August 15, 2019

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019)

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Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

[Spoilers below]

Quentin Tarantino’s new film, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, weaves a fictional narrative around the Tate murders of 1969, in which a pregnant Sharon Tate and four of her friends were killed by members belonging to the cult of Charles Manson at her residence in Hollywood. The film unfolds through a collage of four perspectives: Rick Dalton (a hammy Leonardo DiCaprio) a waning Western TV star ruing his sunset, Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), once Dalton’s stunt double, now his pal and go-to-guy, actress Sharon Tate (Robbie Margot), who has just moved in next door to Dalton with her husband Roman Polanski, and the Manson Family, a hippie commune living in Spahn Ranch, a run-down movie and TV studio where Dalton and Booth used to shoot. The film begins six months before the murder and charts Dalton coming to terms with his imminent professional irrelevance, Cliff’s apathetic life alongside Dalton and Tate’s stuttering rise to public recognition. If not for its ending, the film registers as a transitional work for Tarantino in the way it leaves behind many of the filmmaker’s stylistic traits.

To be sure, Once Upon a Time turns out exactly the way one would expect a film written by Tarantino about the Tate murders to. But it doesn’t look anything like a Tarantino movie. For one, there’s a lot more “dead time” here than in any of his previous films. Nothing much happens in these long stretches except for characters driving around Los Angeles, the radio turned on, wind in their hair, Tarantino asking us to just absorb the atmosphere. The extreme close-ups that he usually reserves for a telling detail is generalized and multiplied. There are at least three identical shots of the Manson Family members walking towards Tate’s house – a superfluity that is symptomatic of the whole film. The pace is measured and the individual scenes themselves are much longer than usual, many of them outlasting their nominal purpose. There are three protracted sequences dedicated to Dalton bemoaning his decline. The last of these unfolds as a conversation with a precocious eight-year-old child actor (Julia Butters). It’s a remarkably insipid scene, even more than the other two, too shallow to be sincere and too cliched to be smart, and it’s surprising to find it in such prominence in a Tarantino film.

Secondly, Tarantino’s relationship with his influences is given much more showcase and precious attention than we’ve come to expect from the filmmaker. Tate looks at a poster of The Wrecking Crew (1968), her newly-released picture with Dean Martin. While this would’ve been a passing glimpse in the director’s previous works, here we get a shot of Tate looking at the poster, then a close-up of the poster and a reverse-shot of Tate again. Scenes of the real Tate in the film are also played for us. When producer Schwarz (Al Pacino) names the Dalton movies he’s seen, we see a detailed film reel of fake films starring Dalton. The reel comprises of Westerns, a musical, and an action movie where Dalton torches Nazis with a flamethrower, and serves as a wish-fulfilment for the Tarantino. Home turf for QT, the Hollywood milieu might have allowed for many more tributes, a temptation that he avoids for fewer, more elaborate quotations.

What most distinguishes Once Upon a Time from Tarantino’s earlier works, however, is the startling absence of suspense and a curious undercurrent of sentimentalism. While the film intercuts between Dalton, Booth and Tate from the outset, there’s no tension that the juxtaposition produces. It’s February 1969 and we know that the murders happened only in August. The first conflict of the film, and its first instance of accelerated editing, doesn’t occur until two hours in, when Booth visits the Spahn Ranch and picks up a fight with one of the Manson Family members. The only expectation the viewer has all through the film derives from the tragic consciousness of the Tate murders and even that is thrown into doubt considering Tarantino’s tendency to rewrite history. Unlike in any other QT film, the film’s only real tense sequence arrives at the end, on the day of the murder, when the filmmaker quickens the crosscutting with arbitrary, pointless time markers, expanding the sequence with extreme detailing of events.

The film’s emotional locus is instead vested in the friendship between Dalton and Booth, one of the few sincere relationships in Tarantino’s body of work. The friendship gets its own emotional climax, in a restaurant scene where Dalton, now married and washed-up, confesses he can’t afford Booth anymore, and a parting shot in which Dalton tells Booth he was a good friend. Also nagging the film’s conscience is Booth’s tragic professional situation. Like countless professionals Hollywood’s technological progress has left behind, Booth leads a ghost-like existence in the shadow of Dalton, himself fast becoming a shadow. He lives in a trailer park, drives Dalton around and even does household chores. His vocation is of no use anymore in the new Hollywood, where actors are expected to do their own stunts. Tarantino’s ode to the profession includes a fight between Booth and Bruce Lee (Mike Moh), presented in long takes, and several shots of Brad Pitt doing stunt-like activities.

