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Solaris (1972)

André Crous

SolarisUSSR
4*

Director:
Andrei Tarkovsky
Screenwriters:
Fridrikh Gorenshtein
Andrei Tarkovsky
Director of Photography:
Vadim Yusov

Running time: 160 minutes

Original title: Солярис

The reality of the world in Tarkovsky’s Solaris seems to be as clear as daylight and yet as difficult to pin down as the reality of the three individuals on board the Solaris Space Station. Things seem to be straightforward (despite being a science-fiction film, there are no aliens here), but as characters’ memories start to physically materialise around them and we realise that no one can really trust the physical existence of anyone or anything around them, the world of the central character, Kris Kelvin, becomes very flimsy indeed, and many essential questions can never be answered.

Andrei Tarkovsky’s film, arguably one of his most accessible (together with Ivan’s Childhood and The Sacrifice), is based on the novel Solaris by Polish writer Stanisław Lem, which was published in 1961. People and their situations constantly shift in and out of focus, and while the central dilemma is quite easy to comprehend (Kelvin is confronted with the physical manifestation of his late wife), the questions resulting from this situation are profound and incredibly relevant today given mankind’s ability to (re)create images.

Kris Kelvin is a psychologist sent to the space station above the planet Solaris to investigate the situation there. Solaris itself is covered by a whirlpool of an ocean, and Kelvin soon discovers that the ocean is sentient. At the space station, a close friend, Gibarian, has committed suicide under strange circumstances, and the only crew members remaining are a Doctor Sartorius, who spends all day locked up in his laboratory, and Doctor Snout, who tries to warn Kelvin about the unexpected apparitions onboard.

These apparitions take the form of someone whose trace of a memory is found deep in the recesses of a crew member’s soul, and in the case of Kelvin, it is his late wife, Hari, who committed suicide 10 years ago. Kelvin is visibly affected by her appearance, even though he knows that she is not real. After he sends her out into space, a substitute appears. These substitutes are, of course, externally identical but always copies of the memory. As such (and this is an important point that is made much clearer in the 2002 remake by Steven Soderbergh), Hari can never know anything that Kelvin does not.

Even though Kelvin knows that Hari is merely a copy, he interacts with her in a way that causes him joy instead of sadness. She does not remind him of a loss as much as her presence makes him happy, and therefore, ultimately, Solaris fails to succeed in torturing Kelvin.

The film opens at Kelvin’s house next to a lake, where clouds or fog are always visible in the background. The environment seems pure, and a lone horse passes through the frame now and again while Tarkovsky takes care to show us water flowing over lush green water plants. It seems to be nature at its most innocent, but the film slowly and surely subverts our preconceived notions until we are left with the realisation that things in the world of the film are never quite what they seem.

Solaris is long and contains a number of scenes that would have benefited from a number of cuts, including, most importantly, an early scene during which we watch a film extensively detailing a mission to Solaris. Another scene, which takes place in a library onboard the space station, has some interesting components, including references to Don Quixote, a work of literature that also investigates a world where reality is no longer virginal.

Bach’s organ choral prelude (“Ich ruf’ zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ”) is used in a striking way throughout the film, and the film’s final scene, when we are confronted with a frozen lake that brings to mind a painting by Bruegel (“The Hunters in the Snow”) shown in fragments earlier in the film, produces a moment of such beauty it nearly brought me to tears.

During a scene that immediately precedes Kelvin’s journey to the space station, viewers are obliged to immerse themselves in the flow of sound and image rather than story. It reminded me of sequences from Koyaanisqatsi and shows a car driving along the highways of Tokyo, at different speeds and in different colours, the sound changing as well to produce a sequence of indescribable energy that finally serves to propel the story itself forward, and Kelvin into space.

The film has a few scenes in black and white, but they are not entirely distinct from other scenes in colour, though sometimes they are flashbacks and sometimes they are not. However, our inability to easily distinguish flashback, dream and immediate reality from each other is of course part of the dilemma that the film poses to us and to Kelvin.

The examination of reality in a world where copies resemble the original to such a great extent is very pertinent and has recently been treated in many other films, from David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ to Christopher Nolan’s Inception. I found the plot more interesting and more accessible than Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, though they are both enigmatic in their own ways and lend themselves to hours of interpretation.

The Wild Child (1970)

André Crous

The Wild ChildFrance
4.5*

Director:
François Truffaut
Screenwriters:
François Truffaut
Jean Gruault
Director of Photography: 
Néstor Almendros

Running time: 87 minutes

Original title: L‘enfant sauvage

The Wild Child is one of François Truffaut’s best films, and the key to grasping its significance for Truffaut himself lies in the film’s opening dedication: “To Jean-Pierre Léaud”. Léaud was Truffaut’s alter ego in his feature film début, The 400 Blows, in which he starred as the 12-year-old Antoine Doinel. The character of Doinel in this film had much in common with the young Léaud, and Truffaut took the actor under his wing, eventually becoming a father figure to the troubled youth.

In The Wild Child, Truffaut stars as Jean Itard, a physician who is confident that he can make a cultured human being out of a young boy who has spent his entire childhood fending for himself in the woods. The story is based on a real case treated by Itard of a boy found in the French countryside in 1798.

