Capricious Summer (Jirí Menzel, 1968)

Capricious Summer (Jirí Menzel, 1968)

Cast: Rudolf Hrusinský, Vlastimil Brodský, Frantisek Rehák, Mila Mysliková, Jana Preissová, Jirí Menzel. Screenplay: Vladimír Kalina, Jan Libora, Jirí Menzel, Václav Nývlt, based on a novel by Vladislav Vancura. Cinematography: Jaromír Sofr. Production design: Oldrich Bosák. Film editing: Jirina Lukesová. Music: Jirí Sust.

Jirí Menzel's Capricious Summer has an obvious and acknowledged debt to the films of Jean Renoir, particularly A Day in the Country (1936), which Menzel cited as one of his earliest film-watching experiences. But it also resonates for me with some of Ingmar Bergman's early comic (or less serious) films like Smiles of a Summer Night (1955) and even Wild Strawberries (1957), with their treatment of the country as a failed retreat from everyday cares. The focus of Menzel's film is on three middle-aged men whose summer idyll is blighted by the caprices of the weather, a source of constant complaint, especially from Antonín, who runs a riverside bathhouse whose business is affected by the rain. And then one day a traveling magician/tightrope walker comes to town, accompanied by his lovely assistant, Anna. Immediately, Antonín, a bluff, cigar-smoking type, and his friends Major Hugo, a retired military man, and Roch, a clergyman, are attracted to Anna in their varying ways. Antonín's wife, Katerina, on the other hand, finds delight in countering her husband's infatuation with Anna by flirting with the tightrope walker (played by Menzel himself). These dalliances are wrapped in a good deal of dialogue, in which the three men constantly spar with each other over matters relating to their own particular spheres of interest: commerce, philosophy, and warfare. There's a little action: Roch is set upon by a gang who want to thwart his relationship with Anna and has his ear partly torn off -- Antonín sews it up, using a fishhook as a needle. But mostly it's a low-key character study with moments to be smiled at, as evanescent as a summer shower.

The Bigamist (Ida Lupino, 1953)

The Bigamist (Ida Lupino, 1953)

Cast: Edmond O'Brien, Joan Fontaine, Ida Lupino, Edmund Gwenn, Kenneth Tobey, Jane Darwell, Peggy Maley, Lilian Fontaine, Matt Dennis, John Maxwell. Screenplay: Lawrence B. Marcus, Lou Schor, Collier Young. Cinematography: George E. Diskant. Art direction: James W. Sullivan. Film editing: Stanford Tischler. Music: Leith Stevens.

There are some curiously "meta" moments in The Bigamist: At one point, Eve Graham (Joan Fontaine) says that the man who is helping arrange their adoption of a child reminds her of Santa Claus. We smile because the man is being played by Edmund Gwenn, who won an Oscar as Santa Claus in Miracle on 34th Street (George Seaton, 1947). And just in case we missed it, a little later in the film we are on a bus touring the homes of the stars in Beverly Hills and the driver announces that the house they're passing is the residence of "a little man who was Santa Claus to the whole world -- Edmund Gwenn." But then there's something meta about the whole movie: It was produced and its screenplay written by Collier Young, who was married to Fontaine after divorcing the film's other major female star, as well as its director, Ida Lupino. I suppose if you don't believe in divorce you might say that Young is the bigamist of the film's title. But that, of course, is Harry Graham, played by Edmond O'Brien, a character actor who never failed to give a subtle and insightful performance when it was called for. Here he's a weak man, the supposed head of the Graham household, who has found himself taking a back seat in the business to his wife, Eve, whom he refers to at one point as "a career woman" -- a pejorative of sorts in the 1950s. The thing of it is, when we see Eve she's always pleasant and loving -- we sense that she doesn't want to be emasculating Harry, but she's got too much intelligence not to do so. While he's on the road for their company, he gets more and more depressed about playing second fiddle to his wife, so he takes up with Phyllis Martin (Lupino), who's a little depressed herself about her failure to make her mark in the world. One thing leads to another and they get married because she's pregnant. Harry is really a nice guy at heart, but somehow he can't help himself. Finally, he spills the beans to Mr. Jordan (Gwenn), who stumbles onto Harry's double life while investigating the Grahams' fitness to adopt a child. Jordan speaks for the viewer when he says, "I can't figure out my feelings toward you. I despise you and I pity you. I don't even want to shake your hand, and yet I almost wish you luck." There are no villains to be found in The Bigamist, only flawed people getting themselves ensnared in situations they can't resolve. Fortunately, the film doesn't resolve things for us either. It ends with Harry in court where he receives a scolding from the judge, who says he will pronounce sentence a week later. Wisely, the film leaves it up to us to deliver that sentence.

