XICA (Carlos Diegues, 1976).
In 18th century Brazil, an emissary from Portugal (Walmor Chagas),
sent to supervise the diamond mines, becomes enamored with a black slave
named Xica (Zezé Motta) whose sexual magnetism and mysterious
erotic techniques make men scream with pleasure. He frees her, and indulges
her ever more extravagant whims, until his excesses prompt an investigation
from the crown.
Taking off from the story of an actual slave who rose to prominence
in the colonial era, the film adopts a fanciful, almost "magical realist"
approach to issues of race and class in Brazil. The white colonialists
are petty and effete, alienated from the body and sexuality, which are
symbolized by Xica and the blacks in general. The whites desire this
aspect of their being, while at the same needing to control it. Xica
uses sexuality in order to gain the material possessions and social
status that she lacks. All this is presented in an exaggerated style,
with more than a touch of buffoonery.
The flamobyant Motta, with her crude intensity, is the best thing about
Xica. She's striking, but not exactly a beauty - and I think
that was a smart, intentional casting decision, to put emphasis on the
pure carnality of her sexual power. But the film's humor is too broad
for my tastes - the smirking attitude towards sex symptomatic of a 1970s
sensibility that hasn't aged well. Diegues' technique is a bit rough
also, with puzzling lapses in narrative emphasis and logic. More importantly,
I question Xica's simplistic equation of the black underclass
with sexual potency and desire. In the name of a critique of the colonial
and slave-owning psyche, the film falls into sexist stereotypes. Overall,
the picture has enough intelligence to engage one's attention, but not
enough to let it rise above mere entertainment into something really
meaningful.
OSAKA ELEGY (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1936).
It would be hard to think of a body of work more thoroughly ahead of
its time than Mizoguchi's films concerning the oppression of women.
Steadily and inexorably, from the late 20s through the end of his career
in the 50s, this great director produced film tragedies about women
who are scapegoated for the failings of men and male-dominated society;
women who are depicted, moreover, in their full humanity - their pride,
fear, weakness, and hostility as well as their suffering and courage.
Isuzu Yamada plays Ayako, a receptionist who is desperate to save her
father from going to jail for embezzlement. When her married boss offers
to help in exchange for sexual favors, she first rejects him. But later,
after the young man she cares for is unable to help her, she agrees.
The boss's wife catches them in bed, which seems to put an end to things.
Then Ayako finds out that her brother will be unable to finish his educaton
unless someone pays his tuition, and of course her father can't do it.
From there, things continue to go downhill.
The sexual double standard has never been more clearly exposed. Ayako's
father and brother react with shame to her behavior, despite the fact
that she has saved them from ruin. Remarkably, her response to the increasingly
hostile attitude of society is one of determined defiance. Mizoguchi
doesn't let the audience off the hook by making her into a pitiful,
virtuous victim. Instead, Osaka Elegy offers a direct challenge
to the prevailing moral code that judges from appearances rather than
character.
Yamada, one of the greatest film actresses of all time, turns in a
complex and moving performance. And there are characteristic Mizoguchi
touches here - showing a scene through a window rather than taking us
inside a room, the camera panning from one room to another as we watch
Ayako's pained reaction to offscreen dialogue. However, the director's
style seems tentative at times, choppy even in comparison to Sisters
of the Gion, filmed later in the same year. The film
looks a little meager, perhaps partly due to budgetary constraints -
and with the action taking place almost exclusively at night, it seems
unmoored from a sense of place. Although it's a fine movie, and thought-
provoking, one gets the feeling the Mizoguchi was shooting in a hurry
and was unable to attain the feeling of assurance that was typical of
his later films. Still, it remains a milestone - arguably his first
masterwork.
THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS
(Orson Welles, 1942).
Welles' second film, an adaptation of a Pulitzer-prize winning novel
by Booth Tarkington, has suffered from its reputation as something of
a "lost" film. It is true that RKO cut 44 minutes from the picture,
rearranged some scenes, and attached an incongruous ending that was
not shot by Welles. Indeed, one can't escape the impression that the
film is too short, and we can only wonder how marvelous the original
132-minute version was. Yet, for all that, it needs to be said that
if I could watch this film without knowing anything of its history,
and with the assurance that its final form was just as the director
intended it, I would rank it as a great and beautiful work of art.
Tim Holt plays George Amberson Minafer, the spoiled, arrogant son of
a prominent turn-of-the-century Midwestern family. His way of life and
his attitude - which today we would call "entitlement" - is at odds
with the modern trends represented by Eugene Morgan (Joseph Cotten),
an automobile inventor and entrepreneur who had wanted to marry George's
mother Isabel (Dolores Costello) years before. George ends up courting
Eugene's daughter (Anne Baxter) after his own fashion, but when, after
the death of George's father, it appears that Eugene is wooing Isabel,
George is furiously determined to prevent the match.
The story is simpler than it sounds in summary. Welles infuses it with
nostalgia, melancholy, and darkness. George's dislike of Eugene is cleverly
paralleled by the theme of the coming automobile revolution. There's
even a scene where Eugene, prophetically for 1942, muses that the auto
may ultimately destroy the quality of American life. The decline of
the Amberson fortunes is, however, a somewhat muted element of the story,
although there is one chilling scene, done in close-up, where the grandfather's
incoherent, vaguely mystical talk presages his death. More prominent
is the Oedipal intensity of George's battle against his mother's suitor
(Welles doesn't soften the character, and Holt is scarily convincing
in the role), and the almost incestuous complicity of George with his
spinster aunt Fanny (Agnes Moorehead, in a raw, incredibly vulnerable
performance that was nominated for an Oscar and should have won).
