Happy Together (Wong Kar-Wai, 1997)

Leslie Cheung and Tony Leung Chiu-Wai in Happy Together

Lai Yiu-fai: Tony Leung Chiu-Wai
Ho Po-wing: Leslie Cheung
Chang: Chen Chang

Director: Wong Kar-Wai
Screenplay: Wong Kar-Wai
Cinematography: Christopher Doyle
Production design: William Chang
Music: Danny Chung

The title, of course, is ironic: Lai Yiu-fai and Ho Po-wing are anything but. In short, Happy Together is another of Wong Kar-Wai's studies of frustrated passion, though unlike the heterosexual couple in In the Mood for Love (2000), Lai and Ho have each other as a physical outlet for passion -- the frustration comes from their blocked desires to have their relationship transcend sex. Any happiness they might find together is prevented by incompatibility: Lai is steady and hard-working, Ho is unfettered hedonism. It's never made explicit why they have chosen to exile themselves in Argentina, other than that Buenos Aires might be presumed to offer a more tolerant environment for a gay couple than a Hong Kong threatened by the transfer to the People's Republic of China that took place in the year of the film's release. As it turns out, exile serves mainly as a catalyst for their breakup. This is, in short, a character study, and a fine one. Leslie Cheung and Tony Leung give searing performances as the volatile lovers, and Wong Kar-Wai wisely concentrates the film on them, providing only one other witness to the intensely destructive entanglement of Lai and Ho: a young Taiwanese named Chang, out to see the world, who works in a kitchen with Lai. In fact, Chang sees only Lai's side of the relationship, although the fact that he is gifted with heightened powers of seeing and hearing suggests that he perceives more than he can interpret. Chang is presented as rather asexual -- perhaps gay, but not experienced enough to make any sort of move toward Lai -- and as such serves as the perfect foil for Wong's portrait of the erotic time-bomb that is the relationship of Lai and Ho. The film ends poignantly with Lai, having finally broken completely with Ho, returning to Hong Kong, but making a stopover in Taipei where he visits's Chang's family's food stall, but narrowly missing the chance of a reunion with Chang. It's another missed connection in a film filled with them.

Watched on Filmstruck

Camille (George Cukor, 1936)

Henry Daniell and Greta Garbo in Camille

Marguerite Gautier: Greta Garbo
Armand Duval: Robert Taylor
Baron de Varville: Henry Daniell
M. Duval: Lionel Barrymore
Prudence Duvernoy: Laura Hope Crews
Nanine: Jessie Ralph
Olympe: Lenore Ulric
Gaston: Rex O'Malley
Nichette: Elizabeth Allan

Director: George Cukor
Screenplay: Zoe Akins, Frances Marion, James Hilton
Based on a novel and play by Alexandre Dumas fils
Cinematography: William H. Daniels, Karl Freund
Art direction: Cedric Gibbons, Fredric Hope, Edwin B. Willis
Music: Herbert Stothart
Costume design: Adrian

MGM was notoriously a producers' studio, a factory system in which the director was rarely allowed to stand out as the guiding influence on a movie. But somehow out of MGM's producer-driven concentration on high style in sets and costumes, and above all on the production of "more stars than there are in the heavens," George Cukor managed to emerge as one of the great directors. He did it in part by his ability to elicit definitive performances from actresses like Katharine Hepburn and Joan Crawford -- and later Judy Holliday and Judy Garland -- but most especially from Greta Garbo in Camille. Garbo's Marguerite Gautier is of course one of the great creations by an actress in the movies, but the remarkable thing about Camille is that Cukor is able to keep her performance from swamping the film. He remembers that there is an ensemble to work with that includes not only such formidable scene-stealers as Lionel Barrymore and Laura Hope Crews, but also a raw, untrained leading man, Robert Taylor. It's to Cukor's credit that Taylor holds up as well as he does against a luminous presence like Garbo, though it's perhaps to Garbo's credit that she makes us believe Marguerite is so profoundly infatuated with a man who has nothing but good looks to work with. Though Camille was always destined to be The Greta Garbo Show, Cukor makes her part of a very entertaining whole. He manages to modulate Lionel Barrymore's usual camera-hogging and turn him into a credible concerned paterfamilias -- in fact, Cukor directed two of the few Barrymore performances I really find myself enjoying, the other being Mr. Peggotty in David Copperfield (1935). He tames another performance that could have got out of hand in Henry Daniell's arrogant Baron de Varville, though he might have reined in Daniell's attempt to turn the French baron into an English upperclass ass: Daniell lays on the r-tapping (e.g., "veddy" for "very") a little heavily, and when he's asked if he wants to dine replies, "Ai'm not hungreh." Which brings us back to Garbo, who is glorious from her febrile first moment, clutching the camellias as if they were life itself slipping away, to her last, a death scene that has never been equaled. Garbo knew that the best performances are the most "actressy," the ones that transcend realism, that throw down a challenge to other actresses: Top this if you can. It's a knowledge demonstrated by many others, from Bette Davis and Joan Crawford to Jessica Lange and Meryl Streep. (Jennifer Lawrence shows signs of learning it, too.) Call it camp if you will, label them divas if you want, but the movies would be poorer without it.

