Ferdy on Films, etc.

A Scene at the Sea (Ano Natsu, Ichiban Shizukana Umi, 1991)
Director: Takeshi Kitano

By Marilyn Ferdinand

Takeshi Kitano (aka Beat Takeshi) is a multi-talented performer and director whose range of vision is extremely broad. He made his reputation with such yakusa films as Sonatine and Boiling Point, but surprises with classically composed, quiet works as well. A Scene at the Sea tells a very simple story with extraordinary lyricism and heartbreaking understatement that compare favorably with the beautiful works of contemporary Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda and master filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu.

The first ingenious clue of this assured film is complete silence as we find ourselves in the darkened cab of a truck with two men. A minute or so after the opening, we hear our first sound—that of the garbage truck the two men operate. One of them is a young man named Shigeru (Kuroudo Maki). He and his partner stop to pick up some garbage; other debris, including a broken surfboard, is strewn alongside the plastic garbage bags. The truck takes off. We watch it recede down the road, only to stop. Shigeru runs back to the debris and retrieves the surfboard. Later, we watch him carefully reattach the broken-off front tip of the board with dowels, glue, and the ever-useful duct tape.

In front of a home, a middle-aged man is performing some strange cross between tai chi and calisthenics while a young woman watches him silently. He utters the words “a date?" rather cryptically. At just that moment, Shigeru emerges from the house with his surfboard. The woman, Takako (Hiroko Oshima), matter-of-factly and rather amusingly turns away from the man and follows Shigeru along the road and down to the beach. Was the older man her father, referring to Shigeru? Was he just trying to ask Takako out? We’ll never know because from this moment on, the film devotes itself to the young people and what happens to them as Shigeru teaches himself to surf.

His first attempts, watched with deadpan concentration by Takako, are pathetic, and more experienced surfers on the beach laugh at him. But he keeps trying day after day, only to have his board from the trash return there when it finally breaks for the last time. Pricing new boards is a painful experience, but Shigeru determines that he needs one. Takako tries to negotiate a lower price on one, but the store owner refuses. So Shigeru saves and finally gets his new ride—only to discover he could have bought it at another shop for much less. The look of frustration on his and Takako’s faces communicates a lot, more than what anyone in that position would feel. For, you see, it has become quietly clear from the sound cut-outs and one scene in which Takako gestures to Shigeru in a deliberate way that Shigeru and Takako are deaf.

Shigeru begins to neglect his job, his friends—everything—for surfing. As he becomes more skillful, his detractors on the beach acknowledge his improvement and worry that without a wet suit, he must be very cold. Nakajima (Toshizo Fujiwara), the shop owner who sold Shigeru his board and a former champion surfer, shows up at the beach one day. As the community of surfers comment on how cold Shigeru must be, Nakajima goes over to the couple and hands Shigeru a wet suit to use. He urges him to enter a surf contest that is coming up. At home, Shigeru carefully fills out the application; Takako looks at what he wrote and makes corrections with the same care she always uses when she folds his clothes on beach after he takes them off to enter the water.

Because Shigeru has never been in a surfing contest, he doesn’t know where to look to see the line-up of surf contestants; because he can’t hear, he doesn’t know when his group is called. The contest ends without Shigeru stepping a toe in the water. Nakajima takes the other surfers to task for not looking out for Shigeru. When another contest comes up, Nakajima personally ensures that Shigeru enters and has the chance to compete.

This graceful film is uses dialogue sparsely, but it is far from silent. The sounds of the surf permeate our senses, hypnotizing us in much the same way that the white caps and rolling water captivate Shigeru. The film employs many long shots, mimicking the wide expanses of shoreline that form the overarching mise en scene. Kitano also makes wonderful use of close-ups, particularly on his two protagonists. Shigeru has a handsome, warm face, and Takako is an unusual kind of beauty. Both actors convey a sense of purpose and serenity in their chosen loves—the water and each other—through the thoughtful gaze of the camera.

At one point, Takako believes Shigeru has taken up with the girlfriend of another new surfer—a comic character who falls every time he runs with his board toward the sea. We see her in a long shot as she comes down the now-familiar steps to the beach behind Shigeru, who has arrived there ahead of her and is seated with the other woman. Takako is little more than a shadow at this distance, but we see her hesitate and reverse direction. Her hurt registers, nonetheless, and the single tear that runs down her cheek when she finally agrees to see Shigeru is extremely eloquent.

The careful observation of these and other moments creates a dramatic drive that defies the absence of dialogue. The film is also helped along considerably by an effectively dreamy score by Joe Hisaishi. The lack of extreme highs and lows, the inclusion of several comic characters (particularly two young men who decide to emulate Shigeru and buy a cheap surfboard Shigeru had rejected for himself), and the dips in and out of the soundless world of Shigeru and Takako create a sense of day-to-day life that makes even a dramatic ending seem part of the endless flow of existence. This is a film to be enjoyed, savored, and held close to one’s heart. l

“Our Backstreets" #15
No Reservations

By Marilyn Ferdinand

I hope my fave-rave chef, author, and travel TV host Anthony Bourdain doesn’t mind me borrowing the name of his TV series to head this edition of "Our Backstreets," but like him, I’ve been traveling. Unlike Bourdain, I haven’t done it to explore the exotic cuisines of exotic places for fame and fortune. Rather, a new publishing cycle in the Land of Paycheck and the effects of dust, environmental chaos, and too many restaurant/fast food meals resulting from our long-running series Kitchen Renovation (now in its 8th week) made me and the hubby realize that we needed to Get the Hell Out of Dodge!

With time and energy in short supply, we settled on a 5-day getaway to a friend’s lakeside summer home in Wisconsin—about a 4-hour drive. It was raining, and we took the long way 'round. After a phone call to the house to get new directions, we arrived about 15 minutes later, none the worse for wear. I should have known things might not turn out so well when there was no one home. Fifteen anxious minutes of driving around looking for the right place and knocking on the wrong doors—and finding out we were in the right place—and our hosts returned to the homestead.

We started drinking, played hearts, and had a really nice late-night dinner of brats off the barby. The following day, still drizzly, was great, motorboating around on a chain ‘o lakes created by dredging channels between several separate lakes. We learned this was done by a developer who had done what had been done in this area for many decades—taken land from the Native Americans on the promise of giving them a few places on it to live, subdivided it, sold it to white folks who demanded more water than they were entitled to for their rec sports, and drained surrounding water from the Indian reservation. Anger between the white folks and the Native Americans brewed to overflowing in the 1970s. Things have improved, but tensions linger on.

