Monday, April 30, 2012
A vision for all — perhaps not meant for one man alone
"I was most jealous of Truffaut — in a friendly way — with Jules and Jim. I said, 'It's so good! How I wish I'd made it.' Certain scenes had me dying of jealousy. I said, 'I should've done that, not him.'" — Jean Renoir
By Edward Copeland
From the first time I saw Jules and Jim in high school, the movie became a personal touchstone and remains one as we mark its 50th anniversary. Truthfully, I know the parallels my teen eyes recognized between myself and others in my life then didn't mirror the characters on screen as closely as my imagination wanted to believe, but as that fantasy faded away, I began to appreciate more of the artistry of a film that I already loved. In addition to what Jules and Jim contains within its frames, the movie also forged the connection I've always felt with François Truffaut.
If you discovered, probably early in your life, that your genetic makeup left you susceptible to artistic impulses of some kind — it needn't matter whether that creative bent took the form of movies, writing, art, music, whatever — the odds weighed heavily toward you falling for at least one Catherine in your lifetime. (Now, I'm speaking from the point-of-view of a straight male. I wouldn't dare presume straight female or gay perspectives, though I've witnessed similar dynamics secondhand.) As far as we go, the Catherines of the real world function like those purple-hued bug zappers hanging on summer porches and inevitably drawing us like moths to their pulsating light and our doom — and we wouldn't trade one goddamn miserable minute of it if it meant losing a single second of the joy. This isn't a new phenomenon:
F. Scott had his Zelda and Tom had his Viv during the same era when Jules and Jim takes place. (A brief aside: I think Tom sent me a personal message from the past when he published The Waste Land in 1922 and penned those lines, "April is the cruellest month.") To casual and outside observers, proclaiming that Catherine must be crazy comes rather easily and mounting a counterargument against that assumption makes for a steep climb. Yes, our real world Catherines come with a fair amount of mental instability, as do we, but without our neuroses and idiosyncrasies, we probably wouldn't be drawn to these wild, wonderful, wounding women in the first place. Of course, Henri-Pierre Roché's novel and François Truffaut's film take the men's point-of-view, even when filtered through Michel Sobor's narration, so Jules and Jim aren't portrayed as being as unstable as Catherine. The closest the male friends come shows through Jules' fear and neediness at times. As for the Catherines of the real world, people do have the capacity for change, no matter what David Chase might believe, and can end up being vital parts of your life even as you become the one holding the monopoly on the madness in the friendship. It's a cliché, but it originates from truth: Most of the best art stems from suffering. Anyone remember Billy Joel during the years when he and Christie Brinkley were happily married? Jules and Jim, for me at least, represents a cinematic temple to that idea. Of course, it also begs the question that if misery breeds great art, why in the hell haven't I accomplished something of note? Jules and Jim made its U.S. premiere April 23, 1962, the same year the film made its initial debut in France on Jan. 23. Though it marked Truffaut's third feature film as a director following The 400 Blows and Shoot the Piano Player, Jules and Jim was only the second of his films to reach U.S. movie theaters. Shoot the Piano Player, though it opened elsewhere in 1960, wouldn't get its U.S. release until July 23, 1962. (Like Jules and Jim, The 400 Blows reached U.S. shores in the same year, 1959, that Truffaut's directing
debut did elsewhere, just a few months later.) As I remind people as often as possible, all opinions about movies are subjective. Before beginning my lovesick tribute to what I think holds the title as the true masterpiece born of the French New Wave, I feel that I shouldn't pretend all critics agreed about Jules and Jim and I'd allow one to have his say before I got started. "With the years, I've sometimes felt the reputation of Jules and Jim is a bit exaggerated," this former critic said to Richard Roud, then-director of the New York Film Festival, in October 1977 on a television program called Camera Three. The ex-critic added, "and that I was too young when I made it." That appearance happened to be François Truffaut's first time on American television. I guess you can remove the man from the role of film critic but you can't take the critic out of the man. "I continue to re-read the book every year. It was one of my favorites. I've often felt that the film was too decorative, not cruel enough, that love was crueler that that," Truffaut went on to tell Roud. Now, François, don't be so hard on yourself. For those who haven't seen Jules and Jim, I'll be vague, I think you could call the film's dénouement fairly devastating. Besides, most recognize (or know from experience) that cruelty usually crosses love's path at some point. On top of that, the subject cuts too close to Truffaut for him to judge. Jules and Jim may speak to me in personal ways, but that isn't why the film rests among my 20 favorite films of all time. As John Houseman used to claim in TV commercials about how Smith Barney made money, Jules and Jim got that rank on my list "the old-fashioned way. It earned it."While I knew that Jules and Jim originated as a novel by Henri-Pierre Roché, it wasn't until I obtained the Criterion edition that I learned that Roché loosely based it on his relationship with Franz Hessel, a German writer who translated Proust into German (as Jim does in the film) and Helen Grund, who became Hessel's wife and herself translated Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita into German. Legend has it that Roché also introduced Gertrude Stein to Pablo Picasso through his original career as an art dealer and art collector. Though the circles that Roché circulated in preceded the time period of Woody Allen's recent Midnight in Paris, he did know many of the literary and artistic figures depicted in Allen's fantasy. The real-life coincidences that brought Truffaut and Roché together border on the extraordinary. Truffaut
stumbled upon the novel in a secondhand bookstore and it led to a letter-writing relationship between himself and Roché where the young critic Truffaut promised that if he ever made movies, he would bring Jules and Jim to the screen. Jules and Jim was the first novel that Roché ever wrote — which he did at the age of 74. His second novel, also autobiographical, Two English Girls and the Continent, eventually became the source material of a later Truffaut film, Two English Girls. Two English Girls, sort of the inverse of Jules and Jim with two women pining for the same man, marks its 40th anniversary this year but unfortunately, like too many other great films I'd like to write about this year, no proper DVD copy has been made for rental or at a reasonable price, the same situation that in the past two years has befallen other films such as Steven Soderbergh's Kafka, Barbet Schroeder's Barfly with its great performances by Mickey Rourke and Faye Dunaway and two of John Sayles' very best films — City of Hope and Matewan. Who said only old classics become lost films? With the constant format changes, some never made the leap from pan-and-scanned VHS. A true travesty, but I've digressed from the subject at hand. Roché didn't live long enough to see the movie of his first novel, but the film version brought best-seller status to his book that it never saw in his lifetime. One aspect that didn't occur to me until I re-watched the movie for this tribute: Not only has the film reached its 50th anniversary this year, 2012 also means a full century has passed from where its story begins in 1912.
