Almayer's Folly (Chantal Akerman, 2011)

Stanislas Merhar in Almayer's Folly

Almayer: Stanislas Merhar
Capt. Lingard: Marc Barbé
Nina: Aurora Marion
Daïn: Zac Andrianasolo
Zahira: Sakhna Oum
Chen: Solida Chan

Director: Chantal Akerman
Screenplay: Chantal Akerman, Henry Bean, Nicole Brenez
Based on a novel by Joseph Conrad
Cinematography: Rémon Fromont
Production design: Patrick Dechesne
Film editing: Claire Atherton

Lots of movies -- think of Sunset Blvd. (Billy Wilder, 1950) and Inside Llewyn Davis (Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, 2014), for example -- begin with an incident and then flash back for the rest of the movie to explain it. So Chantal Akerman's Almayer's Folly begins with the camera following a Malaysian man into a nightclub where another man is lip-synching to Dean Martin's version of the song "Sway" as a group of women dances behind him. Suddenly the man who entered the club is on stage stabbing the lip-syncher. The music breaks off and all of the dancers flee the stage except one, who continues to perform the hula-like hand movements as if nothing had happened. We hear a voice call out, "Nina! Nina!" but she continues in her trance-like state for a while until she stops and begins to sing Mozart's setting of "Ave Verum Corpus" as the camera holds on her in closeup. The movie then flashes back to reveal that Nina is the daughter of the European Almayer and a Malaysian woman, Zahira. Almayer has come to Malaysia in search of his fortune -- he has heard of a gold mine ripe for the taking. Zahira and Nina live with him in a house by the river until one day his fellow European fortune-hunter, Captain Lingard, arrives to take Nina to the city to be educated: Almayer wants her to have the benefits and privileges of a European lady. Though Zahira and Nina flee into the jungle, Almayer and Lingard capture the girl. Nina is intensely unhappy at the school, scorned by the European girls, and when Lingard, who has been paying her tuition for Almayer, dies, she is expelled. She wanders the streets of the unnamed Malaysian city (the movie was actually filmed in Cambodia) and finally returns to Almayer's home. There she's seduced by Daïn, a shady young man who is supposedly helping Almayer find his fortune. Almayer recognizes his defeat and allows Nina and Dain to leave together. Unlike Wilder and the Coens, Akerman doesn't return to the opening scene at  the film's end, but instead leaves us with two of her characteristic long takes: The first shows Almayer, Nina, and Daïn arriving at a sandbar where the river meets the sea to await the arrival of the boat that will take the two young people away; the camera lingers in a long shot as the boat arrives and Nina and Daïn swim out to it, then Almayer and his servant, Chen, push off into the river for their return home. The second long take is a closeup of the haggard, obviously very ill Almayer as he sits brooding in his decaying home, with Chen standing out of focus in the background. At the beginning of this take, Almayer says, "Tomorrow, I would have forgotten," a sentence that he repeats at the end after we watch the sun play across his face -- moving much more swiftly than it would in actuality -- and he talks about how the sun is cold and the river is black. By now, we have realized that the lip-syncher was Daïn and that Chen was his assassin. As for Almayer, we can only assume that he has died. Almayer's Folly, which Akerman loosely adapted from the early Joseph Conrad novel, is clearly a fable about the tragedy of colonialism, but she's not intent on laboring that topic. It's as much an attempt to prod the viewer into contemplating the mystery of character and identity as her more celebrated Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels (1975) was, and by using less radical variations on the same techniques -- extended takes, minimized action -- she used in that film. Akerman developed a compelling and identifiable style, but there is a point at which style becomes mannerism. (We all want to be thought "stylish," and none of us want to be thought "mannered.") I think Almayer's Folly nears that point but doesn't fully reach it, largely because of the compelling performance of Merhar as Almayer, and because of Akerman's use of the setting, with the help of Rémon Fromont's cinematography and Claire Atheron's editing. She also makes fine ironic use of the Dean Martin song and the Mozart hymn, as well as the only non-diegetic music in the film, interludes filled with the erotic longing of Wagner's Prelude to Tristan and Isolde.