After a nice Friday fish fry in a cash-only diner, we stopped at a home on the res to visit our host’s childhood friend. A friendly beer or two became a full-fledged Indian party—one of the daughters was having a birthday bash—and the order of the day was to get as wasted as possible. Every possible cliché you can think of about Indians characterized that night—rampant drunkenness, cheap drugs, poverty, dogs running around, fights. I caught a flung plastic chair in the shoulder. We left shortly thereafter—the hubby worried that our departure would offend our hosts, I worried about escaping further injury—and left altogether to move further north the next day.

What I learned on the res is that I have absolutely no idea what it’s like to be a Native American. The outside appearances, the stories of exploitation, the free-floating anger that I found on the surface still left me feeling almost completely in the dark about the culture I had briefly dipped into. I’ve visited many foreign lands, but invariably the cultures seemed to share a number of common markers with mine. I feel—rightly or wrongly—that Native Americans have fared so poorly because, perhaps, their fundamental way of life was so incredibly different from the European cultures that came to dominate the large tracts of land they used to need to make a living and way of life. I cannot wrap my head around that or the psychology of living in these traditional ways, and their continuing influence. Before the alcohol and drugs took effect on my hosts, I enjoyed some of their stories. After everyone—elders, adults, children—started disappearing into the bottle and hash pipe, all I felt was alone and frightened.

I was very aware that I didn’t fit in at all; one of my hosts as much as said so, though she tried to put me at my ease until she got too loaded to notice. She had said earlier that she hates her job so much that when the weekend comes, she takes any kind of mind-altering substance she's offered. I know plenty of white people who do the same thing. It’s not easy to be honest about my feeling of repugnance at the drunken scene around me—my white liberal guilt rebels in every way, shape, and form, even though I'd feel exactly the same way among people from my own background who were doing the same thing. Maybe if I knew more about Native Americans, I wouldn't feel so alienated. I didn’t grow up around Native Americans. My people came to this country in the 20th century, so I assumed the history of the white man and the Indian didn’t really belong to me. But it does—and I don’t get it. All I wanted to do was run away. Maybe I'm full of shit.

Funny. I thought this was going to be a lighthearted entry on how I spent my summer vacation—a catalog of the homey ways of small-town America, the wide variety of roadkill I saw, an exploration of the many ways of cheese in The Dairy State. Anthony Bourdain had a similar dose of uncomfortable reality in Beirut when he and his TV crew got caught in a war. We both came away with more than we bargained for.

I don't feel guilty about getting the kind of short respite I wanted. I've had a rough couple of years and went after some peace with a selfish singlemindedness. But now I'm home, and I wonder about the res, about the people I met, about whether their shows of native pride on their baseball caps, veterans uniforms, and t-shirts will work for them—and just who else is going to care. l

Happy Feet (2006)
Director: George Miller

By Roderick Heath

It was evening when my friends and I seemed to be aging in reverse. We’re an eclectic group, ranging from 19 to 35 years old, united generally by a love of music and bohemian insouciance. In celebrating an old friend, a singer whom I shall call Jewel, returning briefly to town after a year away—she described her new life as same shit, different town, slightly warmer—we started off guzzling rum and red wine and passing a joint until Jewel was afflicted with rabid munchies whilst hiding under the table. Darth, guitarist and unofficial band manager, and I ended up discussing the nature of recycling in art, making nonqualitative observations of the connection between Picasso and the Transformers movie as both being generated by an alchemy of old ideas into new. With the important addendum that Michael Bay sucks. Hulk showed us downloaded satirical movie trailers, like “Shining," a re-edit of footage from The Shining that makes it look like an uplifting tale of a cranky author befriending an adorable tyke. “Shining" is a work of genius, both proving how clichéd the modern style of movie trailer is, and Hitchcock’s theories on the nature of montage, that is, meaning in film is determined by the arrangement of images.

All this time I’m pondering to myself if our fascination with the detritus of recent pop culture is truly a pathway to new creativity or wallowing in the ruins of the age. Hulk downloaded every TV theme tune from 1975 to 1990, and challenged us to identify them. By the time we got to a remix of the theme of Battle of the Planets and the Waltzing Matilda-derived jingle of Secret Valley (an Aussie show about a gang of intrepid nature scouts constantly contending with evil developer Brian Trenchard-Smith, repeated ad nauseum of a Saturday morning once upon a time), we knew it was time to get out into the night. And lo, we did walkest the night, and didst meet many strange people, and did playeth pool in the club.

The dispiriting experience of a club full of people looking for something that isn’t happening eventually drove us back to the house of Hulk and his fiancée, whereupon we ended up watching Happy Feet, which, as we noted with some amusement, is an animated film by the guy who made Mad Max. Indeed, there’s some continuity of purpose in the film, with Miller’s love of epic tales of wandering loners, individualist heroes contending with a brutal world. Miller once told an amusing anecdote that when making Mad Max III: Beyond Thunderdome, he had to gain permission to shoot on tribal land; in recounting his movie’s story to the Aboriginal elders, they instantly dug it—their myths, too, are filled with wandering heroes in epic tales. Recycling indeed.

Happy Feet is, at heart, an epic tale in the same mould; like Max, Mumble (Elijah Wood) is a solitary being who becomes the saviour of his civilisation precisely by being dedicated to his individual vision. In this case, he is a dancer, in opposition to the organising principle of his race of Emperor Penguins, whose society is built around their individualised mating calls. His siren mother Norma Jean (Nicole Kidman) and father Memphis (Hugh Jackman) met when her song “Kiss" found a perfect counterpoint in his “Heartbreak Hotel." This union of ’50s icons produces a new, but disturbing, cultural offspring. Mumble is joined almost from birth to a girl of strong vocal prowess, Gloria (Brittany Murphy), but his singing is so woeful, everyone cringes at the sound; his “happy feet," as Memphis anxiously explains, “just ain’t penguin."

So Mumble becomes a symbol for every kind of social outcast and reject. His father’s paranoia over raising him wrong—he dropped his egg for a short spell during the winter hibernation—and subsequent begging for him to give up his deviant ways, is a sly nudge towards identifying Mumble with the fate of many gay men. He gains loyal followers in the form of a quartet of Adelie penguins (basically are identified as Mexican) who dig his dancing and adopt it and him.Yes, I can’t help but think, that’s my friends and me in a nutshell.

