Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One (William Greaves, 1968)

Cast: Patricia Ree Gilbert, Don Fellows, Jonathan Gordon, Bob Rosen, William Greaves, Susan Anspach, Audrey Henigham, Stevan Larner, Terence Macartney-Filgate, Maria Zeheri. Screenplay: William Greaves. Cinematography: Stevan Larner, Terence Macartney-Filgate. Film editing: William Greaves. Music: Miles Davis.

Most of the experimental filmmaking that flourished in the late 1960s and early 1970s is forgotten and even unwatchable today. But one film that has endured, even though it went mostly unseen until the 1990s, is William Greaves's Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One, which is a movie about making a movie -- and maybe even a movie about making a movie about making a movie. It's that intricate a concept. It may sound banal: Filmmaker Greaves assembles a crew of actors, sound techs, cameramen, and others, to make a movie that may or may not be called Over the Cliff, in Central Park. But he also hires a crew to film the filming, and himself carries a camera that he uses to capture whatever strikes his fancy at the moment. The ostensible movie is about a couple in the midst of a breakup, and we see a couple of tests of actors for the roles, among them Susan Anspach, who would go on to have a notable career in movies. He seems to decide on Patricia Ree Gilbert for the role of Alice and Don Fellows for Freddy, and we see a crucial moment in their breakup, when Alice berates Freddy for making her have a series of abortions and then accuses him of being a closeted homosexual. But Greaves, the director, doesn't seem to know quite which way to go with the performances and the story, to the consternation of the crew, whom we see griping about his direction. And that's about it, except for a concluding scene in which the crew encounters a homeless, alcoholic intellectual who delivers his semi-coherent thoughts about the state of the world. Describing Symbiopsychotaxiplasm does indeed reduce it to absurdity. But it has a way of drawing you into the apparent incoherence of the situation, of making you realize that film is a collaborative art that needs a central consciousness to succeed. You may even wonder if Greaves is as big a fool as some of his crew seem to think he is. He wasn't, of course -- he's cannily playing a role. He was an important documentarian who started as an actor, trained at the Actors Studio, and went on to produce the National Educational Television series Black Journal, as well as major films about the Black experience. When he failed to get funding for the theatrical release of Symbiopsychotaxiplasm, he shelved it. Eventually, after some prominent people, such as Steve Buscemi and Steven Soderbergh, discovered it at the Sundance Film Festival in 1992, it got the audience it deserved, and in 2015 was added to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress. 

Calamity Jane (David Butler, 1953)

Allyn Ann McLerie and Doris Day in Calamity Jane

Cast: Doris Day, Howard Keel, Allyn Ann McLerie, Philip Carey, Dick Wesson, Paul Harvey, Chubby Johnson, Gale Robbins. Screenplay: James O'Hanlon. Cinematography: Wilfrid M. Cline. Art direction: John Beckman. Film editing: Irene Morra. Songs: Sammy Fain, Paul Francis Webster.

Doris Day sets some people's teeth on edge, and I have to admit that when she's butching it up in Calamity Jane, she sometimes gets on my nerves a bit. But mostly I'm a fan: She had real cinematic presence, good comedy timing, and one of the sweetest singing voices of any star, with an ability to put a song over. I wish that she had been cast as Annie Oakley in Annie Get Your Gun (George Sidney, 1950) instead of the bumptious, brassy Betty Hutton, or as Nellie Forbush in South Pacific (Joshua Logan, 1958) instead of the blandly perky Mitzi Gaynor. But instead we have a string of somewhat undistinguished Warner Bros. musicals, culminating in Calamity Jane, which is an almost unabashed rip-off of Annie Get Your Gun, down to the casting of Howard Keel, who was Frank Butler in the 1950 film. Keel as Wild Bill Hickok and Day as Jane even get an insult-trading duet, "I Can Do Without You," that recalls "Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better" from the Irving Berlin musical. The Sammy Fain-Paul Francis Webster song score for Calamity Jane is of course nowhere near the equal of Berlin's, with only the Oscar-winning "Secret Love" lingering in anyone's memory, and that perhaps mostly because it has been adopted as a kind of LGBTQ anthem. The film itself has attracted a lot of attention because of its supposed queerness: It has a drag number, performed by Dick Wesson as the hapless Easterner who has been hired as a performer because his name, Francis, made the saloon owner think he was a woman, but most of the comment has been about the relationship between Jane and Katie Brown (Allyn Ann McLerie), who set up house together in a montage to the tune of "A Woman's Touch." Subtext aside, the movie is lively and energetic, and Day works her ass off in the role. Still, if you want a taste of what could have been, seek out the recording of Annie Get Your Gun that Day made with Robert Goulet as Hickok.