The film starts in blackness — literally if you were in a French-speaking country or watching without subtitles. You hear a voice (Jeanne Moreau's as Catherine, though we wouldn't know that yet) say, "You said, 'I love you.' I said, 'Wait.' I was about to say, 'Take me.' You said, 'Go.'" Then, quite abruptly, Truffaut launches us into the film's imagery with a bouncy spirit, playing music beneath the credits that seems to herald that a carnival lies ahead courtesy of prolific film composer Georges Delerue, who scores the entire film, though it won't all sound like this energetic romp which accompanies clips, some of scenes that will arrive later in the film, others that just fit the tone of the piece — such as Jules and Jim jokingly fencing with brooms. As with many others, Delerue would collaborate with Truffaut on nearly all of his films, having first worked on Shoot the Piano Player. We'll also get a glimpse of an hourglass, its sand pouring through to clue us in advance of the importance the passage of time serves in the story. We see our first swift sightings of Moreau as Catherine, though her actual entrance
into the film doesn't occur immediately. While Catherine certainly acts as the catalyst for most events in Jules and Jim, her name isn't in the title for a reason. At its heart, Jules and Jim spins a story of friendship between two men. Oskar Werner's Jules acts as the outsider, the Austrian in Paris, until Henri Serre's Jim takes him beneath his wing, acting, quite literally, in the early days of their acquaintance as Jules' wingman. As with many Truffaut films, Jules and Jim employs a narrator (Michel Subor) not only to for exposition purposes but because Truffaut wanted to maintain as much of Roché's prose as possible in the adaptation he co-wrote with Jean Gruault. Jules and Jim's friendship begins when Jules, the foreigner in Paris, approaches Jim blindly to see if the Frenchman might wrangle him an invitation to the Quatres Arts Ball. Jim succeeds and a friendship blossoms as they search for a slave costume for Jules to wear to the event. From that, the men began to teach one another the other's language and culture and shared their poems,
which they'd translate into the other's native tongue. Before long, the men saw each other every day, talking endlessly, finding common ground such as, the narrator informs us, "a relative indifference toward money." The omniscient voice also tells the viewer, "They chatted easily. Neither had ever had such an attentive listener." Jules though lacks luck when it comes to love in Paris, even of the transitory kind while Jim draws women to him as if he were a magnet. Jim finds getting women so easy that he willingly hands some off to Jules, including a musician. "They were in love for about a week." This early setup runs us through the women, most of whom bear little importance to the story so they receive scant attention from the film. Desperate for some amorous action, Jules even ignores Jim's warning to stay away from the "professionals" only to learn that he should have trusted Jim's word and avoided the disappointment. This changes one evening, when the men encounter a woman named Thérèse (Marie Dubois) seeking refuge from her loutish anarchist boyfriend who blames her for a shortage of paint that he thinks will make people believe that anarchists don't know how to spell.
What separates Jules' and Jim's relationship with Thérèse from what lies ahead with Catherine comes from Thérèse clearly indicating a preference between the two men, in this case Jules. Though Dubois' role takes up very little screen time, she does prove a charmer (and remember that U.S. moviegoers, at the time of Jules and Jim's release, had yet to see her film debut as the waitress Lena in love with Charles Aznavour's piano-playing Charlie in Truffaut's second feature, Shoot the Piano Player). When they return to the house,
Jules acts the part of the gentleman, offering Thérèse his bed while he sleeps in a rocking chair, but romance occurs quickly and rectifies that situation. That hourglass first spotted in the opening credits reappears and Jules explains that he prefers it to a clock. When all the sand passes through to the bottom, that means it's time to go to sleep, he explains. She simply smiles and tells him he's sweet. Thérèse demonstrates for Jules her trick that she calls "the steam engine." She places a lit cigarette in her mouth and puffs out her cheeks like a blowfish and then chugs in a circle in the bedroom until she has reached Jules' chair, one of the many, recurrent visuals of circular imagery that Truffaut utilizes in the film. You shouldn't feel bad for Jim — he's busy bedding his frequent lover Gilberte (Vanna Urbino) and making excuses to depart her bed before the sun rises despite her request to lie beside her for a complete night for a change. Jim nixes that idea, saying that if they did that they might as well be married and she'd expect him to stay the next night as well. Gilberte expresses skepticism at his excuse, especially when he suggests that she imagine he's working at a factory, betting that his plan involves sleeping until noon. Later that night, Jules, Jim and Thérèse go to a café and no sooner have they sat down that after making eyes at another
man, Thérèse asks Jules for some change to play music. He complies, she takes the money and the man follows her. Thérèse asks if she can stay with him that night and the two depart. Jules starts to stand in outrage, but Jim grabs his arm and he sits back down. "Lose one, find 10 more," Jim advises. Jules admits that he didn't love Thérèse. "She was both mother and doting daughter at the same time," Jules says, sighing that he doesn't have luck with Parisian women. He shows Jim photos of some of the women back home he loves, presenting them in order of preference and contemplating returning for one of them in a couple of months if the situation in France doesn't change. However, Jules lacks a photograph of one named Helga so he sketches her in broad strokes on the café's table. Jim tries to buy the table, but the establishment's owner refuses unless he purchases the entire set.
That night, they go to the home of Jules' friend Albert (played by Serge Rezvani, a renaissance artist, though he prefers the term multidisciplinarian, who billed himself as Bassiak here and added the first name Boris when taking credit as the composer of "Le Tourbillon" that Moreau memorably sings) to see his slides of ancient sculptures he found around the country. (Somehow it slips my mind between viewings of Jules and Jim how little dialogue the actors actually get to speak openly in the film in favor of voiceover. For example, when Jules and Jim enter Albert's place, they exchange introductions out loud but then Henri Serre as Jim doesn't simply ask Oskar Werner's Jules, "Who's Albert?" Instead, we hear Michel Subor's narrator say, "Jim asked" — When I first heard
this the first few times I watched the film, it sounded as if Subor narrated this entire dialogue. After hearing it for the umpteenth time, it sounds as if Subor merely starts it the Serre asks in voiceover, "Who's Albert?" with Werner's voice replying, "A friend to artists and sculptors. He knows everyone who'll be famous in 10 years." I can't say with 100% certainty which interpretation stands as the correct answer. I've looked for verification, but found none. Jules' response tipped me in that direction because Werner's voice can be distinguished easily from Subor's while Serre's falls in the same vocal range.) One slide of a stone face particularly strikes the friends' fancy — and Subor definitely
describes this, informing the viewer, "The tranquil smile of the crudely sculpted face mesmerized them. The statue was in an outdoor museum on an Adriatic island. They set out immediately to see it. They both had the same white suit made. They spent an hour by the statue. It exceeded their expectations. They walked rapidly around it in silence. They didn't speak of it until the next day. Had they ever met such a smile? Never. And if they ever did, they'd follow it. Jules and Jim returned home, full of this revelation. Paris took them gently back in." Later, Jules and Jim hit the gym where they spar with some kickboxing. Jules inquires about the progress of Jim's book. Jim tells him he thinks it's going well and will turn out to be very autobiographical and concern their friendship. He proceeds to read Jules a passage. "Jacques and Julien were inseparable. Julien's last novel had been a success. He had described, as if in a fairy tale, the women he had known before he met Jacques or even Lucienne. Jacques was proud for Jules' sake. People called them Don Quixote and Sancho Panza and rumors circulated behind their
backs about their unusual friendship. They ate together in small restaurants, and each splurged on the best cigars to give the other." Jules finds the writing beautiful and offers to translate it to German. Jim's brief allusion in his novel to "rumors" about his friendship with Jules marks the closest the film ever comes to implying anything homoerotic between the men. While Jules and Jim opened the door for many cinematic variations on your standard triangle, we'd still need almost 40 years before Y Tu Mama Tambien. As the guys shower, Jules announces that his cousin wrote him and three girls that studied with him in Munich would be visiting Paris — one from Berlin, one from Holland and one from there in France, Jules plans to host a dinner for the visitors the next night. Neither friend has any idea who Catherine happens to be yet or that she will be the French girl in that group of visitors. This Quixote and Sancho soon will be tilting at a very shapely and unpredictable windmill that will change the course of all three lives forever. The next night, when Catherine (Moreau) descends the stairs and lifts the lace netting covering her face, her resemblance to the sculpture stuns Jules and Jim, something Truffaut emphasizes through quick cuts, and Michel Subor's narration, and the young men will keep the oath they made to that statue — they've found that smile, now they must follow it. While for me, Jules and Jim stands at the high watermark of the French New Wave films, I know many others won't agree and when you look objectively at the story of Jules and Jim, it may employ many of that movement's techniques but many aspects of Truffaut's film set it apart from its cinematic brethren such as its period setting and a time span that covers more than two decades. Jules and Jim also caused moral uproars about the open relationships among the various characters in the film (and though Jules, Jim and Catherine might be involved simultaneously, they never took part in a ménage à trois). In a funny way, the 1962 film forecast the free love movement to come later that decade except its source material happened to be a semiautobiographical novel set in the early part of the 20th century. The prurience though lies in the mind of the fuddy duddy because part of what makes Jules and Jim so special comes from Truffaut's refusal to pass any judgment, be it positive or negative, upon the behavior of his characters. Despite the director's own criticism many years down the road that the film isn't cruel enough when it comes to love, the three main characters do suffer by the end but he doesn't paint it as punishment for their sins.
