1981, dir. Bernand Tavernier, 128 mins.
This film is a reworking of an old pulp novel, Jim Thompson's Pop. 1280, with the action transplanted from the American Deep South to French colonial West Africa. Set in a small dusty town out in the middle of nowhere in Senegal, the film follows Lucien Cordier (perfectly played by Philippe Noiret), an inept and corrupt police chief who has serious problems getting anybody to take him seriously. Petty criminals, like a man who regularly beats the crap out of his wife, are beyond his reach, as are two pimps who, in response to his efforts to restrain them, mock him and push him into a river. Even his wife openly mocks him, not so discreetly carrying on some kind of affair with a man who claims to be her brother.
Corider is a bumbling idiot, and while we, as the audience, find humor in his ineffectuality, we also sympathize with him. And so when this slightly off-kilter comedy turns quite dark, quite suddenly, the question of sympathetic identification with this character takes center stage. Cordier, fed up with being a blank in this blank town, decides to take matters--legal and moral--into his own hand. Knowing that, as the law, he cannot stop the two pimps who earlier threw him in the river, he decides simply to shoot them. The decision is sudden, and even though we have some sense that violence is coming, the actual moment when shots are fired is a surprise. More murders follow, and what's remarkable about him comes to the surface--he's not a bumbling idiot at all, but a calculating and effective killer. He's able to cover his violence with his reputation for idiocy, just as he's able to justify his actions, presumably, under the cover of working for a higher (extralegal) category of moral justice.
As the story of a more or less normal man who slowly becomes more and more violent, Coup de torchon is an interrogation of models of morality, asking when and if the illegitimate use of violence can be justified, and, I think, refusing to settle on an easy answer. Almost nobody in the film is innocent, and not until one final act of violence does Cordier seem to need to evaluate his actions. (After this final act of violence, though, we get the sense that his character has been blown open, that anything goes now, that violence and power have become their own justifications.) Because of its colonial setting, the film is rife with the implicit violence of colonial relations, and the damage colonial violence visits on both colonizer and colonized is highly visible in the film. This of course makes Cordier's series of murders seem more like a kind of logical extension of his geographical and political position, and makes Senegal a particularly interesting place to stage the film. The original novel, after all, was in the Deep South; the regions of Africa of which Senegal is a part were a major source of the slaves that would populate the Deep South. Coup de torchon is, then, in its way, an examination of the continuing racial violence that began with the slave trade, a systemic violence that forces its perpetrators (or participants) to generate ever new justifications for their violent acts.
Next up: Neil Jordan's Mona Lisa
Thursday, May 14, 2009
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
Commonplace book: Entry 67
That is why I do not cry out, old Walt Whitman,
Against the little boy who writes
A girl's name on his pillow,
Or the kid who puts on a wedding dress
In the darkness of a closet
Or the lonely men in bars
Who drink with sickness the waters of prostitution
Or the men with green eyelids
Who love men and scald their lips in silence,
But against the rest of you, cocksuckers of cities,
Hard-up and dirty brained,
Mothers of mud, harpies, dreamless enemies
Of the Love that distributes crowns of gladness.
Against the rest of you always, who give the kids
Drippings of sucked-off death with sour poison.
Jack Spicer, "Ode for Walt Whitman," My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer, ed. Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2008), 128-129.
Against the little boy who writes
A girl's name on his pillow,
Or the kid who puts on a wedding dress
In the darkness of a closet
Or the lonely men in bars
Who drink with sickness the waters of prostitution
Or the men with green eyelids
Who love men and scald their lips in silence,
But against the rest of you, cocksuckers of cities,
Hard-up and dirty brained,
Mothers of mud, harpies, dreamless enemies
Of the Love that distributes crowns of gladness.
Against the rest of you always, who give the kids
Drippings of sucked-off death with sour poison.
Jack Spicer, "Ode for Walt Whitman," My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer, ed. Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2008), 128-129.