Between Two Worlds (Edward A. Blatt, 1944)

Between Two Worlds (Edward A. Blatt, 1944)

Cast: John Garfield, Paul Henreid, Sydney Greenstreet, Eleanor Parker, Edmund Gwenn, George Tobias, George Coulouris, Faye Emerson, Sara Allgood, Dennis King, Isobel Elsom, Gilbert Emery. Screenplay: Daniel Fuchs, based on a play by Sutton Vane. Cinematography: Carl E. Guthrie. Art direction: Hugh Reticker. Film editing: Rudi Fehr. Music: Erich Wolfgang Korngold.

Sutton Vane's old warhorse of a play Outward Bound made its debut on Broadway in 1924 and became a community theater staple for many years after. It's a fantasy about the afterlife, in which passengers on a ship gradually come to realize that they're dead and will be judged by a man known as the Examiner, who will send them to their just deserts. Warner Bros. filmed it in 1930 with Leslie Howard as the cynical newspaperman Tom Prior and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. as the suicidal Henry, a role Howard had played on stage. In 1944 the studio decided it was time for a remake that would update the story to the war years: A group of people are desperate to get out of England during the bombing and decide to risk sailing to America. Among them is Henry Bergner, a concert pianist who has been part of the Resistance in France but whose nerves have been shattered so that he can't take it anymore. When he's turned down because he doesn't have an exit permit, he decides to kill himself, so he returns to the flat he shares with his wife, Ann (Eleanor Parker), seals the windows shut, and turns on the gas. But Ann has pursued him to the steamship office, and when she finds out he has just left, she rushes into the street just in time to see a car carrying people who have successfully booked passage -- we have been introduced to them earlier -- blown to bits. She hurries on to the flat and discovers what Henry has done, so she decides to join him in death. Cut to the ship, where she and Henry join the people who have just been blown up. Henry and Ann realize that they're dead, but they're advised by the ship's steward, Scrubby (Edmund Gwenn), not to let the others know just yet. And so it goes, as the passengers gradually awake to the truth of their condition and undergo judgment by the Examiner, who was once an Anglican clergyman. Sydney Greenstreet plays him with his usual affably sinister manner -- in his scenes with Henreid it's a bit like watching Victor Laszlo being judged by Kasper Gutman. The bad people -- an arrogant capitalist played by George Coulouris and a snobbish society dame played by Isobel Elsom -- get dispatched to punishment; the sinful but worthy -- Garfield's raffish journalist and Faye Emerson's conscience-stricken playgirl/actress -- are provided with a measure of redemption. And then there are the suicides, Henry and Ann. It's revealed that their lot is to serve aboard these postmortem ships for eternity, like the steward Scrubby, who had killed himself. Since condoning suicide was taboo, especially under the Catholic-administered Production Code, the script has to provide an out for the attractive, repentant couple, and it does. There's a lot of stiff acting in the movie -- Garfield's is the only really naturalistic performance -- and the dialogue is full of heavy-handed exposition speeches. The capitalist and the socialite never rise above caricature, and there's a sentimental tribute to mother love. This is the first of only three films directed by Edward A. Blatt, and it's easy to see why there weren't more. 

Caché (Michael Haneke, 2005)

Caché (Michael Haneke, 2005)

Cast: Daniel Auteuil, Juliette Binoche, Maurice Bénichou, Annie Girardot, Bernard Le Coq, Walid Afkir, Lester Makedonsky, Daniel Duval, Nathalie Richard. Screenplay: Michael Haneke. Cinematography: Christian Berger. Production design: Emmanuel de Chauvigny, Christoph Kanter. Film editing: Michael Hudecek, Nadine Muse.