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Labels: 60s, Books, Criticism, Dunaway, Fiction, Fitzgerald, Foreign, Mickey Rourke, Movie Tributes, Ray Top 100, Renoir, Sayles, Soderbergh, Truffaut, Woody
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"She's a force of nature that results in cataclysms."
In countless interviews, several excerpted on The Criterion Collection two-disc edition DVD of Jules and Jim, François Truffaut repeatedly admits that what attracted him to the story in Henri-Pierre Roché's semi-autobiographical novel lay in the concept of a love triangle where a film portrayed neither man involved as better than the other. He tells the interviewer questioning him at any given time that intrigued him because the cinematic tradition always paints one of the suitors as inferior. The film critic turned director certainly succeeded with his third feature film, aided immensely by those he cast as the triangle: Oskar Werner (his first name spelled as Oscar in the credits) as the Austrian Jules, Henri Serre as the French Jim and, most indelibly, the intoxicating Jeanne Moreau as Catherine, the French-English object of the title characters' affections. What wows you about Jeanne Moreau's performance though is that for all the brash acts that Catherine commits, Moreau doesn't play Catherine as a stereotypical nut. That "calm smile" referred to that relates Catherine to that statue exists in her performance most of the time as well. When you try to think of new ways to describe her work, it doesn't help when her director used to be a film critic and gave a great summary of it in a 1965 interview: "Jeanne Moreau's acting was like a slalom run against all the possible clichés. I left her free like the other actors to do as she saw fit." Man, I wish I'd written that. It wasn't enough that he made an all-time great film, he has to come up with better review lines as well?
Things move fairly swiftly once Moreau's Catherine enters the picture even though the film does cover a great expanse of time almost from the moment she appears. After the dinner, the narrator informs us that Jules more or less vanishes for a month, spending every day with Catherine, only encountering Jim at the gym. In a steam room meeting, Jules finally invites Jim to hang out with him and Catherine and as the two head up to see her, Jules admits that she inquires about Jim quite often, wondering what he's like. Despite the fact that Jim has been nothing if not generous to Jules when it comes to women, Jules makes a point of stopping him before they go in to meet her and says the line that originally made the film speak so personally to me, "But
not this one, Jim. OK?" I almost spoke those exact words to someone, not that it mattered, and my antennae proved to be tuned correctly to pick up that signal far in advance of my real-life story (of which you will receive no further details). Upon that first "real" meeting, Catherine seems eager to join the boys' club, losing her dress to put on the costume of a man who Jules calls Thomas. She wants to see if she can fool others out on the street so the three depart and, sure enough, before too long a man asks "Thomas" for a light. For many, it would be easy to leap to a feminist interpretation of this scene, seeing it as Catherine's bid to be treated as a man's equal back in 1912 and to be judged by the same rules, but once you've seen Jules and Jim in its totality, that conclusion doesn't quite ring true. Catherine (a) doesn't get judged by anyone within the film and (b) operates under her own set of rules, unique to her and her alone. As the trio continues to wander, "Thomas" thinks that a bridge offers a great spot for a footrace and challenges Jules and Jim. She makes her first mention of rain or water, as Catherine also frequently bring associations with fire. Truly, the woman represents an elemental force (or a James Taylor song). To watch the clip of the race, I suggest going full screen because the image plays very tiny. YouTube offers other clips of the scene but so many of them lack subtitles, I thought it best to go with this one.In that clip, though we'd earlier seen Jules express a mild fear that Jim could woo Catherine from him, we see that it doesn't matter much what Jules or Jim wants — the great friendship has become a threesome and Catherine controls what the group does, immediately deciding that all three will be departing for the shore the next day and selecting Jim to help her get her bags to the train station. (It's also telling that she not only proposes the foot race, but she cheats in it to win as well.) The clip cuts off before we get a few more important lines courtesy of our omniscient narrator who says, "Jim considered her to be Jules' and didn't try to form a clear picture of her. Catherine once again wore that calm smile. It came naturally to her and expressed everything about her."
When Jim shows up at Catherine's apartment, she hasn't completed packing yet and still wears her flowing white nightgown, telling Jim she must put her dress on. Catherine chastises him immediately for not following the superstition and placing his hay on the bed. "Never put a hat on a bed," she chides. First, other things need taking care of before they depart. She dumps a pile of crumpled papers onto the floor from a porcelain bowl and requests a match from Jim who complies and asks what she's doing. "Burning these lies," she tells him. It's not stated explicitly, but I've read references that identify the papers as love letters but doesn't identify either the author or recipient. The pile quickly turns into a tall blaze that leaps on Catherine's nightgown, but Jim leaps to extinguish the flames rapidly. We had the first reference from Catherine to rain, now we have her first connection to fire. She goes behind her
changing screen and asks Jim to hand her the dress hanging on the wall by her bed. When changed, Catherine realizes that she almost forgot to add a bottle to her suitcase. Jim inquires what liquid it contains. "Sulfuric acid, for the eyes of men who tell lies," Catherine explains. Jim warns her that the bottle could break in transit and end up burning through her things. Besides, she can get sulfuric acid anywhere. Reluctantly, she empties the bottle down the sink. "But I promised I would only use this bottle," she tells him as he gathers her luggage. She places hit hat back atop his head and affixes her own to hers and they head off for the train station to join Jules. I can't say with any sense of certainty how many times in the past 25 years I've watched Jules and Jim, but each time I notice something new or view a scene in a new light and that's a trait common to many of the greatest cinematic gifts we've been handed. For instance, I don't recall observing the large number of locomotives, actual, figurative or near where trains run. We've seen Thérèse show off her "steam engine" skills and heard the sounds of a train nearby before Catherine selects the bridge beneath the track for the foot race. We see obvious stock footage of a train rolling by the countryside. Once again, Michel Subor describes the journey to us. "They searched up and down the coast before finding the house of their dreams. Though too big, it was isolated, imposing, white inside and out, and empty."That describes the house but none of those adjectives remotely apply to the movie itself. Many of the greatest films often include a magical ingredient that no matter how many times you've watched them, you forget the exact order in which scenes come. Usually though, that only applies to films that don't follow standard chronological order (the most famous and obvious example being Orson Welles'
Citizen Kane), but somehow Truffaut accomplished that trick in Jules and Jim as well and its narrative follows a straight line and contains nary a flashback. I think any movie that can pull that off should be considered a film critic's best friend since it stamps out any risk of slipping into synopsis. As I prepared for this tribute, taking my notes and marveling at the available YouTube clips, part of me wanted to make sure that I wasn't showing scenes out of order, forcing me to check my chronology again and again. Finally, there came a point where I said, "What the hell am I doing?" First off, I want people to watch Jules and Jim. Secondly, while I'd love to show all these great scenes and repeat the memorable lines, I'd much rather readers discover them for themselves (or be reminded again if they choose to pay a return visit to the film). To give you the briefest update of what occurs after the three settle in at the house, Jules almost immediately asks Jim if he thinks he should propose to Catherine. Jim expresses skepticism, wondering if Jules pictures Catherine as a wife and mother. "I'm afraid she'll never be happy on this earth," Jules responds. He goes ahead and pops the question to Catherine anyway, telling her that if she doesn't answer, he'll ask her again every year on her birthday. "You haven't known many women, I've known lots of men. It balances out. We might make an honest couple," Catherine replies. It isn't exactly a yes or a no, but eventually they do wed. Soon though, The Great War intervenes to separate all three of them.