Soon Mumble’s got all the young folk of the Emperor tribe shaking a leg, only to be loudly and roundly excommunicated by the pharisaic leaders of the tribe. The Scots-brogued Elder (Hugo Weaving) blames him for the displeasure of the sky gods that has resulted in the recent shortage of fish that endangers the whole population; for inspiring a loss of communal identity; for undercutting the entwined purpose of song in joining together the traditional male-female relationship and for celebrating their religion; and for bringing outside influences in. He swats aside one of the Adelies to make his point. It’s an effective and memorable scene that accurately conflates about the last 40 years’ worth of conservative political rhetoric into a solid stone of abuse aimed at Mumble. In fearlessly accepting his exile, Mumble vows to return with proof that the fish are, in fact, being taken away by the awesomely powerful “aliens" responsible for such strange, unexplained phenomena as tags rings around legs and the plastic six-pack holder that entangles heads. When Gloria tries to follow Mumble into exile, he rejects her so that she’ll return and lead a proper life.

Eventually Mumble and his amigos reach a deserted whaling station teeming with garbage, and see a trawler looting the sea. Mumble swims out to sea to follow it, and washes up on a city beach. He wakes up in a zo, and tries desperately to get the attention of humans who idly enjoy watching the quaint animals making their incoherent noises. Mumble is slowly driven first to despair and finally to near-madness, hallucinating and retreating into a corner, staring at his own reflection in the glass, a ball of noncommunicative defeat. Yes, I thought, that’s where so many of us are now—my friends, myself.

Happy Feet, though international in its outlook, is very much a modern Australian film in sensibility. Like our country, it’s an awkward conflation of imported cultures and their tropes—in its everyday life, dedicated to the contemporary pop culture of America, but with a leadership caste oriented to Old World religious conservatism, tolerant and multicultural as long as there is no overt dissent, creative but uninterested in the fruits of its own efforts. In exactly the same way that the Elders of the Emperors maintain status quo by exiling alt-culture tyro Mumble, our current right-wing government has for more than decade maintained hegemony by gutting funding for artistic and cultural organisations that promote diversity of opinion and individuality of voice, and anyone it accuses of having a left-wing or anti-government bias. The conservatives have actively strangled the arts in Australia, leaving us with virtually no native television drama, a pathetic publishing industry, and a financially defeated film industry.

The ironies are built into Miller’s approach; he knows damn well he can only sell Happy Feet in a Yankee-inflected, animated fantasyland. The film is a musical loaded with ideas, except that it can’t actually compose music for itself, instead relying on the artful deployment of jukebox hits. The film references Moulin Rouge!, another Aussie-but-not, musical-but-not featuring Nicole Kidman, in its cornucopia of cultural detritus. Miller is a far better filmmaker than Baz Luhrmann, however; his directorial control is far more evident, and his ideas don’t get the better of his sense of shape and story and are more coherent and thought through.

Miller’s ace up the sleeve, however, is communication. Just as it brought two tribes of penguins together, Mumbles’ dancing now accidentally gets the attention of a little girl. Soon he finds himself a figure of incredulous adoration, and scientists release him back into the wild. His return causes a battle between two camps in the penguin tribe: those who dance to Mumble’s insistence that it will convince humans to help them and the Elders and their acolytes who sing to the heavens. Guess who is proved right. We glimpse the human world furiously debating banning fishing in Antarctic waters, resulting in the rejuvenated penguin world singing and dancing in joy. Finally, Mumble’s new way of expression has defeated barriers and resulted in new thinking and perception that saves the world. It’s an absurdly idealistic, Capraesque finale in a film that skirts dystopian vision, but at least it, like the rest of the film’s story progression, has a logic to it.

The film is far from perfect. Much of its central third repeats scenes, and the finale is rushed. The individualist-artist theme is far stronger than the environmentalist thrust, though considering modern green-left politics, these things are increasingly bound together. The Mumble-Gloria subplot is terribly weak; the finale has them singing and dancing together, despite the fact that she’s gotten married and had a litter of kids in his absence. Huh? The computer animation alternates between some astonishing beauty and imagination, and flat, plastic-textured effects, especially during the tedious proliferation of slide-on-the-ice-on- your-ass scenes. But Happy Feet knows what it wants to say, and says it well. As for my friends—the Mumbles on our Dunciad—it finished with us staring in the glass or clutching each other for comfort. But we keep on dancing, hoping someone notices the zoo is killing us. l

Valentino (1977)
Director: Ken Russell

By Marilyn Ferdinand

You really gotta love Ken Russell. Whatever project he chooses—and they are frequently sexy, operatic affairs that reflect his own sensibilities—he manages to find and remain true to their essential spirit. Valentino is not a literal biography of the great silent film heart throb Rudolph Valentino—the film, in fact, is based on a novel—but one that clings to the spirit of the times and the legendary allure of the man, which is as strong today as it was in his time. As a fan of Valentino—my office is plastered with pictures and memorabilia of the star—I appreciated how Valentino mirrored a wit I have always associated with him.

The film begins with the pandemonium that greeted the news of Valentino’s (Rudolph Nureyev) untimely death at the age of 31. In a faux newsreel sequence, grief-stricken female fans mob the funeral home where his body is lying in state, crashing through the windows in a Technicolor excess of sorrow. After order is restored, one by one, come several important women in his life to pay their respects, mug for the newspaper photographers, and tell the Valentino story in flashback.

Screenwriter and Hollywood executive June Mathis (Felicity Kendal), a tearful mask of tragedy that suggests unrequited love, recalls Valentino’s description of his early days as an immigrant from Italy, trying to make enough money from washing dishes, taxi dancing (and Latin loving his paying dance partners) to go to California and buy an orange grove to farm. A dramatic attack on his apartment by some mobsters forces his hand, and he sets off for Los Angeles, where he keeps his dream of farming alive by dancing in nightclubs.

One night, he incurs the wrath of Fatty Arbuckle (William Hootkins) by grabbing the frizzy-haired starlet (Carol Kane) seated next to him, dancing her into a swoon for a packed house of patrons, and stealing her away to be his first wife, Jean. This scene is a splendor of grotesques—Fatty the most grotesque of them all, turning red and slack-jawed in fisheye close-ups—squealing catcalls and hoots. Nureyev shows off some of his exquisite ballet technique while jazzing his duet up with vampy ballroom elegance. Valentino sees Jean’s lavish lifestyle from a second-rate career in movies, and decides to try his hand. Mathis recalls discovering him in a two-reeler and recommending him for his star turn in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. A recreation of the famous tango scene from that film is a natural for Nureyev.

Back to the present and the gloriously excessive and comic entrance of Alla Nazimova (Leslie Caron). Draped in a foyer-sized blanket of white roses, she collapses over Valentino’s coffin. When photographers ask her to do it again, she obliges with refined vulgarity and launches into a description of her relationship with Valentino. Nazimova singled out Valentino to play Armand opposite her Camille. A seduction scene from the film is shot on a set very similar to the fabulous Art Deco sets of the original film, but Valentino’s aura shone too bright for Nazimova. Having seen Camille, I can testify that it’s a strange telling that has Camille die her fabulously romantic death with Armand nowhere to be found.

