Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 11/02/17

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Thursday, November 2, 2017

Beauty and the Beast (Jean Cocteau, 1946)

Josette Day and Jean Marais in Beauty and the Beast

The Beast/The Prince/Avenant: Jean Marais
Belle: Josette Day
Félicie: Mila Parély
Adélaïde: Nane Germon
Ludovic: Michel Auclair
Father: Marcel André

Director: Jean Cocteau
Screenplay: Jean Cocteau
Based on a story by Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont
Cinematography: Henri Alekan
Production design: Christian Bérard, Lucien Carré
Film editing: Claude Ibéria
Costume design: Antonio Castillo, Marcel Escoffier
Music: Georges Auric
Makeup: Hagop Arakelian

There are no singing teapots in Jean Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast, but there's more than enough magic -- almost too much to provide a satisfying ending, hence Greta Garbo's alleged lament, "Give me back my Beast." This is a fairy tale old style, which means that there's something unsettling about the happily-ever-after. Why does the Beast revert to the form of Avenant, whom it is never quite clear that Belle really loves? Where are they sailing off to at the end? Why does Belle seem oddly not quite enraptured with the turn of events? It's a sublimely erotic, if slightly kinky, film: I love the moment when, making his exit after seeing Belle, the Beast reaches out to caress the bare breast of a statue, as if copping a feel denied to him by his deeply conflicted nature. "Love can make a beast of a man," says the Prince at the end, and it's Cocteau's great achievement that this idea simmers beneath the surface of the entire film.

Aliens (James Cameron, 1986)

Carrie Henn, Michael Biehn, Sigourney Weaver, Bill Paxton, Paul Reiser, Jenette Goldstein in Aliens

Ripley: Sigourney Weaver
Newt: Carrie Henn
Hicks: Michael Biehn
Burke: Paul Reiser
Bishop: Lance Henriksen
Hudson: Bill Paxton
Gorman: William Hope
Vasquez: Jenette Goldstein
Apone: Al Matthews

Director: James Cameron
Screenplay: James Cameron, David Giler, Walter Hill
Cinematography: Adrian Biddle
Production design: Peter Lamont
Film editing: Ray Lovejoy
Music: James Horner

Before James Cameron become "king of the world" and infatuated with the possibilities of CGI, he made this exciting sequel to Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979), which is not only a superb movie on its own but also one of the few sequels whose creator has actually studied what made the first film so satisfying. In this case, characters. Just observe the still above and compare it with the one I chose from Alien in which the crew of the Nostromo gathered around the infected Kane. In the one from the sequel we see Newt, Hicks, Ripley, Hudson, Burke, and Vasquez gathered around a schematic to plot out a way of dealing with the alien threat. And if you remember the film at all, you can immediately recall what made these characters so appealing -- or in the case of Burke, so appalling. Aliens could have been your standard shoot-'em-up in space, with lots of mindless action. In fact, it starts out that way, with an obnoxiously gung-ho crew of space marines blustering about how they're going to kick some extraterrestrial ass. But as the cast is whittled down by the monsters, we get to know the seven survivors -- Bishop, the android so mistrusted by Ripley, is missing from the picture -- and to feel a genuine concern about their fates. Moreover, because Cameron hasn't yet fallen under the spell of CGI, what takes place looks and feels real -- there's a tactility about the sets that computers have yet to learn how to supply. Action movies don't come any better than Alien and Aliens.