1950-1959

Charlotte and Her Boyfriend (1958)

André Crous

A trial run for one of the most famous scenes in Breathless, Jean-Luc Godard’s Charlotte and Her Boyfriend puts two people in a room but only lets one of them speak (non-stop) for 10 full minutes.

Charlotte et son JulesFrance
3*

Director:
Jean-Luc Godard
Screenwriter:
Jean-Luc Godard
Director of Photography:
Michel Latouche

Running time: 13 minutes

Original title: Charlotte et son Jules

After the previous year’s lovely All the Boys Are Called Patrick, which Eric Rohmer, one of his colleagues at the Cahiers du cinéma, had written, Jean-Luc Godard tried his own hand at writing a short film. The product had a much more narrow focus but clearly never went through many drafts. Charlotte and Her Boyfriend is a stream-of-consciousness rant for a full 10 minutes in a confined space, and it loses steam very quickly.

It reunited Godard with Patrick‘s Anne Collette (whose character in that short had the same name) and features Jean-Paul Belmondo in one of his very first roles. Unfortunately for the director, Belmondo was called up to serve in the French army in Algeria shortly after the shoot. As a result, Godard filled in for him during post-production, so every time Belmondo speaks, it is Godard’s own voice, immediately recognisable by his higher pitch and slight lisp. It doesn’t fit Belmondo at all, although it does make the character sound fairly pathetic.

Collette plays the titular Charlotte, an aspiring actress who arrives at the apartment of her ex-boyfriend, a writer named Jules. It quickly becomes clear that she had left him, and he is still seething with rage. Serious about giving her a piece of his mind but unable to control his rage, he lashes out in a torrent of half-formed ideas that become more and more ridiculous as he spins out of control. All the while, she smiles, remains perfectly silent and is unaffected by this mood swings. It takes a very long 10 minutes, but ultimately, it is very satisfying to learn exactly why she decided to visit him.

While Jules moves passionately about his own apartment, marching back and forth with determination, Godard delivers the voice-over mechanically, like a robot half-awake. The film is clearly on Charlotte’s side, however. During the opening credits, the music only plays when the camera is on her, which turns to silence when there is a cut to Jules. Later on, when she tilts her head at him to the right or to the left, the camera tilts along with her. This perspective, as well as Jules’s non-stop, gradually less lucid verbal diarrhoea (he wants her to come back to him, but he keeps calling her an idiot), has a devastating effect on our perception of him.

The message almost seems to be that love drives one crazy. The film’s style emphasises this slight disconnect from reality, as we mostly see Charlotte and Jules visually separated by one-shots. This, in addition to Jules’s voice clearly coming from a voice-over that does not belong to the body we see on-screen, produces an odd discontinuity between sight and sound that is wholly appropriate to the story.

And yet, while Charlotte’s happy-go-lucky attitude offers a fresh contrast to Jules’s self-involved but utterly tedious diatribe, the film is mostly a bore and feels much longer than its brief running time. The setup obviously anticipates one of the best scenes in Breathless, in which Belmondo and Jean Seberg spend 20 minutes talking in a small apartment. But whereas Charlotte and Her Boyfriend is basically a monologue, delivered with a dubbed voice that lacks emotion, Breathless features two palpably living and breathing characters interacting with each other like real people. Charlotte and Jules, by contrast, very much remain rather shallow creatures of fiction.

All the Boys Are Called Patrick (1957)

André Crous

The Rohmer-scripted All the Boys Are Called Patrick is among the most straightforward, playful films of Godard’s oeuvre, although the number of references to the world of film already start to pile up. 

All the Boys Are Called PatrickFrance
4*

Director:
Jean-Luc Godard
Screenwriter:
Eric Rohmer
Director of Photography:
Michel Latouche

Running time: 20 minutes

Original title: Tous les garçons s’appellent Patrick
Alternate title: Véronique et Charlotte, ou Tous les garçons s’appellent Patrick

With two rather conventional début films – a documentary (about the construction of a dam in southern Switzerland) and a genuinely delightful short (about a woman deciding to spice up her life by engaging in some prostitution) – under his belt, Jean-Luc Godard embarked on his next project in the autumn of 1957. Shot on 35 mm, the result was All the Boys Are Called Patrick, 20 minutes in length and based on a screenplay by that great fanatic of dialogue, Eric Rohmer. Although unexpectedly cute for a Godard production, it clearly anticipated the budding director’s future (pre)occupation with films and form.