This sentimentalism might be interpreted as nostalgia, but what Once Upon a Time deals with is nostalgia for a time when nostalgia was possible. His yearning is not for the old movies and movie studios but the neon lights of cinemas and restaurants that once dotted the Hollywood landscape. It’s a yearning that’s second-hand, for Tarantino couldn’t have himself lived the experiences he describes. The film is set in 1969 (two years before The Last Picture Show was made), a time when the studio system had collapsed and the movie brats had started to shape up the business and method of making films. The Vietnam War (and protests against it) continues under the newly-elected Nixon. Tarantino frequently cuts from Dalton to Tate to set up a contrast between an eclipsing, old Hollywood of the fifties and the rising, new Hollywood of the late sixties. Somewhat of a relic, Dalton is modelled after the suburban, middle-class, Eisenhower-era executive. He is mostly seen at the lot or back home. He spends his evening preparing for work or in front of television. He prefers his beer over drugs, hates the hippies and wants nothing to do with the debauched lifestyle of the times. It’s noteworthy, for a film set in Hollywood, how little of Hollywood or its people we actually see. The only party we are shown owes to the presence of Tate, Jay and Polanski, people wholly of their era, unlike Dalton. As Tate watches The Wrecking Crew, Tarantino regularly jumps to Dalton’s shooting of a TV Western. It’s a “old-timey” Western, but made in Tarantino’s style of long takes and direct sound. We don’t see the camera crew for the most part and the decoupage is presented as Tarantino would conceive it. There are several shots in Once Upon a Time of actors snoring, spitting and slurping – sounds rare in classical Westerns. The intercutting between an actor performing and another actor watching herself performing signals the shift of American movies towards greater self-reflexivity.

This opposition between the simple forms and moral clarity of old Hollywood and the darker, self-reflexive anti-authoritarianism of new Hollywood takes on a politically-noxious flavour when combined with Tarantino’s desire to deny the Tate murders. In Once Upon a Time, the Manson Family members enter Dalton’s house instead of Tate’s. Booth, under the influence of an acid-soaked cigarette a hippie sold him, kills all of them with the assistance of Dalton, who is finally invited home by a relieved Tate. In other words, the old heroes of old Hollywood, with their clear-cut notions of good and evil, have protected the Polanski household from crazy hippies squatting over the ruins of Hollywood. The implications are odious: that though home-grown antisocial elements denigrate them, it takes soldiers and war heroes, like Booth once was, to protect the country; that the movies and TV shows of old might have shown violence, but the mediatized images of the Vietnam War have rendered the violence in movies more real, more immediate, making them even more responsible for the violence in society. Tarantino’s reactionary re-revisionism is the opposite of the necessary process of cultural reexamination filmmakers such as Penn, Peckinpah and Altman were undertaking during the time the film is set in.

In Tarantino’s dichotomous image of Hollywood, hippies, cultists, druggies, squatters, libertines, the counterculture in short, are pitted against a pragmatic, intuitive world of cowboys and Mexicans – a strangely anachronistic vision that seems to belong to the film’s era and not current day. There’s no equivalence between the Manson’s Family’s real violence and the fictional violence that Booth and Dalton exercise on them. They are home invaders and so any violence on them doesn’t carry the same moral sanction as their own violence does. Before they leave their car, the Manson Family discusses television shows. One of them wants to “kill the people who taught us to kill”. This twisted reasoning helps Tarantino justify his excesses: movie violence, no matter how graphic, is ultimately harmless compared to real violence. This gives him the carte blanche to abandon himself in the thrill of brutal imagery, as Booth smashes the face of one woman against various hard surfaces of the house, including a framed movie poster. Dalton burns another one down with a flamethrower.

It is, however, impossible to precisely pin down the politics of a Tarantino film and Once Upon a Time, like all Hollywood tentpoles, is riddled with ideological paradoxes that makes any reading tenable. It is quite possible that Tarantino simply wants to further his project of harnessing cinema’s capacity to forge myths and correct historical-representational errors. His film is set in Hollywood, an ahistorical zone where fact and legend mix. Booth is said to have killed his wife, but nobody knows. The production of its films is based on a lie that the actor and the stuntman are the same people. Tarantino recreates a scene from The Great Escape with Dalton/DiCaprio in place of McQueen, even as Dalton clearly states that he was never in the running. It’s a lie that QT visualizes nonetheless: why shouldn’t cinema belie history, when every sane person in their implicit contract with the movies knows it is all made up? One has to be as deranged as the Manson Family, the filmmaker seems to say, to take what is represented for fact. Most auteur films Hollywood tend to be bitter about the industry and its people, but Tarantino’s too much in love with its history for that. In the final passage of the film, he cycles through various characters watching prime-time television. Through the cross-cutting, this shared cultural experience takes on a communal quality. Something resembling a prayer, which is what movie-going is for Tarantino. The prayers have been answered. The movies have made America safe again, if only on screen.

 

August 6, 2019

Based on a True Story (2017) + Happy End (2017)

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of Austria, Cinema of France, Review | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , |
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Based on a True Story

[Possible spoilers ahead]

Delphine (Emmanuelle Seigner) has had a success with her new novel, Vienne la nuit, and fans are queuing up to get their copies autographed. They have all been touched deeply by the book and believe that it speaks to their own personal problems. Unnerved by this unsolicited responsibility, and the series of poison letters she receives for having made money out of her family’s story, Delphine retreats into a shell, unable to write anything anymore. She meets the mysterious, charming Elle (Eva Green), her “biggest fan”, who casts a strange spell over her. Elle helps Delphine with her work, sorting her notes and giving her suggestions, and starts occupying an increasingly large place in her life. She disparages Delphine’s ideas and insists that Delphine must not give into the demands of what her editors want but write her great, “hidden book”. Delphine doesn’t resist the takeover and instead sees Elle as a potential subject for her next novel. What ensues is a tug-of-war between Delphine and Elle to unlock each other’s history. That description might make it sound like an arthouse cliché à la Persona, but Polanski’s circular film treats the obvious symbolism directly, without conceit, and steers clear of the lures of psychological interpretation.