This treatment may also be described as training, and it is this uncertainty about the exact nature of the procedure that makes the film so interesting, for, while Itard is not presented with very much complexity of character, he uses his experience with deaf-mute children to instruct the young boy, whom he names Victor. When Victor is discovered, he is dirty, seems to be deaf and employs the most basic of gestures to express himself since he never learned to use his mouth for anything besides eating and drinking.

It is impressive to watch Victor’s development, which Itard is in a rush to complete, but which naturally takes much longer than he anticipates. In the process, Itard is rightfully scolded by his housekeeper, Madame Guérin: “You want him to catch up in one fell swoop!” Also, since Victor has no experience with the ways of people, he acts out whenever he is frustrated by dropping to the ground, waving his arms and flailing his legs about in a way that reminds one of a seizure. If he encounters resistance from someone, he is also prone to sinking his teeth into an unsuspecting arm. Itard has many clever strategies to conduct his experiments and gain knowledge about Victor’s capacity for learning, but very often he seems to ignore the bridges between one stage and the next, for example, the difference between a picture of a book, the word “book” and the book itself, which Itard takes as something quite self-evident.

Truffaut is excellent as Itard, who shows a remarkable level of commitment, patience and humanity throughout, even when it is very difficult to judge what the wild-eyed boy wants from him. We can understand both of them, both their positions, and the reason for their frustration with each other is clear because there is no easy way to bridge the communication gap that divides them. It is clear that Itard observes without taking as much trouble to learn Victor’s customs as Victor takes to learn his.

The film is a sequence of small incidents charting Itard’s progress with Victor and there are a few very moving moments that make our and Itard’s hearts beat fast with excitement at the possibility of rehabilitation. Unfortunately, the film does not sufficiently address the nagging question of whether it is appropriate to try to integrate the child into society, nor does it even question the legitimacy of erasing the useful skills that Victor had acquired on his own in nature. These are important questions in the background that Truffaut could easily have touched on, but he aimed for a more inspirational film, albeit based on historical documents.

Almendros’s gorgeous black-and-white cinematography is perfectly suited to the story, as is Vivaldi’s “Mandolin Concerto”, which accompanies most major events in the plot. Truffaut engages our attention throughout, as actor and as director, but one scene that fails to convince takes place when the wild boy is captured at the beginning of the film. While dogs bark and growl on the soundtrack, the images we see are of the boy’s arm grasped very gently by a dog’s mouth, and if the sound were removed, it would appear that the two were just amicably horsing around.

Jean-Pierre Cargol, who stars as Victor, the titular Wild Child, never overplays his part and is a great attribute to the film. While almost never uttering a sound, Victor will find sympathy with most viewers because of our curiosity to see the development of a boy for whom most experiences are “firsts”, including the use of clothes, shoes, a spoon, a mirror and many others. He also displays many remarkably touching characteristics in a subtle way, such as his love for the countryside that is made clear when he goes to the window every time he takes a sip of water. The film is a touching tribute by Truffaut to the boy he wanted to teach about the world, and even if it was always just a work in progress, The Wild Child makes it all somehow seem worthwhile.

Black Narcissus (1947)

André Crous

UK
3*

Directors:
Michael Powell
Emeric Pressburger
Screenwriters:
Michael Powell
Emeric Pressburger
Director of Photography:
Jack Cardiff

Running time: 100 minutes

Nuns on the verge of a nervous breakdown. In Black Narcissus, Deborah Kerr is the sister superior tasked with establishing a convent on a cliff in the Himalayas, “at the back of beyond”, overlooking a valley hundreds of feet below. This convent, Saint Faith, is housed in Mopu Palace, which used to be the harem of a general living nearby. Sister Clodagh (Kerr) is trying to keep it together, but the winds are howling 24 hours a day, and the crisp mountain air has awakened “nature” inside the newcomers. The sisterhood is losing its nerve, and it is up to Sister Clodagh to get everybody back in line; to do this, however, she must first deal with her own “ghosts”.

These “ghosts” refer to Clodagh’s flashbacks, seen now and again, whenever she spots something that reminds her of a specific incident in her former life. These objects that facilitate the transition from present to past are very awkward and quite simplistic, but the flashbacks themselves do serve an important purpose, namely to show us that Clodagh’s path has had its twists and turns and that she joined the order so as to escape something else; if she were to be confronted with the same situation once more, what decision would she make this time?

Clodagh is joined by four other sisters, all of whom lose their minds over the course of the story, and at least two of them, Sister Honey and Sister Ruth, become absolutely hysterical. This hysteria becomes unbearable, and while Kathleen Byron (starring as Sister Ruth) does a fine job of seeming possessed, her eyes bulging out of their sockets, she is also the object of the camera’s affection, and Cardiff lights her face beautifully, accentuating her eye-line while obscuring the rest of her visage.

Black Narcissus earns its place as a landmark Technicolor production, and the film’s director of photography, Jack Cardiff, who would go on to light and shoot the equally breathtaking Red Shoes the following year, doesn’t disappoint for a moment. However, for all its colourful images and exquisite lighting, the film is rather bland, perhaps because some of the emotions are so extreme that one easily becomes indifferent to the nuns’ emotional turmoil.