The titular Patrick is actually just one playboy who chats up and arranges to hook up with every girl he meets. What makes this story so interesting is that the two girls he happens to cross minutes apart one afternoon are roommates, and it is a shrewd idea to give them different perspectives on being flirted with. However, while the central narrative idea is wonderful, everything that Godard was responsible for (most notably, the multiple references to art and other films) makes this immediately recognisable as the work of a young film enthusiast rather than a director.

Véronique (Nicole Berger) and Charlotte (Anne Collette) are two young women sharing a flat in Paris’s Montparnasse district. Véronique has a lunchtime appointment but tells Charlotte they can meet up at the Luxembourg Gardens between 2 and 3 o’clock. Charlotte, who reads Hegel in the morning and flips through some pulp fiction (The Fate of the Immodest Blonde, which Godard probably chose because it was written by Patrick Quentin) over lunch, is immediately hit upon when she arrives in the public park.

The chatty flirt is called Patrick (played by Jean-Claude Brialy), who is clearly as shallow as a puddle but spouts off multiple references to the world of film in an attempt to impress her. Pretending to speak Japanese, for example, he merely drops the names of two of the era’s foremost directors from the Land of the Rising Sun: “Mizoguchi-Kurosawa?” It would not be a leap to equate the character with Godard himself, although Brialy is infinitely better-looking.

Charlotte eventually acquiesces to having a quick coffee with him. At the café, the two share a table next to a man whose face is buried in a copy of Arts, whose cover provocatively proclaims that “French cinema is dying under false legends”. This article by François Truffaut appeared in May of that year. Patrick persists with the falsehoods as he claims to be studying law, although the film slyly reveals that he has a geometry textbook. Despite herself, Charlotte ultimately arranges a date with him the following evening.

Moments after parting, Patrick runs into Véronique, who is just returning from the Luxembourg Gardens where Charlotte was nowhere to be found. All but beating her into submission to have a drink, they go to another nearby café, where Patrick runs through more or less the same lines as before (he told Charlotte it has been a month since he has picked up a girl and tells Véronique it has been a year) but somehow scores another date out of this forced meeting. The atmosphere of widespread cinephilia evolves as Véronique is also carrying around a copy of Cahiers du cinéma (it’s the July 1957 edition, with Orson Welles on the cover; later in the film, the magazine’s co-founder, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, also gets a shout-out).

Fortunately, unlike many of the director’s later films, this is the work of someone gingerly experimenting with the medium and not yet trying to steamroll over its conventional form. While the editing is rather thrown together, there is still very much a story to latch onto here, and Rohmer, in particular, deserves our gratitude for keeping the dialogue snappy and spontaneous. 

All the Boys Are Called Patrick lags a bit in the second half, when Godard’s camera starts fixating on unnecessary details like the promotional poster for a Pablo Picasso exhibition (perhaps because Patrick, Pablo and the focal point of “Portrait of Paulo” all share the same first two letters, “Pa-“? I wouldn’t put such inanity past Godard) or a giant movie poster for Rebel Without a Cause that the girls have in their bathroom.

However, the verbal sparring keeps our interest, as the action we witness turns ever more complicated thanks to the way the girls tell each other about their respective Patrick. We know the truth, but it is fascinating to see them hiding and altering details about him to impress or slightly put down the other. One says he looks like Cary Grant, the other like the new American actor, Anthony something (presumably Anthony Perkins). Charlotte says she found Patrick incredibly interesting, and Véronique pretends she hates Coca-Cola, while the real events tell a very different story. There is something Rashomon-like about their interaction, albeit with fewer details and more uncertainty about the direction. 

The lack of firm direction from behind the camera is most evident in the endings of many scenes, which often consist of the characters laughing nonsensically at a non-existent joke. However, the story’s three-part structure is sublime in both its simplicity and efficacy. And despite the constant repetition of Beethoven’s “Rondo a capriccio in G Major” on the soundtrack and the camera’s unplanned (or badly executed) movements, the story loses almost none of its appeal, and the climax immediately gives way to the END intertitle. A perfect conclusion to a thoroughly enjoyable 20 minutes.

A Flirtatious Woman (1955)

André Crous

Devoid of the director’s usual pretentiousness, Jean-Luc Godard’s very first fiction short, A Flirtatious Woman, may just be one of the best films he ever created.