Based on a True Story is an adaptation of Delphine de Vigan’s 2015 novel of the same name, reportedly an autobiographical work. A viewer of Polanski’s film can well imagine the extreme self-reflexivity of the book: here’s a novel about an author who withdraws into herself for four years following the success of her latest book. In 2011, Vigan wrote a personal book about her mother’s suicide and it took her four years to come up with Based on a True Story. She is married to the literary journalist François Busnel who, just like his character in the book, was mired in controversy for interviewing Vigan on his own show and who was traveling the USA interviewing authors at the time Vigan wrote this book. Elle (L. in the book) urges Delphine to reject fiction, dive into her memoirs and write about her own life, but Delphine argues that even autobiography needs a perspective and is, in the final analysis, fiction. The solution to Vigan’s problem of perspective is the character of L./Elle, who gives concrete, personal form to Delphine/Vigan’s memories.

Surmounting creator’s block by representing it is not new even to cinema – Fellini did the same thing in 8 ½ – but the special force of Vigan’s material comes from the social commentary it derives out of the situation. Vigan’s/Delphine’s creative paralysis comes from the conflicting demands society makes of her as a woman, an artist and a woman artist. L./Elle is the ideal version of Delphine, always perfectly groomed and dressed, capable of saying no to her editors and publicists, turning up to events she’s signed up for, rejecting the need for male companionship, and even burning down the house with her abusive father. She is a ghost-writer, which means she doesn’t ever have to burden herself with book tours, speeches and signing sessions, and can therefore concentrate on her writing all the time – a luxury that Delphine can only dream of. Delphine, on the other hand, is in a relationship with a famous journalist whose company she increasingly looks forward to. L./Elle’s self-confidence and unapologetic career-focus is in contrast to Delphine’s jealousy over her boyfriend’s courting of American authors and her guilt of ignoring her children. On screen, this pits Green’s impeccable elegance and command of space against Seigner’s maternal clumsiness and vulnerability.

Needless to say, Polanski’s adaptation – the very intention to adapt – unmakes the vertiginous mise en abyme the book constructs with Vigan at the epicentre. Even worse, the story of a middle-aged matron (played by Polanski’s wife) being supplanted by a younger, more beautiful woman introduces an uncritical element of male fantasy into the film, especially bothersome considering the filmmaker’s history. The film nevertheless works as a dramatization of the creative process, reimagines as it does the quotidian artistic dilemma of what to write about and whom to write for as a ghost story. We are not sure who is haunting whom, with Delphine trying to get into Elle’s head to mine material for her book and Elle taking over Delphine’s life to instruct her on what to write. Delphine keeps getting complimented for capturing her reader’s minds so accurately, but it is Delphine’s whose mind-space is constantly conquered by her reader-subjects. The artist writes on the world, but the world writes on the artist too, dissolving the boundary between the two. It’s truly the death of the author.

A few years ago, when I heard Haneke was making a film about the internet, I expected what we got from The White Ribbon and Amour: a declarative statement about the dangers of the digital age and its capacity for abetting evil. But Happy End is more open, more suggestive than the conclusive theses that were Haneke’s previous two films. To be sure, there’s hardly anything spontaneous about the new film and its shot compositions are still very calculated, perverse in their vehement disavowal of violence, but the manner in which information is presented or withheld forces the viewer to actively stitch the pieces together to understand what’s happening. Even when the final picture emerges, one is not entirely sure if all the behavioural details, choice of shots or narrative information have been accounted for, which makes for a summary that’s far from decisive.

Michael Haneke’s Happy End, an oxymoron if there ever was one, is set in Calais in the northern extreme of France and centres on an upper-class white family that owns a public works construction business. The grouchy head of the Laurent family, Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant) suffers from dementia and wants to kill himself. His doctor son Thomas (Mathieu Kassovitz) is married but is having a kinky online affair with another woman. Georges’ daughter Anne (Isabelle Huppert) heads the business one of whose sites her bumbling son Pierre (Franz Rogowski) manages. Following an accident at the site, in which a worker is seriously injured, their business comes under the risk of government sanction. Meanwhile, Thomas’s daughter Eve (an incredibly precocious Fantine Harduin) from his first marriage is forced to move in with him following her mother’s death. Present in the outer orbit of the Laurents are housekeeper Rachid (Hassam Ghancy), his family and the many refugees of the Calais jungle waiting to get across the channel.

None of these character relations are clear until late into the film. The Laurent family is given to us in shards, as though like pieces of a broken mirror. They appear to be representatives of an old order, the haute bourgeoisie, now crumbling under the weight of political and technological turmoil. Georges the patriarch has lost his mental faculty and thus economic power; he wanders the film looking for ways to die. In an interesting scene, he’s on his wheelchair in an impoverished part of town, having forgotten his way home. Amidst deafening traffic noise, he speaks to a group of male refugees, who don’t understand why he’s willing to give them his watch in exchange for information. Waning under his mother’s supervision, Pierre feels emasculated. Thomas doesn’t really believe in marriage anymore. Eve is out poisoning herself and other people. At the eye of it all is Anne, trying to unsuccessfully hold this European union together.

