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Sunday, July 18, 2004Alfie
1966, England. Starring Michael Caine, Shelley Winters, Millicent Martin, Julia Foster, Jane Asher, Shirley Anne Field, Vivien Merchant, Eleanor Bron, Denholm Elliott, Alfie Bass, Graham Stark, Murray Melvin, Sydney Tafler. Directed by Lewis Gilbert. Available on DVD from Amazon
Something that was a little more successful at seeming hip in more or less the same era is 1966's biting British comedy Alfie, though I guess one should point out that the switch from 1966 to 1967 is one of those points in history where almost everything seems to change within a year. Still, considering Elvis was still cavorting with beatniks as late as 1967, we can allow a bit of wiggle room for our social epochs. If Easy Come, Easy Go was a breezy, almost absurdist slapstick comedy look at a counter culture, then Alfie is a much meaner, critical, and demanding comedy about a different culture, this time England in the swingin 1960s -- but don't let that or other people's misguided comments fool you. This is no movie about swinging London. It is, in fact, very much the opposite, and our hero is far away from the wild, carefree swingers of Carnaby Street. Michael Caine, still fresh into his career as a leading man (despite many films prior to this, 1965's utterly superb Ipcress File was his first real leading role), stars as the titular character, a working class playboy who uses his considerable charms and charisma to seduce, use, and sometimes destroy a number of women. To relate it to some of the previous movies in this Parade, he's sort of the male interpretation of Brigitte Bardot's character in And God Created Woman. More malicious and deliberate in what he does and how he uses women, but also shockingly naïve about the negative consequences of what he does. "I don't mean to hurt people," he says in one scene, to which his friend responds, "But you do." Alfie's goals in life are simple. Seduce a woman, use her to get household chores done, maybe if she has money then buy him some sharp clothes or a new Rolls Royce, then ditch her as soon as he grows tired of her or can't think of another use for her. He's nasty, selfish, mean, and yet played by Michael Caine in a way that is so disarming and devilishly charismatic that you can't help but smile at him, even as you're thoroughly disgusted by what he's doing to the people around him. Caine is astounding in his ability to make you understand how it is he's able to pull of the things he does, how he's able to make the women he targets fall for him. Again, in that sense, he has a lot in common with Bardot's And God Created Woman, though this film is infinitely superior to hers. Making it even easier to like Alfie even when he's being completely unsympathetic and despicable is the film's approach of having its lead character address the camera and b y virtue the audience directly. In these asides, he is frank, naïve, and trusting. He never comes across as malevolent; it's as if he totally lacks the part of his brain that can discern good from atrocious behavior. He's almost childlike even during the nastiest of indiscretions. And he's also frequently quite funny in his observations. He is, I suppose, that person everyone knows, the one you hesitate to call a friend, who constantly does things -especially in relationships - that you find utterly reprehensible. Yet there is something about him that is funny, maybe even a bit pathetic, and that makes you keep him around. There are also little things he does that make him out to be less of a cad than he is. He's not the type to demand perfection in a woman, for instance, or profound physical beauty. Most of the women he pursues are not bad looking, but few of them are picture-perfect. "But I find I'm quite willing to overlook the odd blemish in a woman," he says to us, "providing she's got something to make up for it. Well, that's what we're all here for, innit - to help each other out in this life?" Still, when it comes to dealing responsibly with emotions beyond his own, Alfie is thoroughly unlikable. When he chases away the redheaded Annie and realizes he's made a mistake, it isn't because he's guilty over having crushed her feelings or used her. He's thinking about himself and his own comfort and feelings. When he gets an older married woman pregnant (a friend's wife, no less) and has to help her take care of the accident, the only way he can think of to deal with the situation, one that would make him face someone else's pain, is to take off for a walk and get away from things for a while. His return results in one of the film's most powerful dramatic moments, however. And when he finally gets his comeuppance of sorts when his relationship with the older, wiser, and just as cynical Ruby is brought into focus, we wonder if he's come to some sort of realization about what he does to others, or if he's just feeling sorry for himself. He's not so much regretful or remorseful as he is bewildered byt he fact that what he thought was his common-sense, no-nonsense approach to sex and relationships in the midsts of the sexual revolution ended up going so terribly awry for him. He simply doesn't understand what went wrong, and so seems doomed to wander around in his confused and lonely state.
The approach to Alfie is the same approach that would make Michael Caine an icon. He's not, as I said, a swinging hipster. He dresses sharp but never outrageous, and he lives in a typical, modest, slightly cluttered and dingy apartment that reminds me quite a lot of Harry Palmer's apartment in The Ipcress File. In short, it looks like an actual apartment, like something where someone would actually live rather than like a pop-art experiment. The city he inhabits is similarly blue collar. Truck drivers and hustlers and lost young women and pubs. No wild orgies or clubs full of convulsing go-go girls in psychedelic body paint. Alfie lives, more or less, in the real world, making the movie a pretty stark reaction to the tendency in films of the era to really indulge - and often over-indulge - in the most hyperbolic aspects of underground culture. Again, I can't help but draw a comparison to Michael Caine's previous role of beleaguered British spy Harry Palmer in The Ipcress File, a movie made in response to the growing fantastic jet-set elements of the James Bond films (by Bond producer Harry Saltzman, no less) and determined squarely to place its spy in a realistic but no less intriguing world of having to fill out forms, deal with bureaucracy, and do the grocery shopping. Perhaps not coincidentally, Alfie director Lewis Gilbert would go on to direct James Bond films You Only Live Twice in 1969, The Spy Who Loved Me in '77, and the most fantastical and overblown of all James Bonds to date, 1979's Moonraker. But here he and the story keep things firmly planted in reality, and this being a movie based on a play, characters and dialogue rule the day. Though beautifully shot, Alfie doesn't engage in any of the wild avant garde approaches to set and shot that were reflected in contemporaries like Blow Up. Where as that film focuses primarily on a single unlikeable, somewhat misogynistic lead character who says almost nothing and drifts through a highly stylized and almost dreamlike vision of London, Alfie takes the same sort of character in exactly the opposite direction on a similar journey for some meaning in life. In Blow Up, the quest was primarily artistic. For Alfie, his search is very much concrete and real world, just as his London looks like an actual city and not a fanciful interpretation of a city. Like Thomas in Blow Up, he seeks and fails to find comfort and fulfillment in material wealth and so wanders from one exploit to the next, desperate to keep himself rational and in control of a life that is slipping beyond his ability to guide.