While Sister Ruth snaps at all the women around her, finding fault with everything they do, a new girl arrives at the convent – Kanchi, a young girl with many piercings, played by Jean Simmons – who needs to be educated, since she has arrived on the doorstep of the General’s agent, Mister Dean, and expects to be made his bride. Fortunately, for his and for our sakes, he has no interest in the girl. Her character is terribly irritating and cannot be taken very seriously: In every scene, she has a lascivious look on her face that drips with heat, and while her appearance is clearly meant to be juxtaposed with the nuns and their white habits, her slithering around the General, who quickly gives her what she wants, is rather embarrassing. Luckily, when Ruth imitates Kanchi in a later scene, she is not successful in her attempts at seduction and therefore only embarrasses one of the parties: herself.

Throughout the film, we wait for the inevitable. We get a few very beautiful shots of the bell being rung at the top of the precipice, and it is rather obvious what all of this is leading up to. The power play between the nuns themselves and between the nuns and the natives, including the General and Mister Dean, has the most resonance, and directors Powell and Pressburger, together with Jack Cardiff, compose beautiful shots, particularly notable in some of the first scenes, in which ceiling fans, or their shadows, may be spotted in every frame.

Black Narcissus, shot almost entirely inside Pinewood Studios, with painted backdrops standing in for the actual Himalayas, wants to tackle the conflict between human nature and the restrictions of an order such as that found at a convent, but given the influence of the Catholic League of Decency at the time, this film was not allowed to go very far in its investigation, and it falls woefully short of communicating anything of real substance. But Cardiff, as he would do in The Red Shoes, creates images that sear into one’s memory, and it is his work that manages to elevate the film into the realm of the “must-sees”.

Napoléon (1927)

André Crous

France
5*

Director:
Abel Gance
Screenwriter:
Abel Gance
Director of Photography:
Jules Kruger

Running time: 240 minutes

Napoléon, by French filmmaker Abel Gance, is an experimental epic that has achieved the status of legend, with good reason. The story of the young Napoleon Bonaparte (the film charts his development from school boy till the age of 27, when he successfully invaded Italy) is presented as a visual feast that keeps churning out scene after scene, the one as breathtaking as the next. The entire film is accompanied by a masterful orchestral score composed by Carmine Coppola that deftly integrates melodies from a few other works, including, among others, the French national anthem, “La Marseillaise”, and Hector Berlioz’s “Symphonie Fantastique”. The 2000 restoration of the film has a score by Carl Davis, which has been performed at various public screenings of the film in the past few years, most notably at the Royal Festival Hall in London.

The film is a cinematic tour de force and contains a multitude of memorable scenes, from the snowball fight at Napoleon’s school and a scene with his pet eagle to the scene where crowds of people learn the new French national anthem, a double storm scene and the climactic tricolour triptych that makes visible Napoleon’s desires for himself and his country. At one point, during a chase on horseback across the Corsican countryside, Gance even fixes his camera to a saddle in order to give us Napoleon’s point of view.

These are all scenes that one can talk about extensively, for they demonstrate the skill of the director and the joy he found in telling the adventurous story of Napoleon’s rise to power. I was incredibly moved when the song’s composer, Roget de Lisle, sang “La Marseillaise”: The soundtrack had already been hinting at the gorgeous melody for a while since Danton, Marat and Robespierre had received word of the composer’s arrival, and when de Lisle finally performs his work, the effect is overwhelming exhilaration. The combination of the music itself, the passion on de Lisle’s face, the emotion on the listeners’ faces, in close-ups presented in rapid-fire succession, and the sunlight that pierces the stained glass windows behind them all signal this moment as a cohesive turning point for France and national unity. It is an absolute gem of a scene; if you thought the performance of “La Marseillaise” in Casablanca was wonderful, you ain’t heard nothin’ yet.

However, as much as this rendition of one of the country’s definitive trademarks elicits emotion in the viewer, there are even greater things to be said about the effect that a completely liberated camera can have on the viewer’s reception and interpretation of events on screen. In a well-known scene referred to as the “double storm”, Gance cuts between a physical and a metaphorical storm simultaneously brewing in different places. While Napoleon is stuck at sea on a small sailboat, the sirocco throwing him hither and thither like a wet rag doll in waters ready to swallow him at any second, people at the Paris Convention are growing more and more impatient with each other, and ultimately their event degenerates into complete chaos. At the convention, as blood begins to boil, the camera starts swinging from the ceiling, over the heads of the revolutionaries inside the enormous hall. The result is an awesome sequence of shots unlike any other I have ever seen in a film.

From the very beginning, it is clear that Napoleon Bonaparte is a testy little upstart, but rather than wanting to provoke, he acts out of pride and concern for his country. Born in Corsica in 1769, when France conquered the island, he sees himself as French, though his fellow schoolmates don’t quite agree. Napoleon has a born sense of strategy – as is made evident in a brilliantly staged fight against other boys, which he wins despite being hugely outnumbered and underestimated – and a genuine love for France. He is fearless, and his audacity leads to a moment one could compare to the scene in Birth of Nation when the Confederate flag is rescued from the front lines of the Union.