Numerous instances of digital media feature in the film. Eve records her life with her smart phone and sends the recordings to friends. She watches videos of YouTubers discussing their personal lives. Thomas’s affair takes place entirely on phone, e-mail and social media. This increased publicization of private lives, which Haneke clearly sees as dangerous, is contrasted with the infusion of the public affairs into the Laurents’ private lives. Their business is troubled by strikes in Scotland. The government is grilling Pierre to trace possible negligence as the cause of the accident. At Anne’s all-white engagement, Pierre brings in refugees from the area and creates ruckus. (Not that he’s the voice of the marginalized, he simply uses them as bugbear). The family members love each other, but you sense that it’s the wealth that ultimately holds it together, the stability of the family dependent on the stability of the capitalist social structure they represent. Happy End is Haneke’s vision of post-Brexit Europe.

 

May 1, 2010

Flashback #76

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Flashback, Hollywood | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , |
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Frantic (1988)
Roman Polanski
English

“There is always someone who’ll do you one better”
 

FranticThe more one learns about the life and works of Alfred Hitchcock, the more one sees how influential he has been on the generation of filmmakers that followed. More than the techniques and cinematic devices that Hitchcock had helped shape and the themes that he consistently dealt with, it is his very methodology of working – the now-legendary precision of his craft, the authorial domination that he seems to have exhibited (Godard had once equated him to tyrants and dictators) and the relentlessness of his approach – that seem to intrigue many. Interestingly, it is these very elements that elevate the films of Hitchcock into the realm of personal cinema wherein the director seems to have exerted a ruthless control over his films’ world in response to the unruliness of the real world. Although many filmmakers, such as Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino, have forayed into the distinctive universe of Hitchcock, few filmmakers seem to be completely obsessed with his art. Directors such as David Lynch, Brian De Palma and Roman Polanski, each in their own unique way, have been carrying on the legacy of the master filmmaker with spectacular results. The filmography of the latter, especially, betrays such an obsession with that of Alfred Hitchcock that one can almost predict the next logical step for the director.

The major theme that pervades the entire body of work of Roman Polanski is that of the fickleness of the boundary between Good and Evil – the ease of induction of the former into the latter and the (in)ability of Good to recover from this demonic metamorphosis. For Polanski, like Hitchcock, Evil is an undeniable fact that lurks and simmers just beneath a veneer of order, propriety and Goodness. Most of his protagonists transition from a world of safety and predictability into a chaotic netherworld – from superego to id, if you will – where all their cherished beliefs go for a toss. The Bates Motel is just a turn away from the main road. Even when he adapts from existing works of literature, as in The Tragedy of Macbeth (1971), Tess (1979) and Oliver Twist (2005), his interest has always been on what motivates men to cross over to the other side. This theme relates directly in Polanski’s films to the question of commonplaceness of Evil and the existence of fascist tendencies within each one of us. A Freudian might connect this to Polanski’s traumatic childhood in the Jewish ghettos. Furthermore, this abstract theme also forms the template for a more personal examination of the male psyche, its fears and its insecurities. Evidently, these facets are also hallmarks of Hitchcock’s films and Polanski’s triumph lies in appropriating these elements and imparting his own artistic vision and personal dimension to them.

Even a cursory glance at Polanski’s early films illustrates both the presence of this motif and Polanski’s preoccupation with Hitchcock. Knife in the Water (1962) and Cul-de-sac (1966) are clinical, minimalist studies of the male psyche, reminding us of films such as Lifeboat (1944), and are direct predecessors of the film under consideration. Repulsion (1965) is, in some ways, a companion piece to Psycho (1960) and presents a pretty, young woman Carol (Catherine Deneuve) struggling against the fear of sexual conformism and ultimately breaking down in an alien land. Chinatown (1974) gives us Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson) driving around Los Angeles with a wounded nose (that reminds one of the impotent, plastered leg of L. B. Jeffries in Rear Window (1954)) trying to get to the bottom of the supposed conspiracy around him, a la Scottie Ferguson, and eventually getting sucked into the inevitable spiral of impotence and death. Unlike what Hitchcock does in Vertigo (1958), Polanski does not severe our identification with the protagonist and makes us share his delirium throughout. The Tenant (1976), Polanski’s greatest film, is a glorious melting pot of Polanski’s Hitchcock influences, specifically Psycho, Rear Window and Vertigo, the essence of all his previous films and his Napoleon complex. Despite its flamboyance and non-committal nature, the two mirroring halves of What? (1972) are redolent of Vertigo.

North By Northwest

Frantic

Frantic (1988) is no different, although one could argue that Polanski’s disillusionment with the American ideals, especially that of Liberty (Interestingly, he was rallying for the same against the communist regime of Poland in his short films), adds an extra layer to the proceedings. The very economy of the title – Frantic – recalls the directness of the titles of Hitchcock’s films. Written by Polanski and regular collaborator Gerard Brach, Frantic is a thriller in the vein of Hitchcock’s espionage films and follows Dr. Richard Walker (Harrison Ford) scouring the sunlit streets and dark underbelly of Paris in search of his wife Sondra (Betty Buckley). The film opens with the POV shot of a car travelling on the highway as if to suggest the imminent journey of the protagonist deep into his own psyche. In the car are Mr. and Mrs. Walker reminiscing about the city of Paris, where they had their honeymoon two decades ago. “It’s changed too much” remarks Richard. He might very well have been talking about their matrimony. The cab breaks down. The replacement tyre is also flat. Perhaps that’s how the Walker couple is too. The Walkers find another taxi to arrive at Le Grand Hotel and check in to Room 402 where a strikingly directed, 10-minute set piece unfolds.

