rather have the blues

Copyright © 2012 by James Clark

In the stream of dead ends that is Lars von Trier’s Melancholia (2011), one moment stands out as most violently sustaining a rich man’s dagger tossed toward his wife, “Is everybody in your family mad?” That outspoken fellow having been found by her to have committed suicide with a bottle full of sleeping pills she had bought to administer to herself in the event that an astronomical singularity coming their way might not be as tame as predicted, she turns to her sister, Justine—whom she had installed as a permanent house guest due to the latter’s having become squashed to the point of virtual immobility on losing all will to live, but who had begun something of a recovery—and quietly proposes that they face the squashing of planet earth, by a larger planet gone far astray, by mustering affective graces whose true roots had never been functional. “I want us to be together when it happens… Help me. Justine. I want it to be nice… We could have a glass of wine…” Justine, who had regarded the cosmic developments with gentle awe and depth of body language far outpacing that of her more or less desperately insistent hosts, regards her sister, Claire, with hate in her eyes and a combatively rigid jaw. “Do you want to hear what I think of your plan? I think it’s a piece of shit! You want it to be nice? Why don’t we do it in the fuckin’ toilet?”

Read More

Copyright © 2011 by James Clark

Henri-Georges Clouzot as a Christmas fabulist? Well, his Quai des Orfèvres (1947) does race over a Christmas time-frame. But where is the “peace on earth, goodwill toward men”? At the end, the principals do stagger up to their living-room Christmas tree and a day of celebration. But, despite fulsome protestations of their love for each other, one of them is just a few hours past attempting suicide and the other has frequently and convincingly given her partner (her “flame”) to understand that she hates him. Surely that punishing scenario, as guided by a notoriously hard-boiled auteur, could never yield a cogent dispensation of love, to make the season bright?

If we reflect a bit more, however, and take a close look at this very hard to define vehicle—action thriller? murder-mystery comedy? historical slice ofFranceadrift after the War? sentimental suspense? assault upon the French film and music industries? or ridicule of the quality of policing inParisat that time? (A police inspector is taken to task: “You don’t look like a policeman to me. You don’t even have a raincoat…”/ “It was stolen…”)—we might not only discover a fresh holiday treat, but a more comprehensive way of appreciating Clouzot’s quite bewildering (though directly impressive) art.

Read More

Copyright © 2011 by James Clark

    There is a motif, in the Coens’ A Serious Man (2009), which greatly helps clear the way toward engaging the sensualist factors of Teshigahara’s enigmatic and important film, Woman in the Dunes. A physics professor has a family that rears up and bites him very hard. But there is one family member, namely, his adolescent daughter, Sarah, whose disturbance of the peace reaches us in a particularly pronounced way. Due to her younger brother’s stealing, in order to buy drugs, her money (obtained by stealing from her generally inattentive father), she proceeds to assail him on many occasions—amidst other complaints—ripping into a narrative flow not really about her. Invariably, she bursts through a doorway, gets into his face and discharges streams of insults and threats on the order of salty longshoremen, not suburban Minnesota schoolgirls. “You owe me twenty bucks, you little fucker! You fucking shit! Brat-Fucker!” is for her just a warm-up for kicks and haymakers and blood-curdling shrieks we soon find to derive from her cagily homicidal mother. Along the way we discover that this extreme heatedness stems from her quite murderous resolve to obtain funding for a nose job. Combined with those startling outbursts, that business with rhinoplasty casts light upon a register of sensibility being pursued by that puzzling movie. We’re carried into the Absurdist territory of Eugene Ionesco’s play, Rhinoceros (with its characteristic inclusion of a less than stellar academic, the Logician). Absurdist theatre being a latter-day instalment of the avant-garde agitation known as Dada, and Dadaism being an important precursor of Surrealism (with its project of evoking the “more real” in the form of the more sensual), we can take a bead upon the Coens’ (only) apparent descent (in A Serious Man) into breathtakingly cutting anti-Semitism, along lines of Surrealist filmmaking, particularly that of Louis Bunuel and a film of his so closely allied to Sarah et al, namely, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972).

