Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels (Chantal Akerman, 1975)

Delphine Seyrig in Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels (Chantal Akerman, 1975)

Cast: Delphine Seyrig, Jan Decorte, Henri Storck, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, Yves Bical. Screenplay: Chantal Akerman. Cinematography: Babette Mangolte. Art direction: Philippe Graff. Film editing: Patricia Canino.

Jeanne Dielman (to shorten its unwieldy title) is a film experiment (which is not at all the same thing as an experimental film). Akerman tests the medium to see whether a story can be told without melodrama, without the usual editing cuts that shift point of view within dialogue, without excess camera movement, without a music soundtrack, without all the cinematic techniques that we have come to rely upon. She also tests the audience, to see if they will sit through a 201-minute film in which minutes go by without anything more interesting happening than a woman taking a bath, washing the bathtub, peeling potatoes, preparing dinner, eating it with her son, washing dishes, and so on -- all in long takes with no cuts and no apparent forward narrative drive. The answer as far as the medium is concerned is an emphatic yes, a story can be told that way. As for the audience, that's a difficult question to answer. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who doesn't have a high tolerance for cinematic riddles, or who can't sit raptly looking at a painting in a museum for minutes on end -- for this is a film that draws on visual patience in the way that great works of painting do. Most of the scenes are filmed straight on, as if looking at them through a frame. In short, Akerman treats a kinetic medium, motion pictures, as if it were a static medium like painting. Is it the greatest film of all time, as has been claimed? I think it's at least a great film, but I don't have any urgent desire to see it again soon. What it did to me was make me aware of watching, of patiently waiting to see what image would be presented to me next, what piece of the puzzle that is Jeanne Dielman (Delphine Seyrig) would fall into place. It takes place over the course of three days, on the first of which Jeanne presents herself as a supremely capable and precise person, going through the motions of her daily existence (which include receiving a man into her bedroom, because she makes a living for herself and her son by discreet prostitution) with calm efficiency. On the first two days, we don't follow her into the bedroom with her client, but the camera lingers in the hall, looking at the bedroom door, until the light fades enough to indicate a passage of time, whereupon she and the man emerge from the bedroom and go to her apartment door, where he pays her and indicates that he will see her again in a week. She then goes to her dining room and puts the money in a blue-and-white tureen, whose lid makes  a satisfying clink when she covers it. (In the absence of a music track, ambient sounds take on a greater role.) Later, her son, Sylvain (Jan Decorte), comes home from school and they have dinner, listen to the radio, go out for a walk, and come back home to rearrange the living room furniture so he can unfold the sofa for his bed. They go to sleep. But because many of these incidents are presented in real time, we are allowed to examine them in detail, to notice the furnishings of the apartment and the lack of affect of both mother and son, who have settled into a routine. We also notice the way a blue light, apparently from a sign outside their apartment, bounces off the surfaces of the furniture: It flashes and flickers in a way that suggests a rhythmic repetition but never quite resolves itself into a pattern. In that regard it's unlike Jeanne and Sylvain, who clearly have a pattern to their lives. And that's why it's a shock on the second day -- which begins about an hour into the film -- when Jeanne fails to do up a button on her housedress, something that Sylvain brings to her notice. Or later, when other elements of the pattern of her life don't fall in place: She burns the potatoes she is preparing for dinner; she forgets to switch off a light when she moves from room to room; she fails to put the cover on the tureen after putting the money from the second day's client into it. In any other context than the one established by the first day depicted in the film, these details would be insignificant. But Akerman makes them significant, even troubling, by having made us aware of the cold precision of Jeanne's routine. That this eventually builds to a remarkable climax (I use the word advisedly but not facetiously) is made possible by the mastery with which Akerman has set up her film. I kept wondering what Alfred Hitchcock, the master of voyeurism in cinema, might have made of Jeanne Dielman, a film that makes voyeurs of us all.