Watched on Turner Classic Movies

Murmur of the Heart (Louis Malle, 1971)

Benoît Ferreux, Ave Ninchi, Lea Massari, and Daniel Gélin in Murmur of the Heart

Laurent Chevalier: Benoît Ferreux
Clara Chevalier: Lea Massari
Charles Chevalier: Daniel Gélin
Thomas Chevalier: Fabien Ferreux
Marc Chevalier: Marc Winocourt
Augusta: Ave Ninchi
Father Henri: Michael Lonsdale
Helene: Jacqueline Chauvaud
Daphne: Corinne Kersten
Freda: Gila von Weitershausen

Director: Louis Malle
Screenplay: Louis Malle
Cinematography: Ricardo Aronovich
Production design: Jean-Jacques Caziot

There's a very dated play from 1953 called Tea and Sympathy by Robert Anderson that was made into an even more dated film by Vincente Minnelli in 1956 about a prep-school boy whose effeminacy makes him the target for gibes about homosexuality. To prove to the boy that he's a real man (i.e., not gay), the headmaster's wife offers herself sexually to the boy, telling him as she unbuttons her blouse and the curtain falls, "Years from now, when you speak of this, and you will, be kind." The film version, responding to Production Code strictures, adds a coda in which we learn that the boy is now married -- i.e., "cured." I thought of Tea and Sympathy as I watched Murmur of the Heart, whose very different problem -- adolescent horniness -- has a very different cure -- incest. Murmur of the Heart has always been something of a critical darling, from Pauline Kael's description of it as an "exhilarating high comedy" to Michael Sragow's essay for the Criterion Collection proclaiming that it "boasts the high spirits to match its high intelligence." And for the most part I concur: Lea Massari's joyously earthy performance as the mother is beautifully detailed, and Benoît Ferreux's endearing gawkiness brings the character of Laurent to full life. Louis Malle's script and direction keep things moving splendidly, never allowing things to bog down into "message moments" about priestly pedophilia -- years before that became the stuff of headlines -- or the parallels between the French involvement in Vietnam and that of the Americans, which was very much in the headlines when the film was made. And yet for me the ending of Murmur of the Heart seems as hollow as that of Tea and Sympathy. After having sex with his mother, the product of his attempt to console her for a breakup with her lover, he goes out to have sex with one of the girls he has met at the spa hotel where they're staying -- as if to prove that he's "straight," though in a different way from that of the Tea and Sympathy protagonist. There's an awkwardness in the setup -- the shocking taboo of incest -- for what turns into a feel-good ending gag: The whole family, including the mother, the cuckolded father, the bullying older brothers, and Laurent himself, join in uproarious laughter at the fact that Laurent has gotten laid. If what had gone before the incest scene had not been so splendidly wrought -- if, in fact, the incest scene itself hadn't been so tastefully handled -- would we really feel satisfied with this ending? For that matter, are we today really content with the film's ongoing sexism, including the scene with Laurent in the brothel and an uncommonly pretty prostitute? Would anyone ever dare to make a comedy that concluded with a girl whose quest to lose her virginity ends with her having sex with her father? Or is it that what makes Murmur of the Heart a successful film is that it raises all these questions without belaboring us with them? It's a virtual catalog of all of the social and sexual hangups that continue to make growing up such a trial. That it achieves this with, yes, "high spirits" and without preachiness may be its real virtue.