Une femme coquetteFrance
4.5*

Director:
Jean-Luc Godard
Screenwriter:
Jean-Luc Godard
Director of Photography:
Jean-Luc Godard

Running time: 9 minutes

Original title: Une femme coquette

Made with just a borrowed 16 mm camera and no money, A Flirtatious Woman was Jean-Luc Godard’s first foray into fiction filmmaking. The 24-year-old had shot a 20-minute documentary, Operation Concrete (Opération béton), the previous year, but intrigued by a Maupassant short story entitled “The Signal”, in which a married woman tries her hand at prostitution, he wrote an adaptation and filmed it without any dialogue on the streets of Geneva.

Except for the use of the voice-over and the primary focus on a female character, this feels nothing like a Godard film, which is precisely why it is so good. Technically, it was directed by “Hans Lucas”, Godard’s chosen pseudonym, which he also used on occasion as a byline for his work in the Cahiers du cinéma. The film is not weighed down by film references or political statements, and there are no silly attempts to re-invent film grammar. The French New Wave’s fascination with Hitchcock and with Bernanos via Bresson subtly infuses the narrative without ever overtaking it, and what we get is a thoroughly enjoyable, tightly focused, well-executed film with a central character who justifies her actions intelligently and with a human voice. This cannot be said of the bulk of Godard’s subsequent films. although the film does anticipate Godard’s fixation on prostitution.

In the first and last scenes, we see a young woman, Agnès (Maria Lysandre), writing a letter to her friend, Françoise. The letter is a full confession of the adultery she has committed, which we see in the flashback constituting the main body of the film. The voice-over is very clearly the words written in the letter, but even though this is a verbalisation of written material, the message is conveyed realistically and compellingly. This does not feel like something written down and read for the benefit of the viewer. Many of Godard’s feature films suffer from the burden of being lectures rather than stories. That is certainly not the case here.

Agnès recounts how she was on her way home one day to prepare lunch for her husband when she noticed a woman on a balcony. The woman was well-dressed and gave a warm smile to every man passing on the street below. Young, old, handsome, ugly… she didn’t discriminate. At one point, a serious young chain-smoker with sunglasses (a 25-year-old-going-on-45-year-old Jean-Luc Godard) noticed her, kept looking towards her and noticed she continued to smile at him. He went up, she went inside, and 15 minutes later, he came back out. Agnès is so thrilled by this overt display of flirtatiousness that she innocently dips her toe into the pool of prostitution, too.

On the Île Rousseau, a small island in the middle of Geneva, she approaches a man reading a newspaper on a bench. He peeks at him, again and again. This sustained series of shots culminates in the man being so taken with her coy glances that rushes towards her with a frenzied lust he can no longer control. After all, men are very simple creatures – if anyone good-looking shows the slightest bit of interest in them, they easily turn to putty. Surprised that her ruse was so successful, and also a little shocked by the passion she managed to rouse, Agnès runs back home. But the man pursues her by car, and when he catches up with her, he offers 50 francs (around $250 today) for the pleasure of her company. She doesn’t say no.

A Flirtatious Woman does not contain any dialogue or diegetic sounds. The soundtrack consists exclusively of Agnès’s voice-over reading of the confessional letter, along with bits and pieces of Bach playing continuously throughout. The narration is compelling not only because it comments on the action but also because it informs us about the narrator’s state of mind. Moreover, the words come across as spoken rather than read, which adds dynamism to this part of the soundtrack. The cinematography and the editing both seem a bit flimsy and thrown together from whatever footage Godard managed to collect, but the film’s appeal comes from its simple story told in a compelling way – largely thanks to the voice work, for which I presume the credit goes to actress Maria Lysandre.

Except for the Bach (mostly the “Brandenburg Concertos”) constantly blaring on the soundtrack, this is a wonderful piece of work. It may lack the formal playfulness and the philosophising we tend to associate with Godard, but the film is all the better for it. If only he had kept this up in his later work, though without appearing in them to the same extent as here (this is not merely a Hitchcockian cameo but a major character role), his motion pictures may have been infinitely more relatable.