Enter Natacha Rambova, a 1920s hippie played by a quintessential 1960s hippie, Michelle Phillips, who tells the reporters that although she had been separated physically from Valentino, they remained spiritually close. In her flashback, she is Nazimova’s lover but clearly sees that Valentino has a crush on her and that his career will be bigger than anything to which Nazimova could ever aspire. On the set of The Sheik, Rambova seduces Valentino with a dance of the seven veils under a gold-and-jewel-encrusted tent of Arabian splendor. When Valentino’s divorce is in process, Rambova convinces his to go to Mexico to be married. Upon their return to the United States, they are arrested for bigamy. Studio head Jesse Lasky (Huntz Hall) refuses to bail Valentino out, and he spends a tortuous night in jail where he is taunted by a sadistic guard and the drunks and disorderlies, including a perpetual masturbation machine, for his dandy ways. The scene goes in for hallucinatory visual effects combined with a clownlike atmosphere that could be called Felliniesque.

On the set of Monsieur Beaucaire, Rambova and the film’s director Sidney Olcott (John Justin) call directing cues together in a hilarious scene highlighting Rambova's megalomania. During a break from shooting, two stagehands positioned on the catwalk above the soundstage wonder if Rambova calls the shots in bed, too. They toss down a pink powder puff, which lands squarely on Valentino’s lap. Rambova, outraged, insists that the perpetrator of this insult come forward or she and Valentino will walk off the set. Although Valentino finishes the picture, Rambova insists he refuse future work at Paramount until Lasky meets their demands. Lasky suspends him, and the pair end up penniless on a beach. They are approached by George Melford (Don Fellows), who books the pair to do personal appearances on behalf of Mineralava, a beauty product for women. We are treated to another stunning duet with Nureyev at center stage and Phillips managing to stay out of his way. George becomes Valentino’s manager and eventually negotiates a sweet deal with Lasky, including a huge raise and script approval. It’s back to Hollywood for the Valentinos.

A climactic moment comes when Valentino reads a newspaper article that casts aspersions on his manhood. Russell has given us a scene earlier in the film in which Valentino is dancing, ballroom style, with the famous ballet dancer Vaslav Nijinsky (Anthony Dowell), so to plant doubts about Valentino’s sexuality in the minds of the viewers of Valentino. I never really believed it from Nureyev’s performance (though the dancer was himself homosexual), and this feeling was true to the real Valentino, whose wholesale purchase on the hearts of American women put him in opposition with the ideal of American manhood the popular culture wished to keep alive. In any case, Valentino challenges the reporter to a duel, which for legal reasons, becomes a boxing match. Rory O’Neil (Peter Vaughn) stands in for the reporter—and O’Neil just happens to be a boxing champion. The match is a mini ballet. As O’Neil pounds Valentino, the matinee idol’s body is a rubber doll of fluidity. O’Neil, in an echo and parody of the earlier dance with Nijinsky, twirls the semiconscious Valentino around the ring. Nureyev’s grace during this tragicomic scene is awe-inspiring. Miraculously, Valentino recovers and clocks the middle-aged champ in a stunning series of combinations and a smashing knock-out blow.

By now, Valentino has been exhibiting signs of the ulcer that would eventually perforate and kill him. Nonetheless, when O’Neil asks for a rematch—a drinking contest—Valentino accepts and again bests him. The film omits Valentino’s later films for United Artists, concentrating only on the contract stipulation that barred the disruptive Rambova from the set. Russell ends with Valentino's death, in a regal scene that has the actor stretched on a slab in what almost appears to be a white marble tomb.

Valentino is a gorgeous film that revels in its lush colors—particularly pink—and lavish sets and costumes. The Sheik costumes are just as the many photos of Valentino had them, including a small detail I remember from the film—a wristwatch. A scene in a speakeasy has a bevy of girls dressed as pink powder puffs putting on a show as entertaining and insulting as any on film. Russell’s extravagant imagination is all up there on screen, and yet, as I said in the introduction to this review, the film really captures the fable of Valentino. For example, one scene has Mathis watching one of Valentino’s films in a darkened theatre. The audience is comprised entirely of women. The utter contempt American men showed for Valentino is evident in the behavior of the prisoners and guard at the lock-up, the studio bosses who wouldn’t bail him out, the boxing crowd (that is, until he proves himself in the masculine American way), and the journalists who built him up and tore him down.

The choice of Nureyev to play Valentino seems an odd one, but in general, it was a gamble that paid off. Nureyev, like Valentino, had unconventional good looks from certain angles. His beautifully sculpted and strong body could also look slight. As a homosexual, he certainly would have related to the hate directed at Valentino, and as a world-famous ballet dancer, he would also have been able to relate to Valentino’s fame. While I can’t really say he “acted" very well, he created an impression that I found believable and endearing.

All of the main actresses must have been told by Russell to keep the needle in the red zone. Leslie Caron and Felicity Kendal, both decent actresses, camped shamelessly through their roles. Michelle Phillips, I’m convinced, really was a terrible actress when she made Valentino and thus fit right into the shrill femininity Russell seemed to want to capture—a reflection of the Valentino mania of the time. I found these ungenerous portraits of women a bit offensive, but as an artistic interpretation of a temperment that surrounded this man, I respect Russell’s choices.

Valentino satisfied me like a chocolate mousse topped with three feet of whipped cream. Not just for Valentino fans, Valentino is a riotous, daring adventure in filmmaking that is a real treat. l

The Proposition (2005)
Director: John Hillcoat
Screenplay/Music: Nick Cave

By Marilyn Ferdinand

I am not going to mince words. I am absolutely dumbfounded by the hyperinflated 86% positive rating the Rotten Tomatoes critics have given this film. It’s hard to know what The Proposition brings to the boilerplate Western tale it tells besides the novelty of the setting—1880s Australia. The only way I can account for the gushing praise it has received is its slow-motion violence that provides a pornographic thrill (even as it is unbelievably shy about sex), its Out of Africa school of gorgeous landscape cinematography, and the hero worship its screenwriter, Nick Cave, seems to inspire among star whores. I’m not immune to these seductions (except for the Nick Cave connection—I know nothing much about music), but I’m not dumb enough to be blinded by them. The Proposition is a beautiful, but nonetheless, cliché-ridden American Western rip-off that revels in its ultraviolence and slights native Australians and Aboriginals in playing out an English-Irish blood feud on the new Auld Sod.