Watched on Filmstruck Criterion Channel

Dead Man (Jim Jarmusch, 1995)

Johnny Depp in Dead Man

William Blake: Johnny Depp
Nobody: Gary Farmer
Cole Wilson: Lance Henriksen
Conway Twill: Michael Wincott
Johnny "The Kid" Pickett: Eugene Byrd
John Scholfield: John Hurt
John Dickinson: Robert Mitchum
Salvatore "Sally" Jenko: Iggy Pop
Benmont Tench: Jared Harris
Big George Drakoulios: Billy Bob Thornton
Thel Russell: Mili Avital
Charlie Dickinson: Gabriel Byrne
Train Fireman: Crispin Glover
Trading Post Missionary: Alfred Molina

Director: Jim Jarmusch
Screenplay: Jim Jarmusch
Cinematography: Robby Müller
Production design: Bob Ziembicki
Music: Neil Young

It was probably inevitable that Jim Jarmusch and Johnny Depp, two of American film's best-known off-beat artists, would collaborate, and it seems appropriate that they should do it in that quintessentially off-beat American genre, the "stoner Western."* Unfortunately, for some viewers the film just feels stoned: slow, meandering, and fixated on images that refuse to yield up their significance. It is, I think, one of those films that are more involving to think about after watching them, which is why its reputation has grown since its initial release, when Roger Ebert, among other critics, dismissed it as "unrewarding." It opens with a long montage of young accountant William Blake's westward train journey from Cleveland to the end-of-the-line factory town called Machine, a name that suggests the real manifest destiny of the United States was the spread of industrial capitalism. Blake is on his way to a job with the Dickinson Metalworks in Machine, and is unaware that he shares a name with the poet and artist who was one of the great enemies of industrial capitalism. He dozes through spectacular scenery that has filled the great Westerns -- a reminder that before there were movies there were train windows. But when he arrives in Machine, no job is waiting for him, and his protests are futile when he demands to see Mr. Dickinson, who turns out to be the always-formidable Robert Mitchum in his last screen role. Moreover, that night he kills Dickinson's son in self-defense and, wounded himself, flees town on a stolen horse. Dickinson immediately hires a trio of gunmen to kill him. Blake is found half-dead from his wound by an Indian, who patches him up but also tells him that the bullet is lodged near his heart and he will die from it eventually. The Indian is called Nobody because he belongs to no tribe, having been abducted by white men as a child and taken to England to be exhibited. He was educated there and learned to love the art and poetry of William Blake, so naturally he proclaims the hapless accountant a reincarnation of the poet. And so Blake and Nobody begin an odyssey toward the Pacific, a picaresque in which Jarmusch manages to cross an adventure story with a satiric look at the failure of American ideals, using bits of Blake's prophetic verse as a running commentary. (Remarkably, quotations from Blake turn out to sound much like the kind of native wisdom usually ascribed to American Indians in the movies.) It's to Jarmusch's credit that this high-concept blend becomes as moving as it often is, especially, as I've suggested, in retrospect.

*Jarmusch referred to Dead Man as a "psychedelic Western," but aside from the scene in which Nobody, under the influence of peyote, sees the skull beneath William Blake's skin, it doesn't have the conventional distortions and hallucinations associated with movie psychedelia.