Love and Anarchy (Lina Wertmüller, 1973)

Lina Wertmüller was a big deal 40 years ago, when I saw Swept Away (1974) and Seven Beauties (1975) in the theater. The latter earned her the distinction as the first woman ever nominated for the best director Oscar. (She lost to John G. Avildsen for Rocky, and the less said about that the better.) I remember thinking that her films were wound a little too tight, and seeing Love and Anarchy rather confirms my opinion. The performances are ratcheted up at times to near-hysteria, and things that could be said are shouted. But even when Wertmüller's cast is milking it for all it's worth, it's clear that she has a point of view and the means to express it, especially with the two actors on whom she frequently called during her directorial heyday. As Tunin, the "bumpkin" who has taken on the task of assassinating Mussolini, Giancarlo Giannini plays a complete dramatic arc, from the wide-eyed, almost comatose naïf who finds himself lodged in a Roman brothel and then goes through stages of passion, fear, disgust, commitment, and a final martyrdom. Mariangela Melato as the prostitute Salomè doesn't have such a grand arc to traverse, but somehow she manages to let traces of humanity show through the flamboyant façade she has adopted. Eros Pagni as the odious Fascist Spatoletti and Lia Polito as Tripolina, the winsome prostitute who wins Tunin's heart, are also good, though their roles verge a bit on caricature. The handsome cinematography is by Giuseppe Rotunno, who at one point expresses the divisions in Tunin's character by a tricky, brilliant shot that shows Giannini and his reflections in two different mirrors.

Salaam Bombay! (Mira Nair, 1988)

This is an extraordinarily beautiful movie considering the unremitting sordidness of its setting and the sad hopelessness of the people in it. The beauty comes from the exceptional color cinematography of Sandi Sissel, who like director Nair got her start in documentaries. Nair's ex-husband, Mitch Epstein, who is credited as production designer, also probably deserves equal credit, as the film's end credit -- "52 locations, 52 days, what problem? no problem" -- seems to suggest. The film was edited by Barry Alexander Brown, whose documentary The War at Home (1979) was nominated for the best feature documentary Oscar. The background in documentaries of so many of the creative people associated with the film also helps to explain how Nair was able to get such exceptional performances from her cast of non-professionals, chosen from the Bombay (or Mumbai, if you will) streets. Shafiq Syed as Krishna, the film's central figure, carries a great burden of characterization deftly. There are a few professional actors in the cast, including Anita Kanwar as Rekha and Nana Patekar as Baba, a prostitute and her abusive husband/pimp, and Raghuvir Yadav as Chillum, the junkie who sells drugs for Baba and befriends but ultimately steals from Krishna. To the film and its performers' great credit, these are fully drawn characters, with motives behind their meanness.

Gigi (Jacqueline Audry, 1949)

The print shown on Turner Classic Movies was not very good, the images having shifted into high contrast with little variation in the grays, so that the subtitles are often an unreadable white on white. But anyone familiar with either the Colette novella or the 1958 Lerner and Loewe musical version directed by Vincente Minnelli will have little trouble following the story. It's a movie that retains much of the charm and a little of the bite of the original, and Danièle Delorme is a fetching Gigi, the girl raised to be a grande horizontale who wins the heart and hand of the wealthy Gaston Lachaille (Frank Villard). Delorme and Villard don't erase memories of Leslie Caron and Louis Jourdan in the musical, but they have their own contributions to make, especially Villard, who is particularly strong in the scenes in which Gaston comes to realize the true nature of his feelings for Gigi. You sense his rising queasiness when she accepts his proposal to become his mistress, especially in the scene in the private room at the restaurant where they are about to consummate their relationship. When she naively asks why the couches in the room have slipcovers and when she chooses his cigar by rolling it between her fingers as she has been taught, the full obscenity of the situation becomes apparent to him. It has been apparent to us from the moment at the beginning of the film when we meet his uncle, Honoré, whom Jean Tissier plays as far more a dirty old man than the elegant Maurice Chevalier did in the musical. Which is not to say that the movie's moral stance is heavy-handed: Director Audry has a very light touch, the product of a close collaboration with Colette. There are some wonderful period touches throughout the film, including Gaston's automobile, Aunt Alicia's (Gaby Morlay) telephone, and the bathing machine that is pulled by a mule into the waves at Deauville. The movie also reminded me that Gigi is a nickname for Gilberte, which is also the name of Swann's daughter and the narrator's first infatuation in Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu. There's also a scene in which Gigi plays hide-and-seek with other schoolgirls in the park, that echoes for me Albertine and her little band of girls in À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs. Proust was only two years older than Colette, and the Recherche and  Gigi very much share the same milieu.