Of course, central to the film is its examination of women and, more accurately, ever-evolving male attitudes toward women. It goes about the business of this discussion without ever relying on the obvious. The women in the story often aren't much better people than Alfie, too quick to allow themselves to be taken for a ride and too immature to responsibly handle their own lives. Alfie, likewise, is never so thoroughly demonized so as to become some cartoon character sketch of a vile and evil man. He's basically a regular Joe who just treats women poorly, not even so much because he doesn't like them as because he's just more interested in getting whatever he wants. Sexually, it's most potent stabd seems to be not at the sexist adventures of its title character, but instead at the sexual revolution notion, and indeed one of the pirmary notions of the 1960s, that if it feels good, do it and never mind the consquences. Such an attitude was born partially out of reaction to an era as sexualyl and morally repressive as the 1950s (in England, no less!), under the understanding of Newton's law that every action results in an equal and opposite reaction. The harder you repress a population, the wilder the counter-culture will be (look at the current Japanese underground as a recent example). The attitude also comes partially fromt he belief, fostered by Cold War paranoia and stoked byt he fires of social and political upheaval throughout the world, that we needn't worry about anything, because the world will be ending pretty soon. Alfie's question, then, becomes, "Okay, so if the world doesn't end, what are you going to do then?" In this sense, Alfie is less a critique of sexism and gender than it is a criticism of the emerging lack of responsibility in the youth of the nation - and this, my friends, is something we've seen come to frightening fruition in recent years, something that keeps Alfie disturbingly relevant nearly forty years after its initial release. Because Blow Up was an art film and Alfie is a more logical character drama, the resolution of the film is more concrete. Alfie finds to his horror that he might actually be falling for one of his "birds," an attractive redhead he picks up in a roadside diner. His way of dealing with these feelings is, of course, to lash out at her. At the same time, he's feeling like he might want to settle down with a buxom, wild older woman played by Shelly Winters. Unlike the younger women, she's never taken in by Alfie's act but likes to have flings with him anyway. Naturally, just as Alfie is coming to think that this more seasoned, experienced, and less idealistic sort of woman might really be the dame for him, everything he's ever done is sort of turned back on him. Eventually, he turns to us and explains that through his use of women, he got money, sharp clothes, good meals, and even a car. "But I ain't got me peace of mind, "concludes Alfie, "and if you ain't got that, you ain't got nothing. I dunno. It seems to me if they ain't got you one way they've got you another. So what's the answer? That's what I keep asking myself - what's it all about? Know what I mean?" Caine is at his best here. He's equal parts destroyer of women and genuinely innocent in regards to any knowledge regarding the repercussions of what he does. "My understanding of women only goes as far as the pleasure. When it comes to the pain I'm like any other bloke - I don't want to know." The dialogue with which he works, both when interacting to other characters as well as when speaking directly to the audience - crackles with wit without ever sounding the least bit stilted or false. As per Caine's calling card, he brings a down-to-earth sensibility to the character and what he says, so nothing that comes out of Alfie's mouth ever seems scripted or unrealistic. It's the sort of talk you'd expect from an actual bloke. Not always smart, sometimes hovering on the verge of insight without ever letting Alfie come to a full-fledged revelation. Caine's supporting cast is up to his standard as well, especially Shelly Winters as the playful older female match for Alfie. Despite the tidier wrap-up than the more oblique Blow Up, Alfie still leaves you with plenty of questions and ideas to ponder. It never says anything as patronizing as "Alas, if only I'd settled down and been good!" It's unclear exactly what lesson Alfie has learned, if he's learned anything at all, and in the end he's still just thinking about himself. Will he be different from now on, or is his attitude toward women so stunted that he's hopeless? The answer is less important than the question. Labels: Drama, Netflix Diary, Stars: Michael Caine, Year: 1966 posted by Keith at 11:18 PM | 0 Comments Friday, July 16, 2004And God Created Woman
1956, France. Starring Brigitte Bardot, Curd Jürgens, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Jane Marken, Jean Tissier, Isabelle Corey, Jacqueline Ventura, Jacques Ciron, Paul Faivre, Jany Mourey, Philippe Grenier, Jean Lefebvre, Leopoldo Francés, Jean Toscano, Marie Glory. Directed by Roger Vadim. Available on DVD from Amazon
After the dullness of the supposed erotic celebration that was Embrace the Darkness 2, I thought it might be nice to delve into a film that actually is erotic, and accomplishes this feat without any nudity at all, save for one shot of a female derriere in profile. That said derriere belongs to one Brigitte Bardot certainly doesn't hurt matters, unless you were one of the censors or ratings board members being dutifully outraged that such a scandalous film should ever even attempt to gain distribution in the good 'ol wholesome United States of America. This sun-drenched French production, one of the first for that country shot in color and scope, is famous - or notorious, if you prefer -- for several reasons. For starters, it is the film that launched the career of Roger Vadim, a member of the French new wave in cinema who looked at his films as more of a fashion and art design show than as a way to actually tell a story. His tendency to romance beautiful women, them feature them in his films wearing as little as he could get away with, is among his many great contributions to global society. And here, in his debut film, he decided to give the world Brigitte Bardot. I said when I reviewed the final Vadim-Bardot collaboration the dreary-yet-intriguing Don Juan (Or if Don Juan were a Woman), that a film of that sorry caliber was not the proper place to discuss the life and times of Brigitte Bardot, that she deserved something a little more impressive. Well, you can't find a much better place to discuss her than here, the film that launched her to superstardom. She had been working in film since 1952, but this was the one that turned her into the endearing cinematic icon she would become. She started out training in music and dance but quickly moved into modeling and, as seems to often be the case, film. During the first year of her film career she met Vadim, and they planned to wed just as soon as it was legal (she was 17 at the time). Hey, it was France after all. Their marriage only lasted five years. Vadim was a legendary womanizer, after all, and a young Jane Fonda was waiting to become his next muse. But the Bardot juggernaut was rolling, and she became a huge hit in America despite remaining a wholly French performer. Her photos and dubbed movies created a sensation and outraged Puritanical thinkers who were shocked at the level of sauciness her films often displayed. Yeah, that old chestnut. Will grumpy, uptight American blowhards ever get tired of being shocked and outraged at everything? One can't help but be reminded of the wardrobe fiasco at the Super Bowl, or just a day or two before I sat down to write this, the disgust and dismay on behalf of America that Whoopie Goldberg was perverse enough to make jokes about the Bush and Dick ticket for 2004. So indulge, if you will, for just a moment as I dip into this a bit deeper for a paragraph or two. This overblown reaction to everything, this desperate attempt from so many people to seem shocked and outraged by everything just so they can create a scandal or a sensation where none exists, is perhaps one of my least favorite things about the character of my country. It would be different if the shock was ever genuine, but no, it's always something concocted purely to make waves in the media, who being utterly and fantastically idiotic and useless and an insult to the entire history of journalism, lap it up like mad dogs (if, indeed, mad dogs lap things up more fervently than regular dogs. You know what I mean). And lest you think I'm aiming my criticism purely at "the Conservative right," let me throw into the ring that colossally moronic parade of indignation that was parades through the Left simply because Dick Cheney told someone to go fuck themselves, or way back when G.W. called a NY Times reporter an asshole. Or any of the countless times some innocuous something or other sends a money-hungry lawyer into fits of hysteria because it might offend someone somewhere, possibly.