Later in the film, shortly before the sopping wet Battle of Toulon, Napoleon orders one of his officers to replace a cannon. When the officer tells him that it is impossible, Napoleon firmly asserts: “Impossible is not French!” Napoleon’s delicate features and slight frame hide a soldier with nerves of steel, eyes like a hawk, and military brawn like few others. “He is made of granite heated in a volcano”, declares one of his school teachers in Brienne.

There are many other great scenes to mention, including a pillow fight at his school that precedes Jean Vigo’s Zero for Conduct by more than five years and ends with a frame subdivided first into four, then nine, different angles of the same scene to reflect the different points of view of the schoolboys.

The film has rapturous energy, and while I didn’t much care for the scenes dealing with his courtship of Joséphine de Beauharnais, nor the scenes taking place shortly after their very unromantic wedding, in which he becomes a sentimental fool, writing her one letter after the other in which he proclaims his love for her and his frustration at being separated from her, the film is strong enough to cope with such whimsy.

Napoleon as a boy (Vladimir Roudenko) and as an adult (Albert Dieudonné) were both cast very well, and even at a young age, Roudenko’s eyes convey a striking maturity. Napoleon is an inspirational figure, who persuades his nation to do things they never allowed themselves to dream about, and in the process he becomes a messianic figure. A messianic figure with an instantly recognisable bicorne – something Gance teases us with when Napoleon first appears on-screen as a young boy.

The film deserves all the praise it has received. Not only did Gance make an epic film worthy of its subject, but he employed techniques unheard of at the time that served the story incredibly well and keeps the audience galloping along all the way as history unspools in front of our eyes. The film was meant to represent the first part (out of six) of the life of Napoleon Bonaparte, but Gance spent his entire budget on this first instalment, and therefore Napoléon ends before the title character even gets to the throne. Nonetheless, this monumental film shows what the cinema is capable of and serves as a rousing reminder that representations of real events can be every bit as exciting as life itself.

Final note: This review refers to the 1981 edition of the film. Around the turn of the millennium, Kevin Brownlow added about half an hour’s worth of footage to restore the film to a version that approaches the original. The running time of 330 minutes on some websites refers to the film’s length when shown at 20 frames per second (fps), as opposed to the 240-minute version shown at 24fps.

The Thin Red Line (1998)

André Crous

USA
3*

Director:
Terrence Malick
Screenwriter:
Terrence Malick
Director of Photography:
John Toll

Running time: 163 minutes

The most distracting thing about Terrence Malick’s longest film is not the length, nor is it the extremely slow pace of the narrative or the reflective, fragmentary voice-overs we are treated to by many different characters. No, it is the number of celebrities, almost all of whom unfortunately draw our attention away from the film’s desire to approach the characters of its soldiers as intimately as possible. Forget Grand Hotel; this film features Jim Caviezel, Sean Penn, Woody Harrelson, Elias Koteas, Tim Blake Nelson, Adrien Brody, Jared Leto, John C. Reilly, Ben Chaplin, John Travolta, Nick Nolte, Nick Stahl, John Cusack, George Clooney and a few more. It is ludicrous to pack a film as sensitive as this one with names like these, and while the celebrities almost certainly secured Malick the budget he needed, the effect on the appreciation of the film is devastating.

If you’ve ever heard of Terrence Malick, then you shouldn’t be surprised that The Thin Red Line is not your average war epic. Malick’s voice-overs fill the soundtrack as much as actual dialogue, and despite the battle waged between the Americans and the Japanese, nature is the real character of the film. Set almost entirely on the island of Guadalcanal, part of the Solomon Islands in the Pacific Ocean, it focuses on the experiences of a group of soldiers who are fighting the Japanese and coming to terms with formerly abstract terms such as “death” and “danger”.

One of these soldiers is Private Witt, who went AWOL and is living on an island with native Melanesians when his country tracks him down at the beginning of the film and makes him join Charlie Company, an outfit whose mission it is to take out the Japanese on Guadalcanal. His idyllic life on the island had been beautiful and carefree, but he is about to be confronted up close with the loss of life and the loss of natural innocence, as a streak of blood on a blade of grass subtly informs us early on.

Nature, interior reflection – in the form of voice-overs – and reactions to death are what this film mostly concerns itself with. As Private Witt, Jim Caviezel delivers a performance that draws the viewer like a magnet. He is cool, calm, and wise, with a spirit much older than his youthful face could ever reveal. Witt is one of the few characters that we can hold on to while others slide in and out of view, without reason. Admittedly, Malick does make an explicit point that it is possible for all men to somehow share a big spirit, and that we, like nature, are all connected by a spiritual thread we fail to recognise. But very little is done to develop this insight, which quickly disappears.

There are many voice-overs, always delivered dispassionately, but since the story is not tied to a particular individual, it is often very difficult to establish whose voice we are hearing; sometimes, the speaker doesn’t even appear in the scene. In this way, we hear the disembodied voices of (at least) Privates Witt, Bell (Ben Chaplin), Private First Class Doll (Dash Mihok), First Sergeant Welsh (Sean Penn) and Lieutenant Colonel Tall (Nick Nolte).

