ROBINSON CRUSOE (Luis Buñuel, 1954).
The mordant ironist Buñuel would seem a strange choice to direct
an adaptation of Daniel Defoe's early 18th century novel. Crusoe is
a figure of indomitable optimism and seemingly endless practical resourcefulness.
At times it seems as if Defoe is trumpeting the arrival of a new kind
of man: the confident middle-class Englishman. And here I must make
a confession: I find the book a crashing bore. This is a case where
faithfulness to the source would not necessarily be an advantage for
me.
Buñuel wasn't too excited about it either when he was offered
a chance to make the film in a sort of cross-over production aimed at
the U.S. market--it would be the only film he made in English, and his
first in color. But with Irish actor Dan O'Herlihy on board, along with
blacklisted U.S. screenwriter Hugo Butler, Buñuel went to work,
in what was for him a luxurious shooting schedule of three months. The
result is far more solid than you might expect.
With the exception of a brief, very odd dream sequence involving Crusoe's
father (which in my view doesn't fit here, but neither does it ruin
the picture), the movie adheres faithfully to the book's action. Crusoe
is alone for the first half, which is about how it goes in the novel,
and his various strategies, discoveries and inventions are skillfully
depicted.
I didn't take in the real differences until I went back to the book.
The film accentuates Crusoe's loneliness, the slow agony of not hearing
another human voice for decades. O'Herlihy is marvelous portraying the
gradual regression from intrepid explorer to haunted survivor. When
the character of Friday (Jaime Fernández) finally shows up, Buñuel
and Butler explore the master-servant relationship, which only becomes
happy when it ends in friendship and mutual respect. There is a critique
of religion here as well, but very subtly conveyed--Friday's open-minded
questions about the Bible are something of a civilizing influence on
Crusoe, which I think is a reversal of Defoe's more conventional notions.
Yet on the whole, most of the film's tendencies are present germinally
in the book, and I find it admirable that Buñuel respected the
source enough to build on
the material rather than just subert it with parody, as one might have
expected him to do.
The movie was shot in Pathécolor, which is sometimes beautiful,
other times a bit garish. There are quite a few jokes and allusions,
both verbal and visual, gently woven into the fabric of the picture
without hurting its character as a fairly straightforward adventure
film. O'Herlihy, relatively unknown at the time, has great presence,
and he ended up getting nominated for a Best Actor Oscar for this part
(and losing to Brando). Robinson Crusoe was the closest Luis
Buñuel ever got to making a mainstream American-style movie,
and although it's not in the same league with his later cutting-edge
work, it's a thorougly stimulating and absorbing effort.
BLIND HUSBANDS (Erich von Stroheim, 1919).
A middle-aged doctor (Sam De Grasse) and his younger wife (Francelia
Billington) are on vacation in the Alps. The husband tends to be preoccupied,
taking his wife for granted, and this is noticed by a seemingly gallant
Austrian officer, who is in fact a womanizer, played by Erich von Stroheim.
The wife is very tempted, and the officer goes to great lengths to seduce
her.
This was Stroheim's first effort at directing, made after he'd attained
some fame as an actor playing German heavies. He offered the script
for nothing to the head of Universal, Carl Laemmle, on condition that
he could direct it. Laemmle took a chance, and the film was budgeted
at $25 thousand. Before shooting was over, Stroheim had spent more than
four times that much, but Laemmle heavily promoted the picture, and
the gamble paid off. It was a hit, tripling Universal's investment,
and launching Stroheim's tumultuous career as a director.
He seems to have learned a lot from his experiences as an assistant
director at Mutual, and from observing the master, D.W. Griffith, at
work, because Blind Husbands is a remarkably self-assured debut.
Stroheim's camara placement creates the illusion of spaciousness called
for by the Alpine setting. The acting is subtle for its time--no melodramatic
flailing about here; everything is conveyed through small gestures.
The sophisticated treatment of adultery and of sexual matters in general
was practically unheard of in American films, and there's some witty
visual symbolism that managed to get by the censors. Best of all is
the figure of Stroheim himself--he was modest enough to give himself
a very unflattering role here--in addition to being a roué, the
officer is something of a phony as well, yet you can understand why
he would seem attractive to the wife, especially in contrast to her
stick-in-the-mud husband.