It all really irritates me and makes me want to move to France. Well, no, let's not be drastic. Sweden, maybe, or Italy or The Netherlands. I'd visit France, though. And what irritates me even more than the actual practice is that no one in the media ever calls anyone on the astoundingly obvious hypocrisy. Make that, no one in the media ever calls anyone on anything, no matter how obvious the lie, contradiction, or hypocrisy. If Whoopie Goldberg (why would anyone be listening to her anyway) makes a Bush joke, as if those Bush and Dick jokes were something new, it's an outrage that signals the moral collapse of America and lets the terrorists win. But Cheney telling someone to fuck themselves on the floor of the Senate is just fiery gusto to be applauded. And to complete the chain, Cheney hurling out F-bombs in the Senate is a signal of the raging decay of the American moral fiber, but John Kerry hurling the same in various print interviews in order to seem "hip" is just a sign of how hip the Frankenstein monster from Massachusetts is. Get the picture? Man alive, it's enough to send me into fits of moral outrage. Throw into this bubbling cauldron America's curious attitudes about sex, and everything really is enough to make me want to relocate, and brother before you write me off as some crazy America-hating hippie, let me be the first to tell ya I love this country almost as much as I hate hippies. It's what we're doing to it, and what we're letting it become, that chaffs me. We live now in a society where sexuality comes in two flavors: either we're totally repressed or we're totally pornographic. That middle ground where things are playful and fun and teasing and healthy seems to have been eliminated from our concept of sex. We're either uptight moral watchdogs fuming over some pop star's boob or we're ten-year-olds in thongs freak dancing in some lewd video full of sweaty strippers and guys in needlessly baggy trousers. We're a nation of extremes growing ever further apart, even though in reality, I would bet most people are somewhere in the middle wishing the nutjobs on either edge would just shut the hell up. But that's not going to happen, and as long as the middle doesn't speak up and increase the noise even more, we just have to endure the crazies around us and hope that they keep canceling each other out as we remind ourselves most of them don't even believe what they're screaming about. They're just trying to get more time on television. Perish the notion that, hey, you can be sexy without being whorish, and you can be sexual without having to be pornographic. And incidentally, if you stop raging against this or that on national TV, a lot less people would probably be seeking it out. We're becoming half old-style Puritan America and half Germany, where you have to actually cook and eat someone while you are having sex with them before anyone gets surprised. So what does any of this have to do with Brigitte Bardot, Roger Vadim, and And God Created Woman? Well, it's that same old story, though I guess it was newer in 1956 than it is now, but it was still pretty old even then. The film opens with a playful nude profile of BB as she sunbathes amid sheets of flapping laundry. This is back when people hung things out on lines to dry, you know. This was pushing what you could show in any film that wasn't playing in the grindhouse and featuring a plotline about an escaped gorilla that terrorizes a nudist colony, but the French seemed to roll with it. Say what you will about their snootiness or their lack of appreciation for all those wars we helped them out with -- just as they helped us out with some of ours, by the way. If it weren't for us, the French would all be speaking German today, and if it weren't for the French, us Americans would all be speaking English. Anyway, say what you will about the French. At least they know not to get totally outraged at something like a naked butt. That could be their national motto. When the film sought release in the United States, however, we trotted out our usual shock and outrage. Or rather, the handful of cranky sons of bitches in charge of such things trotted it out on our behalf without ever stopping to inquire as to whether the greater portion of America was actually going to be as offended as they were telling us we were. But even more so than a glimpse of Bardot's behind, the powers in charge of national outrage were outraged, it seems, simply by the naked sensuality in the film, even though it wasn't accompanied by actual nakedness, and by the open depiction of a woman who is at ease with her sexuality, her own body, and not prone to play the demure and loyal housewife. It seems, almost, that Vadim's picture was made specifically for this sort of reaction. It is the story of a sexually liberated woman named Juliete who is perfectly nice and friendly but, because of her tendency to do things like mambo with them colored folks, is considered a trollop by the small-minded villagers around her. Conversely, the men in the film are all highly regarded and can do no wrong because they are successful and society-minded men, never mind how rotten they may actually be. Those transgressions can be forgiven since they are men, and well-dressed men at that.