The war and post-war sections interested me the most in this viewing with the intercutting of stock footage (which isn't actual World War I footage, since there wasn't a lot of filming in that conflict so Truffaut had to use clips from re-creations of the fighting from old films)
with scenes of Jules and Jim — fighting on opposite sides — worrying about accidentally killing the other during a battle. It's with relief that Jules writes Catherine that he's being transferred to the Russian front which he figures makes it less likely he'll face his friend in battle. Everyone returns from the war safely. Jim spends some time visiting some war memorials and cemeteries before eventually reuniting with Jules and Catherine, who have added a third — their young daughter Sabine (Sabine Haudepin, who still acts to this day, mostly on French television, and appeared in one of Truffaut's final films, The Last Metro). Jules confides that his home isn't as happy as it appears, though he has accepted Catherine's frequent infidelities. He just fears the thought that she'll leave sometime and not return. Jim assures him that she'll always come back to Jules because she loves his "Buddhist monk quality." However, the war has changed Jim and it's easy to tell it's more difficult for him to maintain his distance from Catherine for the sake of his friend. One of the more interesting post-war sequences occurs when Jules and Jim chat about the experience of war, joined by Albert (Serge Rezvani/Boris Bassiak), who has been one of Catherine's recurring lovers.Jules and Jim provides so many points of entry, so many possible paths for discussion, that you could choose a topic a day and keep busy for quite some time. That's partially why it's taken me so long to complete this piece. The rest of the blame falls on illness and the calendar. Honestly, if I could put myself into a self-induced coma for the last couple of weeks of April each year, I would. One final clip I'd like to share (which again works better if you watch it full screen) doesn't have as much importance plotwise as it does in terms of filmmaking and one of Truffaut's trademarks.
On the Dec. 2, 1965, episode of the French television program Cinéastes de notre temps titled "François Truffaut ou L'esprit critique," Truffaut spoke at length on the topic of freeze frames and this particular use. He pointed out that in part the scene poked fun at Moreau's previous roles in films such as Antonioni's La Notte that tended to be deadly serious. However, the process isn't as easy as one might think.
"It was hard freezing her expressions there. In the editing room, it looked very sharp and nice so I did it elsewhere in the film, but it can quickly get to be a habit. I stopped doing it after a few films. I stopped using it as a visual effect. Now I use freeze frames only for dramatic effect. They're interesting providing viewers don't notice. You sense them, but an image is only perceptible — it takes eight frames for a shot to register. Fewer than eight frames and it's virtually unreadable, unless it's a tight close-up."
One thing I've noticed while comparing the various YouTube clips (when they actually have subtitles) and the Criterion version of those scenes is how frequently translations differ, For example, in the clip above when Catherine asks for someone to scratch her back, Jules replies, "Scratch and Heaven'll scratch you." On the Criterion translation, his response reads much better and, I imagine, more accurately, "Heaven scratches those who scratch themselves."
I keep thinking back to the comment François Truffaut made in 1977 about being "too young" when he made Jules and Jim. If he'd made it at any other age, it wouldn't be the same movie and probably wouldn't hold the same appeal for so many. Granted, critics of an older age appreciated and praised the film at its release, but for Jules and Jim to grab you, really grab you, and maintain that grip over the years, I think you need to be young when you see it the first time, and that's why Truffaut, not yet 30 but captivated by the novel since 25, had to be young as well. I found this clip on YouTube and knew I had to include it. It's the great actor John Hurt extolling the virtues of Jules and Jim and what an impression it made on him. He was 22 when it opened.
As for Truffaut himself, I don't know what attracts me to him as a filmmaker so much. The obvious answer would be the critic-turned-filmmaker aspect, but it's not as if he stands as the only film critic who made that leap and I certainly don't carry affection for the others as I do him. I'm very mixed on Godard and think Peter Bogdanovich made a single masterpiece. It might be that he seems as if he's the heir to Jean Renoir. On the other hand, my list of favorite filmmakers runs on awhile and few resemble the others exactly. I did think of one connection to another director that I never would have thought of before when watching Jules and Jim this time (or more specifically its extras). As Truffaut time and time again referenced his love of literature and film and why he felt the need to include as much of the novel's prose in the form of narration as he could, that may mark the first time I connected Truffaut to Scorsese, specifically with his wondrous adaptation of Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence, where Joanne Woodward served the Michel Subor role.
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Labels: 60s, Antonioni, Bogdanovich, Criticism, Foreign, Godard, John Hurt, Movie Tributes, Ray Top 100, Renoir, Scorsese, Truffaut, Welles
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Thursday, March 15, 2012
"I'm just one of the Master's robes. He can put me on or he can take me off."
By Edward Copeland
That face. That gorgeous image of Gong Li not only exposed to me to her for the first time but to my first viewing of a Zhang Yimou film as well. Wait! I confess — factually speaking, clips of Raise the Red Lantern and its star crossed my eyesight before I saw the movie, but I prefer to remember it the other way and I hadn't seen Red Sorghum or Ju Dou yet. Besides, the scenes shown on Siskel & Ebert couldn't really do justice to that remarkable face or film, particularly that opening scene that consisted only of a young Chinese girl named Songlian (Gong) speaking to her offscreen mother (voice of Ding Weimin).
SONGLIAN: Mother, stop. You’ve been talking for three days. I’ve thought it over. Alright, I’ll get married
MOTHER'S VOICE: Good. What sort of man is he?
SONGLIAN: What sort of man? Is it up to me? You always speak of money. Why not marry a rich man?
MOTHER'S VOICE: Rich man? If you marry a rich man, you will only be his concubine.
SONGLIAN: Let me be a concubine. Isn't that the fate of a woman?