Watched on The Movie Channel

The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (Alfred Hitchcock, 1927)

Marie Ault and Ivor Novello in The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog

The Lodger: Ivor Novello
Daisy: June Tripp
Mrs. Bunting: Marie Ault
Mr. Bunting: Arthur Chesney
Joe: Malcolm Keen

Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Screenplay: Eliot Stannard
Based on a novel by Marie Belloc Lowndes
Title writing: Ivor Montagu
Cinematography: Gaetano di Ventimiglia, Hal Young
Art direction: C. Wilfred Arnold, Bertram Evans
Title design: E. McKnight Kauffer
Film editing: Ivor Montagu

As Alfred Hitchcock's first major film, The Lodger has been strip-mined for anticipations of the themes and techniques that would recur throughout his career, from the fixation on blondes to the fear of cops, from Russian-inspired montage to German expressionistic lighting and camera angles. They're all there, of course, as is the "wrong man" motif that Hitchcock frequently exploited. It's often told that the film was almost shelved by the studio until producer Michael Balcon called in Ivor Montagu, film critic for the Observer, to critique it. The extent of Montagu's contributions will never really be known, although he has been credited with sharply reducing the number of title cards, and for suggesting that designer E. McKnight Kauffer be hired to give the ones that remained a distinct style. In any case, The Lodger is a film that really feels "Hitchcockian," especially when you compare it to Downhill, the melodrama Hitchcock made the same year, which also starred Ivor Novello. The difference is not just that The Lodger is a suspense movie and Downhill isn't, but that The Lodger has a rhythm to it that Downhill, with its rather sprawling account of the fortunes of its protagonist, lacks. You can sense Hitchcock developing a narrative pace here, especially in the central section in which the landlady begins to suspect that the lodger might actually be the serial killer and snoops in his room while he's out -- at the same time that the blonde-murdering Avenger claims another victim. Hitchcock would refine the rhythm over the years until it reaches its brilliant peak in the similar scene in Rear Window (1954) in which Lisa decides to snoop in Lars Thorwald's apartment. We probably don't have as much problem as contemporary audiences did with the idea that matinee-idol Novello could actually turn out to be the villain, although we can understand it if we remember that Hitchcock faced the same problem in 1941 with Cary Grant's casting as a potential murderer in Suspicion. In The Lodger, Hitchcock gave in and abandoned his original plan to leave the conclusion ambiguous, though he lays it on a bit too thick in the opposite direction by posing Novello cradled in June Tripp's arms like Christ in a Pietà. The Lodger has been beautifully restored, so that it remains a wonderful film to look at, with its elegantly designed title cards and its atmospherically tinted frames.

Watched on Filmstruck Criterion Channel

Shock Corridor (Samuel Fuller, 1963)

Peter Breck and Hari Rhodes in Shock Corridor

Johnny Barrett: Peter Breck
Cathy: Constance Towers
Trent: Hari Rhodes
Stuart: James Best
Boden: Gene Evans
Pagliacci: Larry Tucker
"Swanee" Swanson: Bill Zuckert
Dr. Menkin: Paul Dubov
Dr. Cristo: John Matthews
Wilkes: Chuck Robertson
Dr. Fong: Philip Ahn

