ASHES OF TIME (Wong Kar-Wai, 1994).
On the surface, this is a period martial arts film, a tale of ancient
Chinese swordsmen, but Wong is not very interested in battles or set
pieces. Instead, he offers a dreamy tone poem about unrequited love,
longing and eternal regret. The characters' hearts are fixed on a tragically
unchangeable past, while Wong presents events out of linear order, until
the story collapses into an overwhelming mood of melancholy and loss.
It's a mess, but at least it's a deliberate one.
The plot, such as it is, is quite difficult to follow, which is a major
flaw in the film, no matter how much one admires Wong's style -- it's
hard to maintain interest when the storyline is so vague. At first it
seems to be about a handsome, long-haired warrior played by Tony Leung
Kar Fai, who slays women's hearts, but seems cold and heartless himself.
He visits a friend (Leslie Cheung), offering him a magic wine that will
make him forget the past. Cheung, who is grieving the loss of a lover
that ended up marrying his brother, refuses to drink, but his mysterious
friend does, and then moves on, and gradually the movie seems to center
around Cheung's character instead. He hires himself out as a professional
killer, and in the meantime encounters other haunted characters, such
as a brother and sister (both played by Brigitte Lin) who involve Cheung
in a cat-and-mouse game, and may even be the same person with a dual
personality; and a blind swordsman (the more famous Tony Leung: Tony
Leung Chiu Wai) in despair because his wife has betrayed him with the
other Tony Leung. Well, just trying to explain these relationships is
confusing -- and I've only covered about half of it. In fact, the story's
different personalities are hard to distinguish, and nothing much really
happens. Wong just lathers on the moody imagery until you reach a semi-hypnotic
emotional state.
The picture is beautifully shot by Wong regular Christopher Doyle.
A few scenes achieve a striking, hallucinatory quality that can only
be compared to dreams. After struggling between puzzlement and boredom
for the first hour, I surrendered to the spell and was able to enjoy
the film for what it is: a series of intensely heightened emotional
states translated into visual terms. I can't say it's a successful picture
-- because of its incoherence, I would have it rank it near the bottom
of Wong's output -- but on the other hand, I would never call it forgettable.
A WOMAN OF AFFAIRS
(Clarence Brown, 1928).
Diana and Neville (Greta Garbo and John Gilbert) have loved each other
since childhood, but Neville's stuck-up tycoon father disapproves, and
manages to separate them. Diana ends up marrying a friend (John Mack
Brown), but a subsequent tragedy taints her name with scandal and turns
her brother (Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.) against her. She runs off to Europe
and a series of whirlwind affairs, while Neville gets engaged to another
woman (Dorothy Sebastian). But they can't escape the deep love they
feel for each other.
This melodrama of passion, with a plot as silly as any soap opera,
should be as empty and dismissable as scores of other films of its kind.
But most of the time it works magic, and there's really just one reason
-- Greta Garbo. After only three years in Hollywood, she had perfected
a star persona so captivating that it would convince an audience of
almost anything. In this case, her character is a perfect fit. Diana
is proud, spirited, self-protective, and mysteriously alluring. Every
other character is either in love with her, or fascinated by her, and
Garbo makes it all seem right and inevitable. No longer did she need
to exaggerate or overplay -- she knew how to use the subtle expressions,
the interplay of emotions in her face, to maximum effect. Everything
she does -- her love for Gilbert's character, her giving him up, and
her later defiance of convention -- is completely convincing, and she
manages to make almost everyone else in the picture look good as well.
Fairbanks goes over the top in the role of the aggrieved, alcoholic
brother, which is annoying. But Brown (Garbo's favorite director) knows
how to frame the actors in interesting ways (an early scene with Neville
and his father, for instance, peers down at Gilbert to emphasize his
powerlessness) and he keeps the story clipping along at a good pace.
Gilbert's chemistry with Garbo is as fine as ever, and cameraman William
Daniels makes her look like a goddess. All the elements converge on
Garbo, to create, more perfectly than in any of her other silent films,
the rapturous effect, the picture as total star vehicle.