Journey to the Beginning of Time (1955)

André Crous

Journey to the Beginning of Time

Czechoslovakia
4.5*

Director:
Karel Zeman
Screenwriters:
Karel Zeman
Josef Antonín Novotný
Directors of Photography:
Václav Pazderník
Antonín Horák

Running time: 84 minutes

Original title: Cesta do pravěku

The fossils of prehistoric creatures housed at the National Museum are just a collection of bones, either spread out or assembled in a skeletal structure or set in stone as a result of petrification over millennia. They are not alive, and they only hint at the original. Sometimes, a museum may have an exhibit that is a representation of what one of these animals from long, long ago looked like. Usually, it’s a mammoth.

What the luminary Czechoslovak special effects director Karel Zeman realised, was exactly the same motivating force that must have compelled Steven Spielberg to shoot Jurassic Park in the early 1990s: The ability of the cinema, and of skilled filmmakers, to bring to life what until now we could only imagine and to make the past almost physically present.

Journey to the Beginning of Time was released in 1955, but as the country was isolated internationally at the time and would only open up a few months after Zeman’s death in 1989, his fame and magic were confined to the borders of the landlocked country in Eastern Europe.

What we realise more and more, however, is how far ahead of his time Zeman was. Inspired by Georges Méliès and explicitly referencing Jules Verne, whose work is the obvious forebear of both these artists, Zeman’s Journey to the Beginning of Time is a beloved classic in the Czech Republic and deserves widespread recognition, even though its visual effects have by now, more than half a century later, been surpassed by computer-generated effects.

Three teenagers, Petr, Jenda and Toník, and a younger boy named Jirka set off on a journey through the ages. Having read Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth, they consider themselves explorers and set off on a canoe upstream from the present day all the way back to the beginning of life on earth, where the fossil of a trilobite that Jirka found in stone will be seen for real.

It is a journey that obviously boggles the mind, and we are left wanting for an explanation of how the children go about skipping from one time period to the other (the film does employ some mist to cover the transitions, though), but what is obvious is that these machinations of the fiction are not what we should be focused on. The real reason we watch the film is to see the prehistoric animals come to life, and do so in the presence (and in the same frame!) as the children.

Petr, the de facto leader of the group, obliquely speaks for the viewer, too, when he observes:

We haven’t made this journey just for fun; we came to study what prehistoric life really looked like. We are so lucky to have the opportunity to do just that, to see everything with our own eyes.

Indeed, this is a privilege, and as the children travel back from the time of the cavemen to the time of the dinosaurs and beyond, we find ourselves constantly aware of the fact that while the events are about as possible as time travel, the thrill of seeing creatures from these two very different times in one place is extraordinary, and Zeman assembles and stages the actions with a very firm and steady hand.

While the special effects are not on the more or less seamless technical level of Jurassic Park, they are breathtaking considering the film was made in the early 1950s, in a country that had a few months earlier been racked by its infamous currency reform that cut the worth of everyone’s money by 90% while prices remained the same (a tale told in great detail by the remarkable 2012 film, Ve stínu). Often, the stop-motion animal movements would seem to be too fast or too slow, or when the mammoth stands still but raises its trunk, the bushes around it move without reason with jerky movements.

But Zeman achieves some impressive results during the staging of a nighttime fight between a Stegosaurus and a Tyrannosaurus Rex, and while many animals don’t have a reflection in the water because they were not shot next to the river, but separately, the Brontosaurus’s appearance in the river, reflection included, is gorgeous.

At another point, the camera follows the enormous dragonflies called Meganeura as they fly between the trees, the camera apparently tracking down below while looking up at them. The effect is powerful and this technically ambitious sequence is very rewarding.

In some ways, the film can be called superficial, but covering the various life forms of 5 billion years in 80 minutes is no small feat. From time to time, mention is made of life in the present, and the juxtaposition is worthwhile, for example when club mosses were the size of trees, their eventual stratification would give rise to coal mining in the 20th century.

The four boys, with the exception of the inquisitive Jirka, don’t get up to much trouble and have a surprisingly easy time of all this travelling through the ages, so we ultimately learn little about them, but their awe at being able to see all these creatures is something the viewer understands all too well, as Zeman’s film awakens a curiosity in us for the life of things we may never really have considered beyond the bare bones of a museum exhibit.