The theme is identical to Stroheim's next surviving work, 1922's Foolish
Wives, but the latter film is a much greater achievement, more
elaborate, complex, and ambiguous. This movie is simple and direct,
which makes it something of an anomaly in the brief Stroheim canon.
It should be noted, however, that the film was nineteen minutes longer
than the version we have now--Universal shortened the negative for a
1924 re-release, and the cut footage is now lost. It seems to have been
Stroheim's fate as a director to always be stalked by somebody wielding
a pair of scissors.
TRUST (Hal Hartley, 1990).
A high school student named Maria (Adrienne Shelley) tells her family
that she's been kicked out of school, and is pregnant. Her father slaps
her face, she leaves, and immediately thereafter he dies of a heart
attack. When it turns out that Maria's oafish boyfriend won't marry
her, the girl is stuck living at home, where her mother (Merritt Nelson)
expects her to slave for her in revenge for causing her father's death.
In the midst of one chaotic day, in which a convenience store owner
tries to molest her and she witnesses the abduction of a baby from its
stroller, she meets Matthew (Martin Donovan), a sullenly depressed young
man who carries a live grenade around with him, works at a TV repair
shop, and and lives with his abusive father. Maria and Matthew spend
the rest of the movie eyeing each other warily: can they learn how to
trust?
This was Hartley's second feature after The
Unbelievable Truth, which also starred Shelley and explored
similar themes. But the writing has improved. The dialogue is less showy,
so the off-beat sense of humor seems to emanate more naturally from
the characters. It's not realism, though: Hartley injects his suburban
middle class setting with a sense of absurdity and quiet outrage. A
big part of what makes Trust so enjoyable is the way it turns
"quirky" comedy conventions upside down. Instead of the usual
sentimentality, we get the kind of desperation only a young person with
no clue what to do with her life can feel. The humor expresses the darker
emotions, and as the film goes on the subversion of easy sentiment attains
its own kind of odd sincerity.
A good deal of credit goes to Donovan, an excellent actor who never
got the big breakthrough one expected from him. Here he lends gravity
and comic poise to an essentially ridiculous character. Hartley isn't
always in control--some of the scenes get out of hand, and the tone
is uneven, but the film has a refreshing "cut through the crap"
feeling to it. It's hard to resist a story in which the girlfriend's
mother challenges the boyfriend to a drinking contest, and wins. Trust
is like an antidote to all the stupid teen movies of the 1980s.
ULYSSES' GAZE (Theo Angelopoulos, 1995).
Harvey Keitel plays a Greek-born film director who returns from self-imposed
exile in America to show his latest picture, only to see the film shut
down by protesting religious groups. When he catches wind of a mystery--three
missing reels of film by the famous Manaki brothers, considered the
earliest cinema shot in the Balkans--he decides to find the footage.
The rest of the film concerns his wanderings through Greece, Albania,
Macedonia, Bulgaria, Romania, and Serbia, in search of the elusive footage.
Angelopoulos, as always, chooses the rambling, epic form to explore
a subject larger than most directors would think of tackling. In this
case, it's the history of the Balkan countries, their long suffering
under communist regimes, and the tragedy of their fragmentation after
the fall of the Soviet bloc. The missing reels represent the act of
memory itself, which the director sees as an instrument of redemption.
The Keitel character's search for this missing film, therefore, is a
quest for the recovery of the Balkan soul through art. It strains his
faculties to the limit, to the point of desperation and even loss of
mental balance. The rough parallel to the wanderings of Ulysses amounts
to a device for highlighting various experiences and incidents of heightened
awareness in the different Balkan countries.
In a project of such ambitious scope, one would expect the artist's
reach to exceed his grasp, and in some ways it certainly does. Some
of the episodes seem aimless or unfocused. The dialogue can be awkward.
The director's love of long, leisurely takes occasionally taxed my patience.
But I must say that the sheer audacity of the work, and the richness
of the conception, made this a far more successful film for me than
previous works by Angelopoulos that I had seen.