The Love Parade (Ernst Lubitsch, 1929)

Jeanette MacDonald and Maurice Chevalier in The Love Parade

Count Alfred Renard: Maurice Chevalier
Queen Louise: Jeanette MacDonald
Jacques: Lupino Lane
Lulu: Lillian Roth
War Minister: Eugene Pallette
Ambassador: E.H. Calvert
Master of Ceremonies: Edgar Norton
Prime Minister: Lionel Belmore

Director: Ernst Lubitsch
Screenplay: Ernest Vajda, Guy Bolton
Based on a play by Leon Xanrof and Jules Chancel
Cinematography: Victor Milner
Art direction: Hans Dreier
Film editing: Merrill G. White
Costume design: Travis Banton
Music: Victor Schertzinger

It irritates me a little to think that MGM, thanks largely to those That's Entertainment clip shows in the 1970s, is celebrated for its movie musicals, when in fact the genre was pioneered and perfected at other studios: Warner Bros. with its Busby Berkeley dance spectacles, RKO with its Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers cycle, and Paramount, where Ernst Lubitsch virtually invented the story musical with The Love Parade and subsequent re-teamings of Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald. (Oddly, today MacDonald is better known for her inferior and unsexy MGM teaming with Nelson Eddy.) MGM didn't achieve musical greatness until the end of the 1930s, when after the success of The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939), the studio put its associate producer, Arthur Freed, in charge of the film musicals unit. True, MGM had won a best-picture Oscar with The Broadway Melody (Harry Beaumont, 1929), but that was a standard backstage musical, not one in which the songs and dances are fully integrated into the plot. Besides, it's almost unwatchable today, whereas thanks to the charm of Chevalier and the sexiness of MacDonald in her revealing pre-Code frippery, but most of all to what is known as "the Lubitsch touch," The Love Parade is still enjoyable. Lubitsch's "touch" as a director was based on a sly conviction that the audience would get the joke, usually a naughty one, and it was perfected during the silent era, when things had to be shown, not told. So the film opens with a mostly silent demonstration of why Count Alfred Renard has caused such a scandal with his dalliances in Paris that he has to be recalled to Sylvania and rebuked by Queen Louise. But this is also a film that wittily integrates sound into its sight gags, as the entire Sylvanian court eavesdrops on the burgeoning love of Alfred and Louise. The plot, derived by screenwriters Guy Bolton and Ernest Vajda from a French play, is standard, slightly sexist stuff about the prince consort, Alfred, feeling miffed by the fact that his marriage to the queen leaves him with nothing to do, but it's carried off well by the leads, as well as the saucy servants, Jacques and Lulu, and a court full of skilled character actors like Eugene Pallette, Edgar Norton, and Lionel Belmore. It's too bad that the song score by lyricist Clifford Grey and composer Victor Schertzinger isn't better -- there are too many reprises of "Dream Lover," for example -- but Lubitsch's staging compensates for its weakness.

Strike (Sergei Eisenstein, 1925)

Subtle as a sledgehammer, Sergei Eisenstein's first feature film, Strike, demonstrates the dangerous ability of motion pictures to annihilate thought. With a torrent of images, almost as formidable as the fire hose blasts that mow down the protesting strikers in the fifth "chapter" of the film, the 27-year-old Eisenstein demonstrates a mastery of technique: fast-paced editing, frame-crowding action, provocative close-ups, and powerful montage. The film concludes with a bloodbath -- the "liquidation" of the strikers in their homes, intercut with scenes of cattle being slaughtered in an abattoir -- that makes the Odessa Steps massacre sequence in Battleship Potemkin (Eisenstein, 1925) look like a Sunday picnic. The film veers from documentary realism in the factory scenes, to gross -- or perhaps Grosz, as in George Grosz -- caricature in its portrayal of the capitalist bosses as fat cigar-smoking men in silk top hats, to a baroque expressionism in the scenes involving the spies and provocateurs who betray the workers. Eisenstein never slackens for a moment -- it's an exhausting film. Is it a great film? That's one for the debaters, a conflict between those who believe in art as a servant of truth and those who believe in art as pure form. I can admire its technical virtues and historical significance, and even admit that it plays on my political sympathies for workers over capitalist bosses, while worrying that the effect of the film is to valorize a dangerous suppression of reason, the unhinged anti-humanism that ultimately betrayed the very revolution Eisenstein supported.

