THE FIRE WITHIN (Louis Malle, 1963).
Alain (Maurice Ronet) an alcoholic in his mid-20s, has taken "the cure"
at a clinic in Versailles. His American wife has left him, and when
the film opens he has just slept with her best friend (Léna Skerla),
who loves him but can't commit fully to staying with him. Although the
clinic's chief doctor pronounces him well, he knows better, sees no
future, and decides to commit suicide. But before that, he goes to Paris
and visits all of his old friends.
No one seems to have heard of AA in 1963 Paris (perhaps it really hadn't
established itself in Europe yet). In any case, alcoholism is only a
symptom of Alain's malaise. With a marvelously patient and precise style,
Malle portrays the quet, corrosive effect of self-hatred on a young
man of intelligence and charm. Alain is selfish and spoiled, but increasingly
conscious of a void inside, an inability to fully engage with others,
a flaw of which he is painfully aware -- and this makes him deserving
of sympathy.
Ronet's performance is a tremendous achievement. With sensitive body
language, especially with his sad, haunting eyes, and hardly any dialogue,
he emodies this lonely character, and his quest for a reason to live,
with total assurance. A long early scene in the clinic, with Ronet alone
in his room wandering about, talking a little bit to himself while handling
various objects, smoking, and looking at pictures, is a masterpiece
of intuitive expression, both by Ronet and Malle, who lets the sequence
unfold with a breathtaking lack of concern for traditional niceties.
Later, as Alain wanders through Paris, we meet an assortment of types,
all vividly conveyed, as if with quick brushstrokes (Jeanne Moreau turns
up briefly in one scene), and each expressing a different kind of self-involvement.
There is nothing contemptuous about Malle's treatment of these friends
-- they are mostly ordinary, decent people in their own way, but in
Alain's restless mind they reflect the despair and lack of meaning he
feels inside.
Rarely does one see a film's theme matched so perfectly with its form.
The style is both dryly laconic and pregnant with meaning -- revealing
depths through what is not said, not done, but only felt, as it were,
in the spaces between the characters. The black-and-white photography
(Ghislain Cloquet) is soft without being hazy; the Erik Satie piano
music punctuates the main character's journey with fleeting notes of
melancholy. The film failed at the box office, and is rarely seen. Malle
said that it was too sad a picture to succeed with audiences. This is
a bleak film, to be sure, but not enervating -- it has the bracing vigor
and intelligence of tragic poetry.
A BRIEF VACATION
(Vittorio De Sica, 1973).
Clara (Florinda Bolkan) works in a Milan factory to support her injured
husband and her two kids, along with a nagging mother-in-law and her
husband's indolent brother. When the film opens, she has overslept,
and rages in frustration and stress as she rushes off to work with little
help or sympathy from her family. At the factory, chest pain and faintness
prompt her co-workers to send her to a check-up at a clinic. In time,
she finds out that she has TB. To recover, she must go to a sanatorium
in the Alps to rest and receive treatment. Her piggish husband (Renato
Salvatore) doesn't want her to go, but she does anyway, since the State
is paying for it.
Arriving at this completely new environment, surrounded by beautiful
mountains and all her needs taken care of, Clara starts to feel at home
with the other patients and gradually rediscover her own dignity and
worth. Her new friends include a flamboyant, self-destructive actress
(Adriana Asti) and a gorgeous upper class woman (Teresa Gimpera) in
love with a married man. The dramas and confidences of the other women
help Clara to feel like a part of a community, and she is even offered
the possibility of romance with a sensitive younger man (Daniel Quenaud).
The bitter irony of all this, of course, is that as long as Clara is
sick, she can enjoy her "vacation" and actually have a life. Getting
well and returning to her old world is the one thing she dreads. In
fact, the film's premise is a line from Apollinaire: "Sickness is the
vacation of the poor." De Sica, with help from his old scenarist Cesare
Zavattini, expands on the brutal logic of this idea, in order to portray
the rich inner life that is dormant under the weight of economic pressure
-- the beauty and intelligence that is always there, needing only nourishment
to thrive.
The film's first third, depicting Clara's harsh working class existence,
is reminiscent of early neorealism. When the scene shifts to the mountains,
the story veers occasionally into melodrama, and the intrusion of a
love story seems too calculatedly sentimental to be effective. Nevertheless,
De Sica's attention to the peculiar social atmosphere of the sanatorium
has its rewards. The viewer is slowly acclimated to a new way of experiencing
things, in contrast to the stress of city life, through a careful accumulation
of small incidents, and this quiet transformation is moving and effective.