As the couple indulges in amusing romantic talk that rarely shows signs of a crumbling relationship, we get occasional glimpses of Richard’s possessiveness about Sondra and a tinge of dissatisfaction on her part towards him (“Promises, promises”). Although there is no specific set of devices that Polanski employs for identification with a character (The first human POV shot comes only after the half-hour mark), thanks to his star persona, we immediately identify (in a positive manner) with Ford. We still see him as a charismatic, flawless, blue collar version of Indiana Jones. Richard takes a nap after a shower and finds his wife missing when he wakes up. Of course, one could resort to the old solution of labeling whatever happens after this as merely a bad dream that Richard has and that interpretation does have some validity. But whether it happens really or in his mind is really irrelevant for what is important is the profound change that Richard’s personality undergoes. It is after this incident that Richard leaves the safe and orderly world of conferences and hotel room formalities into a chaotic underworld of smuggling, murder, double dealing and racial politics. And it is in this precarious world in which Richard’s presumptuousness and superiority is revealed and regularly punished.

Paris is no more the city of love that he had seen twenty years ago. It is as “dangerous” and “dark” as the notorious alleys back home. In this unpromising climate, Richard embarks on a detective mission on his own, like Roger Thornhill, in order to “bring back” his wife, now that he has lost confidence in both the Parisian police and the American embassy there. He tries to make his way through his obstacles using the seemingly limitless amount of money he has got and, to an extent, succeeds. But eventually, money proves to be too weak a weapon to control and shape the unruly and the near-bureaucratic world around him. The world around him continuously reveals how powerless and unimportant he is. Ford is no more the omnipotent, omnipresent and the omniscient adventurer who could get an autograph from Hitler, escape from South American tribes and permeate the deepest of Indian caves with ease.  He has aged and is, truly, away from Hollywood. The medicine man becomes a drug user. The revered VIP is seen roaming around barefoot with a junkie. His sense of security and identity is dislodged piece by piece to the point that he indulges in fistfights with random strangers in a random apartment without a shred of dress to cover him. The hotel’s security officer suggests that perhaps Sondra is with “someone she has been thinking about” to which Richard reacts with amazement and denial. This is perhaps his biggest fear for Richard – of losing his wife and of her finding a better man (“There is always someone who’ll do you one better” he says, albeit in some other context). The possibility of that happening seems very high, given the status of their relationship. And this way, Polanski takes apart the myth of the American Hero – a man who simply has to be the best, there’s no two ways about it.

FranticOf course, the last half-hour of Frantic is a significant failure. For one, it contradicts the themes set up so far in the film. While, till now, Walker’s pride and smugness was stripped off layer by layer and his own powerlessness pointed out to him endlessly, the last half an hour restores his original status as an American Hero who can penetrate any setup and rescue anyone. What had been a nightmare till now (Ennio Morricone’s surreal score deserves applause) turns into a dream where every move of Walker’s turns out right and with expected consequences. There might be a reason to this incoherence. Polanski was apparently forced to cut 15 minutes of the film and change the ending (note that Polanski was considered washed out by now). I hear, from a not-so-reliable source, that in the original ending that Polanski wrote, Sondra turns out to be a double agent herself. This twist ending would have served two purposes. First, it would have made a political statement, although superficial, about America’s involvement in the Israel-Palestine conflict (The nuclear detonator is concealed inside the miniature Statue of Liberty; the film was made during the Reagan era). Also, it would have been the final blow to Walker’s ego. His worst fear – that his wife is with someone else and that he is not competent enough for her fantasies – would have come true.

The studio’s intervention is telling. By having Richard plan and win the climactic showdown and save his wife heroically, the studio’s move only reinforces the glory of American conservatism that the film had hitherto satirized (Surely, the Walkers are conservatives.  The Statue of Liberty a visual motif in the film. Richard mentions that they don’t vote anymore. Polanski and Brach don’t even give them token liberal statements to make). The Statue of Liberty which had till now been tossed around stands upright as the Walkers reunite. Additionally, the studio’s cut reestablishes the patriarchal structure of the Walker family that was threatened by the situation (It is only Richard who gets to give orders to his children). The whole point of the film is potentially undermined by the studio’s decision. Polanski would make amends for this blunder with his next film, Bitter Moon (1992), where too a couple plans to travel to the exotic east and rekindle their lost love. If the quintessential hero figure of Harrison Ford was the equivalent of Hitchcock’s Cary Grant, the stammering, insecure Hugh Grant would be that of James Stewart. In Bitter Moon, Nigel (Hugh Grant) ventures away from the boredom of his marriage and into his own erotic fantasy without a clue that he is still far from his wife’s. Polanski both brings down the last shred of esteem in the male character and the patriarchy that he embodies with the twist at the end (which is the kind of device that he seems to have had in mind for Frantic). Polanski, cleverly, even throws in gratuitous amounts of nudity, possibly, to appease the studio.