Sunday, May 10, 2009
Criterion Collection 105: Spartacus
1960, dir. Stanley Kubrick, 196 min.
What's there to say about Spartacus? This is an iconic film, full of moments that have made it into the popular imagination--the "I'm Spartacus" scene for example, or, I think, the gladiatorial fights that precede Spartacus's slave revolt. And because Spartacus is so well-known, it's easy to forget just how unconventional it really is. If you're tempted to put Spartacus in the same category as, say, Cecil B. DeMille's gaudy biblical epics, you should watch Spartacus again, and keep in mind the political climate of the United States during the period of its production.
First of all, as a film made in the U.S. in the late 1950s, Spartacus is walking a delicate political tightrope with its storyline of an uprising of workers--from all nations and languages, no less--against the ruling elite. Of coruse, Kubrick, working for the studio here and not so much for himself as he would later do, manages to disguise what could be read as a proto-communist revolt; the uprising is instead about dignity and individual freedom. Self-determination is of course a very American ideal, and it's no accident that Kirk Douglas and his fellow slaves speak in an American accent against the marked British accent of their Roman overlords. But the slave revolt is communitarian and utopian; it's truly a revolution, and it's easy enough to see through the valorous drive for freedom to Kubrick's critique of the exploitation of labor.
But what's more interesting to me is how the film treats sexuality. The Criterion DVD release has some scenes restored to the film, most notably a bath scene with Laurence Olivier as Crassus and Tony Curtis as his slave Antoninus. Crassus, naked of course, asks Antoninus about what kinds of food he likes to eat; it all becomes a euphemism for bisexuality when Crassus asks if one might like "both snails and oysters." Apparently, film censors at the time thought this all too racy, and suggested, bizarrely, changing the line to "artichokes and truffles," as if that's somehow less indecent. The scene was cut in the original release, and restored in 1991; its surprisingly forthright treatment of sexual openness adds, I think, to Kubrick's critique of the exploitative rich, though this angle of critique is less than satisfying. It's an old saw to argue that sexual decadence is one symptom of the sickness of the rich, and Crassus's bisexuality is depicted alongside Spartacus's uber-heterosexuality, an idealized upstanding version of masculinity that always resists any kind of decadence. (Note that Spartacus, first meeting Jean Simmons's Varinia, refuses, essentially, to rape her, and that this valorous refusal compels her to fall in love with him.)
Next: I continue to play catch-up, with Bernand Tavernier's Coup de Torchon.
What's there to say about Spartacus? This is an iconic film, full of moments that have made it into the popular imagination--the "I'm Spartacus" scene for example, or, I think, the gladiatorial fights that precede Spartacus's slave revolt. And because Spartacus is so well-known, it's easy to forget just how unconventional it really is. If you're tempted to put Spartacus in the same category as, say, Cecil B. DeMille's gaudy biblical epics, you should watch Spartacus again, and keep in mind the political climate of the United States during the period of its production.
First of all, as a film made in the U.S. in the late 1950s, Spartacus is walking a delicate political tightrope with its storyline of an uprising of workers--from all nations and languages, no less--against the ruling elite. Of coruse, Kubrick, working for the studio here and not so much for himself as he would later do, manages to disguise what could be read as a proto-communist revolt; the uprising is instead about dignity and individual freedom. Self-determination is of course a very American ideal, and it's no accident that Kirk Douglas and his fellow slaves speak in an American accent against the marked British accent of their Roman overlords. But the slave revolt is communitarian and utopian; it's truly a revolution, and it's easy enough to see through the valorous drive for freedom to Kubrick's critique of the exploitation of labor.