H-8… (1958)

André Crous

Yugoslavia
4.5*

Director:
Nikola Tanhofer
Screenwriters:
Zvonimir Berković
Tomislav Butorac
Director of Photography:
Slavko Zalar

Running time: 105 minutes

In the glorious tradition of Stagecoach, the 1958 Yugoslavian film H-8… takes a very heterogeneous group of individuals, puts them in a car, lets us slowly come to grips with their stories and their character traits, and before we know it, we know them all and the end credits start to roll. However, with some clever narration, by competing narrators, and a revelation in the very first scene that the characters are rushing together to their doom, this particular film has a core of profound suspense that draws us closer despite us knowing it will all end in a gruesome accident.

The film is based on a real story of a driver who overtook a bus while his car’s high-beam headlamps were turned on and who subsequently blinded the driver of the oncoming truck, causing a horrific accident from which this driver escaped and drove off without anybody ever knowing his or her identity. The only hint was the car’s license plate, which started with H (indicating Hrvatska, or Croatia) and the number 8, which a surviving passenger noticed as the car sped past the bus.

H-8… takes place on the night of April 14, 1957, along the highway between Belgrade and Zagreb, and in a terrifically energetic opening sequence, lasting a full seven minutes, we are shown the highlights of the evening’s events, though little makes sense to us because we don’t yet know the individuals concerned. However, the small snippets are memorable enough for us to realise, all through the film, that we can slowly start to put the pieces together.

The tension isn’t only derived from the fact we know what will happen, in a general way, at the end of the film, but the more we get to know the characters, and the more the narrators teasingly relate the seat numbers fatally affected by the upcoming crash, the more interested we become. Like the best Hitchcock films, the dramatic suspense of knowing the bomb is going to explode usually surpasses the surprise of having a bomb explode while we (and the characters) are focusing on other things.

Nikola Tanhofer, who directed this film around the time his début feature Nije bilo uzalud was nominated for the Golden Bear at the Berlinale, finds many small moments of tension in this main setting. And most of the time, these moments are not overplayed. There is the odd sudden backward tracking shot from or forward tracking shot onto a face, usually underscored by a violent thud on the soundtrack, to highlight the fact death has understood (and so has the viewer) that the intended victim has taken his or her spot in the hot seat.

One scene, in particular, is as short as it is powerful. The parents, clearly unhappily married, are taking care of their daughter at the back of the bus. She has a nosebleed that doesn’t seem to go away, and when one of the drivers eventually asks the girl to come and sit in the front to take her mind off the blood, the parents engage in a very frank conversation, which they themselves shamefully admit is inappropriate, in which they reveal they’ve thought about life without their daughter. When she is taken to the front seat, one of the designated death seats, according to the narrators, one can’t help but admire the director’s skill at infusing the film with a sense of dread, even as we rejoice that the girl is finally relieved of her parents’ petty quarrels.

There are too many characters to mention, but it is remarkable how the director takes his time to slowly reveal the many different angles to the individuals, and very often we come to realise that we have mistakenly judged a book by its cover, as the real intentions or some hidden secret is brought to light.

The other car, the truck with a father back from prison and his son, does not provide anything near the kind of entertainment we get from the characters on the bus, and that is a real disappointment. At a petrol station, the father and son meet up with one of the father’s former fellow prisoners, a man who is working as a con artist, and he ends up hitching a ride with them and shooting his mouth off the whole time. There is a reason for him being included in this storyline, and perhaps the director underplays his importance, but the scenes themselves are rather uninteresting and monotonous.

However, this is an absolute treasure of a film. Dark and ominous though full of life, H-8… must be seen to recognise what depth there can be in the flimsiest of storylines and how tension and suspense can be established very easily merely by pointing the camera at someone eyeing something or, conversely, by setting the camera in a way that makes us see something the character doesn’t. Or, of course, by having two narrators tell us the death seats have not been filled yet, and have us wait for someone to make a move.

I Confess (1953)

André Crous

USA
3*

Director:
Alfred Hitchcock
Screenwriters:
George Tabori
William Archibald
Director of Photography:
Robert Burks
 
Running time: 95 minutes
 
In I Confess, Alfred Hitchcock tries to pull the wool of one problem over our eyes so we are blinded to the easy resolution of another. He suggests the problem of a priest who would rather risk hell on earth than hell in the afterlife is perfectly credible and would inject a valid fear in the viewers of his film. He is only about half-right.
 