Compounding Juliete's problem is that she is an orphan adopted by a stern couple that doesn't approve of her free spiritedness and are planning to send her back to the orphanage unless she settles down and gets married. I didn't know you could send grown adults back to the orphanage, but I guess there're a lot of things I don't know. She eventually finds a man she could love, but he treats her like a one-night stand and takes off the next day. His younger, more sensitive brother takes pity on her and falls in love, and eventually the two are married against the wishes of nearly everyone. Things get more complex with a wealthy shipping magnate takes an interest in her as well, and even more complicated when the older brother returns with romance on his mind. Although the men think of Juliete as a "destroyer of men," Vadim's film is positively on the side of the heroine. She's the victim not just of opportunistic men, but also of the backward attitudes of those around her in, ironically, St. Tropez. Though the film is somewhat sympathetic to Juliete, she is not without her faults. She is unable to remain faithful to her husband, though you could say this was simply because she was more or less forced intot he marriage by circumstance. She seems less malevolent than she is simply innocent and ignorant of the fact that she, as a woman, is expected to do anything other than behave like the men around her, which means she sould be free to flirt and sleep with whomever she wants. She comes across at times and thoughtless and impetuous, sometimes selfish, and as unable to control herself as the men around her. Liek them, she wants to disregard any responsibility she should take for her own actions. All of them deserve a good kick in the bum to wake them up. The only difference between the men and Juliete is they are older, supposedly stronger, and should know better. It's not her fault they turn into a bunch of leering goons every time she comes around. It became difficult, if not impossible, to separate the movie from the controversy it caused. Well, it's been a few years since 1956, so it's easier now to look at the film on its own merits, though it certainly gets points still for having caused such a stir. And separate from said controversy, it's still an enjoyable film for me. Vadim would become famous for his art design and composition, and though this film lacks the eye-popping op-art madness of films like Barbarella, it's still supremely gorgeous. Vadim takes full advantage of color and the richness of the lush Mediterranean setting. He alternates between painfully composed art shots and wild naturalism, using the wide scope format to its fullest to convey a sense of serene beauty and haunting desolation amid the color-drenched French seaside. Of course, let's not kid ourselves, since this is a Vadim picture. It is a serviceable psycho-sexual drama, but like most of his films, it's rather sloppy in the narrative department and wanders without a care between art and exploitation. The plot is breezy at its heaviest, and the few times it attempts to inject serious drama into the proceedings are laughable. It's unevenly paced and drags in spots, but I'm partial to a slower film these days anyway. And of course, every single reviewer will refer to the formerly shocking scenes like the bare bottom or the mambo finale as "rather tame by today's standards," which has always been a phrase that I don't like. Can't say exactly why, other than to relate it to my even more fervent distaste for the "looks dated" criticism. Maybe it's because it just seems stupid. Okay, we get it. Standards have changed in the past half a century. That's not exactly a news flash. Personally, I think this film remains plenty daring and sexy, if not for what it shows then certainly for what it has to say. The "woman in touch with her sexuality" line has been trotted out countless times since this film as if it remains something new, daring, or unique. It's much more enjoyable to go back to a film where it was new, daring, and unique. What the film manages to do with its daring, however, is where the wheels start to come off.
The film seems confused about what to do with its theme and often comes across as reactionary as it is progressive. It seems unable to make up its mind whether it wants to stick by Bardot's character or pull the ol' morality tale ending and teach us all a valuable lesson about the wanton ways of womanhood. If it seems hesitant to support the woman, it's also hesitant to condemn the men, resulting in a film full of mixed messages. Rather than try to decipher the message the film itself seems unable to bring into focus, it's bets to look at the film as something of a time capsule, of masculinity ont he cusp of a new era trying to come to grips with a new breed of woman it fears and cannot fully comprehend. It doesn't help that the dialogue is often campy and stilted. Vadim was never one for a stellar script, after all. But Brigitte is the main attraction, and she truly shines here in a film that could almost be summarized as a series of provocative postcards, or as a love letter to the form of Brigitte Bardot. She's playful, charismatic, and hints at a touch of devilishness. It is quite easy to understand why the men around her are willing to throw their lives into disarray (and then blame it on her) for her affections. She is hypnotic and possessed of a quality few women have been able to convey onscreen. She is also astounding to behold. Anyone who doesn't quite understand why so many people went ga-ga over her should check her out here as she blossoms into full-fledged bombshell status. Her supporting cast is quite good too, including a turn by future James Bond villain, Curd Jurgens, here as the charming older captain of industry Carradine and later in The Spy Who Loved Me giving Roger Moore and Barbara Bach a hard time. But everyone else pales in comparison to BB, who was one of the few mode-turned-actress sex kitten types with some actual acting ability behind the killer body and pout to die for. Her mambo madness during the film's finale is a sight to behold, that's for sure.