Songlian talks to her mother in a voice that's strong and defiant and that makes the silent streams of tears that fall down her cheeks even more powerful, just as the film that follows that scene will be.
When Gong Li and Zhang Yimou collaborated (onscreen and off), it turned out to be one of the most fruitful actress/director relationships in cinema history, even though it lasted a mere six features, the last of which, 1995's Shanghai Triad, ended the teaming on a mixed note (Gong and Zhang reunited for 2006's Curse of the Golden Flower, but it didn't come close to matching their work in the '90s). Raise the Red Lantern marks my second favorite of the Gong/Zhang films (topped only by 1994's To Live). Lantern immediately followed Ju Dou and, like that film, received an Oscar nomination for best foreign language film. However, one major difference separated the two films in terms of Oscar submission. China submitted Ju Duo as its official entry when it received its nomination in 1990, the first Chinese film ever nominated. Ju Dou did face some controversy and the communist government banned it for a few years, though eventually they lifted the ban. Lantern proved even more provocative to the Chinese officials, who viewed the film as a veiled allegory for the contemporary Chinese government and similarly banned it (and later lifted it) so it was submitted to the Academy Awards by Hong Kong, which hadn't been handed over to the China yet.
Like Ju Dou, Raise the Red Lantern takes place in 1920s China during what was known as the country's warlord era, not that anything on the screen specifically tells you the date of the film, aside for a phonograph player that narrows the time period down. Songlian does marry a rich man as she told her mother she would. Soon after she arrives at the ancient fortress that the Chen family has held for generations, she'll learn how right her mother was when telling her that she'd be a concubine since she would become the fourth wife (or Fourth Mistress, as she's formally referred) to Master Chen (Ma Jingwu). Screenwriter Zhen Ni adapted Lantern from the 1990 novel Wives and Concubines by Tong Su. After the brief prologue where Songlian speaks directly to the camera, Zhang divides the film by seasons, beginning with SUMMER when Songlian shows up at the massive, Chen castle grounds dressed like a schoolgirl, wearing long pigtails and carrying a single suitcase. Her unexpected appearance panics the old, longtime servant Chen Baishun (Zhou Qi) who asks her why she didn't take the bridal sedan they sent for her. Songlian tells him that she insisted on walking and when he reaches to take her
suitcase, she refuses. She's determined to be self-sufficient. Baishun doesn't argue and begins to lead Songlian toward her new residence. After her long walk, Songlian feels slightly grimy so before she enters the interior of her home, she spots a servant woman (Lin Kong), who must be around her age, sitting on the ground of the stone courtyard, washing clothes by hand. Songlian asks if she might borrow a bit of the clean water from her basin to rinse her arms and hands and the servant, whose name is Yan'er, reluctantly acquiesces but doesn't hide her bitterness toward this new arrival — through glares, tone and words. Realizing quickly what the pecking order in the Chen household will be, Songlian drops any pretense of politeness and orders Yan'er to bring her suitcase into the house. When I rewatched Raise the Red Lantern, for the first time in several years, while many of its most potent and devastating details had remained seared in my memory, I'd forgotten how many surprises the film springs on you via its talented cast, Zhang's directing choices and Zhen's script. I don't mean twists in the conventional sense that we think of when it comes to movies such as Angel Heart, which I discussed just last week, or Fight Club but in characters and situations where things don't turn out to be quite the way they appear at first glance.
Songlian entered this multiple marriage with a decidedly cynical attitude, but the attention a new wife gets shown on her first day overwhelms the 19-year-old. Baishun shows her into her home, which isn't particularly spacious but comes adorned with nice looking furnishings. What takes Songlian's breath away is when the battalion of servants begins appearing to equip residence, both inside and outside. Men hurry into place pushing rolling racks of bulbous red lanterns that they light and hang on hooks leading to her door. One man comes into the house, lowers a ring holding several of the lanterns above her bed, methodically lights each one and then raises them back toward the ceiling again. This section of the film brings the moment, as in Ju Dou when those dye machines began working overtime, that absolutely gorgeous cinematography consumes the screen. Unlike Ju Dou, which splashed wide array of vivid color across its canvas using the long abandoned Technicolor process, Red Lantern's cinematographer Zhao Fei utilizes the color in the film's title as his hue of choice (and won awards from both the Los Angeles and National Society of Film Critics groups for his work. The Inaccurate Movie Database credits Zhao correctly on the movie's awards page, but claims he and Yang Lun, one of the two d.p.'s on Ju Dou, teamed up on Lantern's cinematography on the film's main page. Zhao removes other virtual crayons besides red from his box to create vibrant and striking images for such as a startling icy blue shade at one point. He even manages to make winter's grays and whites sparkle somehow amidst the dullness of the grayer ancient surroundings. While the pampering flatters Songlian, who likes to consider herself smarter and worldlier than many around her, the audience shouldn't forget her age either.
We eventually learn that Songlian attended a university but her father's death forced her to drop out since her family no longer could afford the tuition. That's what led her mother to pressure her into marriage but it's also why she warned her daughter against the type of marriage she enters. That first day though seems pretty good to Songlian — the new wife gets to decide the dinner menu and receives a foot massage, which brings another group of servants (all female) to her residence to prepare her for that ritual. What Songlian doesn't realize is that every day isn't like this and the Master picks which of his wives receives the "honor" of having
him sleep with her that night along with the other perks (foot massage, dinner menu, etc.) This pits the wives against one another on a daily basis, competing and scheming daily to be the chosen one. If this were played for laughs, they'd call it "Desperate Concubines." Raise the Red Lantern tells its story on so many levels simultaneously (if one happens to be veiled criticism of the Chinese government, so be it; the movie did come out just a little more than
two years after Tiananmen Square), but at its core, the lanterns being lit shine upon the tragic history not only of women in China, but women everywhere — a battle being waged frighteningly on state and national levels in the U.S. today over issues thought settled long ago. (And Songlian tried to pursue a higher education — what a snob!) The wives learn to covet the foot massages that, while not as awful as the practice of foot binding, don't look particularly relaxing. One of the oldest servants, Aunt Cao (Cao Zhengyin), explains to Songlian that "a woman's feet are very important" so she can serve her master well. That's why the wives get the "privilege" of this ritual where servants as the servants stretch out the wife's legs, resting the feet on a stool and wrapping a piece of linen around them. Then Aunt Cao takes two hard looking implements that make sounds like rattles and beat them repeatedly against the souls of the wife's feet. In an issue of Senses of Cinema by David Neo on the film called "The 'Confusion Ethics' of Raise the Red Lantern," Neo writes extensively about the history of fetishism of women's feet by men in China, saying, "It was a Chinese myth that the smaller a woman’s feet, the smaller her vagina — therefore, the better for the man."Songlian gets an idea of the games wives play that first night, what should be her "honeymoon." The young woman expresses nerves as it is, hiding her nakedness beneath the covers and asking her husband if they can turn out the lights, but he likes the
lanterns lit, so he can see her. It doesn't matter much because before they can consummate their union, a servant knocks on the door to interrupt. He apologizes but tells the Master the Third Mistress (He Caifei) has fallen ill and is asking for him. At first, the Master orders him to call for a doctor and to tell her he'll see her in the morning, but the servant says she's insistent. The annoyed Master says he's sorry to Songlian, but if he doesn't go, she'll keep this up all night. so he leaves Songlian alone. (This isn't fun for the servants either who have to extinguish the lanterns and Songlian's home and light them at the home of Meishan, the Third Mistress. Someone, presumably Zhang, made a very interesting decision concerning Master Chen in the film: The moviegoer never gets a clear view of his face. The first time I saw Raise the Red Lantern, I thought perhaps Zhang was withholding the moment the audience sees what he looks like for a dramatic purpose much as Spielberg didn't let you see the shark right away in Jaws. That doesn't turn out to be the case though. While Master Chen certainly can be viewed as a villain, it's more like evil spreads out from him and his family's "rules" while in most cases you don't see him committing the acts himself. The Master really serves as a pawn in this game where the women are the victims as well as the villains. Then as the saying goes, you can’t judge a book by its cover.