Father Logan, a very handsome priest (it’s Montgomery Clift, after all)  in Quebec City, is visited by a German refugee, Otto Keller, late one night. Keller is distressed, and the previous scene had shown us the reason: Keller has murdered a lawyer named Villette and unburdens himself in the confessional to Father Logan. Relieved of this weight around his neck, Keller keeps working at the rectory, where he runs into Father Logan every day, and so does his wife Alma, who also knows about her husband’s dark secret. But Father Logan can’t tell anybody about this confession because in his capacity as priest, he is bound by the confessional privilege, in the same way as a doctor, to respect the confidence his interlocutor places in him.
 
Of course, this secrecy is bound to become an issue, and this process has a few sides to it. Father Logan becomes complicit in keeping very important information from the police. Now, he has the training to do this with legion personal secrets which his parishioners confide in him, so Hitchcock turns the screws by, firstly, having Keller commit the murder wearing a cassock, so as to avoid suspicion, and secondly, having Logan keep his own secret, which is revealed halfway through. This personal secret puts him in a lot of trouble because it could easily result in his reputation being tarnished and therefore his credibility undermined, even though we know, from the very first scenes, that he is not the one who committed the murder.
 
This theme of guilt would play well with a 1950s Catholic audience, but when seeing it today, most viewers would be puzzled, if not outraged, by the main character’s decision to keep a secret (about a mortal sin, no less) rather than protect himself by telling the truth. Rather than honourable, this just seems weak. It is a situation whose gravity and absurdity is compounded by the disgust Keller evokes in us by constantly hovering around Logan, making him more and more uncomfortable. Keller clearly has no regard for the actions taken by Logan to protect him and instead tries to pin the murder on Father Logan — his patron and the man who saved him and his wife from misery by providing them with jobs at the church.
 
The beauty of Quebec City isn’t fully utilized either, and many street scenes could have taken place anywhere. The famous Château Frontenac does appear now and again, and the first glimpse we have of this magnificent building, during the opening credits, has it under dark clouds, a perfect visual metaphor for the film’s plot, and, unfortunately, its execution. One very smart visual move is the stitching on Father Logan’s cope: in one of his first scenes, with his back turned to us, we see a big cross across his back — evidently, the one that he prepares to bear for the rest of the film.
Clift is as good as he always is, which is to say in a class of his own, but he seems a bit too stable, too certain of himself: While he conveys some distress when he clasps his face, his voice never wavers, even under the immense strain of his seemingly hopeless situation. 
 
I Confess is a failed film for Hitchcock, since there is very of the little dark humour that otherwise made many of his films so enjoyable. The murder takes place before the start of the film, which admittedly happens in other Hitchcock films as well, but the notion of our hero being framed for a crime he didn’t commit is something Hitchcock does not successfully exploit. Instead, he opts for flashbacks in soft focus (!) and a love story that, despite its considerable running time in flashback, never lives up to much in the present. And although they have picked a priest as their prime suspect in the case, has it not occurred to anybody that his silence in many key scenes — most significantly his testimony in court, when, with the ridiculous flourish of a fade-out, an important part is done away with by means of an ellipse — is the result of his duty as a priest to keep matters of confession in the confessional?

Niagara (1953)

André Crous

USA
4*

Director:
Henry Hathaway
Screenwriters:
Charles Brackett
Walter Reisch
Richard L. Breen
Director of Photography:
Joseph MacDonald

Running time: 85 minutes

Niagara is all about Marilyn Monroe — everything happens as a result of her, and the effect of this blond goddess on the people around her is blood-curdling. This film proved that film noir was not limited to colour, nor was star-studded suspense limited to Hitchcock.

Shot mostly on location in gorgeous Technicolor, Henry Hathaway’s Niagara demonstrates the talent of a young Ms Monroe (she was 26 years old during production of this film) and her ability to play — but never overplay — the role of the wily femme fatale: Rose Loomis.

And while Joseph Cotten, whose portrayal of Leland in Citizen Kane arguably engages us as much as Charles Foster Kane, stars as her husband, George Loomis, he is not nearly as memorable as Monroe. There is another couple, the Cutlers, who arrive at the Niagara Falls just as things start to fall apart for the Loomises, but they serve more as a sideshow to the fun than anything else — the viewer’s companions, compared with the shining stars of Monroe and Cotten.

This couple, Ray and Polly Cutler, is spending a few days in a luxury resort opposite Niagara Falls. They are on a delayed honeymoon, having just moved here in order for Ray to start working at a Shredded Wheat Company plant. But on their arrival, making the acquaintance of Mr and Mrs Loomis, they soon discover that all is not well – Mrs Loomis, for one, leaves her husband, who seems to be mentally ill, at home, while she flirts her way into another man’s arms at the Falls.