The movie lets us know exactly what it’s about in the opening scene—several people inside a metal shack are being sprayed with bullets from outside, holes ripping through the walls, metal pinging sounds resonating from the richocets, people lying dead or dancing with fear to avoid their seemingly inevitable fate. Somewhat miraculously, the objects for which these bullets were intended—Irish expat Charles Burns (Guy Pearce) and his simpleton younger brother Mikey (Richard Wilson)—escape death. They do not, however, escape capture by the English constable of the fictional Queensland town of Banyon, Captain Morris Stanley (Ray Winstone). It seems eldest brother Arthur Burns (Danny Huston) led a heinous raid on the Hopkins family, raping the pregnant Mrs. Hopkins and slaughtering the entire clan. It is never made clear, but it appears Captain Stanley was brought in to replace Hopkins as the chief constable. His beloved wife Martha was a good friend of Mrs. Hopkins, so Stanley is hellbent on bringing the Burnses to justice. “I will civilize this land," is his determined motto.

Stanley knows the town would be happy swinging any of the Burnses they’ve got lying around, but he is sure that without Arthur, nothing will change. He hits upon The Proposition: Charlie has until Christmas Day, nine days away, to kill Arthur and bring his body in. If he fails, Mikey will hang. So the hysterical Mikey is flung into the Banyon lock-up, with foamy-mouthed Aussie guards doing their best to keep him pissing himself for the duration of his stay, while Charlie is set free to hunt down Arthur.

The remainder of the film can’t seem to make up its mind as to whether Australia is a place of beauty people don’t seem to appreciate or a hellhole that drives its residents mad. Teeming with flies that cinematographer Benoît Delhomme takes pains to show coating the backs of anyone who stays outdoors for more than a few minutes and rimming Charlie’s mouth in his sleep, this common Australian pest vanishes as the film picks up steam. Perhaps the actors objected to the sugar water plastered all over them to create this effect—or perhaps we were just being treated to a feature film version of “Fear Factor." Aboriginals, treated with the same condescension and third-banana status in this film as Native Americans are in American Westerns, are shown savagely spearing white men, being slaughtered by them (one’s head is exploded with a Winchester in a slow-motion stomach turner), or riding alongside the English colonists like Tonto to betray their own kind. No noble savages here, but also none of their appreciation for the land.

We get poetry from Arthur as he views a spectacular sunset, but he’s a mad dingo leading a bloodthirsty gang. Another poet of the outback, Jellon Lamb (John Hurt), an English bounty hunter who hates the Irish, belies his gentle surname. Even the refined Mrs. Stanley, with her English rose garden rising from Queensland clay and her carefully transported belongings recreating an English home in the bush, is the first in line when a town leader demands that Mikey receive 100 lashes when the town learns about The Proposition Stanley made. “She was with child," Martha justifies to her husband, who, after taking a stand to defend his prisoner, instantly gives Mikey up to the mob. The residents of Banyon are shown to be a small-minded, revenge-seeking lot who turn blankly from the whipping when blood is wrung from the whip, their lust slaked.

One feels for Captain Stanley, portrayed by the superb Ray Winstone as a tired, sad-looking man who is overwhelmed by the enormity of his task. He’s not really a very upstanding fellow, though. To keep his men from hunting down Charlie and ruining his plan, he sends them instead to hunt Aboriginals. He pistol-whips Mikey. He shoots the Burns’ homestead full of holes. He crumbles at the turn of his wife’s little finger. When the final showdown between him and Arthur Burns takes place—predictably on Christmas Day, just after Martha has said “For what we are about to receive, may the Lord make us truly thankful"—we’ve got the Stanleys to root for, but it’s a bit half-hearted. Emily Watson, absent from screens lately, seems repressed and enigmatic as Martha—not her best turn.

Guy Pearce gives perhaps the best performance in the film. He conveys concern for Mikey and fear mixed with familial obedience for Arthur to telegraph the dilemma his character is in. Later, his loathing for Arthur’s crimes bubbles to the surface in determined outrage. Danny Huston, an actor I admire quite a bit, plays a coldly rational madman who puts family above everything—he’s Michael Corleone with a gentle brogue. Most of the supporting cast turn in versions of Huston’s Arthur, creating a very nasty, one-note film.

If you choose to view The Proposition, take it for what it is—not the “thought-provoking" masterwork some people seem to have assigned it, but an old-fashioned Western that gives us what most Westerns do—a voyeuristic orgy of violence. l

La Notte (1961)
Director: Michelangelo Antonioni

By Marilyn Ferdinand

Among cineastes, Michelangelo Antonioni will always be revered for producing L’Avventura (1960), a film of mysterious disappearance, betrayal mixed with grief and comforting—though temporary—closeness, and a modern ennui that pervaded much of world cinema at the time mixed with richly empty spaces. La Notte, Antonioni’s very close follow-up to L’Avventura covers similar territory, though its focus is much more internal—dealing with the disappearance of feeling rather than the physical disappearance of a beloved person. Such a premise is risky, particularly with a filmmaker like Antonioni who relies heavily on visual styling to convey feeling. In this case, he doesn’t quite pull it off.

Lidia (Jeanne Moreau) and Giovanni Pontano (Marcello Mastroianni) are an established married couple who live quite comfortably in Milan on Giovanni’s earnings as a writer. When we first meet them, they are emerging from a car and entering a hospital to visit their dying friend Tommaso (Bernhard Wicki), Giovanni’s publisher. In the hallway, the pair is accosted by a patient (Maria Pia Luzi), who sidles up to Giovanni seductively. On spying a nurse down the hall, she quickly retreats to her room. Tommaso greets the pair as his only real friends, compliments Lidia’s appearance, and praises Giovanni’s new book as a real masterpiece. Soon the effects of the morphine we saw Tommaso receive in the opening sequence start to fade. Lidia excuses herself and goes outside so that Tommaso won’t see her crying. When Giovanni makes his exit, the seductive patient meets him again in the hallway and coaxes him into her room, where he embraces and kisses her. Only an intervention by two nurses prevents him from consummating their lust.

As Lidia and Giovanni inch their way through a traffic jam toward a book signing, Giovanni tells Lidia—against her wishes—of the seduction, which he considers very disagreeable. Lidia, smirking, wonders why he thought so; it can be the basis for another story. The impression she gives is that everything in Giovanni’s life is fodder for his fiction, especially their relationship.

After Giovanni is safely ensconced at the book signing, Lidia slips out and takes a cab to a working-class town near Milan where the couple lived when they were first married. She asks the cabbie to wait as she wanders through the town, pulling peeled paint off a wall, watching friends walk down the street in happy conversation, and finally seeing some teenaged boys brawling. She runs over and screams at them to stop. They slowly break up the fight, and one boy, stained with blood, sweat, and dirt, puts his shirt back on and moves toward her like a predator. She runs, phones for Giovanni to pick her up, and dismisses the cabbie. Giovanni, who has been worried about her all night, drives hurriedly to her side.

