return to Rachel’s present life in Israel.

Black Book is a melodrama. As with all melodramas, our emotions are heightened through circumstance rather than character development. Rachel/Ellis—plucky, smart, and fatalistic—joins the Resistance because she has nothing to lose. She and the handsome and sympathetic Müntze fall in love because Müntze has lost his taste for war and victory. Both characters act on the horrible circumstances they have endured rather than truly make us feel them. The supporting characters play their parts like pawns on a chessboard, too. And perhaps this is part of Verhoeven’s plan. In war, individuals become “the enemy" or “friends" without necessarily earning either of those labels.

Melodrama is often maligned as somehow more manipulative than a more psychological drama, but I think this is extremely unfair. No films are “true," and with this story in particular, the aspects of memory fused with the truly harrowing times through which Rachel lived create the heightened emotions that are best served by the conventions of melodrama. To go much deeper could invite a pornographic voyeurism regarding feelings most of us will never understand; Schindler’s List, unforgivably for me, allowed us to do just this. Better choice, in my opinion, to let us see some naked bodies than to subject these unfortunates to an emotional striptease.

There is perhaps a subversive commentary on current times as well. Black Book carries on in the tradition of Hollywood's heroic war films. Yet the use of the word "terrorist" has a definite contemporary ring, and one that sounds hollow to the ears of Americans who think of terrorists as the bad guys. In this film, only Nazis use the word, applying it to the Resistance fighters. In addition, the Dutch all await the "Tommies" to liberate them, not the Yanks. When the occupying forces of the victorious Allies do set up shop in Holland, they are Canadian, not American or British. This "Hollywood" film in structure and gorgeous production values has cut America completely out of the picture.

Black Book is melodrama of the highest order, and one whose lack of prudishness is as un-American as its cast. Paul Verhoeven has done himself proud and told a story, in his native land, that is much more grown up than the films it seems to mimic. I hope one day that Verhoeven's critics learn to look a little deeper, too. l

Neil Young: Live at Massey Hall 1971 (2007)
Director: Bernard Shakey (Neil Young)

By Don Jacobson

Neil Young has, over the many years in which he's made such a huge impact on rock music, harbored a second career as a filmmaker. His role as movie director was on display fairly recently in 2004's Greendale, an interesting and informative work in which Young illustrated in film an album's worth of original song-cycle about a northern California hippie clan's family history.

When he takes up the camera, Young is self-deprecating: He uses the nom du cinema of Bernard Shakey. That's actually a pretty accurate description of his film style. Lo-fi, DIY, he cultivated the modern ethos of feigned handheld incompetence to produce a homespun quality that has an admirable ability to cut through the emotional clutter and go straight to the heart of his meaning - much like his music.

Mr. Shakey's first efforts, it turns out, came way back in early 1971, in the midst of a time that was the most exciting and productive of Young's career as a rock musician. It was then that he decided to minutely film a solo acoustic tour he undertook as he prepared what he thought at the time was going to be a live album and accompanying film, but which eventually morphed into his classic studio album Harvest. The film of the acoustic shows mouldered on the shelf until he began a project in 1997 to publish an archive of all manner of unreleased materials, with the best so far being the DVD Neil Young: Live at Massey Hall 1971.

Released in March with an accompanying audio CD, the concert film is best described as grainy and intimate. Filmed by Wim Van der Linden under the direction of the 25-year-old Young, the film features at a lot of tight close-ups of Young with just an acoustic guitar and harmonica, and occasionally follows him as he moves stiffly to the piano. He had suffered a debilitating back injury in 1970, and as he lay in a hospital bed at that time, he wrote many of the unforgettable songs that appeared on Harvest, such as “Old Man," “Needle and the Damage Done" and “Heart of Gold." During the acoustic tour filmed here, he introduces these now-classic songs as something new.

To see him perform them in front of an audience that does not recognize them is to move powerfully back to a time when the Kent State massacre was still a burning topic and the fight against Richard Nixon’s Vietnam war policies were just as urgent as today’s conflict over Iraq. The enthusiastic response of small, in-the-round audience to Young’s then-current antiwar song “Ohio" is eerily reminiscent of the kind of reaction that performers get today when they bash George Bush. At the same time, it’s depressing: It makes you realize that the lessons of one generation are largely lost on the next and that each has to learn the terrible lessons of the abuse of power for itself.