Bolkan is impressive as Clara -- her combination of stolid reserve and
vulnerability almost makes you forget her good looks. She is truly convincing
as a working class woman, long beaten down and only fitfully coming
to life.
De Sica's technique is fairly straightforward -- this is an accomplished
minor work in the canon, not as dramatically intense as his great early
works, but compassionate and thoughtful. It is also distinguished, perhaps
more than any other of De Sica's films, by a strong feeling for the
plight of women.
MERRY-GO-ROUND (Rupert Julian, 1923).
In the waning days of the Hapsburg Empire, an Austrian count (Norman
Kerry) is engaged to be married to a countess he doesn't love. On an
outing at the Prater, an amusement park in Vienna, he meets a pretty
organ- grinder (Mary Philbin) to whom he pretends to be a commoner.
Later, after flirting with her, he finds that he has actually fallen
in love, but when he seeks to end his engagement he is forbidden to
do so by the Emperor.
The original director was Erich von Stroheim. His perfectionism had
already caused controversy on his previous film, Foolish Wives,
and on this project he reportedly raged at the cast and crew nonstop,
unhappy with the sets, the costumes, and Kerry. After a month of this,
he was removed from the picture by Universal studio chief Irving Thalberg.
This was something of a milestone in Hollywood history, signaling the
ascendant power of the producer over the director.
Thalberg replaced Stroheim with the reliable but less talented Rupert
Julian. You can almost tell the exact point at which Julian took over.
The first half hour or so of the film has the dry, formalistic rigor
of Stroheim at his best -- the sequence of the count waking up, bathing,
and being dressed by his servant shows a characteristically amused attention
towards the minute rituals of aristocratic life. Then, soon after Philbin's
character appears, the picture starts to become sloppy and exaggerated.
The plot, involving the organ grinder's puppeteer father, an evil circus
barker, and a hunchback in love with the girl, is much too complicated
for its own good. The main thread -- a hopeless love affair between
a nobleman and a commoner -- was already an old formula, familiar even
from Stroheim's other films, such as the later (and far superior) The
Wedding March. Still, the film is at its best in the scenes between
Kerry and Philbin, who had her first major role here, and is lovely
and touching in the movie's quieter moments. The plot, however, drags
on -- with death and war and reconciliation and chance encounters --
past the point where one cares about any of it.
Julian lightened the story's tone, and now we can only wonder what
kind of film Stroheim would have made. In any case, Thalberg's instincts
paid off: Merry-Go-Round was a major box office success. This
was the end of Stroheim's association with Universal. He went on to
sign with Goldwyn, but unfortunately for him, there was no escape. L.B.
Mayer bought it up, and then Thalberg jumped to the new firm, MGM.
TORCH SINGER
(Alexander Hall & George Somnes, 1933).
Claudette Colbert plays a woman who has a child out of wedlock. The
father (David Manners) has skipped out of the country without knowing
he's a father, and his stuck-up family won't help her, so after struggling
and failing to make ends meet, she gives the kid up for adoption and
ends up becoming a nightclub singer. Then the story gets realy stupid:
she fills in for a lady with stage fright on a radio program for kids,
singing them lullabies, and the show becomes a hit. So then, wouldn't
you know, she decides to use the show to try to find her lost child.
Colbert was best playing honest working girl types. She isn't very
convincing as a loose woman about town, but she gives it her best, and
actually gets to sing a few Ralph Rainger-Leo Robin songs -- yeah, that's
her own voice, and she's not bad at all. But the picture, with its risible
kiddie radio hostess idea (what we hear of the show doesn't sound like
any sane child would listen for longer than a minute) and the unappealing
Manners, is a disappointment.
Ricardo Cortez plays the girl's manager, who saves her from poverty,
gets her get out of jams, even helps her look for her kid -- and
he's better looking than Manners, so why doesn't he get the girl? Anyway,
the pre-Code tolerance for unwed motherhood is refreshing, but the script
(based on a stage play) isn't smart enough to make this film more than
a middling pleasure.
I AM CUBA (Mikhail Kalatozov, 1964).