Andrei Rublev (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1966)

Nikolay Burlyaev in Andrei Rublev

Andrei Rublev: Anatoliy Solonitsyn
Daniil Chyornyi: Nikolay Grinko
Theophanes the Greek: Nikolay Sergeyev
Boriska: Nikolay Burlyaev
Kirill: Ivan Lapikov
Durochka: Irma Raush
Prince Yuri/Prince Vasiliy: Yuriy Nazarov
Patrikei: Yuriy Nikilin
The Jester: Rolan Bykov
Foma: Mikhail Kononov

Director: Andrei Tarkovsky
Screenplay: Andrey Konchalovskiy, Andrei Tarkovsky
Cinematography: Vadim Yusov
Production design: Evgeniy Chernyaev
Music: Vyacheslav Ovchinnikov

Has any filmmaker ever made more eloquent use of the widescreen format than Andrei Tarkovsky does in Andrei Rublev? It was a process developed by Hollywood to help win its war with television -- bigger naturally assumed to be better. In Hollywood, it usually went hand-in-hand with color, and although the various widescreen processes -- Cinerama, Cinemascope, VistaVision, etc. -- were used in black-and-white films, they often feel out of place today. A case in point: The Diary of Anne Frank (George Stevens, 1959), which won an Oscar for the cinematography of William C. Mellor, but which seems to cry out for a format less expansive than CinemaScope, in which the Frank family's attic seems far too spacious. Andrei Rublev was filmed in a process called Sovscope, which like CinemaScope used anamorphic lenses to produce a 2.35:1 aspect ratio. Tarkovsky and cinematographer Vadim Yusov artfully work with the expanse of the screen, not shying away from closeups but also doing extraordinary movement with the camera. One of the earliest scenes takes place in the barn in which Rublev and his fellow artist-monks take shelter from the rain. We are given an astonishing 360-degree pan inside the barn, circling from the monks to the other denizens of the shelter and back to the monks, a study in faces that establishes one of the film's major subjects: the nature of Russian humanity, which also becomes an abiding concern of Rublev's. (I think there's a witty acknowledgment of the nature of widescreen in that the peep-hole cut into the wall of the bar seems to have the same aspect ratio as the film.) And in the concluding sequence, there is a magnificent pan from the gates of the walled city of Vladimir below and the emerging procession up to the structure that holds the newly cast bell, where Boriska waits anxiously. Andrei Rublev is one of those films I can't help rewatching; even though (or perhaps because) it's slow and challenging, it more than repays frequent viewings. Tarkovsky is not a director to be taken lightly, and the moment you begin to be lulled by the magnificence of Yusov's cinematography or Vyacheslav Ovchinnikov's score, the director is likely to shock you with images of cruelty and brutality but also of beauty that make you sit upright. A "trigger warning" might be especially needed for lovers of animals, given the harshness with which they are occasionally treated: There is a scene with a cow on fire that will likely haunt me for a long time. But all the unpleasantness in the film is in service of a story about the persistence of the Russian people and the transcendence of art. Anatoliy Solonitsyn, who plays Rublev, looks a bit like Viggo Mortensen, and recalls for me the tormented masculinity you find in some of Mortensen's performances. Another standout performance is given by Tarkovsky's wife, billed as Irma Raush, as the "holy fool" Durochka, whom Rublev saves from a massacre by the Tatars by killing the assailant -- leading Rublev to atone by giving up his painting and taking a vow of silence. The last section of the film is given over to young Boriska, played by Nikolay Burlyaev, the astonishing Ivan in Tarkovsky's Ivan's Childhood (1962), who takes on the task of casting a church bell despite the suggestion that he will be murdered by the tyrannical Grand Prince if he fails. Although the film is in black-and-white, it concludes with a breathtaking color sequence in which Rublev's paintings are shown in close-up. (To my mind, this  final ecstatic survey of Rublev's work is the only section in which Tarkovsky is thwarted by the widescreen process: Rublev's paintings had an aspiring verticality that is at odds with the dimensions of the screen.)