Read More

Copyright © 2011 by James Clark

      For quite a while, I’ve been jockeying into position one of my favorite films, Woman in the Dunes (1964), whose guiding light (along with novelist and scriptwriter, Kobo Abe), namely, Hiroshi Teshigahara, has occupied some of my daydreams due to his abandoning film in favor of  flower arrangement, ikebana. That vocation seems very near to actress, Setsuko Hara’s abandoning film just after Yasujiro Ozu’s death, for life in a meditative retreat. These trajectories have a way of haunting us, in view of the unforgiving weight of social misalliance. Teshigahara’s film, however, could be seen as entailing a strange rejoinder to such quietism.

    But Woman in the Dunes has many strikes against it as a communicative vehicle. It’s (that word) “slow.” It’s claustrophobic. Few have seen it. And still fewer have cared for its eerie illuminations in a super-strange Beast’s lair. Therefore, I’m broaching this tight squeeze by way of a pair of raucous and flashy soulmates to that quiet little gem (namely, Bunuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and the Coens’ A Serious Man), in hopes that their raging entropy will pave a way toward countering their suspicious helplessness. Just prior to that, however, we need to do a bit more grading of the Surrealist Inter-State to ensure that subsequent apparent strays more clearly take their bearings from the imperative—memorably keyed by Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast—of cogent interpersonal motion. Louis Bunuel’s Viridiana (1961) and Tristana (1970) transmit with gratifying transparency the “Pitfalls” (an alternate title for Woman in the Dunes) of maintaining that dynamic route in a state of perpetual waylaying of its uncanny prospects. But, in one of those cases at least, there is intriguing traction, necessitating one further twist to this preamble that may seem to be inspired by Laurence Sterne’s eighteenth-century novel Tristram Shandy.

Read More

Copyright © 2011 by James Clark

    This Catherine Deneuve vehicle, from the same year (1967) as The Young Girls of Rochefort, bristles with infusions from the history of modern thought (particularly Surrealism) and from the history of modern film (particularly Cocteau’s Belle et Bête, Godard’s Breathless and the omnipresent [in French cinema at that period] Kiss Me Deadly). However, to bring some apt tuning to this flurry of disparate visitors, we have to keep our eyes primarily upon Deneuve’s “Severine” as subjecting herself to a spectacular and consequential metamorphosis. As such, the film poses a turning point (easily underestimated) consisting of Severine’s coming upon an acquaintance, “Henriette,” at their tony tennis club. Severine had heard from a friend that Henriette, far from cash-strapped, had begun working as a prostitute, and she herself (married to a wealthy physician) was seen to carefully ponder such a choice of give-and-take activity. (Coming from the courts into the facility, she remarks, “I can’t hit one ball today!”) On showing some interest in having Henriette stop for a while, Severine presents an almost adolescent disarray, rendered more conspicuous by the other woman’s poise in addressing her and moving on. I think that scene offers an opportunity to fix upon the dynamics of her story, and thereby not to succumb to the rampant psychobabble this work tends to elicit.

Read More

by James Clark

      The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) seems to be a simple and exquisite tale of the vicissitudes of young love. A then-unknown Catherine Deneuve seems to carry the whole show on her perfect, stately and fragile shoulders. Jacques Demy has given her the name, “Geneviève,” likening her to the fair maiden of the lore of Camelot with its complement of brave warriors whose care for beautiful presences seems never to have been surpassed. The setting, the French port city of Cherbourg, comes to us in the first shot as all misty, watery, and antiquated. Some time into its actions, Geneviève has a crown placed upon her head by her and her mother’s dinner guest, “Roland Cassard,” whose fortune comprises impressive numbers of high-quality jewels. The crown is golden in color and paper in substance.