The Prestige (Christopher Nolan, 2006)

Michael Caine, Scarlett Johansson, and Hugh Jackman in The Prestige

Cast: Hugh Jackman, Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Scarlett Johansson, Rebecca Hall, Piper Perabo, David Bowie, Andy Serkis, Samantha Mahurin, Roger Rees, Ricky Jay, Daniel Davis, Jim Piddock, Christopher Neame. Screenplay: Jonathan Nolan, Christopher Nolan, based on a novel by Christopher Priest. Cinematography: Wally Pfister. Production design: Nathan Crowley. Film editing: Lee Smith. Music: David Julyan.

With his low-budget feature Following (1998), Christopher Nolan showed a genius for making the preposterous plausible, and he followed it up well with Memento (2000). But although he managed to get his footing again with Inception (2010), after his excursion into the comic book world of Batman, in The Prestige he lost control. It's a dark thriller about dueling illusionists with a sci-fi twist that seems to take to heart Arthur C. Clarke's assertion, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." As Nolan is careful to show from the outset, stage magic is technology-based, a careful use of low-tech apparatus like trap doors and collapsible cages that can prove accidentally deadly -- or intentionally so, as the sacrifice of several pigeons demonstrates, and the film's plot will exploit. But as the rivalry between illusionists Robert Angier (Hugh Jackman) and Alfred Borden (Christian Bale) heats up, The Prestige wanders into the fancifully futuristic, a sort of molecular cloning technology devised by no less than Nikola Tesla (David Bowie). The problem for me -- if not for the fans who give The Prestige an astonishingly high 8.5 ranking on IMDb -- is that this insertion into the story of a real historical figure, who never crafted anything of the sort, is about as cheesy as turning Abraham Lincoln into a vampire hunter. It undermines the suspension of disbelief we need to appreciate the film's intricate plotting (complicated by Nolan's non-linear narrative technique) and enjoyable performances. I didn't get the exhilaration I expect from a thriller's twists and turns, but instead a kind of numb depression set in.

Summer Hours (Olivier Assayas, 2008)

Jérémie Renier, Juliette Binoche, and Charles Berling in Summer Hours

Cast: Charles Berling, Juliette Bioche, Jérémie Renier, Edith Scob, Dominique Reymond, Valérie Bonneton, Isabelle Sadoyan, Kyle Eastwood, Alice de Lencquesaing, Emile Berling, Jean-Baptiste Malartre. Screenplay: Olivier Assayas. Cinematography: Eric Gautier. Art direction: Fanny Stauff.  Film editing: Luc Barnier.

Summer Hours sounds like the title of a film by Yasujiro Ozu, but the resemblance doesn't stop there. It has the melancholy tinged with humor of that master's films, and like his Tokyo Story (1953), it begins with a family gathering and the subsequent death of the matriarch. But it takes place in another country half a century later, and milieu is almost everything. Now we are in France, and the characters it centers on, the siblings Frédéric (Charles Berling), Adrienne (Juliette Binoche), and Jérémie (Jérémie Renier), are caught up in the global economy, with all that implies about letting go of the past, of pulling up roots. The Marly siblings, their spouses and children, and their mother, Hélène Berthier (who took her maiden name back after the death of her husband), are apparently content with their lives, but happy families are really not all alike. Olivier Assayas's story centers on a legacy, the stuff of 19th-century novels and murder mysteries as recent as Knives Out (Rian Johnson, 2019). But Assayas never lets his film sink into melodrama or the flamboyant acting out of squabbling heirs. It's about mature people facing the inevitable. Hélène (Edith Scob) has inherited the house owned by her uncle, a famous artist, which is filled with valuable works of art, though it is rather run down and very much lived in. The decorative panels by Redon are marred by damp, a broken plaster statuette by Degas is shoved into a cabinet -- itself a work of art -- in a plastic shopping bag, the art nouveau desk is cluttered with papers, and a couple of Corots hang casually in a hallway. When the family gathers there to celebrate Hélène's 75th birthday, she pulls the oldest, Frédéric, aside to give him some instructions about what to do with things when she's gone. This invariably awkward discussion is handled by Assayas and the actors with truth and finesse. Soon, sure enough, Hélène is dead, and the rest of the film is about the family coming to terms with the consequences of a legacy all of them treasure but none of them really has room for in their lives. It might be classified as a character study rather than a drama, but Assayas and company build such intimacy with the characters that we can feel the drama as intensely as if it dealt with matters of great moment and urgency.