Ultimately, the film's aspirations slightly outreach its ability to deliver, but we're left, if nothing else, at least with a film that had aspirations and looks damn good while trying to attain them. Bardot is stunning, the cinematography is divine, and the story may not be perfect, but it's still a satisfying film for me. Is it art or cheap titillation? Well, does it really even matter? Is there a difference? As I've always maintained, what counts in a film, and with any sort of medium isn't whether or not some body of strangers pronounces it as "art" or as "important." What matters is, "did you enjoy it?" and "did it entertain or move you?" And you know, I did and it did, and that's that. Like any Roger Vadim film it's flawed, and things really start to fall apart the closer you examine the confusing messages behind the pretty pictures and see a movie that manages to be sexy, sexist, and sexually liberating all at once, that somehow is pro- and anti-feminist at the same time. In the end, what you have to remember is that this train wreck of moral messages is simply more proof that even at the beginning of his career, Vadim was far more interested in the image than the story. And God Created Woman emerges, some decades after the initial splash, as something of a curiosity piece. An exploitation film wrapped in a art film -- something that would become Vadim's trademark. You can't necessarily take it seriously, but that's probably for the best. If you did, it would just make your head spin. Bardot would go on a spectacular career full of many bad movies and a few more good ones. Her marriage to Vadim crumbled shortly after the completion of this film. In the end, the fact that she was reportedly a rather kind and generous person got the better of her, and relentless tabloid attention (you didn't think those were new inventions, did you), crazed fans breaking into her home, and ultimately demonization simply for the fact that was sexy and willing to show the fact off, drove her to the brink of a breakdown. She retired from film in the early 1970s and did her best to disappear entirely from the public eye, eventually becoming active in the fight for animal rights. Vadim would reunite with her for her final picture, and then in 1988 go on to remake/rewrite And God Created Woman with Rebecca DeMornay in the lead. Labels: Country: France, Director: Roger Vadim, Drama, Netflix Diary, Stars: Brigette Bardot, Year: 1956 posted by Keith at 10:55 PM | 0 Comments Monday, July 12, 2004Blow Up
UK/Italy, 1966. Starring David Hemmings, Vanessa Redgrave, Sarah Miles, John Castle, Jane Birkin, Gillian Hills, Peter Bowles, Veruschka von Lehndorff, Julian Chagrin, Claude Chagrin. Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni. Available on DVD from Amazon
There's a reason, however misguided, that we here at Teleport City have always avoided reviewing films like Blow Up, and as I explained in the preamble for this whole viewing journal experiment, that's part of the reason we are now doing what we're doing. The reason, as detailed there, was because films like this have so much said about them, spark so much conversation, that I always felt like you didn't need us chiming in as well, regardless of how terribly charming and witty we may be. What would we have to say that hasn't already been said and been said better? Discussing a movie like this is redundant, or so I thought. I reconsidered that position, however, and found it to be wholly misguided, especially these days. That was brought into crystal clear focus a few days ago when driving back from a hiking trip up to the White Mountains in New Hampshire (read about that elsewhere on the site!), I subjected myself to a brainless tirade from some talk radio nobody who, on the day of Marlon Brando's death announcement, insisted that he wasn't the greatest actor of his, the previous, and the next generation. The opinion is not in itself offensive to me. I don't think of Brando as the greatest actor who ever lived, either, though I do have a pretty high appreciation of him. What was offensive about what this guy said - and incidentally, he just kept repeating himself over and over and saying the same thing because, like all talk radio personalities, he doesn't actually have anything to say - was that Brando wasn't the greatest actor on account of his films are too weird and, with the exception of Godfather and Apocalypse Now, won't be remembered or seen by anyone younger than the current generation of thirty-somethings. And there in lies the heinous claim: that something or someone can't be considered great simply because modern teenagers aren't going to be interested in it. Yep, if the same people who make Britney Spears and boot rap popular don't appreciate your work, then it can't possibly be good. If Brando, or Jimmy Cagney, or any number of famous people aren't held in high esteem by people who recently appeared in a Girls Gone Wild video, then there can't possibly be any merit in the work. But rather than pontificate on the implications of what this radio guy said, especially since in all honesty he was probably just trying to get a rise out of people and get them to call in to cover the fact that he was just repeating the same couple of sentences over and over until I finally got bored to tears and just put in a Les Baxter CD, I thought we'd look at the one sliver of truth in what he was saying: that "kids these days" have no appreciation for or even knowledge of anything beyond what was made in the past few years, and most of them have no interest in investigating things further. Obviously, if you are here and have made it this far into my rambling nonsense, you can't be accused of not wanting to investigate things further. You're obviously not the typical member of young society that is being put under the microscope, though even you may find that you've been sorely lacking in the drive to delve into the past. That's no condemnation. After all, the goal again of this journal is to give me a public forum to discuss films that we might not discuss otherwise, and to give you a first hand account of my effort to plug the holes in my own cinematic education. So here we are, and what I realized is that by ignoring some older acclaimed films simply because they were acclaimed some decades ago, we were doing a disservice to our readers - an even greater disservice than the one we do simply by inflicting our writing on you. Although as someone in his thirties I can no longer set myself up as a credible spokesman for "the youth," I do know that Teleport City has a lot of readers in college, and more than a few who are still in high school. If they are here and ignorant of a lot of great films from the past, it's not because of a lack of interest or intelligence on their part; it' simply a lack of exposure. You can't know to try a certain film if no one ever tells you about it, and we were so busy reviewing Filipino midget spy films that we didn't realize no one was bothering with "the classics," which have been all but forgotten by the generations below my own, and by and large by my own generation as well.