Read More

Copyright © 2011 by James Clark

    We first encounter the protagonist at home, attending to some business on the phone while looking out his apartment window as evening overtakes towers and groves of the city. On the TV, a basketball game between two of the less storied franchises—the Clippers and the Raptors—is in what could loosely be called progress. Then he is in his car, and damn if he doesn’t have that game on his radio! The LA announcer—perhaps an actor between jobs—gives the fantastical impression that it’s a vital playoff match. That aside, we’re struck by the Driver’s own game face, millions of light years from the Clippers and the Raptors. Now that he’s in the thick of the game he was joining at the window, namely, driving with total indifference a pair of professional thieves from their assignment point to the point of joining the innocents coming from watching the Clippers, we have to pause, first of all, on noticing that the kind of wide-eyed, silent impassivity and, at the same time, expectant strike of his athletic young man’s face and body, while moving at stratospheric speeds in a souped up “Plain Jane” Chevy Impala, and into very sharp turns, stops and pivots, is no different from how he looked when at home. Right from the start, therefore, we’re caught up in a full-court press complicating our understanding of the league (one of the breakaway moves, vis-a-vis police raptors thudding all around, is a cut behind a parked truck, followed by a veer to free space—a kind of pick and roll, in other words) this gamester finds himself occupying.

Read More

Copyright © 2011 by James Clark

Sunset Boulevard (1950), like another drama with a Hollywood locale, namely, Drive (2011), may seem to be a saga about history closing in on a hapless risk-taker. But, though the protagonists of both films receive major burns, I think such a conclusion goes too far, and, at the same time, doesn’t go far enough. Billy Wilder, in the former case, and Nicolas Refn and James Sallis, in the second, can be seen as testing the leeway for surreal lives within rational (“real”) domains. And though it could be maintained that both “Norma Desmond” (for Wilder) and “the Driver” (for Refn and Sallis) don’t carry their torch very far, it can also be maintained that they illuminate, by omission as well as commission, avenues that might eschew disaster for the sake of more modest and productive thrills in a realm of comedy seldom eliciting belly laughs.

Read More

Copyright © 2011 by James Clark

On the isle of Ischia a funeral is in progress at the ancestral cemetery reserved for members of the Carlucci family. The current scion of the clan, “Carlo,” manages the tony Grand Hotel Excelsior, and with him this day are four of his clients. “Wendell Armbruster, Jr.” and “Pamela Piggott” are a 30-something couple (he from Baltimore, she from London) in the process of having her mother and his father buried, side-by-side, as befits lovers. Carlo asks what inscription should go on the headstone. “Willy and Kate” is the first draft (the deceased being Wendell Armbruster Sr. and Katherine Piggott). Then Pamela finds apt the additional term, “Willy and Kate Carlucci.” Junior, who had been slow to warm to this situation (his respectably married father having died at Ischia [in Kate’s arms during a car accident] putatively during a solo sojourn to attend to health problems as met by the island’s historic thermal mud baths), concurs, “I’ll go for that.” How does it become apt that an Italian alias cover those lives—removing from their Anglo-Saxon story line a pillar of his church (drawing evangelist Billy Graham to preside over the Baltimore observances) and his country’s economy (the president of the United States directing Henry Kissinger, Secretary of State and supposed expert on questions of antithetical aliens, to be in attendance) and a lady residing in Britain all her life? Billy Wilder’s exploration of that strange state of affairs constitutes the heart of the generally dismissed film, Avanti! (1972).

Read More

Copyright © 2011 by James Clark

This article was first planned as bringing out a duet between Eclipse (L’Eclisse) (1962) and Avanti! (1972). For years, I have been convinced that the former is Antonioni’s best film, and yet could never satisfactorily comprehend the reason for my feeling that way. The overlooked ingredient has, I think, to do with its concentration upon the fecundity of the Italian setting, perhaps a strange entry for a work about relentless desolation. That would bring it forward to chord with (show its having in play telling phenomena with regard to) Billy Wilder’s seldom seen comedy, Avanti! While it may be even harder to account for preferring this forgotten creature over Wilder’s roster of brilliant hits, it is, above all else a film capture of the zest of the Italian setting, and as such forms a workable link with Antonioni’s poem of obliteration in the Eternal City.

Read More