When I knew at the end of last year that the anniversary of the U.S. release of Raise the Red Lantern occurred this year, the prospect of
writing about this great film excited me. I wanted to detail the surprises and turns the film takes and how what could have been a staid period tale of oppression turns into a moving, riveting and entertaining motion picture all at the same time, but when I watched it again, a protective feeling awoke in me. Sure, I could utilize the silly SPOILER ALERT, but it isn't that important to tell you in specifics who does what to whom. If you haven't seen the film, you must experience these events for yourself to truly appreciate Zhang's masterful direction, Zhen's great screenplay and, most especially, the wondrous ensemble of actresses. I love Gong but, unlike most of her films, she's not the only actress with chops. All the characters that matter are women and two of the other actresses give performances as downright superb as Gong's. He as Third Mistress Meishan and Cao Cuifen as Zhuoyun, the second mistress also do brilliant work. Giving a fine turn in a smaller role is Lin as Yan'er, the spiteful servant who becomes Songlian’s personal maid and spits in her laundry. We eventually learn her attitude comes from her feeling that she should have been the Fourth Mistress. Playing the First Wife, Yuru, is Jin Shuyuan, an older woman who keeps quiet most of the time since Master Chen shows little interest in her anymore. (Given her age, that's one reason I though they kept his face hidden — to shock us with how old he looks.)
He Caifei and Cao Cuifen stand out in what really end up being the film's most difficult roles since the movie places the audience in the same position as Songlian in that we don't know how to read them. He's Third Mistress Meishan definitely comes on the scene as the troublemaker, interrupting Songlian's first night and when the same tactic fails the second night, she
uses her skills as a former opera singer to sing all night on the roof of the castle and keep everyone awake. Cao's Second Mistress Zhuoyun
doesn't seem duplicitous at all at first, going out of her way to be friendly to Songlian and give her gifts. She even acts as if she's happy for her when she gets picked as the mistress for the night. It's only when Songlian uncovers secrets that Yan'er hides in her quarters that she realizes that the maid works as a spy for Zhuoyun. The situation that persists in the Chen household infects everyone in the end and soon Songlian plays the same sort of games and schemes in the same ways to try to monopolize the master's attention. Eventually this chain of events leads to horrifying results for most of the people who live there. After someone dies, Songlian actually says that she is lucky to be dead because that is a better fate than being alive in the Chen household. A lot of lines prove to be very telling, but I'm going to give them to you as blind quotes to preserve the film's surprises. During a dinner of the wives, one complains about another and vows how different things will be when she's in charge prompting another to say, "When you're in charge, the Chen household will perish." One mistress on another: "She has the face of Buddha and the heart of a scorpion. She's the truly wicked one. I'm no match for her." Even though Master Chen has a grown son Feipu (Xiao Chu) by his first wife and has another by Meishan, Zhuoyun regrets only giving him a daughter and Songlian gets warned, "If you don't give him a son, you're in for hard times." Both actresses give simply superb performances, but I haven't heard much of either since. Not that you can trust the Inaccurate Movie Database, but it lists very few titles for He Caifei (I'm going with the spelling of her name I find everywhere else, that's how little I trust IMDb these days) except for some Chinese TV series, though it says her last feature was Ang Lee's Lust, Caution. Cao Cuifen's IMDb filmography ends up even sparser, showing a single TV series and four feature films in her entire career. Then again, who know what can happen to artists in China?
As for Gong Li, Raise the Red Lantern might have been one of her earliest performances, but it showed what a gifted actress she was even then in her mid-20s. She has continued to work steadily in China as well as some American productions such as Memoirs of a Geisha and Michael Mann's film version of Miami Vice. In Red Lantern, what she has to accomplish and does truly amazes. Every emotion you can think of, Songlian expresses — and she gets a drunk scene and gets to go mad as well. It's too bad the performance wasn't eligible for an Oscar nomination. When you think of the Academy's tendency to bestow best actress on twentysomething actresses constantly, few of whom approach what Gong did.
Zhang Yimou provides a lot of great camera moves in the movie both in terms of composition and motion. He has one sequence that pulls back from a scene (I don't want to say of what) to give you the bigger picture that's quite remarkable. As I said earlier, the wondrous
cinematography combined with the production design just produces a stunningly beautiful film, even if it's a heartbreaking one in the end when you see a Fifth Mistress arrive who looks like the youngest yet. Zhang often ran into trouble in China, but he has stuck it out there. Part of me always has wished that he made the leap as other directors did when fleeing totalitarian states such as Fritz Lang and Billy Wilder. Then again, who's to say that Hollywood wouldn't have ruined him as they did Jean Renoir who had to return to Europe to make good films again? China has done their own damage. I miss the Zhang Yimou who made the personal, intriguing films before he got caught up in the Hero-House of Flying Daggers-Curse of the Golden Flower-type of filmmaking. Riding Alone for a Thousand Miles certainly went in the right direction and there are a frustrating number of his works that just never make it here at all. The Flowers of War makes me curious, but after the disaster of A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop, I don't know what to expect from him. Whatever he does, we'll always have that great period of work that lasted through about The Road Home in 2000. More importantly, we'll always have Raise the Red Lantern.
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Labels: 90s, Books, Ebert, Fiction, Foreign, Gong Li, Lang, Michael Mann, Movie Tributes, Oscars, Ray Top 100, Renoir, Spielberg, Wilder, Zhang Yimou
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Wednesday, March 07, 2012
No explanations for the inexplicable Why do we feel the need to force meaning upon magic?
By Edward Copeland
A sentence, once begun, hung suspended in the air, as if frozen by the frost,
and picked up, probably where it left off — or elsewhere.
probably with a significant other, but not necessarily,
that you have again and again for years?"
How did Alain Resnais pull it off? Most films that aim for the abstract and teeter toward pretension just bore me or piss me off. One need look no further than Lars von Trier's recent Melancholia for an example of the type of film of which I speak. Now, I stand by my belief that there is no right or wrong in film criticism since all opinions are subjective (even though when reading positive reviews for films such as Melancholia I often visualize the writer struggling to convince himself of the film's worth, as if daring to say otherwise could mean the loss of her membership privileges to the hip critic tree house). Knowing my tastes, that makes my affection for Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad all the more mystifying — even to me. I can't explain my love for this film, which marks the 50th anniversary of its U.S. premoere today, but I do. It's not that I'm an across-the-board disciple of the French New Wave — a lot of Godard's work leaves me cold (though I worship Truffaut). Then Resnais differed from the other New Wavers in that he wasn't a critic first. He started out as a documentary filmmaker. Each time I see Last Year, those black-and-white images and nameless characters in its essentially plotless universe mesmerize me more than the last time. I couldn't give you a coherent explanation as to what Last Year is about and, what's more, I don't care. I just know it's beautiful and infused with the magic that only great cinema can conjure.