Some actors deliver stellar performances, most notably Jim Caviezel and Ben Chaplin, who absorb the chaos around them without being overly shaken by it and yet portray absolute humanity and a dignity that is beautiful. I also want to acknowledge the strength of Elias Koteas’s character, Captain Staros, who seems to possess divine force when he speaks his native Greek, and Nick Nolte’s Lieutenant Colonel Tall, who is euphoric at his first taste of real war and doesn’t flinch even while grenades explode around him. Some actors are quite bad, such as Dash Mihok (an actor who has played wonderful roles in other films), who seems to be scared when he is not shocked and who never loses his slightly childlike demeanour. And then there are many actors who were not given any opportunity to develop their characters. Adrien Brody, always wide-eyed in this film, is seen but almost never heard, and George Clooney pops up in an interesting role… in the film’s final scene.

As usual for a Malick film, the audiovisual elements are simply stunning, and the director has included a romantic angle, which in this case does not serve the film well. One feels slightly embarrassed when Private Bell (Ben Chaplin) receives a letter from his wife, the context having been sketched previously with simple flashbacks that do not present us with a concrete picture, but Chaplin copes exceedingly well. For all the weaknesses of the screenplay (the entire plot can be summarised in a very short paragraph), the camera does some amazing tricks with its pitch perfectly coloured images, and the Melanesian choir music is unforgettable. Look out for an early scene, after the death of two soldiers, when sunlight turns the grass from dark-green to yellow.

Malick gets at the complexity of war and there are many interesting moments scattered throughout the film, including a captain’s desire to see his men protected, no matter what the effect on the battle, the awkwardness of battle depicted by soldiers running into each other while fleeing gunfire, and the universality of suffering, when a Japanese prisoner cries for the dead friends around him. But these moments, while rich and insightful, do not cohere into a strong narrative and ultimately we get the sense that Malick is meticulous but unable to move beyond the abstract and give us a physical experience of his world. The film has an abundance of water and greenery, and a sharp eye for human emotion, with some strong performances, but these are lonely elements in a film that gets caught up in its own rhetoric.

Seven Days in May (1964)

André Crous

USA
3.5*

Director:
John Frankenheimer
Screenwriter: 
Rod Serling
Director of Photography:
Ellsworth Fredericks

Running time: 118 minutes

John Frankenheimer’s Seven Days in May is a slow cooker, and even though it doesn’t punch you as hard as some other political films, most notably Frankenheimer’s own The Manchurian Candidate, released two years earlier, it is as eerily relevant today as it was during the Cold War.

It’s early May in Washington, D.C., and the temperature is rising fast. Outside the White House, protesters are lamenting the president’s decision to sign a nuclear disarmament treaty with the Soviet Union, which, they say, would put the United States at a disadvantage, and demonstrates the naiveté of their commander-in-chief, President Jordan Lyman. On their side is the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a four-star general named James Mattoon Scott, who has nothing but contempt for the treaty and the Russian communists it seems to appease.

The story centres on the administration’s concerns with Scott and his secretive dealings at the highest levels of the government, including the construction of a secret base near El Paso. Thanks to a number of fortunate slips of the tongue in the company of one of Scott’s subordinates, General Casey, known simply as “Jiggs”, a plan to overthrow the government slowly comes to light, and it is the administration’s task to contain the imminent threat to their national security.

Two questions surface: How does one go about containing this threat, when this act of sedition (by one of the most public, vocally patriotic individuals in the government, no less) is almost unthinkable? And does General Scott, despite his plans being labelled as treason, actually have a point when he stands up to defend his country against what he deems to be enemies both foreign and domestic?

The first question is obviously the narrative thread of the film, while the second question relates to the film’s relevance to politics today. Does patriotism (or nationalism) ever trump democracy and its institutions? The populism of General Scott is made clear during an address to a stadium packed with like-minded individuals furious at the president’s insistence on peace with communist Russia. Scott declares that patriotism, loyalty and sentiment define the USA, but he fails to recognise the importance of the institution of democracy. He has a Messiah complex and pretends to speak for “the people”, but his judgement is clouded by arrogance and a refusal to compromise or to discuss. Referring to the era of uncertainty brought about by the Cold War, Lyman makes the following statement:

And from this, this desperation, we look for a champion in red, white and blue. Every now and then, a man on a white horse rides by, and we appoint him to be our personal god for the duration. For some men it was a Senator McCarthy, for others it was a General Walker, and now it’s a General Scott. 

Parallels with current politicians and presidential candidates are self-evident, although they make a point of using the Constitution to protect themselves, even though, more often than not, they confuse the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.

The film has many highlights, including our first view of General Scott – in close-up, from behind, so we can’t see his face during a committee hearing. When Jiggs watches television, to see General Scott speak in front of the big crowd, the tension built up by the crowd’s euphoric reaction (they keep chanting “We want Scott!”) is also very well depicted by means of quick-fire editing, both inside the frame on the television set, and between these images and Jiggs’s face. There are also two excellent scenes inside the White House: In the first, Jiggs tells the president of his suspicions; in another, the showdown between the president and General Scott, the atmosphere is electric.

But the film also has its faults. Boom and camera shadows are visible, some scenes seem a bit too contrived (the scenes at El Paso, both in the restaurant and at the base, and the extraordinary timing of a key piece of evidence in the final scene), and the film ends with a speech every bit as cheesy as President Thomas Whitmore’s victory speech in Independence Day.