Interestingly, there is another film that achieves what Polanski’s film unfortunately doesn’t. Of course, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo serves as the inspiration for Frantic, with the male fantasy being destroyed and chastised by the mysterious woman he seeks. And perhaps David Lynch’s Lost Highway (1997), which I’ve not seen, deals with the same thing too. But Frantic is remarkably similar to Kubrick’s final film, Eyes Wide Shut (1999). Kubrick’s film has often been compared to Polanski’s The Ninth Gate (1999) because both films deal with secret societies and strange rituals. Kubrick’s film is, in fact, closer to Frantic than The Ninth Gate, in which Polanski was eyeing something else altogether. In Eyes Wide Shut, Tom Cruise plays Dr. Bill Harford (Richard Walker in Frantic is also a doctor and Harford is an acronym for Harrison Ford!) who is nudged into a cat and mouse game of pursuing his wife’s fantasies and trying to build his own. Tom Cruise is the direct successor, in some ways, to Harrison Ford. Both are the icons of the confident, self-assured man in Hollywood. No one would imagine the existence of a weak, possessive and insecure person beneath their flawless exteriors. Had Polanski made his film a decade later, my guess is that he would have most definitely cast Tom Cruise in the lead role. While Polanski’s planned ending stops at the male’s disillusionment, the destruction of his dream and his subsequent return to harsh reality, Kubrick goes one step further and proposes what might be done for reconciliation.

 

February 7, 2010

Super Scenes #11

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of France, Cinema of the UK, Super Scenes | Tags: , , , , , , , |
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Death and the Maiden (1994)
English
Roman Polanski

(Spoilers, sort of)

This scene here is the climax of one of Polanski’s very best films, Death and the Maiden (1994). Let me not elaborate on the plot details and just say that Dr. Miranda (Ben Kingsley) is making a certain confession to Paulina (Sigourney Weaver) about his dark past as her husband, Gerardo (Stuart Wilson), watches on. If the whole of Polanski’s filmography is to be summed up in one line, is must be that key quote from Chinatown (1974) – that man is capable of doing anything given the right circumstances. This monologue where Miranda, himself a variant of John Huston’s character from Chinatown, confesses is, arguably, the most important shot in all of Polanski. Death and the Maiden is not a film dealing with the Holocaust per se, but, as it is with most Polanski films, the parallels are striking (it’s kind of like how The Pianist (2002) wasn’t about the Holocaust at all, even when it dealt with it). The film, and particularly this sequence here, is exactly what Holocaust cinema should all be about. There are no painstakingly recreated details of the war here, no tacked up statements about the triumph of the human spirit and, thankfully, no beautification of the horror (a trap that films as latest as Polytechnique and The City of Life and Death (both 2009) fall into) for the sake of creating art. It’s a film that deals with the impact and significance of a holocaust rather than the mishap itself. And, most importantly, it’s a rare film that truly knows, in Peter Rainer’s words, that “it is the artist’s job to show us that the monster is, in fact, a human being”.

This scene here is filmed as a close up and records Miranda, looking slightly towards the left, recollecting the past in fine detail. The composition is noteworthy here. Polanski could have filmed Kingsley head-on, with him staring into the camera, whereby cinema would intimately and truthfully perform its humble, ethical and mandatory function of acknowledging that “the monster is indeed a human”. But, despite its advantages, if it were done so, the image of Ben Kingsley would overwhelm that of Miranda and break the credibility of the diegetic events, thereby going exactly against the purpose of the shot. The casting of Ben Kingsley here as Miranda is remarkable. He is, I believe, one of those stock stars who wouldn’t be as comfortable when cast in roles much different from one another (Brad Pitt, Bill Murray and Jack Nicholson are few others I can think of now). Kingsley excels in indifference. There is something both pitifully innocent and terrifyingly sinister about his introversive image. His voice is flat, nevertheless brimming with pathos. It is simultaneously befitting of the scene’s intent and appalling to realize that this “Gandhi” turns out to be such a “Hitler” and, more importantly, that this Hitler belongs to the same species as Mohandas Gandhi and Itzhak Stern. (It’s the exact kind of casting decision that von Trier made recently when he bestowed Willem Dafoe with the twin distinction of having played both the Christ and the Antichrist). The result is one of Polanski’s finest and a new direction for Holocaust cinema.

 

November 1, 2009

The Polanski Gaze

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of France, Cinema of Poland, Cinema of the UK, Filmmakers, Hollywood | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , |
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Repulsion (1965)

Repulsion (1965)

Cul-de-sac (1966)

Cul-de-sac (1966)

The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967)

The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967)

Rosemary's Baby (1968)

Rosemary's Baby (1968)

The Tragedy of Macbeth (1971)

The Tragedy of Macbeth (1971)

Chinatown (1974)

Chinatown (1974)

The Tenant (1976)

The Tenant (1976)

Tess (1979)

Tess (1979)

Pirates (1986)

Pirates (1986)

Frantic (1988)

Frantic (1988)

Bitter Moon (1992)

Bitter Moon (1992)

Death and the Maiden (1994)

Death and the Maiden (1994)

The Pianist (2002)

The Pianist (2002)

 

October 25, 2009

Flashback #69

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of the UK, Flashback | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , |
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Repulsion (1965)
Roman Polanski
English

“We must get this crack mended.”

 

RepulsionRepulsion (1965), Roman Polanski’s second feature following Knife in the Water (1962) and the first one made in the UK is perhaps one of the few horror movies that have really aged well. The reason for that is probably because Polanski manages to avoid all the flashy temptations and pitfalls of the genre and the era and sticks to minimalism. Enchantingly shot in black and white, Repulsion presents to us the events that unfold in a span of two weeks in the life of Carol Ledoux (Catherine Deneuve), a foreigner who lives in London in an apartment with her sister Hélène (Yvonne Furneaux) and works at a local beauty parlour as a manicurist. Carol is aloof from her colleagues and seems to be living in her own world. Hélène has a boyfriend Michael (Ian Hendry) who appears to be eyeing Carol too and whose presence seems to infuriate Carol for no apparent reason at first. Meanwhile, a young man called Colin (John Fraser) tries to win Carol over in vain. Soon, we witness Carol descending into some form of a trance and then into a (self) destructive mode as she shuns herself from everyone. With a storyline that can’t be, by any measure, called meaty, Polanski weaves magic as he performs a quantum leap with his innovation and resourcefulness in translating the text to the screen.