But what's more interesting to me is how the film treats sexuality. The Criterion DVD release has some scenes restored to the film, most notably a bath scene with Laurence Olivier as Crassus and Tony Curtis as his slave Antoninus. Crassus, naked of course, asks Antoninus about what kinds of food he likes to eat; it all becomes a euphemism for bisexuality when Crassus asks if one might like "both snails and oysters." Apparently, film censors at the time thought this all too racy, and suggested, bizarrely, changing the line to "artichokes and truffles," as if that's somehow less indecent. The scene was cut in the original release, and restored in 1991; its surprisingly forthright treatment of sexual openness adds, I think, to Kubrick's critique of the exploitative rich, though this angle of critique is less than satisfying. It's an old saw to argue that sexual decadence is one symptom of the sickness of the rich, and Crassus's bisexuality is depicted alongside Spartacus's uber-heterosexuality, an idealized upstanding version of masculinity that always resists any kind of decadence. (Note that Spartacus, first meeting Jean Simmons's Varinia, refuses, essentially, to rape her, and that this valorous refusal compels her to fall in love with him.)
Next: I continue to play catch-up, with Bernand Tavernier's Coup de Torchon.
Monday, April 27, 2009
Criterion Collection 104: Double Suicide
1969, dir. Masahiro Shinoda, 104 min.
Based on a classical bunraku puppet play, Double Suicide tells the story of a middle-class paper merchant who falls irreparably in love with a prostitute. Bankrupting and shaming his family after years of patronizing her, Jihei (Kichiemon Nakamura) convinces the prostitute, Koharu (Shima Iwashita), to kill herself with him. Their double suicide represents the only way out for their mutual erotic obsession, and despite their fears--her fear of death, his fear of permanently shaming his family and rendering his child futureless--they see their coming death as the only way they can ultimately be together.
But what's actually interesting about this film is how it plays with conventions and techniques from puppet theatre. The film opens inside an actual theatre, with a production company preparing for a bunraku performance; only after several minutes does the scenario slowly change to the dialogic interior of this performance. Even after we've entered the world of the puppet play, though, we're constantly reminded of the theatricality of what we're watching--kurago, the black-clad technicians who, in the puppet shows, maniuplate the puppets and the scenery, show up in the film to help the action move along in various ways.
The central tension that Jihei faces--between individual desire and social obligation--is particularly foregrounded by the two women in the film--both Koharu, the courtesan, and Jihei's wife, Osan, are played by Iwashita. But it's not so simple that Koharu represents desire where Osan is obligation; both of these women--or this woman, depdending on how you read it--suffer from a similar tension. Koharu's torn between her love/desire for Jihei and her desire to continue living, as well as the yearning to become free of the geisha's house; Osan, the wife, is torn between her love for Jihei and the pracitcal obligations she feels towards her child and her parents' family.
A dark film, Double Suicide is compelling for its exploration of how interpersonal ethics exists in tension with erotic desire; the lovers, trapped by layers of obligation, ultimately find that they can only acquire agency in taking their lives.
Based on a classical bunraku puppet play, Double Suicide tells the story of a middle-class paper merchant who falls irreparably in love with a prostitute. Bankrupting and shaming his family after years of patronizing her, Jihei (Kichiemon Nakamura) convinces the prostitute, Koharu (Shima Iwashita), to kill herself with him. Their double suicide represents the only way out for their mutual erotic obsession, and despite their fears--her fear of death, his fear of permanently shaming his family and rendering his child futureless--they see their coming death as the only way they can ultimately be together.
But what's actually interesting about this film is how it plays with conventions and techniques from puppet theatre. The film opens inside an actual theatre, with a production company preparing for a bunraku performance; only after several minutes does the scenario slowly change to the dialogic interior of this performance. Even after we've entered the world of the puppet play, though, we're constantly reminded of the theatricality of what we're watching--kurago, the black-clad technicians who, in the puppet shows, maniuplate the puppets and the scenery, show up in the film to help the action move along in various ways.