The real star of the film is its moody, expressionistic style. The
source material may be Midwestern Americana, but Welles makes it seem
German, as in the scenes where the townsfolk gossip about the Ambersons,
and you see their faces set eerily against the empty background of the
sky, or in the complex scenes between Holt and Moorehead on the mansion's
huge, winding central staircase, a vertical labyrinth that serves as
the film's central visual motif. The film uses lots of long, continuous
shots, combined with a smoothly flowing camera, in which characters
come in and out of the frame, say things, and then move away for other
characters and dialogue. A scene between Holt and his uncle (the excellent
Ray Collins) dispenses with the conventional grammar of close-ups, cuts,
and over-the-shoulder shots and reactions, everything done in one medium
shot with only a slow pan, and it's a thousand times more gripping and
effective than it would have been if handled in the "normal" way. With
its darkly toned Bernard Herrmann score, opulent deep-focus photography
(Stanley Cortez), and dreamlike sense of shadow and space, The Magnificent
Ambersons is reminiscent of Citizen
Kane, but soft and elegiac where the earlier film was
bold and insistent.
The technique seems unusually innovative even today. At the same time,
Welles isn't afraid to look backward - at one point, at the end of the
sleigh ride scene, he pays tribute to Griffith by closing the sequence
with an iris, something no one did any more in movies, but it completely
works within the context of the scene's haunted nostalgia. Welles raises
the smallest moments to significance, showing the small-mindedness of
the Ambersons without pity, yet never coldly withdrawing his affection.
I remembered the picture as a tour de force, but I'd forgotten how sad,
how touching it is. Yes, it's a shame that the film we have is a cut
version. And yes, the brief ending sequence is obviously tacked on by
other hands. But The Magnificent Ambersons is still a masterpiece.
DARK PASSAGE (Delmer Daves, 1947).
Vincent Parry (Humphrey Bogart), an escaped convict wrongly convicted
of murdering his wife, is sheltered by a young woman (Lauren Bacall)
who believes in his innocence. After changing his face through plastic
surgery, he seeks to clear his name.
The film starts out with an intriguing use of the subjective method.
Everything is shot with a hand-held camera from the point of view of
the escaped man, never showing us his face. This creates a very strange
atmosphere of mystery and tension, the viewer not knowing what to believe
or who to trust. The sequences leading up to and including the plastic
surgery - with an odd, amusing bit by Tom D'Andrea as a cab driver who
helps Vincent find a surgeon - become almost surrealistic. But after
the operation, with Bogart in a face bandage hiding out with Bacall,
the picture degenerates into a sketchy and extremely implausible crime
drama.
Clifton Young is on hand as a punk who tries to blackmail the hero,
and Agnes Moorehead plays an hysterical friend of Vincent's dead wife,
but the motivations are weak and the dialogue bordering on the risible.
Daves' direction is never less than crisp - it's just that his script
lacks substance and conviction. What seemed like it would be a thrilling
film noir becomes a mere curiosity, and a waste of Bogie/Bacall star
power.
THE SARAGOSSA MANUSCRIPT
(Wojciech Has, 1965).
Attempting to make a film from the huge 19th century novel by Count
Jan Potocki - a work containing over a hundred different tales - was
an ambitious undertaking, to put it mildly. Has, a member of the group
of postwar Polish directors that included Wajda and Munk, pared the
structure down to about ten major strands, filmed it in beautiful widescreen
black & white, and produced a three hour epic with an intermission,
a flawed but engaging ode to the picaresque that is truly one of a kind.
In the midst of a battle during Napoleon's war in Spain, a French
officer stumbles upon a manuscript so fascinating that he barely looks
up from his reading when Spanish troops burst in and capture him. A
Spanish officer joins him in his reading, discovering that the book's
protagonist was his grandfather, a Belgian captain named Alfons van
Worden. We then cut to the story of Alfons (Zbigniew Cybulski) who gets
caught in a kind of supernatural loop as he tries to get to Madrid,
encountering temptations from two Muslim princesses, threats from the
Inquisition, and the demonic influence of a couple of hanged men who
keep coming back to life. Each character he meets has his or her own
story, told in flashback, and as the movie goes on, characters within
the stories tell their stories, in which other characters tell theirs,
until we have flashbacks within flashbacks within....well, you get the
idea.
Has has captured something of the 18th century love of surface, the
playfulness of tale-telling mixed with ironic pedantry, familiar from
authors such as Fielding and Diderot. Cybulski projects a dense naiveté
that is quite charming, and the picture is beautiful to look at - the
luscious widescreen compositions by Mieczyslaw Jahoda have an almost
classical purity. On the downside, the film's humor occasionally dips
into a kind of hipster excess, characteristic of the 1960s but badly
dated today. And the material inherently loses in depth what it attempts
in narrative range - the movie sometimes seems a little like junk food
that leaves you feeling empty. Yet you could do a lot worse than indulging
in this riotous alternate world for three hours. The Saragossa Manuscript
has enough wit, or nerve, to avoid the trap of heaviness - it's a light
spectacle, a mock mini-epic, absurd, inconsequential, but fun.
©2003 Chris Dashiell
CineScene