Atonement (Joe Wright, 2007)

James McAvoy and Keira Knightley in Atonement

Cast: Keira Knightley, James McAvoy, Saoirse Ronan, Romola Garai, Benedict Cumberbatch, Vanessa Redgrave, Juno Temple, Brenda Blethyn, Harriet Walter, Jérémie Renier, Alfie Allen, Patrick Kennedy, Daniel Mays, Nonso Anozie, Gina McKee. Screenplay: Christopher Hampton, based on a novel by Ian McEwan. Cinematography: Seamus McGarvey. Production design: Sarah Greenwood. Film editing: Paul Tothill. Music: Dario Marianelli.

Atonement -- and I'm speaking here of Joe Wright's film and not the novel by Ian McEwan on which it's based -- tries to have it both ways: It provides both a happy ending in keeping with the lush, romantic production and a bleak surprise ending perhaps truer to the epic wartime sequence that interrupts the romance. But by doing so it demonstrates that what may work on the page as a provocative fable doesn't entirely work on screen. Both film and book ask a key moral and aesthetic question: Can art provide both truth and justice? Briony Tallis (Saoirse Ronan as a child, Romola Garai as a young woman, Vanessa Redgrave in old age) seeks redemption for a lie, but in the end she thinks she has achieved it by lying again, by writing a work of autobiographical fiction that is untrue to what actually happened. That moral conundrum comes as a kind of surprise at the very end of Wright's film, but it's anticipated on every page of McEwan's novel, a trick that can only be pulled in literature, where the unreliable narrator is a familiar device. There's a problem, too, in visualizing McEwan's story, where both the opulent country-house setting and the portrayal of the Dunkirk retreat, with its celebrated long traveling shot, tend to overwhelm the narrative and the depiction of the characters of Briony, Cecilia (Keira Knightley), and Robbie (James McAvoy). The actors, fine as they are, keep getting upstaged by the images. It's what it was called at the time, an "Oscar-bait" movie, and it won for Dario Marianelli's score, and picked up nominations for best picture, for Christopher Hampton's screenplay, Ronan's supporting performance, for Seamus McGarvey's cinematography, and for art direction and costumes.

Rendez-vous (André Téchiné, 1985)

Lambert Wilson and Juliette Binoche in Rendez-vous

Cast: Lambert Wilson, Juliette Binoche, Wadeck Stanczak, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Dominique Lavanant, Jean-Louis Vitrac, Jacques Nolot, Anne Wiazemsky, Olimpia Carlisi, Caroline Faro. Screenplay: André Téchiné, Olivier Assayas. Cinematography: Renato Berta. Production design: Jean-Pierre Kohut-Svelko. Film editing: Martine Giordano. Music: Philippe Sarde.

The volatile, nigh unpredictable behavior of the characters in Rendez-vous keeps the viewer off balance, which is not unexpected from its screenwriters, two major French writer-directors, André Téchiné and Olivier Assayas, who delight in making their characters walk on a moral tightrope. At one point, the story looks like a familiar pattern, a love triangle involving Nina, an aspiring actress (Juliette Binoche); Paulot, a naively infatuated young man (Wadeck Stanczak); and Quentin, a swaggerer who at some moments brandishes a razor (Lambert Wilson). But things keep taking odd turns: Quentin dies in what could be an accident but is possibly a suicide, and then returns as a ghost, or at least a figment of Nina's imagination. Enter, too, Scrutzler, a theater director (Jean-Louis Trintignant) who wants to put on a production of Romeo and Juliet, and casts Nina, who really isn't very good, against the objections of the producers, only to reveal that he had in mind Quentin for Romeo -- for rather perverse reasons. Meanwhile, Paulot, who works as a real estate agent, pursues Nina, only to reject her after finally succeeding in having sex with her -- a bliss in proof and proved, a very woe. It's all very well-acted -- this was Binoche's first major film role -- but there's something unfocused about the story, as if the writers were making it up as they went along instead of having a clear goal in mind.