The central tension that Jihei faces--between individual desire and social obligation--is particularly foregrounded by the two women in the film--both Koharu, the courtesan, and Jihei's wife, Osan, are played by Iwashita. But it's not so simple that Koharu represents desire where Osan is obligation; both of these women--or this woman, depdending on how you read it--suffer from a similar tension. Koharu's torn between her love/desire for Jihei and her desire to continue living, as well as the yearning to become free of the geisha's house; Osan, the wife, is torn between her love for Jihei and the pracitcal obligations she feels towards her child and her parents' family.
A dark film, Double Suicide is compelling for its exploration of how interpersonal ethics exists in tension with erotic desire; the lovers, trapped by layers of obligation, ultimately find that they can only acquire agency in taking their lives.
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
Criterion Collection 103: The Lady Eve
1941, dir. Preston Sturges, 93 min.
Well, it's been about three months now since I watched this film, so I'll do what I can.
At first, this film seems like a light-hearted precursor of the modern-day ridiculous romantic comedy. The plot is silly enough; a lady con artist accidentally falls in love, for real, with her mark; when she fesses up, he dumps her; she later insinuates herself into his life, conning everyone into thinking that she's a British aristocrat, and he comes around to realize that his love for her (and hers for his) was genuine all along. There's a lot of slapstick in this comedy--when Jean (Barbara Stanwyck), the lady scammer, plays the titular Lady Eve, Charles (Henry Fonda) becomes absurdly accident-prone, spilling things on himself, falling over, knocking furniture about. But there's also a lot of allure; Stanwyck's character is sophisticated and witty, and is able to wrap around her finger not just the socially inept Fonda but the entire upper-class society he inhabits.
The film is cleanly divided into three acts--Stanwyck as con artist falling in love with Fonda; Stanwyck as con artist conning society and trying to win Fonda's affections back; their final reunification. Each act of the film has a very different tone, and the plots of the three acts each seem to stand alone. And while the film's larger arc makes sense across the three acts, each one seems disconnected from the others, and the most visible sign of this is Fonda's character. He's a socially inept, science-nerd virgin at the beginning of the movie, but he's thoroughly honest and "real" next to Stanwyck's conning persona. In the second act, though, even though her con is more elaborate, it's as if he's become a con artist of his own, playing to social convention--and repeating some lines that he used in the first act--in a starkly hypocritical fashion. What seems bizarre is his sudden transformation, in the third act, to a more stable figure, whose now honest love for Jean/Eve can be honestly expressed. If the film felt a little less disconnected, Fonda's character might seem subtly layered, but as it is, it comes across as a jumble, a mess of contradictions.
Well, it's been about three months now since I watched this film, so I'll do what I can.
At first, this film seems like a light-hearted precursor of the modern-day ridiculous romantic comedy. The plot is silly enough; a lady con artist accidentally falls in love, for real, with her mark; when she fesses up, he dumps her; she later insinuates herself into his life, conning everyone into thinking that she's a British aristocrat, and he comes around to realize that his love for her (and hers for his) was genuine all along. There's a lot of slapstick in this comedy--when Jean (Barbara Stanwyck), the lady scammer, plays the titular Lady Eve, Charles (Henry Fonda) becomes absurdly accident-prone, spilling things on himself, falling over, knocking furniture about. But there's also a lot of allure; Stanwyck's character is sophisticated and witty, and is able to wrap around her finger not just the socially inept Fonda but the entire upper-class society he inhabits.
The film is cleanly divided into three acts--Stanwyck as con artist falling in love with Fonda; Stanwyck as con artist conning society and trying to win Fonda's affections back; their final reunification. Each act of the film has a very different tone, and the plots of the three acts each seem to stand alone. And while the film's larger arc makes sense across the three acts, each one seems disconnected from the others, and the most visible sign of this is Fonda's character. He's a socially inept, science-nerd virgin at the beginning of the movie, but he's thoroughly honest and "real" next to Stanwyck's conning persona. In the second act, though, even though her con is more elaborate, it's as if he's become a con artist of his own, playing to social convention--and repeating some lines that he used in the first act--in a starkly hypocritical fashion. What seems bizarre is his sudden transformation, in the third act, to a more stable figure, whose now honest love for Jean/Eve can be honestly expressed. If the film felt a little less disconnected, Fonda's character might seem subtly layered, but as it is, it comes across as a jumble, a mess of contradictions.