Family Plot (Alfred Hitchcock, 1976)

Barbara Harris, as the "spiritualist" Blanche Tyler, is the best thing about Alfred Hitchcock's last movie. According to Stephen Whitty's  The Alfred Hitchcock Encyclopedia, Hitchcock wanted Harris for the role, but he met resistance from the studio, which wanted a bigger name, so he cast Karen Black in the slightly lesser role of Fran to please the higher-ups, who gave Black higher billing than Harris. Which brings up an old question: Why did Harris never become a major star? She made an impressive movie debut in A Thousand Clowns (Fred Coe, 1965), was a standout in Robert Altman's Nashville (1975), and received an Oscar nomination for Who Is Harry Kellerman and Why Is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me? (Ulu Grosbard, 1971), but is pretty much forgotten today. She may just be a case of the right talent having been born at the wrong time: Harris had just turned 40 when she made Family Plot. If she had been born a decade later, she might have given Goldie Hawn or, even later, Meg Ryan competition for the romantic comedy roles they became famous for. Family Plot is feather-light lesser Hitchcock, though on the whole it's a return to form for the director after the rather grim Frenzy (1972) and the late misfires Topaz (1969) and Torn Curtain (1967). There are some touches of the master director to be seen in it. The film makes us think that its main story is that of Blanche and her boyfriend George Lumley (Bruce Dern) as they try to track down the missing heir to a fortune, but as Blanche and George are riding in his cab arguing, he suddenly slams on the brakes to avoid hitting a woman crossing the street. The camera takes a sharp left turn and follows the woman instead, taking us into a plot about jewel thieves. The setup is in Ernest Lehman's screenplay, but Hitchcock is classically artful in the way he keeps both plots dangling until we can see how they intersect. There's another glimpse of the master at work in the way he films George trying to meet up with a woman he's trying to question. The scene takes place in a cemetery, and Hitchcock films it with an overhead camera so that we can see the crossing paths among the graves as George maneuvers his way toward the woman. I doubt that Hitchcock ever played one, but the sequence reminds me of a video game maze. Harris, Black, and Dern are all good in their roles, and William Devane is a fine villain. (Though have there ever been toothier leading men than Dern and Devane?) John Williams adds a touch of Bernard Herrmann in some parts of his score, the only one he did for Hitchcock.

The Kid With a Bike (Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne, 2011)

Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne have said that they were influenced by fairytales when they wrote and directed The Kid With a Bike. Like the Grimm brothers, the Dardenne brothers don't bother giving the backstories of the "good" and "bad" characters in the film. We don't ask how the wicked stepmothers in fairytales got to be so wicked or why the fairy godmothers are so good. In a similar fashion, we are never told what causes Guy Catoul (Jérémie Renier) to be so coldly abrupt in cutting his own son, Cyril (Thomas Doret), out of his life, to the point that he sells the boy's beloved bicycle and puts him into a group home. He provides an economic motive -- he can't afford to support the boy -- but refuses even to make contact with him. Nor do we learn what makes Samantha (Cécile de France) so willing not only to buy the boy's bike from the man Catoul sold it to but also to take the boy himself into her own life. After all, her first encounter with the enraged, belligerent child is in the waiting room of a clinic, where he clings to her for help as the attendants from the group home try to subdue him. She seems to have a settled life as a beautician with a handsome boyfriend. Why borrow such obvious trouble? I felt another literary influence at work in the film: Charles Dickens, who set his tales of rescued orphans like Oliver Twist and David Copperfield in the realistic context of 19th-century England. The Dardennes set their story about Cyril in the context of 21st-century Belgium's working-class suburbs. Like Oliver Twist, Cyril Catoul falls prey to the underworld: He is persuaded to take part in a robbery by a kind of Fagin, a gang leader who calls himself Wesker (Egon Di Mateo), after a character in the Resident Evil video game franchise. The Dardennes don't take a fully neorealist approach to the story the way they do in the only other film of theirs I've seen, Two Days, One Night (2014), which is a movie full of sympathy for those abused by capitalism. The Kid With the Bike is not an exposé, but rather a tribute to human kindness overcoming contemporary anomie. It is made plausible by the matter-of-fact approach of the Dardennes, but mostly by the performances, especially that of 13-year-old Doret, who had never acted before, but brings full conviction to every scene, including his rages and his hunger to be reunited with his father, as well as his eventual acceptance of Samantha's love and authority. The directors never milk a moment for sentiment: The only non-diegetic music on the soundtrack is the occasional punctuation at the end of a scene with a few bars from Beethoven's "Emperor" concerto, which has the tantalizing effect of keeping us suspended until the rest of the adagio is performed over the end credits.