And as an aside, nothing irritates me more than when someone's chief complaint about a film is that it "looks dated." This one truly baffles me. Only an utter buffoon couldn't understand or relate to a good movie simply because the clothing is from a different decade, or the music is old, or the style of filmmaking is not what is currently expected. I expect more from myself as a viewer than to be completely coddled and nestled into the safety of a film that looks exactly like what is currently surrounding me, and if I'm ever thrown for a loop simply because some of the lads have shaggy Beatles haircuts, then I figure I'll just hang it all up, grow a big beard with owls living in it, and go live in the mountains. Which brings us, in our usual roundabout way, to Blow Up. I wish I could be cool and say I'd seen this movie plenty of times before. It is considered to be one of the great important films of the 1960s, and someone who studied film, makes it his hobby, and has a love affair with all things swingin' sixties ought to know the movie inside and out. But truth be told, the first time I'd ever seen it was when I sat down to watch it for this review. That's going to be the case for a lot of the films that show up here from now on. Even with that mission in place, assembling thoughts around a film like this is daunting. It's been a long time since I had to try and write seriously about a serious film, or as the case may be, humorously about a serious film. And Blow Up is one of those films that is considered to be everything from a masterpiece to a ground-breaking avant-garde piece of art, not to mention "overrated" and "confusing." The last adjective I dismiss entirely, simply because it is the one people so often employ to criticize a film that challenges them or doesn't allow itself to be easily explained. It is the insult of the lazy and, for my money, is no better than people who think "it rocks" or "it sucks" is viable commentary on a film. I would agree that the movie is both a masterpiece and an avant-garde work of art, and I would also agree that, as is almost always the case with works of art and masterpieces, it is indeed overrated, though only ever so slightly and simply because much of the praise aimed at the film has been so hyperbolic. On the surface, Blow Up is a simple enough film about a fashion photographer who is popular among London's hipster mod crowd. While wandering through a park snapping candid shots of people to complete a photo book upon which he is working, he accidentally photographs a murder, though even he himself doesn't realize this until much later when a frantic woman from the photos shows up demanding he turn the film over to her. This is the plot that serves as the basic description for the film in many places, but frankly, anyone who goes in expecting a murder mystery or thriller because of it is going to be either pleasantly surprised or severely disappointed. The murder is much less of the film, and everything else is much more. David Hemmings stars as our photographer, Thomas. Though popular and seemingly successful, his life seems directionless and shallow. When he's not earning a living shooting emaciated waifs for fashion spreads, he wanders the streets of London in search of art with some sort of meaning. He never finds it, or really, seems to look particularly hard. Similar people, artists who seem to have no meaning or desire for meaning in what they do, surround him. Blow Up paints a stark picture of the so-called swingin' generation. Whereas it was and still is often portrayed as full of wild abandon, freedom, color, cuteness, and blossoming daring and adventure, director Antonioni paints it more as an aftermath. The city is washed out and gray. The hipster denizens often verge on a catatonic state, engaged in the excesses of freedom and youthful rebellion without actually enjoying any of them. They are listless, jaded, and look like their ten days into a two-week heroin binge. The women adorn themselves in cute and sexy mod fashion, but their bodies are waifish, bony, unhealthy and unattractive. Everyone looks tired, disinterested, and glum. Thomas stands at the center of it all, drifting in and out of one excess after another until finally this mystery in the park ignites in him a fire that none of swingin' London's decadent nightlife and counter-culture can match. His curiosity sparked by the strange woman's desperate plea to have the film he shot, Thomas begins scrutinizing the photos in ways he never would have otherwise. What looks at first to be a simple tryst in the park between a young woman and an older man, possibly of an adulterous nature, soon takes on different dimensions when Thomas notices the woman seems unduly preoccupied with something going on in the bushes near them. He enlarges the photo, then enlarges the enlargements, until what he's looking at is scarcely more than a series of abstract blobs of black and white. But there, in the bushes, he sees a gunman - or does he. Hard to tell. And in a later photo, is that a body lying near a tree? Impossible to tell, but that's what it looks like - at least to Thomas and, presumably, to us. Thomas investigates further and does indeed discover the body of the man with whom he had seen the mysterious woman. But is it a murder or something else? Perhaps he had simply died of a heart attack or some other common ailment while in the embrace of his young lover, and she had fled in fear of a scandal. Who is he? We don't really know. And we won't know, because Blow Up delights in a slow assembly of all the pieces of a thriller but never allows it to get going and never bothers to solve it. Thomas' interest in the corpse isn't moral. He doesn't want to solve the crime, if indeed a crime has been committed. He doesn't examine the body, comb over the scene, or even phone the police. His motivations are purely artistic. Here, finally, is something that has challenged him.
The murder is not the central plot. Instead, it is what it sparks in Thomas and how it calls into question the reality of what we perceive, or how reality is shaped by what we perceive. Almost, in a way, related to that old joke about ten different eyewitnesses having seen ten different things. All the drugs, the groupies, the sex - nothing matters much to Thomas, but as he tries to decipher what he has photographed in the park, he rediscovers passion. He becomes an artist lost in his art. But the closer he looks, the more abstract things become. Every step he takes toward decoding the images carries the solution even further away. Thomas will never understand what he is seeing, because like all of those around him, he survives at the surface and doesn't know how to dive deeper even when he wants to. Antonioni manages to both critique rather savagely the politics or lack thereof of this embryonic era and become one the shining examples of it. The mod crowds are seen as burnt out but unable to quite make that push to the next level of awareness - a society trapped between two worlds. They've managed to throw off the shackles of 1950s repression, but their freedom comes without meaning or direction, leaving them adrift, sitting listlessly and without passion at a Yardbirds concert or simply staring off into nothing a hashish party. The impetus that would push them forward - namely the war in Vietnam and large-scale social upheaval - is only just beginning to influence people, and even then in only the most cosmetic of ways. The characters are images without meaning. But just as he tears apart the culture around him, Antonioni builds it up again through the very existence of his film calling for some meaning to be applied to life, and doing so in a way that shocked, puzzled, delighted, and outraged viewers. His film pushes the boundaries of what was acceptable at the time, not just in the obvious way of onscreen sex and drugs and nudity but in the more meaningful ways of how one tells a story, or refuses to tell it, and how one photographs a film. Plenty of movies embrace the op-art vibrancy and colors of the early 1960s on the surface, which is the problem as far as Antonioni is concerned. Like the characters in the film, they are there for the spectacle. They need to grasp more than the pretty colors and nice dresses. They achieved their freedom; now they have to do something with it. Blow Up is one of those sharply divisive films that is as loved as it is hated. It demands the viewer do a lot of thinking and a lot of work, and then it refuses to give you any sort of obvious pay-off for what you contribute. The murder will never be solved. Thomas will never come to any sort of revelation about himself. No one will ever step forward and give some well-written soliloquy explaining the film's meaning. If you're not prepared for it, I would imagine the whole thing could be a bit of a let-down. What I found, however, is that the movie's power is in its ability to linger. It's sort of like how I felt watching Wicker Man for the first time, though I don't know that I would exactly put the two films up against one another. But like that film, Blow Up has the ability to stick in your mind, to make you feel as you are watching it like there is more at work than what you are seeing. And that, in my opinion, is absolutely bloody brilliant. Antonioni doesn't just make you ponder the theme; he makes you part of it. He makes you feel it. And like Wicker Man, which shares beautiful composition set in a curious and insular subculture, the film becomes increasingly haunting and hypnotic the further away from it you get. You become Thomas, only hopefully without the various aspects of his character that make him a bit of a prick. In this sense, Antonioni has made a movie about the movie he is making without it being one of those "film within a film" deals, and his final conclusion, if it is indeed a conclusion, is a bit sad. Thomas chases the meaning of the photographs he has taken, but he never gets there. And in the end, everything he has done vanishes. One of the subtlest yet astounding little tricks has Thomas catching a glimpse of his mysterious woman outside a club, only to watch her vanish seemingly into thin air. In his review of the film, Roger Ebert remarks on this same scene and says they sat there and watched it frame for frame and couldn't for the life of them figure out the exact moment she disappears. "There is an uncanny scene where he sees her standing outside a club, and then she turns and takes a few steps and simply disappears into thin air," Ebert writes. "We ran the sequence a frame at a time and could not discover the method of her disappearance; presumably she steps into a doorway, but we watched her legs, and they seemed somehow to attach themselves to another body." Once again, Antonioni has made the viewer into his subject, has us examining his film frame by frame to decipher how things were done, just as Thomas pores over his increasingly impossible-to-read enlarged photographs. Just as the woman disappears, so too does the body, and the photos. And eventually, even Thomas himself vanishes into thin air during the film's final sequence. In a rare moment in which one of my ramblings actually connects to something about the actual subject, my whole spiel in the beginning about how these older, astounding films are being forgotten fits squarely when with one of the over-arching themes of the movie. Antonioni seems to be acknowledging that everything will fade. His own film will one day cease to exist simply because it has been forgotten, or subsequent generations can't decode its meaning. Not only does Blow Up not solve this mystery; everyone and everything involved with it simply vanishes, though in a way much more creatively and artistically satisfying than, say, Monster A Go-Go's finale. And heck, the fact that Antonioni seems to resign his work of art to fading away is a good reason to keep it around just a little longer.