That evening, the Pontanos have a dinner party at the villa of the wealthy businessman Gherardini (Vincenzo Corbello). Lidia dresses for the party and spins into their living room in a smashing new cocktail dress. She has a bright, coquettish smile on her face—a façade—that instantly vanishes once Giovanni can no longer see her face. She asks that they beg off the party and go out together alone somewhere. We next see them at a nighclub where a black man in a loin cloth aids a black woman perform an acrobatic striptease while balancing a cocktail on her head. Giovanni thinks she’s quite good, but Lidia is bored and says she wants to go to the party after all.

Hundreds of people are gathered on the lawn, drinking, listening to jazz, and eating off an enormous banquet table. Lidia retreats into the shadows as Gherardini shows off his newly collected novelist to his guests. She finds a woman reading a book called The Sleepwalkers alone in a stairwell. Eventually, she steers Giovanni toward the woman, who is now playing a type of shuffleboard with her make-up compact on a checkered floor. The woman is Valentina (Monica Vitti), Gherardini’s daughter, and Giovanni becomes infatuated with her. As Giovanni pursues Valentina, Lidia quietly flirts with a man, coaxing him with her eyes while remaining elusive. She ends up leaving the party with him, but stops short of more. They return to the party, and Valentina learns that she is Mrs. Pontano.

The two women meet, and Lidia asks Valentina what her intentions are toward Giovanni. Valentina says she has no intentions at all, that, in fact, she can’t feel for anyone. Lidia says she’s really not jealous, that it doesn’t matter. It sounds as though she was jealous but gave up the last bit of caring she had on the spot. When Valentina sends Giovanni and Lidia away, the pair walks into the woods on the estate. Lidia reads a beautiful passage about eternal love, naming Lidia as the object of that love, she has folded in her handbag. Giovanni asks who wrote it. She says that he did and then says she no longer loves him. The film ends with Giovanni wrestling with Lidia on the ground, trying to kiss her and swearing that he still loves her.

Antonioni demonstrates the estrangement of the Pontanos as a microcosm of human estrangement from the environment with vibrant camera shots that have come to define ennui in films. Medium and long shots that put the pair far in the background emphasize the remoteness of human emotions in a mechanistic foreground of modern steel buildings and automobiles. The individual shots of estrangement of the couple box them off from each other. In Tommaso’s hospital room, Lidia moves to the head of the bed, off to the side and behind Tommaso. The camera moves to follow her and completely cuts Giovanni out of the frame. Tommaso, we later learned, always believed in Lidia’s potential and encouraged her, both enraging her and endearing himself to her. In framing the two this way, we see an opposition between a connected relationship and the disconnect between Lidia and Giovanni.

Lidia’s sojourn to her old neighborhood reflects the decay of the old ways, both of her marriage and of Italian society, which has rejected its grounding for the glamour of money. When Lidia stumbles upon the fistfight, however, the reasons for this rejection come more clearly into focus. Her rejection of a liaison with the handsome stranger from the party similarly suggests that she herself finds human intercourse and emotion a frightening prospect. She claims to have loved Giovanni once, and I tend to believe her; perhaps years of being under his writerly microscope, of being the appendage of a famous writer in whom few people take any real interest for herself, have burned the love and life out of her. Moreau communicates both the beauty and ugliness of Lidia; her sadness and cold heart toward her once beloved husband are heartbreaking and unbearable to watch.

Giovanni and Valentina are much more problematic characters. They are such stereotypes of the warmly detached writer and spoiled, directionless rich kid that I really felt nothing for either of them. Tommaso is an blueprint deathbed philosopher, lamenting all the time he spent doing things that didn’t matter.

La Notte also suffers from the obvious comparisons that can be made of it with Fellini’s masterpiece La Dolce Vita. In the very first scene, Moreau calls Giovanni “Marcello," an error (perhaps) that reminds the viewer instantly of Mastroianni’s character in the Fellini film and extends the comparison to Tommaso as a knock-off of the Steiner character. I love Monica Vitti, but in this film, she’s fairly interchangeable with the Anouk Aimée character in La Dolce Vita and not nearly as interesting.

What keeps this film from resonating more deeply, however, is a lack of characterization. Moody camera angles, industrial sterility, and blank performances don’t work well in creating a strong understanding of what modern society has lost of its humanity. At a distance of 40 years, the film looks like an arthouse cliché, certainly not something we can fault it for during the time of its release, but something that dates the film in a way La Dolce Vita has not. European ennui, with its exotic air of sophistication, is just dressed-up depression. It can spin out in all its finery, but the glitter, like the smile on Jeanne Moreau’s lovely face, is all façade. l

Persona (1966)
Director: Ingmar Bergman

By Roderick Heath

Ingmar Bergman’s death last week was an event that swept with unusual speed and prominence through the news services. Yet, the bleakly amusing thing about many of the commentaries on his passing was the statement, or confession, by many critics of his rapidly fading importance. So-called young film fans apparently asked in their droves, “Ingmar who?" Not that Bergman’s works should be regarded without a healthy dash of skepticism, either. A review of Hour of the Wolf (Vargtimmen, 1968) in the Encyclopedia of the Horror Film, edited by Phil Hardy, pithily summarized Bergman’s oeuvre: “As (nearly) always, Bergman’s film is less about ‘great existential problems’ than about people unable to see further than the ends of their own noses who have all the time in the world to concentrate on their favourite (and only) world view." Bergman stumbled into a fortunate situation that very few other directors of any stripe have ever achieved—he was allowed almost complete artistic freedom of expression for nearly 30 years. He treaded water more than few times in that period looking for something new to say. But his best, most galvanising films, are deep in their cultural scope as well as their visceral emotional impact.

Persona, Hour of the Wolf, and Shame (Skammen, 1969) form a loose trilogy analysing horror, as Conrad would understand it, though containing quite a bit of horror as Roger Corman would understand it, too. They chart a cycle of thought and reaction to the Atomic Age, of desire for complete retreat within the artistic psyche, the terrors within that psyche, and the effect of finally being unshelled and destroyed by a violent world. Each film centers on an artist who has retreated from the world. In Persona, an actress, Elisabeth Vogler (Liv Ullman, in her debut role for Bergman) goes mute, seemingly as a reaction to a cruel, existential dread evoked by images of violent death, and is placed in the care of a nurse, Alma (Bibi Andersson). In Hour of the Wolf, a painter, Borg (Max Von Sydow) and his wife (Ullman) live in a remote cabin on an island, where Borg seems to go mad, and the wife cannot tell if the mad things she sees are real or merely a shared delusion. In Shame, Von Sydow and Ullman play married musicians who find their womb of privacy shattered by a real war erupting around their ears.