Star power in the movies is fundamentally different than "acting."
That isn't to say that Garbo doesn't act -- she does, and rather well
at that. But star power has to do with the deliberate projection of
a larger-than-life personality onto the screen, to create an intense
identification in the audience. In a cinematic age of romanticism, this
was especially true of female stars, and of Garbo more than any other,
then or since. We talk of "glamour," but something deeper was at work.
The camera captured a quality of soul, an elusive promise, that triggers
an internal image summoning the audience's most profound, unspoken wishes.
The language of film, especially the close-up, revealed something that
could never be seen on a stage -- the silent mystery of a person's spirit
as revealed in the face. Garbo somehow learned how to portray this mystery
better than anyone else, and this accounts for the amazing strength
of her appeal, which can't be explained in objective terms.
And that's the true story of A Woman of Affairs. It works because
the carefully crafted Garbo persona takes you hostage and allows you
to believe in the whole crazy story of doomed lovers, scandal, passion
and sacrifice, even though you might laugh about it afterwards. This
is pure, delightful, guilt-free entertainment, and it's probably the
Garbo film I would recommend to start with if you want to understand
her as a phenomenon.
TAXI! (Roy Del Ruth, 1932).
A cab driver (James Cagney) leads the fight against a taxi consortium
that tries to strong-arm the independents out of business, while falling
for the daughter (Loretta Young) of one of the cabbies slain in the
struggle.
This is one of many fast-talking working class dramas churned out by
Warner Brothers in the early sound era. The theme of labor unrest gets
a cursory treatment; the story focuses instead on the Cagney-Young romance,
which becomes troubled because of the Cagney character's need for revenge
against a racketeer. His wife is afraid that if he gets his revenge,
he'll go to jail and she'll lose him, so she ends up trying to aid the
escape of the bad guy who (unbeknownst to her) had caused her father's
death. This makes Cagney very angry with her, and the dynamic between
them -- combining love, hate, and danger -- is actually kind of disturbing
at times, at least for present-day viewers.
At this point, Cagney was a major star, and perfectly comfortable on
screen. He's funny and full of attitude, and he can switch from tough
to tender at the drop of a hat. The performance is as smooth and engaging
as you could ask for, and Loretta Young is lovely, of course, and a
good match for him (in their only film together). Comic relief is provided
by Leila Bennett, with her weird, drawling whine of a voice, in the
wisecracking girl's best friend role.
I'm very fond of the pre-Code Warners films -- they don't waste time
(this one's only 70 minutes long) and they rarely disappoint. Despite
an almost "deus ex machina" resolution, Taxi! is great fun and
enjoyably diverting.
WAR REQUIEM (Derek Jarman, 1989).
Benjamin Britten's great 1961 choral work was set to the poetry of
Wilfred Owen, who died in World War I. Owen portrayed the martyrdom
of an entire generation of young men in the Great War, while evoking
the eerie relationship of sexuality and death in the midst of the slaughter.
Britten's work memorializes the tragedy of the Second World War as well,
in an anti-triumphalist vision of grief and horror. This seemed the
perfect vehicle for gay avant-garde filmmaker Derek Jarman, who combines
newsreel footage with silent ritualistic performance to create a visual
counterpoint to the work.
Each section of the oratorio is coupled with a static scene or tableau,
such as the dead poet (Nathaniel Parker) lying in a temple-like sanctuary,
being mourned by a woman (Tilda Swinton) who is also a nurse. In another
scene, barbed wire becomes a crown of thorns for a dying soldier, while
another soldier carries him in his arms. Jarman uses low-key lighting,
shadow, and flame to create an eerie death-in-life effect. Once in a
while, anger bursts through the grief; most of the time a feeling of
awe-inspiring pity and terror prevails. Some of the best effects are
achieved with the use of old news footage -- mostly from World War I,
but also from other conflicts -- in which the suffering and dying of
soldiers becomes a visual motif of surpassing gravity.