It's impossible, at least for me and perhaps for you, to avoid comparing this film to the one for which most cult films know David Hemmings, Dario Argento's Deep Red. In fact, the connections between this film and that run much deeper than the simple inclusion of David Hemmings as the central character: an artist who witnesses something crucial in a puzzle yet can't quite decipher what it is he has seen. The way the story goes, it was his frustration with Blow Up's lack of narrative resolution that drove then film critic Dario Argento to launch his own career, and Deep Red was his answer to Blow Up. Argento loves to play with perception and give audiences puzzles, but though his imagery is often fantastic and grotesque, he is at his heart a logical man who has to fit all the pieces together and solve the mystery in his films. Putting his film next to Antonioni's makes for interesting companion pieces. Personally, I think despite whatever criticism of Blow Up might exist that is thought-provoking and well-written, the best commentary on it remains Argento's reaction, which was to go out, hire the same actor, and make his own movie in response - which probably pleases Antonioni to no end, since that was sort of the reaction for which he was fishing. Thematic and artistic discussions of the merits of Blow Up have gone on for decades now, and with any luck the DVD re-issue will keep the movie from fading. Just like the movie, we're not going to be solving any of them here today. We just don't have the space and I, quite frankly, don't have the motivation (or skill) in this format to properly order my thoughts into a cohesive argument. So I will leave you with the various points, ask that you see the film, and allow you to go from there. We shall move, then, to more concrete discussions regarding the film. The performances are wonderful. Most of the people are props, and the only ones attempting to engage us are the arrogant Thomas and shady Jane (Vanessa Redgrave). They are the only two characters meant to seem the least bit alive. Hemmings became a 60s icon thanks to his role here, and he is indeed wonderful. Thomas is not a sympathetic character, but he's not a total bastard. He's rude, sometimes condescending, often irritable, but he acts less out of malice than out simply out of boredom. He is at once irked by the shallow world around him and unable or unwilling to detach himself from it. So he wanders from one party to the next in a state of ennui. Yeah, that's right, baby. You never thought you'd see the term ennui in Teleport City, did you? Well, it just never came up, but it's one of those words that will get you through film studies classes, like "juxtaposition" and "mise-en-scene." Did I spell that right? Like most art cinema of the 1960s, the look of the film is entirely gorgeous. Antonioni and cinematographer Carlo Di Palma paint a vivid landscape that wanders from featureless gray streets to vibrantly colored windswept parks. The city seems almost uninhabited. In a film about photography, filmmaking, and the elusive nature of reality and the image, composition is of the utmost importance, and every shot here is put together with the utmost care. It is through these images far more than the dialogue (which is sparse and simplistic) and the characters (which are thinly drawn) that the director pulls you into the story - only fitting given the themes of the film. Yet as hypnotic, vibrant, and arty as the film looks, it never sinks to the level of bombast. Everyone is, after all, too world-weary at such a young age to be garishly colorful and peppy. Antonioni was, like Takeshi Kitano later on, famous for his films' slow pace, long takes, and expansive stretches of silence. Though Blow Up is one of the director's more kinetic films, you wouldn't exactly call it a flurry of activity, which is fine by me. Years of rapid-fire, thrill-a-second MTV-era films have left me utterly numb and disinterested and feeling a bit like Thomas, so I've come to re-appreciate the value of a languidly paced, quieter film. Almost all the music here, and there isn't much of it, comes from within scenes. A radio playing or a band performing. Vast stretches of the film, are without music - crazy, I know. There are films made today that have music in every single scene, sometimes several songs in one scene, never allowing for a moment of rest or contemplation. Blow Up has some beautifully quiet scenes, culminating in the final scene of Thomas, stymied by the disappearance of the girl, the photos, and the body, watches a group of young art students engaged in a pantomime tennis match (once again indulging the notion of images that don't actually exist). When it does show up, the jazzy score by Herbie Hancock is superb, but this isn't a film that survives by filling itself with lots of timely hits. Just as the streets of London seem peculiarly empty, so too is the soundtrack strangely desolate. I think any lover of film has to see this. Make up your own mind about whether or not you liked it or whether or not it has any value or is simply a big load of pretentious garbage, but see it. Like me, your education will have a large hole in it until you've plugged it with this movie. As far as my opinion is concerned, I thoroughly loved the film. It becomes something of an obsession you want to visit over and over again. It is utterly captivating and sticks with you long after you've finished watching it. Though the characters are jaded and cynical, the movie itself is full of reserved energy and possibility. It earns its hype. And best of all, it gives you something to ponder without giving you answers. If it gave you answers, then the process would be over. But it's open, and you can think about it, have to think about it, and discuss it. With any luck, this and many more older films that still remain as cutting edge now as they were four or five decades ago, will continue to get discovered and discussed and won't simply vanish into thin air. Labels: Director: Michelangelo Antonioni, Drama, Netflix Diary, Year: 1966 posted by Keith at 10:39 PM | 1 Comments Tuesday, July 06, 2004Don Juan...Or If Don Juan Were a Woman
France, 1973. Starring Brigitte Bardot, Robert Hossein, Mathieu Carrière, Michèle Sand, Robert Walker Jr., Jane Birkin, Maurice Ronet. Directed by Roger Vadim. Available on DVD from Amazon.