Paisan (Roberto Rossellini, 1946)

The phrase "fog of war" was coined by Carl von Clausewitz in reference to the cloud of uncertainty that surrounds combatants on the battlefield, but it seems appropriate to apply it to the miscommunication experienced by the soldiers and civilians in Roberto Rossellini's great docudrama about the Allied campaign to liberate Italy in 1943 and 1944. The six episodes in Rossellini's film illustrate various kinds of problems brought about by language, ignorance, naïveté, and lack of necessary information. A young Sicilian woman (Carmela Sazio) struggles to communicate with the G.I. (Robert van Loon) left guarding her; a black American soldier (Dots Johnson) tries to recover the shoes that were stolen from him by a Neapolitan street urchin (Alfonsino Pasco) after he got drunk and passed out; a Roman prostitute (Maria Michi) picks up a drunk American (Gar Moore), but when he tells her of the beautiful, innocent woman he met six months earlier in Rome she realizes that she was the woman; an American nurse (Harriet Medin) accompanies a partisan into the German-occupied section of Florence in search of an old lover; three American chaplains visit a monastery in a recently freed section of Northern Italy, but only the Catholic chaplain (William Tubbs), who speaks Italian, realizes that the monks are deeply shocked that his two companions are a Protestant and a Jew. Only the final -- and the best, most harrowing -- section deals with the traditional concept of the fog of war, as Allied soldiers try to aid Italian partisans in their fight with the retreating but still fierce Germans. As in many Italian neorealist films, the actors are either non-professionals or unknowns, and their uneasiness with scripted dialogue sometimes shows -- at least it does with the English speakers; I can't judge the ones who speak Italian or German. There is also occasional sentimental overuse of the score by the director's brother, Renzo Rossellini. But on the whole, Paisan is still an extraordinarily compelling film, an essential portrait of war and its effects, made more essential by having been filmed on location amid the ruin and rubble so soon after the war ended. Glimpses of the emptied streets of Florence, bare of tourists and trade, are startling, as are the scenes that take place in the marshlands of the Po delta in the final sequence. The cinematography is by Otello Martelli. The screenplay earned Oscar nominations for Alfred Hayes, Federico Fellini, Sergio Amidei, Marcello Paglieri, and Roberto Rossellini, but lost to Robert Pirosh for the more conventional war movie Battleground (William A. Wellman, 1949).

The Outlaw and His Wife (Victor Sjöström, 1918)