First of all, the choice of the well-known Keitel in the lead role,
criticized by many as being inauthentic, was, in my view, a very shrewd
move. Keitel bravely employs the hardness of his persona to convey the
nameless director's struggle with his own roots, his resistance to the
fragility that seems to have doomed the landscapes through which he
travels. As a point-of-view person, an eye through which we see the
many stories of the land, you couldn't have asked for a better actor,
and the fact that he's fairly well-known helps, frankly, with the audience
identification for a huge wandering tale like this.
The film's finest set-piece is a meditation on time and death that occurs
in the home of the director's parents in Constanza, on the Black Sea.
The now middle-aged man (Keitel) steps back in time and encounters his
mother, who takes him to the family New Year's Eve party at their home.
Eventually the camera takes a
stationary viewpoint of the main hall where the guests are dancing.
From this point of view, we witness three different New Year's Eve parties
covering five years, years in which the family (and by extension, their
city) is shattered by the intrusion of the police, who arrest members
of the family for subversion and force the rest into exile. The sequence
is executed with great technical mastery--figures appear and disappear
within the frame, but the action as a whole appears as if uncut. The
viewer only gradually realizes what is happening, and is then confronted
with emotions both intimate and terrifying.
The mother, along with several other important female characters in
the film, is played by Maia Morgenstern. This particular strategy may
be an art house cliché, yet there's no denying its effectiveness
here. There's something rather old-fashioned about Angelopoulos' use
of a woman to represent the soul of a people, but being old-fashioned
is part of his world view--the whole film is about looking backward
and grieving.
The film's most famous sequence has Keitel saying goodbye to Morgenstern
(his lover) against the background of a huge statue of Lenin being loaded
onto a boat where it floats away into the distance, the figure of Lenin
on his back, finger pointing to the sky. The image evokes the grotesque
legacy of the communist era and the end of its hollow symbolism. This
is, however, one of those cases where I wish the director could have
reined in his attachment to the long take.
The picture is visually stunning. Even when a sequence is too difficult
or prolonged, there is an intense pictorial beauty to help compensate.
Erland Josephson shows up eventually as a film curator in Sarajevo,
a mysterious figure who seems to hold the key to the missing film. The
ending is both tragic and enigmatic. With Ulysses' Gaze, Theo
Angelopoulos has produced a three-hour national epic of art, history,
and memory--flawed yet admirable
in its sweep.
THE PARSON'S WIDOW
(Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1920).
A divinity student named Söfren (Einar Röd) wins a preaching
contest in a rural Norwegian parish, resulting in his being offered
the job of village parson. The young man, who has proposed marriage
to a village girl named Mari (Greta Almroth), discovers at the last
moment that taking the job requires his marrying the previous parson's
widow (Hildur Carlburg), a woman over fifty years his senior. He accepts
the position, and the marriage, reasoning that the old woman will die
soon, after which he will have made his living and will be free to wed
Mari. He ends up pretending that Mari is his sister so that she can
work for them as a servant, while the old woman (who persistently refuses
to die), foils all of his furtive attempts to make love with the younger
woman.
Dreyer made the film for a Swedish studio after a falling out with Nordisk,
the Danish company where he got his start. It was shot on location in
Norway, using non-professional villagers for many of the secondary roles.
It was his only comedy--a fact that critics like to point out to refute
Dreyer's image as a gloom-and-doom director. The first lengthy sequence
of the preaching contest, with a solemn bore and a pretentious fop as
Sofren's rivals for the parson's job, is broad comedy. The main plot
about the widow and her husband's attempts to escape her watchful eye
is also humorous in an uncomfortable sort of way. Scandinavian humor,
at least in this instance, can be rather crude and heavy--I imagine
a 1920 audience laughing with condescension at the bizarre 17th century
custom (the story was based on true events) that propels the action.
Dreyer's trick is to gradually turn the disagreeable old widow into
a sympathetic character. The second half of the film becomes more sentimental
and thoughtful as a result. Carlburg's performance is the best thing
about it. She was deathly ill when she took the part, and died a few
weeks after shooting stopped. Although I find the film's story and shifts
of tone less than appealing, Dreyer's method is fully realized. The
acting is very natural, especially for that time, and the director's
marvelous sense of space is already evident even within the cramped
confines of this country tale.
©2007 Chris Dashiell
CineScene
