Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 07/23/20

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, July 23, 2020

The Phantom of Liberty (Luis Buñuel, 1974)

Cast: Adriana Asti, Julien Bertheau, Jean-Claude Brialy, Adolfo Celi, Paul Frankeur, Michael Lonsdale, Pierre Maguelon, François Maistre, Hélène Perdrière, Michel Piccoli, Claude Piéplu, Jean Rochefort, Bernard Verley, Monica Vitti, Milena Vukotic. Screenplay: Luis Buñuel, Jean-Claude Carrière. Cinematography: Edmond Richard. Production design: Pierre Guffroy. Film editing: Hélène Plemiannikov.

The most famous, or notorious, scene in The Phantom of Liberty is the one above, in which a group of well-dressed people sit down at a table on flush toilets, and begin to discuss scatological matters. Eventually, one man excuses himself to go to the "dining room," a small private place where he can eat in privacy, an act that evidently would be disgusting if done in public. The film is a kind of tag-team of episodes, in which a secondary character in one scene becomes the central character of the next, all proceeding though dreamlike situations. In movies, dreams are typically not much like our real dreams; they're usually soft-focus and full of portentous events. But Luis Buñuel and his co-scenarist Jean-Claude Carrière know better: Real dreams seem to proceed with the kind of groundedness of daily life, but with logical inconsistencies that we don't question as we're dreaming them. For me, the most dreamlike sequence in The Phantom of Liberty is the one in which the Legendres (Jean Rochefort and Pascale Audret) rush to their daughter's school because she's been reported as having disappeared. When they get there, the little girl is present, but everyone behaves as if she has really disappeared. When they go to the police to report her disappearance, the girl accompanies them and even supplies information about her age, height, and weight to the police, who thank her and the parents and proceed to investigate the case. This is perhaps the most playful of Buñuel's films, though it contains his usual keen satire of bourgeois manners and mannerisms, and is chock-full of ideas about how we conform to conventions and rules that are at base arbitrary and irrational.

Scaramouche (Rex Ingram, 1923)

Ramon Novarro and Alice Terry in Scaramouche

Cast: Ramon Novarro, Alice Terry, Lewis Stone, Lloyd Ingraham, Julia Swayne Gordon, William Humphrey, Otto Matieson, George Siegmann, Bowditch M. Turner, James A. Marcus, Edith Allen, John George, Willard Lee Hall, Rose Dione. Screenplay: Willis Goldbeck, based on a novel by Rafael Sabatini. Cinematography: John F. Seitz. Art direction: Harold Grieve. Film editing: Grant Whytock.

A year after Ramon Novarro, as Rupert of Hentzau, threatened to steal Rex Ingram's The Count of Monte Cristo away from Lewis Stone's Count, we find the two actors in reversed roles. In Scaramouche Novarro is the dashing hero and Stone the cunning villain. Actually, Scaramouche could have used a bit more dash and cunning in both roles. Novarro isn't given much opportunity to display the impishness he brought to Rupert, even though a title card proclaims, in Rafael Sabatini's words, that Novarro's character, André-Louis Moreau, "was born with the gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad." Nor does Ingram provide enough swashbuckling for Novarro to do: Most of his duels are fought off camera, and the crucial one with Stone's Marquis de la Tour d'Azyr is somewhat awkwardly staged. Ingram seems to be more interested in Harold Grieve's opulent sets, beautifully filmed by John F. Seitz, and in the menacing crowd scenes of his version of the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror. It's all hokum, of course, but it has its moments.