The Falls, shown so often from up close, and appearing in the background on many occasions, serve both as a nice backdrop to the story and as a very ominous reminder of the destructive power of beauty. In one very frank conversation between Ray Loomis and Polly Cutler, he anticipates the story’ developments:

Let me tell you something. You’re young, you’re in love. Well, I’ll give you a warning. Don’t let it get out of hand like those falls out there. Up above… d’you ever see the river up above the falls? It’s calm and easy, and you throw in a log, it just floats around. Let it move a little further down and it gets going faster, hits some rocks, and… in a minute it’s in the lower rapids, and… nothing in the world — including God himself, I suppose — can keep it from going over the edge. It just… goes.

Niagara does a neat job of combining both suspense and surprise, and in one of the film’s key moments, the suspense is accomplished by a deafening silence – one that would have made Hitchcock proud. In another moment of audiovisual ingenuity, reminiscent of the famous scene in North by Northwest when a conversation is obscured by an airplane engine, the sound of the Falls drowns out an important bit of dialogue between George Loomis and Polly Cutler.

The Cutlers are in way over their heads: Polly, though a goody-two-shoes, is still bearable, but her husband, Roy, has a constant smile on his face that shows there is nothing going on upstairs. The two make a quaint couple, far removed from the emotional turmoil in the relationship (and the characters) of George and Rose, and at times this disparity between the two couples is a little too much to take. But the film sketches the situations and the motivations well enough and Hathaway’s direction is exactly what is needed to tell this story coherently and effectively. I was also impressed by the very good quality of the scenes that use rear projection — coming only two years after The African Queen, whose green screen made for some terrible pictures on the rapids, Niagara is brilliantly staged and photographed to create the impression that all of these scenes on the roaring waters are taking place outside a studio.

Cairo Station (1958)

André Crous

Egypt
4.5*

Director:
Youssef Chahine
Screenwriters:
Abdel Hay Adib
Mohamed Abu Youssef
Director of Photography:
Alevise Orfanelli

Running time: 77 minutes

Original title: باب الحديد
Transliterated title: Bab al-Hadid
Alternate title: The Iron Gate

The acting could be much better, and the climax requires an enormous suspension of disbelief, but Youssef Chahine’s Cairo Station is compact and those parts that might seem random at first all fit together in the end, underlining Chahine’s skill as a storyteller and a craftsman.

Chahine stars as the main character Qinawi, a young man who lives at Cairo’s main railway station and whose limp either scares other people or makes him the object of their ridicule. He sells newspapers and has his eye on Hanouma, a woman who doesn’t let herself be ordered about, but she seems destined to be married to Abu-Serih, who wants the workers at the station to form a union and stand up against their boss, Mansour, in whose employment they struggle to make ends meet.

The film is very frank about Qinawi’s sexual frustration, and the first time we see the inside of his little home, it is plastered with magazine cut-outs of scantily clad women in braziers. Referring to Qinawi, the voice-over ominously asks us “How could anyone have foreseen his end?”

While Qinawi is infatuated with the feisty Hanouma and sometimes leers at her obscenely, a gesture she does not take very seriously, two others stories, seemingly insignificant, are taking place in the background. In the first one, a young girl’s boyfriend is about to leave for four years and the small part of their story that we are privy to seems sincere and romantic. The second story, of which we learn indirectly whenever the main news vendor, Madbouli, talks about it, is a grizzly tale of murder: a woman was discovered in a trunk, her head and arms chopped off, and her killer unknown. These two stories will slowly come into focus towards the end of the film and tie in with Qinawi’s obsessive idea of romance.

The film doesn’t have many surprises – we can spot the dénouement from a mile away – but the final reel does contain a nail-biting sequence of events that is breathtaking to behold and even if you know what you are in for, the full cinematic experience is truly amazing. In many respects, this final part of the film is the culmination of the art of the filmmaker, whose film starts off on some shaky ground. Another scene that is a stand-out takes place on a stationary train at the station, where Hanouma starts dancing along to the music being played by the passengers. It is a raucous affair, upsetting some of the more conservative onlookers, and at the end of the number, Hanouma turns to the camera and winks at us, signalling our complicity in this unconventional bit of fun.