The film was ahead of its time with its use of videophones (giving an accurate impression that the film was set a few years into the future), and it has some wonderful moments of sharp dialogue. The use of actor Martin Balsam, who had appeared as detective Arbogast in Hitchcock’s Psycho a few years earlier, is also very clever, and when he picks up the phone after a significant encounter, we know that he won’t make it back in one piece.

Seven Days in May is a serious look at the potential for betrayal in government ranks and is worth a look. Though it doesn’t have the dramatic power of The Manchurian Candidate nor the power of drama disguised as comedy, as in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, the film provides an insightful glimpse of the fear that the Cold War not only had dire international, but also intranational, implications. And these fears have not disappeared with the fall of the Iron Curtain, for populism and the likelihood of a man or woman “on a white horse” are even more frightening as the years pass.

The World of Apu (1959)

André Crous

The World of ApuIndia
3.5*

Director:
Satyajit Ray
Screenwriter:
Satyajit Ray
Director of Photography:
Subrata Mitra

Running time: 107 minutes

Original title:  অপুর সংসার
Transliterated title: Apur sansar

This review is part of a series on the Apu Trilogy that also includes:
– Pather Panchali
– Aparajito

The poetry of youth has disappeared. What is left, though unexpected and not always pretty, has its own dignified arc and undeniable realism. Satyajit Ray’s The World of Apu is the third instalment of the Apu trilogy, which also comprises Pather Panchali and Aparajito (The Unvanquished). Where the first two films showed the young Apu facing all kinds of domestic tragedies, besides his terrible poverty, there was genuine hope at the end of the second film that Apu, thanks to his education and his interest in all kinds of subjects, would be able to rise above his socio-economic class.

But things don’t always turn out the way we want them to, and in the very first shot of this last film, we find an adult Apu asleep on his bed, wearing a T-shirt with a hole in the back, the ink of an empty ink-well soaking his bedsheets and his shirt. Nature is also crying at Apu’s situation, as a very heavy sheet of rain is covering Calcutta outside his window. As he gets up to rinse out the ink stains, the all too familiar train whistle – the sounds of opportunity, established in Pather Panchali – can be heard on the soundtrack.

Apu has obtained an “Intermediate” in Science, which means that he is teaching private lessons in the subject, but he does not have full-time employment, and when the rent is due and he goes out in search of more work, he only finds work that he deems to be beneath him. He has retained some of his father’s optimism that things will eventually work out, but we get a very miserable picture of his present living conditions.

Pulu, one of his school friends, invites him to his cousin’s wedding in the countryside; when he arrives, the bride’s mother is quite taken with him and says that he reminds her of Krishna. The day of the wedding is supposed to be very “auspicious”, and despite the fact that the groom-to-be arrives at the wedding half-mad, the father insists that the couple get married. But Pulu asks Apu to consider taking the place of the groom and after he initially dismisses the idea, he finally relents and takes his wife, Aparna back to Calcutta.

Given the lack of means at their disposal, Aparna seems to adapt to life with Apu, whom she doesn’t know from Adam. They have very little money, and the bedroom scenes seem very cold (although this might be a result of their lack of sexual chemistry, or a prudish way of presenting intimacy; it must be said that none of the films contains any real intimacy – not even a hug), but somehow Aparna manages to get pregnant.

It is here that tragedy strikes in Apu’s life once again, and unlike the previous times, this incident hits him very hard and sends his life careening into even greater uncertainty, to such an extent that he even considers suicide, in the film’s only shot that is as visually perceptive as his two previous films. Standing at the railway tracks, his face in close-up, he is expressionless. When a train approaches, the camera zooms towards the sky, giving us a white screen while the train whistles loudly; when the camera zooms back, we are relieved to see Apu still in the frame, his place having been taken by a stray pig on the tracks.

Another scene is worth noting: Apu has been working on an autobiographical novel meant to sketch the optimism of a young boy despite his terrible surroundings. At one point in the film, he throws away this novel, dropping the pages from a cliff and letting them float through the air into the dense forest, and by implication, he lets go of his past, but the moment seems unusually melodramatic for such a naturalistic film, and I was strangely unmoved.

The film proves the point of the father in Ozu’s Tokyo Story – children don’t always live up to expectations – and having seen the development of Apu, one might be disappointed by his decisions in life. Apu is also disappointed and tries to make up for his mistakes, though it is unclear what lies ahead after the end credits roll. This final instalment of the trilogy is also visually much less courageous than the other two films, and I was frustrated by the lead actor’s rather awkward performance. The World of Apu remains a work that should be seen as part of the larger story of Apu, but it is the weakest film in the series.

Days of Heaven (1978)

André Crous

USA
4*

Director:
Terrence Malick
Screenwriter:
Terrence Malick
Directors of Photography:
Néstor Almendros
Haskell Wexler

Running time: 95 minutes

Terrence Malick is a big ol’ romantic; just consider Badlands and The New World. Days of Heaven is in the same vein, and its images are breathtaking. It stars Richard Gere and Brooke Adams, who pretend to be brother and sister, lest other people “start talking”, and go to work in the Texas Panhandle in 1916, where they sack the wheat on the farm of a bachelor roughly their age. The farmer is never given a name, but ironically, he is the best-drawn character of the three.