The documentary's visual style is unremarkable. It's meant to be a filmed record, and as such it succeeds. Its main accomplishment is acoustic. The sound is pristine and so detailed that Young's every vocal nuance - at a time when his voice was at its clearest and most emotive - is thrillingly captured in the smallest detail. The set list includes such songs as “Cowgirl in the Sand," “Helpless," “Don’t Let It Bring You Down," and “Down By the River." Young performs them here without the harmonies of his pals David Crosby, Graham Nash, and Stephen Stills, and minus the loud rock accompaniment of his band Crazy Horse. The 1970-71 acoustic tour was a chance for him to perform in theaters that normally hosted plays or classical music, such as Toronto’s Massey Hall, Chicago’s Auditorium Theater, and Minneapolis’ Guthrie Theater.

The thing about Neil Young: Live at Massey Hall 1971 that makes it such a precious document is that it captures one of the 20th century's most important cultural figures at the precise moment when he was just graduating into that role. You can tell from his demeanor that he was beginning to grasp that he was turning into a legend and icon, but also hadn’t yet tired of the music that would become his legacy. l

9th Annual Roger Ebert’s Overlooked Film Festival

Stroszek (1977)
Director: Werner Herzog

By Marilyn Ferdinand

Whenever you go into a film by Werner Herzog, expect the unexpected. The idiosyncratic director with a taste for the grotesque never does anything by half, and frequently inflicts the same fate on his characters. His feature Stroszek comes close to defining the word “offbeat" while still clinging to a fairly linear plot and recognizable characters. In fact, his characters are played by nonactors and, indeed, many play themselves in a film that spans from Berlin to serial killer Ed Gein’s hometown of Plainfield, Wisconsin (called Railroad Flats in the movie because of a feud Herzog had with documentarian Errol Morris about—oh never mind, it’s just too complicated).

The film opens on the day that Bruno Stroszek (Bruno S.) is released from jail. The nature of his crime is not revealed, but the warden warns him away from taverns. My guess would be that he was drunk and disorderly and playing music in public for money without a license. I guess this because when the articles he had when he was taken into custody are returned to him, they included an accordion. Bruno immediately heads into the nearest pub and orders a beer, which he downs in one swill.

In the pub, he meets up with his old friend Eva (Eva Mattes) and the pair of loathsome pimps (Wilhelm von Homburg and Burkhard Driest) she works for. After being rejected by the pair, Eva goes home with Bruno to the apartment his friend Scheitz (Clemens Scheitz) has been keeping for him. Scheitz, a little old man in a black topcoat and beret; Bruno; and Eva form an odd family for a short time. One day, the pimps come into the apartment and trash the place; later, Eva comes home beaten and bruised. Scheitz has a relative living in Wisconsin who will hire Bruno and get Eva a job in a truck stop. The trio review a map to find out where Wisconsin is, fantasize about mobile homes, pack up, and head for America.

At first, things go pretty much as planned. Eva is shown working like a well-oiled machine at the diner. Bruno goes to work for Scheitz’s relative, a mechanic (Clayton Szalpinski,) and the threesome get a brand-new mobile home to live in. All seems miraculous in America, that is, until the three find out they actually have to pay back the loan they got to buy their dream trailer. Inevitably, Eva starts turning tricks again, eventually running off with a trucker to Vancouver. Bruno and Scheitz decide to rob the bank to which they owe money, but go when the bank is closed. Instead, they stick their shotgun in a barber’s face and steal $30 from his register. Then they cross the street to buy groceries. Scheitz is apprehended by the police. Bruno, all alone, does what anyone would do—he steals a tow truck from the mechanic shop and drives off to find Eva, shotgun and a frozen turkey from the grocery store in tow.

It’s tempting to think of this movie as a lampoon of the American dream, but listening to Herzog’s explanation of how the film came about shows it to be an excuse for Herzog to create a dark comedy populated with an odd assortment of characters he met by chance in Berlin and Wisconsin. Bruno S. was a tragic human being, raised by a prostitute and beaten into temporary deafness. He also played the lead in Herzog’s Kaspar Hauser: Jeder für sich und Gott gegen alle, which tells the true story of Hauser, who was locked in a cellar for most of his life and then set into the world. Bruno S. picks up where he left off from that film as a man who doesn’t quite fit into society and carries a childish optimism and adult melancholy with him wherever he goes. Wilhelm von Homburg was a pro wrestler and boxer who had served time in prison; Herzog reported “I liked him very much." The mechanic actually fixed Herzog’s car some time before. When Herzog came back to shoot Stroszek, he asked for the mechanic’s Native American assistant to be in the film. Szalpinski didn’t even remember the guy, then realized he had hired and fired him the same day. Of course, Herzog tracked him down, and the man, Ely Rodriguez, is in the film.

Stroszek ends with a Native American police officer somewhere in the vicinity of Vancouver phoning in as Herzogian a line as any: “We have a 10-80 out here, a truck on fire, we have a man on the lift. We are unable to find the switch to turn the lift off, can’t stop the dancing chickens. Send an electrician, we're standing by." Naturally. l