Repulsion fittingly begins with a zoom out of Carol’s eye and ends with a zoom into it, preparing us for the purely subjective tale that takes place between these two shots (and also paying homage to the surreal masterpiece Un Chien Andalou (1929) which, too, slit the human eye to look beyond its retina). The movie is entirely seen through Carol’s eyes and faithful reproduction of reality is flushed down the drain. Anything is possible within these two goal posts. None of the events that we witness might have happened in reality, but they sure do in Carol’s mind. Her colleague even talks about the chicken scene in The Gold Rush (1925). Clearly, Repulsion stands as a direct manifestation of Polanski’s ideas about normalcy and abnormality. Right from the early short films, Polanski has always questioned the popular definitions of these two terms. With him, it isn’t easy to incriminate or vindicate any character for their acts. With him, one is never sure who is in the cage and who is out. One could say, in Repulsion, that the old lady next door was unethical when she listens to the conversation between Colin and Carol, but is it her mistake that the door is open to all? Same is the case with his very first film Toothy Smile (1957). In The Lamp (1959), we see broken toys separated from the new ones that are manufactured to perfection – perfection as defined by the society. In Repulsion, characters are presented to us as they appear to Carol. They conform to or deviate from what she sees as normal.

Repulsion also resonates with the most dominant Polanski theme of them all, which is that of violation of boundaries. Right from Toothy Smile, where a man stares at a naked woman through the open window that he notices by chance, the director has been preoccupied with characters who breach some form of limits that are imposed on them by the society. Although it is highly likely that this vision of Polanski, who had had to put up with a lot during his stay in communist Poland, was politically motivated it has trickled down into every kind of scenario, refining itself and exploring various manifestations of this notion of infringement of limits (Looking at the events that have transpired in Polanski’s life – the murder of Sharon Tate, his arrest in Switzerland recently and the weight of his celebrity status – one can only conclude that life has a morbid sense of humour). It is no mere coincidence that he chose the well known tale of Macbeth, where too the sacrosanct border between the ruler and the loyal warlord is breached with miserable consequences, to make a film. Be the violation interpersonal in nature, as in the case of voyeurism, break-ins and conquests, or individual, arriving in the form of agnosticism, impotence and alienation, it seems to be only detrimental to all its participants.

RepulsionMoreover, in this film, this motif of violation manifests itself in social, psychological, sexual and even religious terms. Carol is the symbol of complete purity in the film (Dressed in white, Deneuve is nothing short of a divine angel). She keeps warding off every kind of threat to that purity. A foreigner, now living in a completely alien city, she not only has to adapt to the new conventions, but also has to put up with every kind of oppression that the place may impose on her. There are enough indications in the film that Carol is homosexual (or, at least, unsure of her orientation). Now living in London, a city that must be far more conservative and, I daresay, homophobic than the place that she comes from, Carol is, clearly, far from freedom of choice (The anonymous phone call in which a female threatens Carol just goes to show how concrete this hostility is, as perceived by her, of course). It isn’t just sexual penetration that she is fighting against, but also those of conventions – political, social and religious– upheld strongly by the right wing. Carol is battling all the models presented by the society through its oppressive structures as the “right” way to live. But eventually, starting with the shaving knife – the first trace of a man in her apartment – that seems to have a disturbing presence, she is persuaded to give into all these forces.

Evidently, Polanski draws a lot of inspiration from Hitchcock, especially from Rear Window (1954) and Psycho (1960). Both Jeff (James Stewart) in Rear Window and Carol in Repulsion are alienated individuals living in an urban setting who look at their world through their skewed vision with a preconceived opinion about it. The only difference between them is that while Jeff becomes the aggressor, trying to find a deeper meaning to the world around him in order to add depth to his own life, Carol becomes the victim as she turns paranoid about her surroundings and pushes herself into a shell further away from the society. But the film is perhaps closest to Psycho, when it comes to genre elements, as it constructs a similar lonely, claustrophobic atmosphere where trespassers will be punished irrespective of their importance in the narrative thus far. My only gripe with Psycho is that it tries to explain Norman Bates’ (Anthony Perkins) behaviour scientifically till the last detail. By attributing his behaviour to a psychological disorder, it isolates him as a stray case and hence fails to aim higher and explore why each one of us is a potential Norman Bates (Hitch corrects this slip stylishly in The Birds (1963)). However, Polanski, like Akerman did in her Jeanne Dielman (1976), which, also, dealt with an alienated woman taking to violence, carefully keeps all the ambiguity generated in the film intact, thus providing ample space for discussion and interpretation.