Inside Daisy Clover (Robert Mulligan, 1965)

Natalie Wood and Robert Redford in Inside Daisy Clover

Cast: Natalie Wood, Christopher Plummer, Robert Redford, Ruth Gordon, Roddy McDowall, Katharine Bard, Peter Helm, Betty Harford, John Hale, Harold Gould, Ottola Nesmith, Edna Holland. Screenplay: Gavin Lambert, based on his novel. Cinematography: Charles Lang. Production design: Robert Clatworthy. Film editing: Aaron Stell. Music: André Previn.

As a satire on Hollywood and the star system, Inside Daisy Clover occasionally feels slack and uncertain. That may be because it was adapted by Gavin Lambert from his own novel, and authors are sometimes not the best judges of which parts of their books to transfer to film. There seem to be characters in the movie who haven't been given as much to do as their prominence suggests, such as Daisy's sister Gloria (Betty Harford), or Baines (Roddy McDowall), the assistant to the studio head, a role more generously cast than the function of the character in the story deserves. But I think a major problem stems from when the movie was made: in the mid-1960s, when the Production Code was on its last legs, and before films like Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper, 1969) and Midnight Cowboy (John Schlesinger, 1969) showed filmmakers what they could get away with. So although Inside Daisy Clover shook free of the Code's strictures against homosexuality and let Robert Redford's character, Wade Lewis, be revealed as gay (or, in a departure from the book, bisexual), you can still feel that people in the film aren't using the kind of verboten language that they would have in real life. Once, for example, Daisy (Natalie Wood) says "damn" and is reproved by her mother (Ruth Gordon) for using "those four letter words." When Daisy scrawls in anger on a wall, you expect stronger language than her graffiti contains. Lambert and director Robert Mulligan are chafing at the restrictions but haven't been given the go-ahead to take the film as far as it wants to go, so there's a kind of tonal dithering -- lunges in the direction of black comedy, as in Daisy's suicide attempt, that fall short of the mark.

Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Céline Sciamma, 2019)

Adèle Haenel and Noémie Merlant in Portrait of a Lady on Fire

Cast: Noémie Merlant, Adèle Haenel, Luàna Bajrami, Valeria Golino, Christel Baras, Armande Boulanger, Guy Delamarche, Clément Bouyssou. Screenplay: Céline Sciamma. Cinematography: Claire Mathon. Production design: Thomas Grézaud. Film editing: Julien Lacheray. Music: Jean-Baptiste de Laubier, Arthur Simonini.

It isn't just the title of Céline Sciamma's Portrait of a Lady on Fire that made me think of Henry James. It's the film's delicate and subtle treatment of a Jamesean theme, the intersection of consciousnesses, and the fact that Sciamma, as James did in some of his stories, uses an artist as a vehicle for developing the theme. I also found the film something of a revelation of Sciamma's great talent after watching two of her previous films, Water Lilies (2007) and Girlhood (2014). The contemporary setting of those films necessitated a kind of documentary realism that is set aside for Portrait of a Lady on Fire, with its 18th-century setting and more rigid moral codes serving as limitations on its characters, defining their roles and allowing us to confront their responses to the limitation with clarity. It's also fascinating, I think, to compare Sciamma's film with Abdellatif Kechiche's Blue Is the Warmest Color (2013), a film heavily defined by the male gaze, while Sciamma's view of the lesbian relationship of her characters, Marianne (Noémie Merlant) and Héloïse (Adèle Haenel), is an exploration of female "looking." There are extraordinary moments that perhaps only a woman might have imagined, or imaged, throughout the film: The abortion that takes place with the maid Sophie (Luàna Bajrami) lying across the bed while a baby plays with her face; the festival that seems to be made up mostly of women, at which Héloïse's dress catches fire; Marianne leaping from the boat to rescue her paints and canvases; Marianne propping a mirror against the nude Héloïse's mons veneris so she can sketch a self-portrait on page 28 (the page number will become significant later in the film) of Héloïse's copy of Ovid, where the story of Opheus and Eurydice is told. Reviewers of the film reached a little too often and too eagerly for the word "masterpiece," an epithet that can only be applied by time, but it's certainly an extraordinary film, made so by fine performances, and by Claire Mathon's cinematography and Dorothée Guiraud's costumes, which often evoke the paintings of Chardin.