Thursday, April 9, 2009
Commonplace book: Entry 66
Is it because we relive our past years not in their continuous sequence, day by day, but in a memory focused upon the coolness or sunshine of some morning or afternoon suffused with the shade of some isolated and enclosed setting, immovable, arrested, lost, remote from all the rest, and thus the changes gradually wrought not only in the world outside but in our dreams and our evolving character (changes which have imperceptibly carried us through life from one time to another, wholly different) are eliminated, that, if we relive another memory taken from a different year, we find between the two, thanks to lacunae, to vast stretches of oblivion, as it were the gulf of a difference in altitude or the incompatibility of two divergent qualities of breathed atmosphere and surrounding coloration?
Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Vol. 3: The Guermantes Way, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, rev. D. J. Enright (New York: The Modern Library, 1998), 544-5.
Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Vol. 3: The Guermantes Way, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, rev. D. J. Enright (New York: The Modern Library, 1998), 544-5.
Commonplace book: Entry 65
There is nothing like desire for preventing the things one says from bearing any resemblance to what one has in one's mind. Time presses, and yet it seems as though we were seeking to gain time by speaking of subjects absolutely alien to the one that preoccupies us. We go on chatting, whereas the sentence we should like to utter would have been accompanied by a gesture, if indeed we have not (to give ourselves the pleasure of immediate action and to gratify the curiosity we feel as to the reactions which will follow it, without saying a word, without a by-your-leave) already made this gesture.
Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Vol. 3: The Guermantes Way, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, rev. D. J. Enright (New York: The Modern Library, 1998), 483.
Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Vol. 3: The Guermantes Way, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, rev. D. J. Enright (New York: The Modern Library, 1998), 483.
In which I come back
I've not blogged in a while--I've been both busy (end of quarter, beginning of quarter, marathon, Lent, conference, travel) and somewhat uninterested in blogging. But I realize, as I continue plowing through Proust and Criterion Collection movies, that I don't want to lose my thoughts on them, and I kind of want to do more day-to-day diary/observation-type writing as well. So, I intend to return, shortly. I've got a lot of catching up to do, and this will be a bit of drudgery, but, there it is.
Monday, February 2, 2009
Criterion Collection 102: The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie
1972, dir. Luis Buñuel, 102 mins.
First off, I have to say that The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie is one of the best charades clues ever. It's particularly hard to act out, but if you're with a group of people who have heard of this film, it can be a lot of fun.
On to the film itself. What is there to say about it? The title of the film kind of says it all; it's a charming film, lighthearted without being silly, or silly in an intelligent and not-overbearing way. Its charm is particularly discreet--deft and clever, but not pretentious; it does call to mind the surrealist impulses of Buñuel's other work, but there's a coherence to the film that defies pure surrealism. And of course it's about bourgeois folks in Paris.
A group of six friends--an Ambassador from a made-up Latin American country, some business associates of his, their spouses or girlfriends--have a dinner appointment. But dinner is interrupted, or pre-empted, and as further dinner dates are made, further interruptions happen. Along the way, the Ambassador and his friends get involved in various love triangles, drug-dealing plots, and politically-motivated assassination attempts. Some of the interruptions to the intended dinner are quite real, and others merely in dreams, but part of the charm of this movie is that the line is never clear between the dream and the reality. There are dreams within dreams, and plausible scenarios revealed to be dreams only after something goes hideously awry.