Some of the direction is magnificent, including a moment when a boy is saved from an oncoming train and narrowly escapes when Hanouma pulls him from the tracks. The film sometimes struggles with the post-production studio dubbing and it is particularly audible whenever Abu-Serih speaks and produces a very loud echo even when he is outside. One brief shot caught my attention: when Hanouma and Qinawi are sitting next to the fountain, one quick image shows them clearly defined in the foreground, separated from an indistinct background by the haze of the fountain. It is beautiful – much shorter, unfortunately, than the strange long take that precedes it, which shows these two characters speaking at length without looking at each other.

Chahine’s film is short and creates tension by means of a play between light and darkness, and a quickening pace at the end that will leave you breathless. Its climax relies on us to believe that Qinawi is literally blinded by obsession, but the rest of the film makes up for this bit of extreme simplicity and succeeds in presenting a story that is truly riveting.

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.

Aparajito (1956)

André Crous

India
4.5*

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

Running time: 113 minutes

Original title: অপরাজিত
Alternate title: The Unvanquished

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

With a tighter focus on Apu, the trilogy’s main character, and his mother Sarbajaya, the second film, Aparajito, substitutes the episodic nature of the first film, Pather Panchali, with a strong narrative that is a journey full of love and loss, presented in an unforgettably cinematic way that takes the best of Eisenstein and uses his approach in a new context without the film ever seeming self-indulgent.

Watching this film in sequence provokes the same kind of emotions I had when I first saw the series of Antoine Doinel films years ago: One feels privileged to watch a character grow in this way, for it is a kind of divine perspective, and it is the medium of film that enables us to appreciate this possibility.

In Aparajito, based on two novels by Bengali writer Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, we meet the young Apu and his parents in Varanasi, where they were headed at the end of the first film. They are still living from hand to mouth, but Apu has made a few friends, including a boy with whom he speaks English. When Apu’s father falls ill and dies, Apu and his mother move back to the countryside, having only each other to lean on.

But let me dwell on the father’s death for a moment. In a fusion of striking images, potent sitar sounds and a very emotional undercurrent, Ray creates the most stirring five seconds of his first two films, and in cinematic terms I would rate it close to the cut from the match being extinguished to the sun rising on the horizon in Lawrence of Arabia. Here, Apu’s father’s face is in close-up, his mouth open, receiving water from the sacred Ganges. When he loses consciousness, a very audible gasp is heard on the soundtrack. There is a cut to birds leaving a rooftop – literally released from their terrestrial bonds; first from up close and then, in another shot, from farther away – and the metaphor of escape should be fairly obvious. But it is the combination of these three shots, and the addition of the sitar, that brings about a very moving moment that does not inhere in the shots considered separately.

The film is about Apu’s journey towards becoming an adult, and besides the death of his father, there are two very general themes I wish to touch on briefly. The first is his relationship with his mother, who has already endured the loss of her daughter and now, of her husband as well. She has little hope of living a prosperous life and wants to hold onto her son as long as possible, but then, in the countryside, there is a major turning point in Apu’s life that would forever change the trajectory of his story: He catches sight of a school and decides that he wants to enrol there.

What follows is a sequence of events that deal with the second theme – Apu’s education – and demonstrate Apu’s aptitude for learning. We quickly become caught up in his progress at school, which includes very clearly defined snippets of schooling; this sequence culminates with a scene at the headmaster’s office, where Apu, now all grown up and about to leave school, is informed that he has received a scholarship to study at university in Calcutta.

One can feel the heartache of the mother, but one can also comprehend Apu’s position, and Ray does not choose sides: Rather, he presents both characters in all their human complexity. In one instance, a shot of Apu’s mother, sitting under a tree, desperately waiting for her son to come visit her, is intercut with a shot of Apu lying leisurely under a tree in Calcutta, studying for his exams. This is life, and people have their reasons and seen from the outside it might seem tragic, but we fully understand how the situation has come to this.

As in the first film, Apu is introduced in a very significant manner, his big black eyes immediately captivating our attention when he peers around a wall in Calcutta, playing hide-and-seek with a friend. As a young man, he seems to be responsible and quite shy, but his intelligence and desire to learn create expectations that the last film, The World of Apu will challenge – and make us realise once more that stories don’t always work out the way we expect. On the contrary, they have a mind of their own.