Coquette (Sam Taylor, 1929)

Is Mary Pickford's performance in Coquette the worst ever to win a best actress Oscar? It's certainly a bad performance, full of cute mannerisms and telegraphed emotions, along with a terrible attempt at a Southern accent. At 37, Pickford was about 20 years too old to play the flirtatious young Norma Besant, a fact that becomes especially clear when she sits on the lap of Louise Beavers, who plays her "mammy," the black servant who raised her -- Beavers was ten years younger than Pickford. But this was Pickford's first talkie after 20 years in silent films in which she become the movies' first superstar, and unlike some silent stars, she demonstrates a perfectly fine speaking voice. Still, after three more features that did only passable box office, she took the hint and retired. The main problem with Coquette is not Pickford but the creakiness of the vehicle, which had been a stage hit for Helen Hayes. The melodrama, about a flirtatious girl whose carelessness brings about disaster for both the man she loves (Johnny Mack Brown) and her father (John St. Polis) who objects to their love, is stagebound, largely because of the limitations of early sound technology, but also because screenwriter-director Sam Taylor had not made a sound film before. Pickford appears game throughout, and she's certainly a better actor than Brown or St. Polis, not to mention the callow William Janney, who plays Pickford's younger brother. In one scene Janney wears one of the most eye-offending outfits ever seen on-screen: a plaid sweater tucked into deep-pleated striped pants. My retinas have yet to recover. It's very possible that Pickford's performance stood out against the others that are in Academy records as under consideration (there were no official nominations that year): Ruth Chatterton in Madame X (Lionel Barrymore), Betty Compson in The Barker (George Fitzmaurice), Jeanne Eagels in The Letter (Jean de Limur), Corinne Griffith in The Divine Lady (Frank Lloyd), and Bessie Love in The Broadway Melody (Harry Beaumont). I've been unable to see the performances by Chatterton and Compson, but my pick so far would be Eagels.

No End (Krzysztof Kieslowski, 1985)

I probably should have brushed up on the political situation -- the suppression of Solidarity, the imposition of martial law -- in Poland in 1982, the time depicted in Kieslowski's film. It would have made the narrative a little easier to follow, and would have more readily explained the melancholy, despairing tone that pervades the entire film. On the other hand, Kieslowski and his co-screenwriter, Krzysztov Piesiewicz, make things emotionally lucid for at least this uninformed viewer. After all, I don't expect a film to rest entirely on a knowledge of outside context to succeed: All the President's Men (Alan J. Pakula, 1976) is still an acclaimed movie, even though most people who watch it today didn't sit glued to their TV sets, as I did, during the impeachment hearings of Richard Nixon. What makes Kieslowski's film work is placing its politics in the context of personal loss, the death of the lawyer Antek Zyro (Jerzy Radziwilowicz) and its effect on his wife, Urszula (Grazyna Szapolowska), and child (Krzysztof Krzeminski). Having the dead Antek address the camera at the film's beginning is a bold move, one that threatens to turn the film into a sentimental fable about a love that persists after death. But as we see, the relationship of husband and wife was not an ideal one, and the feeling of guilt that she experiences after his death is potently developed. (I'm not sure it entirely justifies the film's ending, however.) The point here is that a premature death like Antek's inevitably results in unfinished business, not only in the life of his family but also in the legal case, that of the incarcerated political prisoner Darek Stach (Artur Barcis) he left undefended. The defense of Stach devolves upon Mieczyslaw Labrador (Aleksander Bardini), the aging lawyer who would not have been Antek's choice for the role. Labrador saves Stach from a longer prison term by engineering a compromise with the judge, a move opposed by Labrador's own assistant (Michal Bajor), who still clings to some of the ideals of the suppressed Solidarity movement. The decision makes no one really happy, because Stach, like everyone else in Poland, isn't really free. The interweaving of the Stach case and Urszula's attempts to resume a normal life despite grief and guilt is sensitively handled, with the great help of Krystyna Rutkowska's editing and Zbigniew Preisner's score.

Two With Roscoe Arbuckle

The Round-Up (George Melford, 1920)
"Nobody loves a fat man," the kicker line for Arbuckle's 1920 feature, was meant to be wistfully ironic, since at the time, everybody loved "Fatty" Arbuckle (a nickname he hated). The irony went from wistful to bitter in a couple of years, when the scandal surrounding the death of Virginia Rappe turned Arbuckle into one of the country's most despised men, bringing his career to a halt. But when The Round-Up was made, Arbuckle was so popular that he received the featured billing for a film in which he was a supporting player, the comic relief in a somewhat routine Western. Arbuckle plays the sheriff in a small Arizona town, where he's much admired because he uses his dexterity, rather than his fists or guns, to disarm the bad guys. But he's painfully shy around women, which is why he loses the girl he loves (Jean Acker) to someone else. The main story revolves around a prospector (Irving Cummings) who is thought to be dead, so his girlfriend (Mabel Julienne Scott) marries someone else. Meanwhile, a lot of trouble gets stirred up by the "half-breed" Buck McKee (Wallace Beery). Things get sorted out eventually after a lot of chases and gunfights. Arbuckle and Beery are the best things in the movie, along with some location scenery handsomely photographed by Paul P. Perry.