As I pondered what to say in this tribute, since I lack the desire to force an interpretation onto the film that would bore me to write even more than it would any reader to read and any attempt at synopsis surely would reach the higher rungs on the ladder of Fools' Errands, my thoughts drifted to more general areas of film and criticism. I loved Pauline Kael, though I'm certain if added up, I probably disagreed with her more often than not. Kael was not a fan of Marienbad. She'd bring it up frequently in reviews of other films, such as when she reviewed Antonioni's Blow-Up for The New Republic in 1967. "It has some of the Marienbad appeal: A friend phones for your
opinion and when you tell him you didn't much care for it, he says, 'You'd better see it again. I was at a swinging party the other night and it's all anybody was talking about!' (Was there ever a good movie that everybody was talking about?" Kael wrote. Of course, that review was published more than two years before I was born and I haven't been to any swinging parties (or nonswinging, for that matter) of late and I sharply disagree with her about Resnais' film (I'm more mixed, leaning to positive, on Blow-Up, though it and L'Eclisse remain the only Antonionis I truly tolerate). Despite our differing opinions on Marienbad, how can I not laugh out loud at Kael's parenthetical punchline? As Fat Tony (voiced by Joe Mantegna) said once on The Simpsons, "It's funny 'cause it's true." So while I firmly live by what I said earlier about all criticism being subjective and you should avoid what Kael called "saphead objectivity," in this world we live in today the cruder saying, be it about movies or politics or religion or whatever, rings louder than ever: Opinions are like assholes: Everybody's got one. The question writing this tribute sparked in my mind is "Why does Marienbad work for me, but not for Kael or others" and continuing along those lines, "How can a director such as Lars von Trier have either fans who think he walks on water or people such as myself who mock him mercilessly but seemingly few who look at him dispassionately from the middle ground?" Does the magic reside in the movies or within ourselves? With these conundrums circulating in my head, I decided that two posts would be necessary, since a large portion wouldn't be dealing with Marienbad directly. Therefore, today the tribute to the film, Thursday (or maybe even Friday), the broader discussion. I decided two posts were required not only because of length and the larger issues bubbling in my brain but because I thought Last Year at Marienbad deserves separate words on its anniversary, especially after devouring its two-disc Criterion DVD. One of the most interesting special features is an audio interview with Resnais by François Thomas, author of the book The Workshop of Alain Resnais, recorded specifically for Criterion in 2008. (Resnais, who turns 90 in June, maintains an active filmmaking life, having made the great Wild Grass that opened in the U.S. in 2010. It also has little in common with Marienbad and should be accessible to most.) Resnais talks extensively about the process that led him to collaborate with highly regarded French novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet and produced Marienbad as a result. Two of the film's eventual producers, Raymond Froment and his friend Pierre Courau, suggested to Resnais the idea of a partnership with the novelist. "I'd never read a book of his, not a single line. I remember my first response was 'From what I've read in the press, he's a very difficult writer whose books are quite off-
putting. I really don't know if we could collaborate on a film,'" Resnais admits in the interview. The men asked if the director would at least meet the author and so Resnais did. "(T)he meeting with Robbe-Grillet was so pleasant and friendly that I believe we spent the whole afternoon together discussing life, cinema and the arts. We realized that we had similarities as to certain (things) and even works of literature. I hadn't hidden the fact that I hadn't read his works and I wanted to read his four published books. I was as won over by his writings as I was won over by Robbe-Grillet in person," Resnais says. That sounds like a stroke of luck, but it pales compared to the actual process that occurred that produced this landmark (if you like it) film. "…Robbe-Grillet offered to write four ideas for screenplays, each a page in length, and if I found one of the four interesting enough, we could move forward with that. A week later, (he) did in fact give me four ideas and I took another 24 hours to make a decision because those four pages could easily have made four films and it was hard to decide and it was hard to decide on the most enticing and most captivating. I decided on Last Year. The words 'at Marienbad' were added later," Resnais explains. The full screenplay was written in less than two months — an extremely detailed script that had visuals on the left-hand side while dialogue and even stage directions filled the right-hand column. In fact, Resnais told Thomas that what they produced had so much spelled out, anyone could have picked it up and made the same movie. When Resnais composed his usual shot breakdown, it barely differed from the screenplay. The way Resnais conceives images on all his films turns out to be fascinating by itself. He has his screenwriters record all of a film's dialogue on tape without identifying which characters are speaking. Resnais then lies on a couch and listens to the tapes until the images come to him. While I wouldn't try to slap a meaning on Marienbad, I know what appeals to me. Part of it is its fluid nature, something best shown by this YouTube clip.Resnais insisted on real sets because he needed shadows from the "molding in the decor, on doors, or even the actor's shadows to fall on
something three-dimensional," he also says in the interview whose existence practically ensures that a first-person account of the mechanics of making Last Year at Marienbad should outlast us all. Though even as a fan, I wouldn't label this as a film about acting (Hell, the characters aren't given names, just letters), yet Resnais wanted the performers to know the tone he had in mind so he screened for the cast and crew G.W. Pabst's silent classic Pandora's Box. He also claims to have been influenced by the Stanislavsky acting
method, even though his book hadn't been published in France yet, because the female lead A (Delphine Seyrig) had studied with Lee Strasberg in the United States. Seyrig did ruin one of Resnais' plans unexpectedly. He wanted her to have her hair cut similar to Louise Brooks' look in Pandora's Box, but she trimmed it after a break ruining any chance for that. The collaboration between Resnais and Robbe-Grillet only had one disagreement — over what did happen last year between A and X (Giorgio Albertazzi). The novelist scripted the encounter as a rape, but Resnais hated that idea, but everything in the movie plays with time and memory. "To me it was a simple love story, so I like to express the emotional love, precisely the opposite of the idea of a rape. I don't know how the film is interpreted, but I know my mind when I shot it," Resnais says. As I perused many reviews of the film for my larger question, I found a couple that connected the film to Hitchcock's Vertigo. Now, I don't know whether Resnais has mentioned this a lot, but he admits its influence in the DVD interview, even acknowledging that somewhere in the film you might spot a shadow of Hitch, though I couldn't spot it. "If you glimpse Hitchcock's profile in the film, it's an homage, a friendly wink of the eye, a way of saying to Hitch if he saw the film, 'We love you,'" Resnais tells Thomas. Those French New Wave filmmakers. (You know how much this film hypnotizes me? I decided to Google search for the Hitch image and discovered I had made a screenshot of it and NOT realized it. It will be in the second post.) As for the memory of what happened, it's as good as time as any for the other clip.Since he's prominent at the end of the second clip, I probably should point out the film's third main character (main as he received a letter designation). The tall, gaunt-looking man standing at the table playing a game has been given the moniker M and presumably is A's