Spoilers follow in this paragraph. In one case, the group is invited to dine at a colonel's house, after this colonel has interrupted one of their attempts at dinner. The house is mysteriously quiet and empty, and there's something amiss about the food the group is served. When a curtain behind them lifts up, it's revealed they're on a stage in front of a crowded theatre--they're in a play, but none of them know their lines. But this is a dream; one of them men immediately wakes up in bed, having dreamt that they were all on a stage. When they go to the colonel's "real" apartment the next day--a place that looks exactly like the stage set, only brighter--everything seems more normal. Until, that is, the Ambassador gets into an altercation and shoots one of his fellow guests, an act which is then revealed to be again a dream. End of spoilers.
The characters in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie are all exceedingly well-mannered, and they maintain a sense of cheer and solidarity throughout their various real and imaginary trials. But this outer happiness seems to mask some kind of inner emptiness; in the same way that they never get to the substance of their meals, they never seem to probe the substance of their selves, and a kind of quiet desperation seems to reign over them throughout. An interesting foil for all of them is a local bishop, a prelate who has decided to work for one of the couples as their gardiner. This is an act of humility in a way, but also deeply ironized in the film. The bishop has a haunting past, and he commits one troubling act--one that is profoundly real--which reveals an overwhelming darkness he contends with, even if he's cheerful and polite throughout the rest of the film. One suspects the other discreetly charming people in this film of having a similar darkness, though with some we get to see more of it than with others.
First off, I have to say that The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie is one of the best charades clues ever. It's particularly hard to act out, but if you're with a group of people who have heard of this film, it can be a lot of fun.
On to the film itself. What is there to say about it? The title of the film kind of says it all; it's a charming film, lighthearted without being silly, or silly in an intelligent and not-overbearing way. Its charm is particularly discreet--deft and clever, but not pretentious; it does call to mind the surrealist impulses of Buñuel's other work, but there's a coherence to the film that defies pure surrealism. And of course it's about bourgeois folks in Paris.
A group of six friends--an Ambassador from a made-up Latin American country, some business associates of his, their spouses or girlfriends--have a dinner appointment. But dinner is interrupted, or pre-empted, and as further dinner dates are made, further interruptions happen. Along the way, the Ambassador and his friends get involved in various love triangles, drug-dealing plots, and politically-motivated assassination attempts. Some of the interruptions to the intended dinner are quite real, and others merely in dreams, but part of the charm of this movie is that the line is never clear between the dream and the reality. There are dreams within dreams, and plausible scenarios revealed to be dreams only after something goes hideously awry.
Spoilers follow in this paragraph. In one case, the group is invited to dine at a colonel's house, after this colonel has interrupted one of their attempts at dinner. The house is mysteriously quiet and empty, and there's something amiss about the food the group is served. When a curtain behind them lifts up, it's revealed they're on a stage in front of a crowded theatre--they're in a play, but none of them know their lines. But this is a dream; one of them men immediately wakes up in bed, having dreamt that they were all on a stage. When they go to the colonel's "real" apartment the next day--a place that looks exactly like the stage set, only brighter--everything seems more normal. Until, that is, the Ambassador gets into an altercation and shoots one of his fellow guests, an act which is then revealed to be again a dream. End of spoilers.
The characters in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie are all exceedingly well-mannered, and they maintain a sense of cheer and solidarity throughout their various real and imaginary trials. But this outer happiness seems to mask some kind of inner emptiness; in the same way that they never get to the substance of their meals, they never seem to probe the substance of their selves, and a kind of quiet desperation seems to reign over them throughout. An interesting foil for all of them is a local bishop, a prelate who has decided to work for one of the couples as their gardiner. This is an act of humility in a way, but also deeply ironized in the film. The bishop has a haunting past, and he commits one troubling act--one that is profoundly real--which reveals an overwhelming darkness he contends with, even if he's cheerful and polite throughout the rest of the film. One suspects the other discreetly charming people in this film of having a similar darkness, though with some we get to see more of it than with others.
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