Director: Samuel Fuller
Screenplay: Samuel Fuller
Cinematography: Stanley Cortez

Sam Fuller's Shock Corridor is the kind of raw, nightmarishly energetic film that cinéastes love but more classically oriented movie lovers often find ridiculous or repellent. And sure enough, there's plenty to ridicule, starting with the film's premise that schizophrenia is a contagious disease. (This is not a film for people who take mental illness and its treatment seriously.) Johnny Barrett is a hotshot reporter lusting after a Pulitzer Prize -- "Pulitzer fever" is, as anyone who has ever worked in a newsroom knows, a real and untreatable illness -- who pretends to be in love with his sister so he can get committed to a mental hospital where he plans to solve the recent murder of an inmate. He doesn't have a sister, however, so he persuades his girlfriend, Cathy, who works as a stripper, to play the part. Cathy doesn't much want to go along with the plan, worrying that he can't handle the stress of constant contact with the inmates and may go mad himself. But she somewhat abruptly decides to go along with the idea, which is endorsed by Johnny's editor. Once inside, Johnny befriends three inmates who actually witnessed the murder. The murder case, however, is just a MacGuffin -- a plot device that allows Fuller to make symbolic statements about the malaise of America in the 1960s, afflicted by the Cold War, racism, and the nuclear arms buildup. One of the witnesses, Stuart, is a Korean War vet who briefly turned communist and was imprisoned; he now thinks he is the Confederate general J.E.B. Stuart. Another, Trent, is a young black man who was the first of his race to attend a Southern university; he was harassed into a breakdown and now thinks he's the grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan -- he steals pillowcases off of beds to make hoods. And Boden is a Nobel Prize-winning scientist who helped develop the atomic bomb and is so laden with guilt that he has regressed to the mental age of 6. Johnny's friendship helps each of them break through to brief moments of sanity during which they provide clues that help solve the murder before reverting to their disturbed states. But Cathy's fears about what might happen to Johnny also come true, so at the end, as one of the doctors says, "An insane mute will win the Pulitzer Prize." This is grand exploitation B-movie stuff, treated with a mixture of low-budget quickie filmmaking and actual artistry, but it doesn't quite deserve to be taken as seriously as some of its admirers do. There are too many glaring continuity gaffes: In one scene, the closeups, lighted by the fine cinematographer Stanley Cortez, have a deep-shadowed expressionist look, but when the film cuts to an establishing shot the faces are conventionally lighted. There's a ridiculous scene in which Johnny wanders into the women's ward and is attacked by a group of what he calls, in voiceover, "Nymphos!" Six or eight women knock him down and swarm over him, but it's not entirely clear what they're up to. Later, we see Johnny with his face heavily bandaged as if they had bitten or scratched him, but after the bandages come off there are no visible bruises or scabs. The performances are mostly good, especially Hari Rhodes as Trent, but Constance Towers's part is a thankless one. She spends most of the film histrionically worrying about Johnny, but she also has to bring off a clunkily choreographed striptease scene that begins with her face completely muffled by a large feather boa, making her look in closeup like Big Bird's butt. In short, Shock Corridor is fascinating personal filmmaking, which is why it has an enormous cult following. But if you're of a conservative or conventional bent, you should know what you're getting into.

Watched on Turner Classic Movies

Le Bonheur (Agnès Varda, 1965)

François Chevalier: Jean-Claude Drouot
Thérèse Chevalier: Claire Drouot
Émilie Savignard: Marie-France Boyer
Gisou Chevalier: Sandrine Drouot
Pierrot Chevalier: Olivier Drouot

Director: Agnès Varda
Screenplay: Agnès Varda
Cinematography: Claude Beausoleil, Jean Rabier
Film editing: Janine Verneau

A summer idyll set to the music of Mozart -- what could be more charming and pleasant, especially when it's filmed in such ravishingly beautiful color? It features a handsome young working-class couple, François and Thérèse, and their two adorably well-behaved children. He's a carpenter, she's a dressmaker, and they are obviously blissful, taking the kids on excursions in the countryside where, while the little ones nap, they make love. Happiness indeed. And then he goes on a business trip and meets the very pretty Émilie who works in the post office and is about to move to the very Parisian suburb, Fontenay-aux-Roses, where François and Thérèse live. He agrees to build shelves in Émilie's new apartment and she becomes his mistress. This doesn't diminish his love for Thérèse, however. Indeed, it only increases his happiness. He's so happy, in fact, that Thérèse notices it and, one day when they're on an excursion to the countryside and the children are down for their naps again, she asks him why he has become so happy lately. After hedging for a few moments, he tells her the truth. He explains that they and the children are like an apple orchard in a field, and that one day he saw another apple tree growing outside the field, blooming along with them: "More flowers, more apples," he burbles. Thérèse not only seems to understand this analogy, but she and François then make passionate love. But at this point Agnès Varda's carefully crafted idyll turns savagely, searingly ironic -- which is what we should have known this portrait of an improbably perfect family was all along. With the aid of skillful photography and clever editing, Varda has crafted an enticing fable about sex, marriage, male egotism, and female enabling of it. Is the story tragic or comic? Is François a fool or a cad? Is Thérèse willfully blind? Is Émilie naive or wicked? How are we to take the film's ending, with its switch from summery to autumnal? There aren't many films that manage to be so satisfying and so tantalizing at the same time.