The Outlaw and His Wife is a standard domestic melodrama made memorable by fine performances under the restrained direction of Victor Sjöström, who doesn't allow the usual stagy gesticulations that contemporary viewers often find ludicrous in silent films. Sjöström himself gives a fine performance in the role of the outlaw, Ejvind, who in the middle of a severe famine stole a sheep to feed his family and had to flee after breaking out of jail. He appears one day in a small Icelandic village under the assumed name Kári, and soon wins the heart of Halla (Edith Erastoff), a widow who runs a prosperous farm. Halla's brother-in-law, Björn (Nils Aréhn), also has designs on Halla, and when he discovers that Kári is a wanted man, Ejvind is forced to become a fugitive. Halla gives up everything to join him, and when we see them again they are living happily in the mountains with their small daughter. They are joined by Arnes (John Ekman), who is also on the run, but when Arnes begins to lust after Halla, trouble brews, compounded by the fact that Björn has never relinquished his pursuit of the couple. The film's story, based on a play by Jóhan Sigurjónsson, gains depth from the wild natural setting -- northern Sweden posing as Iceland -- in which the strong simple emotions of the tale seem integral. Sjöström makes the most of the mountain scenery, the waterfalls and hot springs, which are well-photographed by Julius Jaenzon. Sjöström did his own stunt work in a particularly hazardous scene in which Ejvind dangles on a rope from a cliff.

Onibaba (Kaneto Shindo, 1964)

A dark shocker, with a close kinship to its contemporary, Woman in the Dunes (Hiroshi Teshigahara, 1964), Onibaba -- which translates as "Demon Hag," and has been released under the titles Devil Woman and The Hole -- takes place in the grasslands alongside a river during a devastating civil war in medieval Japan. A woman (Nobuko Otowa) and her daughter-in-law (Jitsuko Yoshimura) share a hut there. The older woman's son, who was married to the younger woman, has been conscripted into the army. The two women survive by waylaying samurai who have strayed into the tall grasses, killing them, stripping them, and tossing their bodies into a deep sinkhole. They then exchange the armor and weapons for food and supplies. One day, Hachi (Kei Sato), a neighbor who was conscripted into the army along with the older woman's son, returns and tells them that they had both deserted but the son/husband was killed when he tried to steal food from some farmers. Hachi begins to make a play for the young widow, who is soon sneaking out at night to have sex with him, to the older woman's dismay and jealousy. One night, while spying on Hachi and her daughter-in-law, she encounters a lost samurai general (Jukichi Uno) wearing the mask of a demon. When she asks why he is masked, he says that it's to protect his face: He is, he says, extraordinarily handsome, and if she shows him the way out of the grasslands he will reward her by removing the mask. The woman, however, lures the general to the hole and he falls to his death. She climbs down into the hole, which is filled with skeletons, to retrieve his armor and weapons and to remove the mask, which comes off only after great effort, revealing that he is terribly disfigured. She decides to use the mask to frighten the younger woman off from her liaison with Hachi, but with suitably horrifying consequences. Writer-director Kaneto Shindo plays with the fear of female empowerment and sexuality: The hole, like the sandpit in Woman in the Dunes, is a pretty obvious symbol. But Onibaba makes its way around such heavy-handedness with ferociously committed performances and cinematographer Kyomi Kuroda's striking use of its setting. It has an unusual but effective score by Hikaru Hayashi that blends such disparate elements as taiko drums and jazz saxophones.

Yi Yi (Edward Yang, 2000)

In his Criterion Collection essay on Yi Yi, Kent Jones does something that I endorse completely: He compares writer-director Edward Yang's film to the work of George Eliot. As I was watching Yi Yi, I kept thinking that it gave me the same satisfaction that a good novel does: that of participating in the lives of people I would never know otherwise. George Eliot's aesthetic was based on the premise that art serves to enlarge human sympathy. It's an idea echoed in the film by a character who quotes his grandfather saying that since the introduction of motion pictures, we now live three times longer than we did before -- we experience that many more things  The remark in context is ironic, given that the character, a teenager (Pang Chang Yu) who will later commit a murder, mentions killing as one of the experiences now vicariously afforded to us by movies. But the general import of the observation stands: Yi Yi gives us the sweep of life, beginning with a wedding and ending with a funeral, and taking in along the way birth, found and lost love, and other experiences of the Jian family and acquaintances in Taiwan. The central character, N.J. (Nien-Jien Wu), is a businessman caught up in the machinations of his company while trying to deal with family problems: His mother-in-law suffers a stroke and lies comatose; his brother-in-law's wedding to a pregnant bride is interrupted by a furious ex-girlfriend; his wife has an emotional breakdown and leaves for a Buddhist retreat in the mountains; his daughter, Ting-Ting (Kelly Lee), is in the throes of adolescent self-consciousness and blames herself because her grandmother suffered a stroke while taking out the garbage Ting-Ting had been told to take care of; his small son, Yang-Yang (Jonathan Chang), refuses to join the family in taking turns talking to his comatose grandmother, and he keeps getting in trouble at school. And these matters are complicated by the reappearance of N.J.'s old girlfriend, Sherry (Sun-Yun Ko), now married to a Chicago businessman, who joins N.J. in Tokyo on a business trip that puts him at odds with his company. The separate experiences of N.J., Ting-Ting, and Yang-Yang overlap and sometimes ironically counterpoint one another, and the film is laced together by recurring images and themes. Although it's three hours long, Yi Yi never seems slack. A lesser director would have cut some of the sequences not essential to the narrative, such as the performances of Beethoven's "Moonlight" Sonata and the Cello Sonata No. 1, or the long pan across the lighted office windows in nighttime Taipei, but these give an essential emotional lift to a film that has rightly been called a masterwork.  