The Life of the Party (Joseph Henabery, 1920)
As a knockabout comedy more in the Arbuckle mainstream, The Life of the Party seems designed largely to provide him with an opportunity to dress up in children's party clothes. The plot has to deal with a women's group who are out to bust up a trust that fixes the price of milk. Arbuckle plays Algernon Leary, an unscrupulous lawyer who is at first willing to go along with the trust, but is converted to their side by a pretty young member of the group (Viora Daniel). She also happens to be engaged to a judge (Frank Campeau) who, unknown to her, is in the pockets of the milk trust. This leads to much farcical running around, especially after the women's group decides to throw a fundraising party to which everyone is expected to come dressed as babies. It all goes on too long. The cast includes Roscoe Karns, an actor who didn't really come into his own until sound arrived, giving him the chance to reel off snappy patter for Howard Hawks in Twentieth Century (1934) and His Girl Friday (1940).

In Life of the Party, Arbuckle attends a party in which the guests dress as babies.

Sherlock Holmes (Arthur Berthelet, 1916)

It's easy to see why William Gillette was such a success on stage as Sherlock Holmes: He has the calm centeredness that the best Sherlocks possess. I'm thinking of Basil Rathbone and Jeremy Brett here; even though I like Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller in their versions, the contemporary setting makes them more active and volatile, not to say eccentric, than the traditional Victorian Holmeses. But Conan Doyle's character was not, I think, a good fit for silent film: I missed the detective's ingenious deductions that provide so much of the wit in Conan Doyle's tales and don't fit neatly onto title cards. The plot, cobbled together from several stories, is also both needlessly complex and tiresomely chopped up into discrete "acts." Apparently the surviving version of the film is a conversion of the American original into a French four-part serial. Gillette and Edward Fielding as Dr. Watson (here limited for the most part to the fourth segment) seem to have an awareness that less is more when it comes to film acting, but most of the company is made up of scenery-chewers, particularly Mario Majeroni and Grace Reals as the villainous Larrabees. Ernest Maupain isn't a terribly convincing Emperor of Crime as Moriarty, considering that his chief function is to bluster about bumping off Holmes, in which he is repeatedly thwarted, and his henchmen (one of whom is reportedly the later-to-be-famous character actor Edward Arnold) do a lot of ludicrous skulking and crouching. Still, it's a valuable record of Gillette's famous role and really not an unwatchable movie.

The Grim Game (Irvin Willat, 1919)

Harry Houdini escapes from all sorts of things in this film: handcuffs, shackles, a straitjacket, a bear trap, and even a plane crash. But the one thing he can't escape from is the movie's incredibly snarled plot. Houdini plays Harvey Hanford (apt alliteration's artful aid), a reporter for a newspaper that's on the verge of going out of business unless its owner (Augustus Phillips) can get the money he needs from a skinflint backer (Thomas Jefferson). So Hanford cooks up a plot to have the old miser, who just happens to have a lovely ward (Ann Forrest) with whom Hanford is smitten, taken off to a retreat by a showgirl (Mae Busch) posing as a nurse. Then Hanford will plant traces suggesting that the old man has been murdered for his money -- traces that incriminate Hanford. The reason for all this is a little screwy: Hanford has been working on a story about people unjustly convicted on the basis of circumstantial evidence, though what that has to do with getting the backer to pony up isn't clear. What Hanford doesn't reckon with is the fact that the newspaper owner and his cronies, a lawyer (Tully Marshall) and a doctor (Arthur Hoyt), have their own reasons for wanting the old man dead, so when he's found murdered, Hanford becomes the prime suspect. Got that? The whole thing is an excuse to show off Houdini's stunts, but he was not a very interesting film actor. Whatever charisma he had on stage was lost in close-ups, revealing him as a balding middle-aged man with an overbite that reminds me of a Simpsons character. The film was long thought to be lost, but it had been carefully preserved by a collector, and the restored version, in remarkably good shape, was shown publicly for the first time in 96 years this past March. The movie's highlight, other than seeing the actual Houdini at work, is some remarkable aerial photography and stunt work that resulted in an accidental mid-air plane collision being caught on film. The planes managed to land safely: The crash shown in the movie is staged.