Watched on Filmstruck Criterion Channel

Dodsworth (William Wyler, 1936)

Walter Huston in Dodsworth

Sam Dodsworth: Walter Huston
Fran Dodsworth: Ruth Chatterton
Edith Cortright: Mary Astor
Arnold Iselin: Paul Lukas
Captain Lockert: David Niven
Kurt Von Obersdorf: Gregory Gaye
Baroness Von Obersdorf: Maria Ouspenskaya
Matey Pearson: Spring Byington
Tubby Pearson: Harlan Briggs
Renée de Penable: Odette Myrtil
Emily: Kathryn Marlowe
Harry: John Payne

Director: William Wyler
Screenplay: Sidney Howard
Based on the play adapted by Sidney Howard from a novel by Sinclair Lewis
Cinematography: Rudolph Maté
Art direction: Richard Day
Music: Alfred Newman
Costume design: Omar Kiam

I have a feeling that Dodsworth is not quite as well known as it ought to be. It's one of the few Hollywood dramas of the 1930s that seem to have been made for grownups, avoiding melodrama and sentimentality in its treatment of marriage and growing old, and sidestepping the Production Code's infantilizing attitudes toward adultery and divorce. And most of all, it has a wonderful performance by Walter Huston, who was nominated for an Oscar but lost, rather shamefully, to Paul Muni's hammy turn in The Story of Louis Pasteur (William Dieterle, 1936). Huston's Sam Dodsworth is a captain of industry, founder of an automobile company, who decides to sell the business and spend the rest of his life figuring out what to do with himself. His wife, Fran, knows exactly what she wants to do: Sail to Europe and flirt with all those interesting men who can't be found in the Midwestern city of Zenith -- which was also the setting for Sinclair Lewis's novel Babbitt, whose title character became a byword for Midwestern fatuousness. Fran is a few years younger than Sam -- Chatterton was 44, Huston 53 -- and unwilling to grow old gracefully, claiming to be 35 and unwilling to reveal that she has just become a grandmother. Opportunity presents itself immediately on shipboard in the form of a British military officer, but after flirting shamelessly with him, Fran takes fright when they reach England and he wants to take their relationship another step. But when the Dodsworths move on to Paris, Fran becomes bolder and after Sam, bored with life in Europe, returns alone to the United States for a visit with their daughter and her husband, she begins an affair with a suave European. Getting wind of the affair, Sam returns to Paris and confronts Fran, who breaks it off. But their efforts to patch things up fail and Fran asks him for a divorce. In Vienna she finds another suitor, a younger, rather effete aristocrat named Kurt Von Obersdorf, and is ready to marry him once the divorce goes through. Meanwhile, Sam travels on his own and in Naples is reunited with Edith Cortright, a divorcee he had met earlier. Sam moves in with Edith in the villa she is renting, but their happiness is interrupted by Fran's misery: Kurt's mother, the baroness, forbids their marriage on the grounds that Fran is not only divorced but also too old to provide an heir for the family line. A distraught Fran, facing up to failure, urges Sam to return to America with her, presenting him with the dilemma of continuing a marriage that has proved hopeless or exploring the new vistas that have opened for him. Lewis's novel is more in the satirical vein of Babbitt than the film version; Sidney Howard's screenplay, based on his Broadway play, which also starred Huston, evokes Henry James's stories about American encounters with Europeans. William Wyler, with his smooth, unobtrusive professionalism, is the perfect director for the film, which was made under the aegis of producer Samuel Goldwyn, who aimed for polish and prestige and for once achieved it. Given that Dodsworth was made in the mid-1930s, when Nazism was on the rise in Germany and fascism had taken hold in Italy, it seems a bit out of its time. Sam and Edith's dream of traveling the world together feels more than a little naive in the context of the period. The only reference to the rumblings of war perceptible in the film comes in Sam's comment that he prefers the United States because there are "no soldiers along the Canadian border."