Caché is one of those films I want to like more than I really do. It's a thriller without a payoff, somewhat in the mode of Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Avventura (1960) in that it's a mystery that doesn't get solved. But Michael Haneke is a colder, more cynical filmmaker than Antonioni, so that I can never quite shake the feeling that Haneke is just toying with us, parading themes like deception and guilt before us without having anything particularly revealing to say about those topics. On the other hand, we live in an age of increasing invasions of privacy, when the technologies we depend on seem to betraying our secrets to the world, so Haneke's film may have an element of prescience to it. The premise is this: a couple, Georges and Anne Laurent, played with their usual edgy brilliance by Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche, receive a videotape that's simply a record of the façade of their house during several hours of what seems to be random day. It's a premise that David Lynch used some years earlier in Lost Highway (1997), but where Lynch expanded from that into a florid nightmare of a story, Haneke simply traces the slow effect of that enigmatic tape on the Laurents, who are initially unsettled by it but not particularly concerned. And then more tapes arrive, some wrapped in childlike drawings that have a more sinister effect, and the Laurents begin to worry. Is it a threat, a kind of terrorism, or is it just a prank, played perhaps by one of the friends of their teenage son, Pierrot? Eventually, Georges realizes that he is the primary target of this strange harassment, and that the perpetrator is someone who knows about something that happened when Georges was only 6 years old. The confrontation with the man he suspects is responsible for the tapes proves calamitous, made worse by Georges's initial attempt to keep the truth from Anne. Still, at the film's end, there is no real resolution: We may suspect we know the truth, but Haneke never gives us certainty. It's a film that provokes analysis, but I'm not convinced that it entirely deserves it.

Blindspotting (Carlos López Estrada, 2018)

Blindspotting (Carlos López Estrada, 2018)

Cast: Daveed Diggs, Rafael Casal, Janina Gavankar, Jasmine Cephas Jones, Ethan Embry, Tisha Campbell-Martin, Utkarsh Ambudkar, Kevin Carroll, Nyambi Nyambi, Jon Chaffin, Wayne Knight, Margo Hall. Screenplay: Rafael Casal, Daveed Diggs. Cinematography: Robbie Baumgartner. Production design: Tom Hammock. Film editing: Gabriel Fleming. Music: Michael Yezerski.

Blindspotting sets up its essential high-wire tension early in the film when we see Collin (Daveed Diggs) being given the terms of his probation after being released from prison: the usual no drugs, no firearms, no bad company, and so on. Whereupon we almost immediately see him sitting in the back seat of a two-door car that all of a sudden is bristling with the owner's guns. Collin panics: He has three days left before his probation ends. Things get worse when Collin's best friend, Miles (Rafael Casal), reveals that he's carrying too. Collin panics, and when he's released from the car heads for the truck he's driving -- he has taken a job with a moving company managed by his ex-girlfriend, Val (Janina Gavankar) -- eager to get to his halfway house before his 11 p.m. curfew. And then he's stopped by a red traffic light that shows no sign of changing, even though there's absolutely no other traffic moving. As he fumes in frustration, a man suddenly runs up to the truck, followed quickly by a cop on foot. As Collin looks on in horror, the cop fires four bullets, killing the other man -- we see him fall in Collin's rear-view mirror. Like Collin, the man is black. And through his side window Collin looks face to face at the cop, who is, needless to say, white. But then the light changes and Collin drives home. Blindspotting is like that throughout, though the rest of Collin's hair's-breadth moments don't involve a fatality. It's about the precariousness of being black when even your closest white friends, like Miles, don't understand the ease with which things can go suddenly wrong. We're constantly aware of the way the world -- or at least Oakland, the beautifully characterized milieu in which Collin's story takes place -- can suddenly turn against Collin, who just wants to stay out of jail. But the remarkable thing about this real and painful fact is that it's the premise on which a very funny and very insightful movie is based. There are critics who fault Blindspotting for an inconsistency of tone, for having one foot in farce and the other in tragedy, but I think that's the brilliance of the film. I doesn't need to hammer its message home. It can make a point about, say, gentrification by showing Collin and Miles at work cleaning out the "junk" in a house that's about to be gutted and turned into an upscale townhouse, just by taking a look at what's been left behind by its former residents: a wedding photograph, an old photo album, in short, a cache of memories about to be obliterated. And it culminates in a lovely sequence in which Collin comes face to face again with the cop, and conquers the man not with a gun but with a rap diatribe. There are those who think this is only a disguised version of the conventional happy ending, but I prefer to see it as a hopeful resolution of the cultural dissonance in which we now live.