husband. The actor Sacha Pitoëff portrays M. Last Year in Marienbad technically proved to be somewhat of a bridge between nuts-and-bolts moviemaking in France as well. While even detractors would find it hard to make a case against the beauty of Sacha Vierny's black-and-white cinematography, the actual camera operator, Philippe Brun, insisted on using the old-style hand-cranked camera, especially impressive considering the nearly constant movement of those shots. Brun wasn't an old timer either — Marienbad marked his third film as a camera operator, though he served as a cinematographer on two films in the 1950s. He's remained a camera operator through 1991's Impromptu and included such classics as Buñuel's Belle de Jour, Jean-Pierre Melville's Army of Shadows, Costa-Gavras' Missing and Bertrand Tavernier's A Sunday in the Country. Widescreen was a rarity in French films in 1960 and in order to get the look that Resnais wanted, they created their own lenses that were cut so both foreground and background stayed in focus
simultaneously. Their modifications also allowed them to shoot split screens within the camera itself. Two of the film's most famous sequences took amazing planning. The classic room of mirror sequence required two days of rehearsals before actual shooting. The long corridor sequence looks as if it were one continuous tracking shot but they filmed it in three separate sections and at three different locations months apart. Because Resnais wanted the baroque look for the hotel and not much of that style of architecture existed in France, Marienbad filmed largely "mostly at the Nymphenburg Palace in Munich, with additional scenes at the Schleissheim Palace just outside the city," according to page five of press notes compiled by Rialto Pictures for a re-release of the film. Interesting enough, since much filming took place in Germany, one of the second assistant directors happened to be Volker Schlöndorff, who would go on to direct films such as The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, The Tin Drum and The Handmaid's Tale. Though she took no credit, Coco
Chanel designed the film's costumes, the first film she had done that for since Jean Renoir's The Rules of the Game. When they finished the film and screened it for the first time, Resnais says in the interview, the first audience openly mocked it for nearly the first half (and at 93 minutes long, there wouldn't be much left), but he tells Thomas that eventually the audience grew quiet as the film won them over. At the end, it received a standing ovation. That seems perfectly understandable to me. As much as I adore the film, I also can appreciate the potshots. That's why it's such a puzzling film for me. They submitted it to the Cannes Film Festival but (and this I find utterly ridiculous), the festival refused to accept Marienbad unless they dubbed all the dialogue of Italian actor Giorgio Albertazzi (X) with a French actor's voice. Resnais and his producers refused. The Venice Film Festival accepted it and it won the Golden Lion for 1961. It also received the best film prize that year from the French Syndicate of Critics. As it opened elsewhere in 1962, it joined 17 other nominees up for the BAFTA for best film from any source including Truffaut's Jules and Jim, Bergman's Through a Glass, Darkly, The Manchurian Candidate and West Side Story, though all lost to Lawrence of Arabia. The Oscars nominated it for best story and screenplay written directly for the screen and look at what kind of nominees joined Marienbad back then: Divorce — Italian Style, Freud, That Touch of Mink and Through a Glass Darkly. Three foreign films, a John Huston-directed biopic and one piece of fluff but no best picture nominees and certainly no piece of crap such as a Bridesmaids. Imagine that today. Unfortunately, Divorce — Italian Style, a fairly lame foreign comedy, won.It can't be an accident that Coco Chanel provides a concrete link between Last Year at Marienbad and my favorite film of all time, The Rules of the Game, because I'd thought that subconsciously, though the two films couldn't be more different, that part of the appeal of Marienbad for me came from the large gathering at its hotel reminding me of the weekend gathering at the Marquis' chateau for Andre in Rules. In a piece Kael wrote on Rules, which she loved, that I re-read while searching for her Marienbad references, that she speculated that Resnais used Rules subliminally and that's why so many embraced it. For my part, the eerie feel Resnais creates with those long trips down seemingly endless corridors couldn't help but put me in mind of David Lynch and the halls of the high school, the hospital, the sheriff's station, the Great Northern, etc., in Twin Peaks. Though by and large I'm a Lynch fan, I found it dispiriting to read this by Mark Harris in The New York Times ahead of a two-week engagement of Marienbad in January 2008:
The people who walked out (literally) of INLAND EMPIRE, David Lynch’s Marienbad-influenced 2006 film, saying 'What was that all about?' will find similar though more elegantly concise cause for discomfort here.
What the hell? I scanned about the Web and found that Harris' words weren't isolated ones. I may be puzzled as to the hold that Marienbad has on me, but I'm not confused at all as to why I found INLAND EMPIRE to be an inexplicable mess. In comparison to Lynch's film, Marienbad plays as a rather conventional story about a love triangle. There lies why this post prompted my contemplation and, more
importantly, why these issues deserve a separate forum. The influence of Last Year at Marienbad has been acknowledged by some filmmakers, seen by even more people. In Bergman's works starting with The Silence and stretching through Persona and beyond, it's been spotted. Everyone recognizes the signs in Kubrick's take on The Shining. It's set in a hotel after all. I wonder if anyone has spotted signs in the film of Neil Simon's Plaza Suite. (I know — they're referring to Kubrick's hallway shots, not the fact it took place in a hotel. Can't a fella make a joke? You all are way too Malickserious.) Some also think Kubrick sneaked some homage into the later scenes of 2001. Peter Greenaway did go on the record admitting its influence on his work. If you want to believe the list on the Inaccurate Movie Database, it popped up in an episode of I Dream of Jeannie. I do recall Don Draper watching Marienbad in the second season of Mad Men. The list even claims it influenced a video game.Now that would be appropriate. I may not attempt to snap a lid on this movie with an all-encompassing theory as to its meaning as if I was sealing it in Tupperware, but games play a key part of Marienbad. That is obvious. The characters play all sorts of games, the kind you do for fun and the type you do to toy with people. "If you can't lose, it's not a game," X tells M when challenged to a game that M says
he always wins. Within the walls of that hotel, everyone plays and everything gets debated. In a way, perhaps I'm too quick to declare INLAND EMPIRE incompatible with Marienbad when the headline I posted on my review of Lynch's film was "Film as nonsequitur" and Marienbad really runs on nonsequiturs. Anyone who knows me personally realize that my entire life I've been a fan on nonsequiturs, though mine usually lean to the comical. Those loopy lines you would hear in an Airplane! or Police Squad! or even Twin Peaks, but Resnais wasn't going for laughs — was he? I took very few notes from the film itself, but most were just lines that struck my fancy such as "These silences to which you confine me are worse than death. These days we spend here side by side are worse than death. We're like coffins lying side by side in a frozen garden." Did I find that profound or funny? In Kael's brief mention of the film in 5,001 Nights at the Movies, she refers to that very line after calling the characters "a tony variant of the undead of vampire movies." There will be time for that in the next post. Today, I celebrate Last Year at Marienbad neither for its story nor its message, its acting nor its dialogue. I celebrate it simply for its pure cinematic beauty, its mystical power to transfix, its fluid imagery, its ability to be repetitive without becoming redundant and its unusual use of sounds. I never even brought up the organ.
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Labels: 60s, Antonioni, Criticism, Foreign, Godard, Hitchcock, Ingmar Bergman, Kael, Kubrick, Lynch, Mad Men, Movie Tributes, Ray Top 100, Renoir, Resnais, Truffaut, Twin Peaks, von Trier
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