Watched on Turner Classic Movies

That Obscure Object of Desire (Luis Buñuel, 1977)

Fernando Rey in That Obscure Object of Desire

Mathieu: Fernando Rey
Conchita: Carole Bouquet, Ángela Molina
Édouard: Julien Bertheau
Martin: André Weber
Encarnación (Conchita's mother): María Asquerino
The Psychologist: Piéral

Director: Luis Buñuel
Screenplay: Luis Buñuel in collaboration with Jean-Claude Carrière
Based on a novel by Pierre Louÿs
Cinematography: Edmond Richard
Production design: Pierre Guffroy
Fernando Rey's voice dubbed by Michel Piccoli

In my comments on Luis Buñuel's Belle de Jour (1967) I expressed my attitude toward solving what some people think of as that film's riddles as "like concentrating on the threads at the expense of seeing the tapestry." And I'll stick with that. I'm not particularly interested in why Buñuel cast two actresses in the role of Conchita in That Obscure Object of Desire, or why Mathieu occasionally carries around a burlap sack, or even why the central story, of Mathieu's efforts to consummate his desire for Conchita, plays out against a background of terrorist attacks. I know that Buñuel and Jean-Claude Carrière toyed with the idea of multiple casting even before the film began with a single actress, Maria Schneider, in the role, and that Carole Bouquet and Ángela Molina got the part after Buñuel had difficulties working with Schneider. I know, too, that the theory has been advanced that Conchita is a terrorist and that she finally sleeps with Mathieu after he agrees to become one, too -- hence the bomb that explodes at the end of the film. (A theory that reduces a masterwork to the level of hack thriller-filmmaking.) I'm sure that someone has come up with an explanation for the burlap sack, too, along with the fly in Mathieu's drink and the mouse caught in a trap and any other incidental detail that sticks in viewers' minds and can be fitted into an elaborately reductive network of symbolism. But my ultimate response to all of these enigmatic details is delight that they are there, that they popped up in Buñuel's mind as he made the film and that he could and did get away with them. They are what keeps me coming back to Buñuel's films with renewed interest and revived delight, viewing after viewing.

Watched on Filmstruck

Coffee and Cigarettes (Jim Jarmusch, 2003)

Cast: Roberto Benigni, Steven Wright, Joie Lee, Cinqué Lee, Steve Buscemi, Iggy Pop, Tom Waits, Joseph Rigano, Vinny Vella, Vinny Vella Jr., Renee French, E.J. Rodriguez, Alex Descas, Isaach De Bankolé, Cate Blanchett, Michael Hogan, Jack White, Meg White, Alfred Molina, Steve Coogan, Katy Hansz, The GZA, RZA, Bill Murray, William Rice, Taylor Mead

Director: Jim Jarmusch
Screenplay: Jim Jarmusch
Cinematography: Tom DiCillo, Frederick Elmes, Ellen Kuras, Robby Müller
Production design: Dan Bishop, Mark Friedberg, Tom Jarmusch

For Jarmusch fans only. Coffee and Cigarettes, a collection of 11 black-and-white short films in which people sit at tables and drink coffee and smoke cigarettes, began as semi-improvisatory shorts spun off from Jarmusch's features by their crew and cast members and friends. Starting with Roberto Benigni and Steven Wright essentially winging it in "Strange to Meet You," the collection evolved from a series of shaggy-dog sketches into more structured narratives with a few motifs echoing throughout. The most structured is certainly "Cousins," in which Cate Blanchett plays two roles: the soigné movie star Cate and her blowsier cousin Shelly, who resents Cate's privileged life. They meet in the coffee shop of a luxury hotel, where Cate patiently endures Shelly's sniping until she's called away for an interview. Shelly has been smoking throughout their conversation, but when she lights up after Cate leaves, a waiter tells her that smoking is forbidden there. The episode "Cousins?" is a parallel story in which Alfred Molina and Steve Coogan, two British actors trying to make it in the States, meet for coffee, during which Molina reveals to a very unimpressed Coogan that he has done genealogical research which proves they are distant relations. After an excited fan asks for his autograph, Coogan becomes more and more condescending toward Molina. Then Molina receives a call on his cell phone from Spike Jonze, instantly deflating Coogan's ego to the point that Molina leaves him to pay the check. Amusing as these vignettes are, they don't rise much beyond the level of anecdotes, and some of the other episodes, such as the ones in which Jack White demonstrates his Tesla coil or Renee French fends off a too-attentive waiter, fall flat. Still, if you don't expect too much, there's an evanescent charm to the whole project.

Watched on Showtime