This tribute to the Cuban revolution, consisting of four fictional
episodes depicting different aspects of pre- revolutionary conditions
on the island, is a very curious hybrid. In content, it generally falls
within the standard genre of inspirational socialist propaganda. Each
story portrays the suffering and injustice of the Batista regime, and
their order represents a progression -- from mute suffering to enraged
impotent rebellion to revolutionary agitation to (finally) full-scale
military revolution and triumph. But no matter how accurately the stories
may represent the conditions in pre-Castro Cuba, the film's didactic
intent, and its efforts to arouse indigination and fervor, work against
its effectiveness as drama -- nuance is sacrificed, and full-rounded
characters are subsumed by the symbolism of social "types."
Such was the weakness of almost all Soviet art, but I Am Cuba
is a special case because of its daring formal strategies, an experimental
style that helps the film transcend its limitations, at least most of
the time. Kalatazov's camera moves constantly -- primarily with hand-held
shots that glide through the scenes in incredibly complex ways, but
also crane shots and unusual tracking shots from high or low angles,
close-ups shifting seamlessly to dizzying long shots. The high contrast
black-and-white photography is unbelievably vivid, using infrared film
to make the landscape look almost three dimensional. The virtuosity
never seems like mere trickery -- instead the feeling of almost constant
graceful movement creates a unique sense of "being there," observing
events in the midst of their unfolding rather than in discrete set-ups
as is usually the case in conventional montage.
The poet Yevgeni Yevtushenko wrote the narration, and for the most
part it's very precise and delicate in its points, with a woman's face
speaking as the personification of Cuba itself, and phrasing the political
in the finer accents of the personal. After a brief, dreamlike prologue
with a man rowing a small boat down a river (this short sequence alone
letting you know that you're in store for an altogether different visual
presentation than you're used to), the first story concerns the decadent
world of the Havana nightclubs and brothels, in which a poor young woman
(Luz María Collazo) is ashamed to let her betrothed know that
she makes ends meet by working as a prostitute. The episode opens with
a stunning tour de force: a single shot in which the camera moves from
a bikini beauty show on the top of a high rise, down through different
open-air scenes of tourists and party-goers, to the hotel swimming pool,
where we finally dive in and watch swimmers cavorting underwater. Much
of the story takes place in a darkened nightclub, and the camera movement
and imagery is so intense as to seem almost hallucinatory, despite the
crude caricatures of American businessmen (played by actors for whom
English is obviously a second language) drinking and picking up hookers.
After an amazing sequence in which the young woman is pushed from one
man across the dance floor to another (the camera following the movement
with apparent ease), one of the men goes to see where she lives out
of curiosity, and we witness the contrast between her squalid living
conditions and the luxury of the Havana tourist nightlife.
This first story is so brilliantly shot that the next three can never
quite live up to it. The second one involves a sugar cane farmer who
is told that he'll be displaced because the land has been sold to United
Fruit -- it features a wonderful dance by the old man's daughter on
a trip to town (once more, the moving camera evoking a little world
opening up to our view) and then a spectacular scene of the farmer burning
the crops, and his home, in a fit of rage. The third story shifts back
to the city, where a student activist (Raúl García) is
tormented by thoughts of revenge against the police, although he is
cautioned against rash actions by his comrades. This episode ends with
a scene of a crowd carrying a coffin through the streets, in which the
camera gradually rises above the multitude to an awesome overhead view
that is one of the film's most beautiful shots. The final story, about
a peasant who rejects the idea of taking up arms and only wants to be
left alone, but changes his mind after his home and family gets strafed
by an air force attack, is the most didactic of the four and consequently
the least impressive, although as always the visual technique is bold
and fluid.
I believe that is not only possible, but often desirable, for a dramatic
film to take a sharply defined political position. Kalatozov proves
here, as other pioneer Soviet directors did before him, that activism
can produce striking and beautiful work. My reservations about I
Am Cuba are not due to the film's pronounced pro-Castro position,
but to the way the position comes to define the story within the limitations
of ideology, rather than allowing a full story, with inherent contradictions
and multi-sided aspects of character, serve the position. The director's
flamboyant style, with its love of formal experiment, implies a certain
openness and subtlety of understanding in itself, but this is belied
by the schematic nature of the stories. Whenever an artist attempts
to make ideology the driving force behind a work, a loss of artistic
power and effect results, because the life of human beings must always
come first for an artist, and ideas and interpretations only secondary
to that primary perception. The trouble with ideology is that it doesn't
tolerate expressions that don't fall within the limits of its doctrine.
Life, however, is always messy, always coloring outside the lines. Nevertheless,
and given these limitations, I find it amazing that I Am Cuba
is as exciting and wonderful a film as it is.
©2005 Chris Dashiell
CineScene