Persona could be Bergman’s most aggressively abstract film. Essentially, nothing happens, and yet a lot seems to go on. Elisabeth is stricken by her mute terror whilst giving a performance of Electra, an archetypal role ripe with meaning—a woman who kills her mother and runs from the avenging Furies—and disengages from the world. Whilst in a nursing home, she watches with utter desolation, whilst cowering in the corner, footage from Vietnam, including the famous image of a Buddhist Monk immolating himself as a protest.

Her psychiatrist (Margaretha Krook) believes she’s chosen silence as a kind of a new role—a guise to be worn in until her crisis resolves, and leaves her to the care of Alma, a very normal young woman, carelessly chatty, impressed by having a famous woman as her charge. Alma and Elisabeth move into the doctor’s summer house. Here, Alma learns, or rather fails to learn, that Elisabeth’s enigmatic silence offers a mirror that can seem both infinitely open and endlessly malevolent; Alma can write anything she wants onto eternally attentive features, but finds they sink like stones in a pool. Bergman fills the film with framings that feature reflections in mirrors and lakes.

Alma gleefully confesses all her secrets to Elisabeth—her troubled relationships and a beachside sexual escapade with her best friend and an anonymous young man that resulted in her boyfriend Henryk getting her an abortion. Elisabeth seems to listen with compassion, and Alma falls so deeply in their cocoon of confidence she almost kisses her. Moments of sexually charged intensity are rife between them. One night, Elisabeth comes into Alma’s room and embraces her, caressing her hair as they gaze at themselves in a mirror. The next day, however, Alma isn’t sure if it’s a memory or a dream. Delivering mail for Elisabeth, Alma sneaks a read of her condescending description of their relationship in a letter to the psychiatrist, and smoulders with resentment. She leaves a shard of glass for Elisabeth to walk on. Elisabeth does so, and their subsequent exchange of looks confirms its deliberation—whereupon the film breaks down briefly, a hole burning in the celluloid, with a short shard of a silent comic film, some of which was also shown at the start along with images of a film production beginning.

When the narrative returns, Sven Nykvist’s preternaturally sharp cinematography wanders in and out of focus as the women walk through the house. A chasm has been jumped from relationship to psychodrama. Alma alternates between pleading for forgiveness with Elisabeth and physically assaulting her. In the night, Alma awakens from a terrible dream to the sound of someone calling Elisabeth’s name; this proves to be Elisabeth’s husband (Günnar Bjornstrand) who’s blind, and thinks Alma is Elisabeth. Elisabeth seems to encourage Alma to continue the ruse, to the point of sleeping with him. When she finds Elisabeth studying a photo of her crippled son, Alma settles down in front of her coldly, mercilessly spinning out an incisive account of why Elisabeth had the child and her reaction to it, which causes Elisabeth to writhe and flinch. The same scene is repeated from the opposite angle, this time fixed on Alma’s face, until, in a grotesquely powerful moment in which the two women’s faces are joined by a split-screen effect, locked in a kind of mutant immobility. With her direct assault on Elisabeth’s psyche, Alma’s fallen right into the same rabbit hole.

The remaining narrative is impossible to judge. Alma seems to abuse Elisabeth further, except that she speaks about playing roles, and it seems perhaps she and Alma have swapped bodies. Or has Alma stolen Elisabeth’s power? Alma tears her arm with her nails, and Elisabeth sucks the welling blood from it, whereupon Alma repeatedly beats the cowering woman. Bergman intercuts between the two women packing to leave, but only Alma actually gets on board the bus to go. The film breaks down again, returning to boom cranes, cameras, and a fading arc light.

The impression of Persona is its meaning, and its impression is an evocation of dread of many things: sexuality, artistic barrenness, war, the pains of interpersonal communication. This last dread Bergman always insisted was the key to his films. Bergman weaves a tapestry that combines many influences and exports just as many. There are dashes of several Scandinavian masters’ influences: the erotic-horror expressionism of artist Gustav Munch, the psychodynamics of playwrights August Strindberg and Henrik Ibsen, the films of Carl Dreyer (whose Vampyr and Day of Wrath anticipate several Bergman works). Bergman was also an avid fan of gothic fiction and filmmaking, and Persona tracks like some of Poe’s crazier stories, like Morella or The Tomb of Ligeia, where a couple try so desperately to know each other, to join in the deepest, most spiritual sense, that it passes well beyond sexuality into obsessive mutual destruction.

The theme of psyches intertwining would be furthered in Hour of the Wolf, which explores the idea that perhaps in a marriage, couples begin not merely to look like each other, as the old canard goes, but also share the same thoughts, the same madness; in fact, Ullman’s character in that film cannot decide afterwards if the gothic terrors she has seen truly haunted her and her husband or were just her involving herself in her crazed husband’s delusions. In Persona, the entwining minds have the aspect of a sick love affair. The dread is thus highly sexualised, though nothing sexy is seen. The one heterosexual relationship in the film, the marriage between Elisabeth and Mr. Vogler, is a match of deficiencies. He is blind, and she has become mute. Each embodies a lack, not complementary, but instead causing permanent alienation, a complete divorcement from communication. A possible new human connection is found in the homosexual attraction of Alma and Elisabeth, except this is little more than glorified narcissism, a search to bathe in the reflection of a more perfect version of the self. The antiseptic chill of Persona is pervasive as he investigates lust as an aspect of emotional need.

The relationship between Alma and Elisabeth anticipates a modern fascination with the celebrity cult. Alma wants to find herself in the acting icon, and Elisabeth can absorb anything she wants through the subservient/idolising ordinary girl. Persona evokes anxieties about artistic responsibility and effort; when Elisabeth actually stoops to sucking Alma’s blood, it seems an ultimate fulfilment of an artist’s creed. Bergman was perhaps prophetic. Years later, Ullman would refuse to make any more films with her ex-lover because she was sick of having her psyche scoured in the process of making his art.

Bergman became one of the greatest of cinematic expressionists, that is, he knew how to use image and sound in such a way as to drag an overwhelmingly physical response, usually unsettling, out of his audience. He knew how, with his camera, and even more so, his editing, (kudos to Ulla Ryghe, the cutter on this picture), to mould cinematic space exactly to his needs. Bergman’s overpoweringly weird mise-en-scene commands attention, and in this regard, Bergman is second to none, even David Lynch, a major acolyte. You’re never entirely too sure of what you’re seeing or hearing in Persona, a film whose effects are as spare Swedish modern furniture.