Days of Heaven starts with the music of Camille Saint-Saëns, the famous seventh movement (“Aquarium”) of his “Carnival of the Animals”, and the music sets the tone for the rest of the score, composed by the master, Ennio Morricone. Malick’s images are dreamlike in colour yet very clearly “of this world”, and his characters seem to float through existence even though we can easily project our own fears onto them. For once, I think the film’s images themselves surpass even the beauty of the film’s Criterion DVD cover (the poster image at the top).

The film was famously shot mostly at magic hour (that brief window of time after sunset and before darkness), and as a result, the horizon is often bright orange, the sky is tinted purple-orange and the characters are bathed in hues of pink. Malick’s decision to shoot primarily (though, importantly, not exclusively) at this time of day inevitably led to some trouble, including errors in continuity, because shots would change from magic hour to full sunlight in a single scene. However, his directors of photography, Almendros and Wexler, knew how to cope with the demands of their director, and for the most part, these changes in lighting are not very significant.

It is true that the film has less plot than some music videos, but honestly, one doesn’t really care. Malick is a visual storyteller, and he easily manages to fill an entire film with action set on a single farm. The majestic farmhouse, perched on a hill, which looks out over the whole property and is reminiscent of the famous farmhouse in George Stevens’s Giant, appears in many shots in the background, and sometimes the camera pans from the action in a pond or in the fields back to the house in the background.

Brooke Adams’s character, Abby, who looks like a young Ali MacGraw, catches the eye of the farmer, who asks her to stay on at the farm past the end of the season. Her boyfriend, Billy, had heard that the farmer is ill, and they decide to let Abby stay on so that they could inherit the farmer’s money when he dies. Of course, he doesn’t die as quickly as they’d like,  and this fact generates some frustration in Billy. But Abby is carefree and starts to fall in love with the farmer, played by Sam Shepard, who never looked more handsome and genuinely cares for her.

Days of Heaven plays as a kind of memory – an idea supported by the voice-over of Abby’s young sister, Linda, who also joins them at the farm. But for some reason, the Linda on the soundtrack is the voice of the Linda as a young girl, which doesn’t make much sense. Also, the point of the view of the camera is always displaced from one character to another.

The inspiration for David Gordon Green‘s film, Undertow, is obvious, especially in the way both directors use dialogue in their respective films. In scenes with dialogue, Malick uses the age-old rule of starting a scene as late as possible and ending it as quickly as possible. These conversational moments are effective, although some scenes exist purely for the sake of producing one or two lines of important dialogue before we move on to the next poetic scene with wheat ears quivering under a gentle breeze.

Days of Heaven‘s finest moment, the attack of the locusts, may be compared to the buffalo hunt in Dances with Wolves, but it also has a very important symbolic role to play, as it comes at a critical point in the narrative, and Malick makes use of this moment to introduce his only vertically downward shot – a divine point of view that plays on the locusts’ significance in a biblical context as well.

But for all the beautiful imagery, the central story and, in particular, the characters of Abby and Billy needed to be fleshed out a bit more. Abby, in particular, seems to have no real attachment, and one doesn’t get a clear idea of her true interest. The film contains some interesting glances from smaller characters who are suspicious of the relationship between Abby and her “brother”, Billy, and these are well integrated into the flow of the story.

Terrence Malick’s film is enchanting and, despite any objections one might have about the story or the characters, he demonstrates that the cinema has a powerful ability to present even the simplest of stories in harmonious sounds and images that can be truly astounding.

The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928)

André Crous

France
3.5*

Director:
Carl Theodor Dreyer
Screenwriters: 
Carl Theodor Dreyer
Joseph Delteil
Director of Photography:
Rudolph Maté

Running time: 82 minutes

Original title: La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc

The saying goes that a picture is worth a thousand words, and this is particularly true of silent films, where one often has only the images to rely on. Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc has a remarkable following and is revered as one of the best silent films. Above all, reviewers focus on the force of the lead performance, by Renée Falconetti, whose face conveys anguish and passion with great clarity and admirable conviction.

However, for all the veneration it has inspired in viewers all over the world, and I grant that Dreyer’s film has much going for it, it has never provided me with the kind of transcendental experience that other viewers have written about.

Based on the trial records archived at the Bibliothèque de la Chambre des Députés, the film prides itself on being an exact reproduction of historical events. It focuses on the interrogation of Joan of Arc in court in 1431, her obstinate refusal to disavow her statement that she is the daughter of God and her eventual execution by burning.

The problem is the same one I had with Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, incidentally also very faithful to previous texts, and my objection has nothing to do with the religious content of the two films. Rather, I question the approach of a filmmaker who seems to think that the viewer would be able to fill in the big gap left by the removal of the film’s build-up. In Gibson’s film, as in Dreyer’s film, if you had never heard of Jesus Christ, or of Joan of Arc, the film simply wouldn’t make much sense, since the reason for their suffering has been wholly omitted.

In the film, Joan of Arc is supposed to be about 19 years old. At the time of the shoot, Falconetti was almost twice her age: 35. This is not a fatal disparity, but since the main character states her age in the opening scene, I found it difficult, from the very beginning, to trust anything she had to say.