The King of Kings (Cecil B. DeMille, 1927)

Director Cecil B. DeMille always had a fondness for unintentionally hilarious dialogue. Think of Anne Baxter's Nefretiri purring to Charlton Heston's Moses in The Ten Commandments (1956), "Oh, Moses, Moses, you stubborn, splendid adorable fool!" I'm almost sorry that The King of Kings is a silent film, so that we can't hear Mary Magdalene (Jacqueline Logan) utter the line: "Harness my zebras -- gift of the Nubian king! This Carpenter shall learn that he cannot hold a man from Mary Magdalene!" After the intertitle card fades, she swans off to rescue her lover, Judas Iscariot (Joseph Schildkraut), from the clutches of Jesus (H.B. Warner). It seems that Judas has become a disciple of Jesus because he believes that he has a chance at a powerful position in the new kingdom that Jesus is planning. This isn't the only hashing-up of the gospels that the credited scenarist, Jeanie Macpherson, commits, but it's the most surprising one. It also gives director DeMille an opportunity to introduce some sexy sinning before he gets pious on us: The Magdalene is vamping around a somewhat stylized orgy and wearing a costume (probably designed by an uncredited Adrian, who was good at that sort of thing) that leaves one breast almost bare. This opening sequence is also in two-strip Technicolor, as is the Resurrection scene some two and a half hours later. Yes, it's an enormously tasteless movie. Warner's Jesus is the usual blue-eyed blond in a white bathrobe found in vulgar iconography, and the actor has little to do but stand around looking wistful and sad at the plight of the world, occasionally giving a little smile that, with Warner's thin, lipsticked mouth, verges dangerously on a smirk. The film goes heavy on the miracles, even recasting one of the gospel writers, Mark, as a boy (Michael D. Moore) cured of lameness by Jesus. (When he throws away his crutch, it accidentally strikes one of the Pharisees standing nearby, only adding to their enmity to Jesus.) Unfortunately, DeMille stages the revival of Lazarus in a way that enhances its creepiness, having him emerge from a sarcophagus swathed in bandages like a horror-film mummy. Still, there's entertainment to be had, if you're not too demanding. Schildkraut's Judas is fun to watch at times: Once, he even skulks away like Dracula with his face hidden by his cloak. His father, Rudolph Schildkraut, plays the sneering high priest Caiaphas, Victor Varconi is a suitably conflicted Pontius Pilate, and William Boyd, soon to make his name as Hopalong Cassidy, is Simon of Cyrene, who helps Jesus carry the cross. The storm and earthquake after the Crucifixion is a DeMille-style special-effects extravaganza. The cinematography by J. Peverell Marley leans heavily on filters and screens to cast halos around Jesus, but does what it can to bring DeMille's characteristic tableau groupings to life. Fortunately, the movie also goes out of its way to avoid arousing antisemitism: The crowds calling for crucifixion are shown to be largely made up of bribed bullies who are suppressing those who want Jesus released, and one man furiously rejects the bribe by saying that as a Jew he cannot betray a brother.