Bergman’s stringent, unflinching attitude towards the toughest subjects demanded a fair amount of nerve of him and his audiences. As a man, he was nothing like the stern shaman that seemed to make these films, but a fiery, plain-spoken, sensual workaholic who remained haunted by his formative years. It was once said of Thomas Mann that he was a great novelist not because he tried to drum up brilliant answers, but because he asked the most interesting questions. This is perhaps, most fundamentally, what all great artists do, and it can be said of Bergman as a filmmaker. Even at their most opaque and peculiar, Bergman’s films always have the tone of urgent questioning. The sheer balls of his examinations, mixed with his peerless creative sense of cinema, mean their questions will be unnerving and problematic, affecting and hypnotic, for a long time to come. l

The Chicago Cinema Forum will present Persona at 6:15 p.m., Sunday, August 12, at the Chopin Theatre, 1543 W. Division in Chicago. Other Bergman films and the documentary Bergman Complete will be part of CCF's tribute to Bergman this weekend. Go to the CCF website for complete details.

Twentynine Palms (2003)
Director: Bruno Dumont

By Marilyn Ferdinand

In the 1992 film The Last of the Mohicans, Cora (Madeleine Stowe), the daughter of a British officer fighting the French and Indian War in the American colonies, is travelling in the wilderness with the gone-native white “Mohican" Hawkeye (Daniel Day-Lewis) as they flee an attack. She says to him, “We do not understand what is happening here. And it is not as I imagined it would be, thinking of it in Boston and London." Hawkeye responds, “Sorry to disappoint you." “On the contrary," replies Cora, “It is more deeply stirring to my blood than any imagining could possibly have been."

Wild places do things to people, and movies have been exploring this confrontation between civilized human beings and their natural roots for decades. Twentynine Palms extends this exploration with psychological and physical brutality that, nonetheless, is spellbinding to watch.

I don’t enjoy spending too much time with unpleasant characters, and David (David Wisser) and Katia (Katia Golubeva) are among the most unpleasant I’ve met in a movie. I didn’t realize this until the movie really got cranking, however, and the turnaround is one of the fascinating elements of the film. When we first meet the couple, David is driving his new red Hummer down a California desert highway, wrapping a piece of red tape around the top of its steering wheel to monitor the tank’s alignment, and listening to a CD of some twangy Japanese pop music. Katia, a porcelain beauty, is asleep in the back seat. She awakens and enthusiastically points out the window. David veers off the road, and they end up wandering in a field of windmills. David is very loving toward Katia, saying that he’s happy she came with him on the trip to Twentynine Palms, where he is doing some location scouting. I assumed he was in the movie business, though this is never made clear.

David and Katia pull up to a motel and get situated. They go for a swim in the pool. As Katia floats on her back, David looks at her intently and moves stealthily across the water. He grabs her gently but insistently from behind and then pulls her toward him and asks her if she likes his cock. They end up having sex in the pool. This is the first of many sex scenes between the couple. All appear to be real—a hallmark of the new vanguard in French film making—and they become increasingly anguished and terrifying as the couple’s relationship becomes strained.

The first rent in the fabric comes when David allows Katia to drive the Hummer offroad as they scout in the desert. She scrapes by scrub and puts a gash in the driver’s side door. Dave’s furious. When they return to town, he fixes the scratch with Turtle Wax, and all seems back on track. Katia, however, becomes increasingly moody, pouting when she perceives that he was looking at another woman.

On their next excursion into the desert, they spy a house and decide to see if anyone is home. David goes up to the house while Katia plays with two dogs in the yard. Finding the house deserted—or at least, unresponsive to their calls—the pair climbs into the Hummer, and David slowly accelerates. Katia encourages the dogs to follow, setting up the accident that follows: one of the dogs, a three-legged mongrel, is struck by the car. Katia starts screaming hysterically and demanding that David call for help. He wants to leave. Eventually, the dog recovers itself and hops away. Katia says that David is heartless.

When they return to their hotel, Katia locks herself in the bathroom. When she finally emerges, David throws her out of the room and tells her to go back to Los Angeles. She wanders in the dark, running in terror from passing cars. Eventually, David comes to fetch her, but she refuses to return. He begins slapping and beating her. Eventually, they hold each other very near, look into each other’s eyes, and return to the room.

On their final foray into the desert, a white truck swerves in front of them and stops. Presently, it peels off. Instead of turning back, Katia drives forward and ends up getting them stuck in a rut on a hillside road. David manages to free the car, and they drive in relief onward—to a horrible climax.

Dumont makes terrific use of imagery and the landscape to build as sense of dread in the viewer. For example, when Katia explores the desert for the first time, she circles a Joshua Tree, running her hand along its tough, barbed trunk and registering a charged look on her face that signals her fear and fascination with this alien-looking life form. David and Katia decide to climb some rocks in the nude. When they reach a place to stretch out, Dumont gives us an overhead shot of them, lying side by side in opposite directions, with Katia covering David’s penis with her hand to shield it from the sun. It’s a gorgeous look at two people in a most natural, but also very vulnerable, state. In retrospective, it reminds me a bit of the scene in Ken Russell’s Women in Love (1969) in which the drowned lovers are found naked in the mud, draped in each other’s arms.

The flip side to this beauty is the harshness of the landscape itself, and unknown to the casual viewer of the film, that Twentynine Palms is home to a marine base. Is the savagery of training in the air? I came across this marching cadence popular during the Gulf War:

I wish all the ladies were pies on the shelf.
If I was the baker I'd eat 'em all myself.
Left...left...left, right, left...
I wish all the ladies were bells on the tower.
If I was the hunchback I'd bang 'em on the hour.
Singin' hey boppa-ree-ba, he bobba row...
Wish all the ladies were holes in the road.
If I was a dump truck, I'd fill 'em with my load.
Left...left...left, right, left.

David certainly does seem to behave as though Katia is his convenience, despite his declarations of love at the beginning of the film. Near the end of the film, after the couple has been severely traumatized, Katia tells David that she loves him. I felt instantly that this was exactly the wrong thing to say to him, and was proven right. The film has become so filled with hate and perversions of love that she might as well have said, “I’d like to kill you, David." I’m not entirely convinced there is a Gulf War/invasion of Iraq metaphor in this film, however, because the making of war, like the making of love, is primal.

I read that Dumont wrote this film in response to a strong feeling of fear he had in a desert landscape. The film is quite like a nightmare in which the dream is trapped in the dreamer's own head and the horrors just keep multiplying. Impressionistic, savage, instinctual, and uncivilized, Twentynine Palms has the lingering hangover of a night terror. l