At its best, War Requiem attains a sublimity of feeling, a sense
of profound meditation on the greatest human questions, that is rarely
seen on film. The problem is, Jarman has trouble integrating the form
of Britten's work with the essentially visual form of the cinema. A
choral work like this needs to stretch itself out in time, and the emotional
effect is achieved through accumulation of song and feeling over an
extensive period, in the ear of the listener. A film, on the other hand,
is attuned primarily to the eye. One must be very inventive indeed in
order to dramatize or visualize an oratorio, so that the editing can
represent the viewer's thought process without negating the effect of
the music. Jarman's painterly sequences, designed to function as primal,
elemental scenes of emotion, are forced to continue on and on, in order
to accompany a particular section of Britten's score, and more often
than not they become tedious in the process. You can only watch Tilda
Swinton clutching her hair in grief so long before you lose interest.
The visual poetry fails to live up to the musical expression.
Nevertheless, I admire the attempt, even if the execution is faulty.
War Requiem aims to evoke the most soul-crushing experiences
of history through a marriage of music and image, and it succeeds more
often than one might expect. In the context of 1989, when it was made,
I believe that the AIDS epidemic acts as a disturbing undercurrent in
the film as well. It helps to be familiar with the libretto to the Requiem
before watching, or at least with Owen's poetry, if you wish to avoid
being completely bewildered. On the whole, this is a moving, albeit
highly flawed, film experiment.
THE SPECIALIST (Eyal Sivan, 1999).
Sivan and co-scenarist Rony Brauman unearthed the videotapes of Adolph
Eichmann's 1961 trial for crimes against humanity in a Jerusalem archive,
and after a bureaucratic struggle, created this documentary as an illustration
of Hannah Arendt's famous observation (inspired by the Eichmann trial)
about the "banality of evil."
Eichmann was the SS officer in charge of the system of mass deportation
that transported millions of Jews to their deaths during the Holocaust.
He was captured in Argentina by Israeli agents and tried in Jerusalem.
His conviction was a foregone conclusion -- the film doesn't even bother
to mention his execution in 1962. The trial's real significance was
in helping to bring the genocide of the Nazi regime to wider public
consciousness, and to enact a ritual of justice for the Holocaust as
a catharsis for the young state of Israel.
Sivan is highly selective in his choice of footage from the trial.
He focuses almost exclusively on the testimony of Eichmann himself --
a thin, balding man with spectacles, sitting in a glass booth, who always
stands to attention when he answers a question from the prosecutor or
the judges. His defense is that he had no choice but to follow orders;
he tried to be reassigned from his duties but his superiors wouldn't
let him; if he disobeyed orders he would be killed himself; he was even
a kind of Zionist himself, believing in relocation to Palestine rather
than extermination. He listens to the testimony against him with a quizzical
smile. He seems polite and anxious to please. All in all, Eichmann appears
to be an individual of incredible narrowness and mediocrity. But (says
one of the witnesses) he looked different in his SS uniform.
The courtroom is a scene of almost surreal bareness -- with white walls
and simple tables where the lawyers sit, and the glass booth on the
left with bored-looking soldiers sitting behind the defendant. The viewer
is left to wonder at this spectacle of justice: the motives of the judges
and attorneys, the strange disparity between the dry courtroom procedures
and the enormity of the crimes discussed, the occasional outbursts of
spectators, and the bizarre, unnerving non-entity behind the glass.
No narration intrudes -- we are allowed to have our own thoughts and
come to our own conclusions.
There's nothing tricky or particularly inventive about Sivan's method.
He has simply edited down the videotapes into a visual definition of
Arendt's notorious phrase. Evil, as we see it in Eichmann's testimony,
is not banal merely because it contradicts the satanic stereotypes of
evil that we tell ourselves, but because it can so clearly be nurtured
in the ordinary smallness of mind that society usually values. Conformity,
obedience, following the proper procedure: Eichmann is the man in whom
conscience has become irrelevant because the state has usurped its function.
This is the warning that Arendt, and now Sivan offers us. We can easily
"become" Eichmann, not necessarily in our actions but in our failure
to take action, simply by trusting the given social authority as absolute.
©2004 Chris Dashiell
CineScene