Where to start with this one? First off, it's a mess. Not necessarily an unenjoyable mess, but a mess never the less. Comparisons to Barbarella are, at least for me, inevitable since this is once again director Roger Vadim constructing a film around pop art, outrageous fashion, and his sex kitten obsession of the week. This time around it's French bombshell Brigitte Bardot. Granted, constructing your movie around Brigitte Bardot wearing outrageous outfits (or nothing at all) and parading around a series of equally outrageously designed space-age pop sets is certainly not a bad thing, but where Barbarella was freewheeling fun and campy enough to make the darker moments seem palatable, If Don Juan Were a Woman is possessed of a grubbier, perhaps even sleazier feel that makes the cynicism and nastiness of the characters difficult to bear. It certainly lacks the sexy-yet-innocent perverse glee of Jane Fonda's space opera. Bardot stars as Jeanne, a self-proclaimed man-destroyer who recounts her deeds to a young priest. Her goal in life, after deciding that men are contemptible creatures is to seduce them, then drive them to ruin and, from time to time, suicide. She does this all while living on a partially submerged boat that looks to be the end result of a fight between interior designing mods and those weird 1970s people who dressed in flowing, shiny "future wear." Mod meets Freddie Mercury, I reckon. The script has a tendency to be so bland that this orgy of campy fashion and décor becomes the main reason to keep watching. Well that and the fact that, even a few years past her sex kitten prime, Brigitte Bardot is still a wonder to behold. She need only look at the camera to make you understand why men are willing to destroy themselves for her. Heck, I like her more for being "a bit past her prime" and showing that yep, older women can indeed still be one hell of a sight. Still, if you'r elooking for a movie to discover Brigitte Bardot and discover why so many of us old farts are, even today, prone to wobbly knees and dreamy eyes at the mention of her name, this film is a pretty bad place to start.
As I said, the movie has a real nasty streak. The woman who is abused by men to the point that she seeks to extract revenge on as many of them as possible should be a sympathetic character, but the script never really gives Bardot's Jeanne a chance to do much that is likeable. She fancies herself, as the title suggests, something of a reincarnation of the famed 16th century lover, Don Juan. In the end, as befits a broadly drawn morality tale, she gets her comeuppance, but not before the film has indulged in numerous saucy moments that are, in reality, fairly tepid even by standards of the day. BB shines in a few erotic moments, but most the film lacks any real sexual charge. It all feels a bit...I don't know. Tired, I suppose. I think the movie would have been better played as a farce with more drive and spirit. Instead, it takes a more serious approach and sinks under it's own attempts to be important. Vadim was never a good director, but he had a great eye for the absurd, both in art design and storytelling. He should have indulged that predilection more in this film. Instead, it wallows not so much in its own mean-spiritedness as it does in its own tedium. It was meant to be sort of a autobiographical stab at the audiences from BB, the fading arthouse sex symbol who saw her life ravaged by tabloid attention. I guess the main problem isn't so much the darkness as it is the fact that everything unfolds in such dull fashion. Actually, I guess the fashion is the one thing that isn't dull about this film. Chalk it up to this being a French production. Where Vadim under the guidance of the Italians was wild and free, here as part of the French New Wave he is morose and dreary, a hipster whose hippest moments are behind him in the same way Bardot's best days were behind her. He goes about making this movie devoid of joy, passion, or insight. It is clinically dry, even when Bardot is reclining naked in her big furry bed with another woman. Vadim was a stylist, and this movie relies too much on storytelling from a man who can't really tell a story. We are left with a train wreck of a film, too listless to be pleasurable, too silly and broadly drawn to be intellectual.
But it's not all drudgery here. There's enough eye candy on display to keep a viewer like me marveling at the tacky beauty of it all. And while they call her over the hill or past her prime, the way I see it Bardot, then age 39 or 40 is still plenty in her prime. This was, however, her last film, but I guess my taste for older women biases my views. Give me a woman in her thirties any day over those babbling young things, especially if that woman in her thirties looks like, say, Brigitte Bardot or Nicole Kidman. Even with her icy, detached performance here, Bardot still can't help but smolder. Too bad for this film that nothing every actually ignites. There's plenty to dicuss when it comes to Brigitte Bardot, and God knows we love her even in a bad film, but I think I'll hold off on that discussion until we get to one of her better films (we have both Contempt and And God Created Woman coming up soon). Of course when it comes to eye-popping art design, Vadim was an ace, and this movie, despite its failings elsewhere, is still quite beautiful to behold. Nice cinematography helps highlight the truly cracked vision of this world that exists somewhere between the swingin' sixties and the self-destructively indulgent seventies. The look of the film is enough to merit slogging all the way through to the end, but just barely. And when you get there, the end is pretty goofy anyway. Still, I can't help but defer to the quirkiness of it all. As big a mess as it is, as haggard and confused and tired as it may seem in some parts, there is still something curiously alluring about the film. It's like probing a cold sore with your tongue. You know it just hurts, but you can't stop doing it. Of course, I'd much rather probe Brigitte Bardot with my tongue but then, well, I've crossed the line, haven't I? Labels: Country: France, Director: Roger Vadim, Drama, Netflix Diary, Stars: Brigette Bardot, Year: 1973 posted by Keith at 6:19 PM | 0 Comments |
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