And then there is the face of the film, Falconetti’s face, with eyes, says Roger Ebert, “that will never leave you”. That much is true: when I think of the film, I think of Falconetti’s face and her unblinking eyes. But that is because Dreyer spends so much time showing us her face, and Falconetti spends so little time doing anything else than trying not to blink. Her pauses are frustrating, and she remains a very opaque figure at the centre of the drama, even though it is clear that the director intended for her to seem like she was drunk on divinity. Most of the time, whenever she is asked an important question, she stares blankly at her interrogator, her eyes as big as plates.

The film is evidently on her side, not only because an opening title card informs us that we are about to watch the story of “a young, pious woman confronted by a group of orthodox theologians and powerful judges” (théologiens aveuglés et juristes chevronnés: blind theologians and seasoned legal experts), but also because the judges themselves are not portrayed very flatteringly: In one of the opening shots, a judge scratches his ear and examines the piece of wax on his finger. The judges often snicker at Joan’s responses to their questions and victimise her even further.

Despite my objections about its plot and the central performance, The Passion of Joan of Arc is an audiovisual gem. I watched a version with Richard Einhorn’s glorious “Voices of Light” on the soundtrack, and the experience of listening to his choir music, often accompanied by strings, and watching the stark, clean images with pure white backgrounds, sometimes in very elegant tracking shots over slightly expressionist décor, was extraordinary.

The film is intense, and many sequences stand out for provoking powerful feelings in the viewer, but Dreyer’s choice to place his central character above all else (significantly, he fails to introduce all other characters by name) makes it a very prejudiced work of art. On the technical side of the production, however, The Passion of Joan of Arc is one of the most beautiful films ever produced.

IP5 (1992)

André Crous

France
2.5*

Director: 
Jean-Jacques Beineix
Screenwriters:
Jacques Forgeas
Jean-Jacques Beineix
Director of Photography:
Jean-François Robin

Running time: 119 minutes

Original title: IP5: L’île aux pachydermes

Poor Jean-Jacques Beineix. Perhaps he thought that this would be his 8½, and that is why he indicated in the title that it would be his fifth film. Supposedly, the letters represent the initials of his girlfriend at the time, supporting the romantic element of the narrative. But ultimately such self-indulgence does little to enhance the experience of watching the film, except to make us shake our head. The film has three wonderfully entertaining central characters, but the director doesn’t quite know whose story he wants to tell, and he ends up failing us on all counts.

The three characters are Jockey, barely in his teens; Tony, in his mid-twenties; and the sage old Mr Marcel, who might just be a tree hugger who escaped from an insane asylum. Tony, played by Olivier Martinez looking like a young Elvis, is a professional “tagger”, a graffiti artist who is constantly on the run from the law but merely wishes to create his art on the walls of his city. Jockey, the son of an always drunken immigrant, lives in the same block of council flats as Tony and wants to have a good time, even if this involves a bit of petty theft now and then.

And then there is Mr Marcel, played by Yves Montand, who died shortly after the shoot. One night, Jockey and Tony steal a car only to discover in the backseat Mr Marcel, a man who very politely but insistently refuses to leave them alone. Mr Marcel is mysterious and presents signs of clairvoyance that might be construed as traces of something divine, but as the film proceeds, this initial hypothesis falls apart rather quickly; unfortunately, the film itself does not provide any useful information to explain his behaviour and especially his insight.

The full French title translates as “IP5: The Island of Pachyderms” and “pachyderm” is a term I know from Eugène Ionesco’s absurdist play, Rhinocéros; it means “thick-skinned mammal”, but alas, we don’t get to see any of them. And it isn’t a certainty that we’ll get to see the island either. The film is about memory and desire, but such a statement makes Beineix’s film sound much more clearly defined than it actually is. While Mr Marcel and Tony are both on a journey to reclaim the loves they lost, their journeys are quite different, and so are the women, and the reasons they haven’t seen each other for 40 years (Mr Marcel and Monique), or, well, barely 40 hours (Tony and Gloria).

The film’s only relationship that we care about, though to a very limited degree, is the one between Mr Marcel and Monique, and once that part of the story has been resolved, we suddenly find ourselves remembering that the film started out being about Tony’s journey, from Paris to Toulouse, to find Gloria. At this point, at the end of the second act, the film starts to drag, because there is no real desire to see Tony’s “love”, based on two or three very brief encounters, when it was made very clear to Tony that Gloria couldn’t care less about his feelings towards her.

As is to be expected from the director of Diva and Betty Blue (37°2 le matin), the colour palette is strikingly beautiful, and there are particularly attractive shots scattered throughout the film, including a moment when Mr Marcel stands, preacher-like, in the middle of the forest during a rainstorm and lets the “lustral rain” purify him while he is lit up like a Christmas tree. This is, however, one time where his crew let him down and one can spot very odd changes in lighting on Montand’s face.

IP5 contains too many coincidences for the story development to be credible, and while Mr Marcel could have had a mysterious air about him that might make us believe in a supernatural force at work, the questions generated by the film are never answered but rather lead to a very banal conclusion that – considering the film’s energetic opening – is not at all satisfactory.