Too Many Girls (George Abbott, 1940)

Hal Le Roy, Lucille Ball, Richard Carlson, Eddie Bracken, Desi Arnaz in Too Many Girls

Cast: Lucille Ball, Richard Carlson, Ann Miller, Eddie Bracken, Frances Langford, Desi Arnaz, Hal Le Roy, Libby Bennett, Harry Shannon, Douglas Walton, Chester Clute, Tiny Person, Ivy Scott, Byron Shores, Van Johnson. Screenplay: John Twist, based on a play by George Marion Jr. Cinematography: Frank Redman. Art direction: Van Nest Polglase, Carroll Clark. Film editing: William Hamilton. Songs: Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart.

When Desi met Lucy -- that's the most memorable thing about this silly college musical that was directed on stage by George Abbott, who brought over several members of the original cast when he was hired to make the film version at RKO. It was designed to be a vehicle for Lucille Ball, an RKO contract player who hadn't been in the stage production and whose singing voice wasn't up to the demands of the Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart songs of the original show, so she was dubbed by Trudy Erwin. Among the cast hired out of the original were Eddie Bracken, Hal Le Roy, and Desi Arnaz, as well as a young chorus boy, Van Johnson, who has a couple of lines but goes uncredited. Although Arnaz is paired in most of the film with Ann Miller, he and Ball hit it off when they weren't on screen and married shortly after the movie wrapped. The story is nonsense about Connie Casey (Ball), a playgirl whose father wants her to settle down and go to college at his alma mater, Pottawatomie, in New Mexico. But he also hires some bodyguards, four young college football players, to keep her out of trouble. And so it goes, as the four bodyguards lead the Pottawatomie football team to a string of victories, and one of them, Clint Kelly (Richard Carlson), falls hard for Connie. It's very loose-jointed stuff, with some lively musical numbers spotlighting Arnaz, Miller, Frances Langford, and a large company of dancers directed by LeRoy Prinz, but a lot of dull filler in between. It's amusing to see Eddie Bracken before he got stereotyped as a doofus in Preston Sturges movies, and a crewcut Richard Carlson before he wound up as the very square star of such 1950s sci-fi movies as It Came From Outer Space (Jack Arnold, 1953) and Creature From the Black Lagoon (Arnold, 1954). 

Red Road (Andrea Arnold, 2006)

Kate Dickie, Natalie Press, and Martin Compston in Red Road

Cast: Kate Dickie, Tony Curran, Martin Compston, Natalie Press, Paul Higgins, Andrew Armour, Carolyn Calder, John Comerford, Jessica Angus, Martin McCardle, Martin O'Neill, Cora Bisset. Screenplay: Andrea Arnold. Cinematography: Robbie Ryan. Production design: Helen Scott. Film editing: Nicolas Chaudeurge. Music: Glenn Gregory.

Andrea Arnold's Red Road walks the fine line (not always steadily) between psychological drama and melodrama, between hard-nosed realism and sentiment. At its best, it takes us somewhere we haven't been (and probably didn't want to go), the Glasgow housing project of the film's title, and immerses us in some desperate lives. It uses the hand-held camera technique associated with the Dogme 95 moment splendidly, so that we stay off-balance physically as well as emotionally throughout the film. At its worst, a rather perfunctory sort-of-happy ending, it feels like an unconvincing attempt to wipe away the film's grit. It's a story about Jackie (Kate Dickie), a young woman who works as a professional voyeur, spending her days watching a bank of video monitors that record the goings-on in a particular slice of Glasgow. When she spots malfeasance, she can alert the police. But mostly she's watching people going about mundane tasks in decidedly unlovely places, so small wonder that her attention wanders and she fixates on individual people, such as a man walking his aging English bulldog. And eventually she lights on someone she knows: His name is Clyde (Tony Curran), and she has reason to become obsessed with him, because of something that happened in the past. Arnold lets us piece together the story as the film goes on, and she does so skillfully. It was Arnold's first feature -- she had previously won an Oscar for best live-action short with Wasp (2003) -- and it earned her much praise, including the Jury Prize at Cannes. Whatever its faults,  it repays your attention, not to say your endurance of some of its uglier moments.