Given the subjective and mostly surreal nature of the movie and the advantages of the genre, there is a lot of scope to employ warranted symbolism in the film and Polanski does just that. Phallic and penetration symbols galore, Repulsion is a gold mine for any student of Freud (The postcard showing the Leaning Tower of Pisa from Carol’s sister is the closest the film gets to being humourous). During the course of the movie, Carol’s apartment becomes the embodiment of her psyche and her virginity. What was initially well lit, neatly arranged, spacious and unblemished becomes, by the end of the film, a ruptured, dark, ramshackle mess overcrowded with neighbours, much like Carol herself. But, like it was done in Psycho, these symbols never become necessary elements for the film to be successful. They merely impart an additional layer to the film without ever having to reveal their presence. The object that she slams Colin with may be the symbol of the very thing she is hostile to, but, first of all, it is a weapon. The cracks on the wall may signify the cracking of her own psyche and resistance, but, primarily, they are elements of horror. The head of the rabbit in her handbag may allude to something deeper, but, again, it is first a shock factor. Furthermore, the film itself, notably, remains faithful to its genre instead of digressing into needless discourses or trying to be too clever for itself. It is, in the first place, a solid horror film and, only secondarily, a film that is a satire against the mores of our society and the baseless tenets that it proposes to everybody.

More so than the masterful Rosemary’s Baby (1968), which, too, spoke in subjective terms and satirized religion within the framework of a conventional horror movie, Repulsion is Polanski’s version of Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist (2009). When, in Antichrist, She (Charlotte Gainsbourg) does the unthinkable after knocking Him (William Dafoe) out, what she is actually doing is the exact opposite of what religion has taught us through the years – to be fruitful and to multiply. So does Carol as she slays – the icon of reproduction – a rabbit, destroys all the phallic symbols in the movie and, essentially, combats the obligation placed on everyone by religion to get a family and reproduce. Only that Trier isn’t content with just employing symbols for this purpose! Early on, Michael, upon observing a catholic procession, jokes that the church perhaps has wild parties at night. Soon, this notion of religion and sex being the two sides of the same coin takes shape in the movie as the soundtrack consistently replaces sounds of sexual moaning with those of the church bells. For Carol, who has been so far standing in opposition to this unfair responsibility of perpetuating the human race, this hypocrisy of organized religion is too just much to take and she, sadly, succumbs to it.

Repulsion

Repulsion

Even technically, despite being the director’s second feature, Repulsion reveals itself as an auteur’s work. One has to just look at a few of those early short films to see the consistency of directorial choices that Polanski makes. The pan shots that stray from the central object of attention, the ground-level deep focus shots and the spectacular interplay of light and darkness confirm the signature of Polanski. Furthermore, Polanski uses the camera (maneuvered magically by Gilbert Taylor) to provide contextual meaning using the pans and the zooms. His camera often starts out at the sunlit window and gradually makes its way to the darker interiors where Carol is sitting as if penetrating the resistive apartment. But what is truly the high point of Repulsion is the way it prunes down details to the most basics leaving the rest to our imagination – the most important factor as far as this particular genre is concerned, for horror never concerns itself with what’s out there, but with the uncertainty about something being out there at all. There is rarely a B-movie moment in the film that goes for cheap shock. For almost the whole movie, Polanski’s camera lingers entirely on Deneuve’s face. Every other information that we require is provided by the meticulously assembled soundtrack that not just evokes the creeps that it should, but also provides meaning to the visuals that we see.

One just can’t abstain from mentioning the role of Catherine Deneuve in the movie for Repulsion flourishes upon her very presence. More than her performance, which is indeed pretty commendable, it is her very image that provides depth to the film’s text. With looks that could puncture any man’s heart, Deneuve as Carol is the angel herself. In Repulsion, Polanski lets his probing script collide with the cherubic image of Deneuve and comments on what mass hysteria could do to even a goddess. Polanski gives feline mannerisms to Carol (cats being the cleanest of all animals), who is seen fiddling with her nose and purging herself like a cat now and then. After watching Repulsion, the casting of Deneuve as a bored urban housewife who takes to casual prostitution in Luis Buñuel’s Belle De Jour (1967), another superb film that examined the consequences of sexual conformism and oppression albeit in a hilarious fashion, looks all the more virtuoso since it absorbs the image of Deneuve distorted and updated by Polanski’s film and further subverts it in ways that only a master could have thought of. Employing Deneuve, Polanski, like Buñuel, has successfully turned the Cinderella story inside out (Michael calls Carol “Cinderella” early in the film), with escapism giving way to confinement, hope giving way to despair and fantasy giving way to paranoia.

 

June 6, 2008

Super Scenes #4

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Super Scenes | Tags: , , , |
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The Pianist (2002)
English/German/Russian
Roman Polanski

Hollywood has always had a constant flow of World War movies coming from it. But not more than a dozen stay in memories of the average film goer. Writing off the Clint Eastwood double bill and a few forgettable ones, Roman Polanski’s The Pianist (2002) may be considered the last successful World War movie. Adrian Brody’s chilling portrayal of the Polish pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman won him the Oscar in 2002, making him the youngest to do so.

In one of the best scenes in the movie, Wlady meets an old friend who promises to provide him a refuge from the Nazi army. As he leaves for the hideout he watches his friend Dorota play the Cello. Upon reaching the house, his friend’s spouse informs him that no one knows he is here and it is a locality frequented by the Nazis. After the person asks Wlady not to make any kind of noise and leaves, Wlady notices a piano and sits in front of it. He takes his hand towards the keys on the piano and we cut to his face. A music piece is being played. It is only after some seconds we notice that the music is actually playing in his mind and his fingers are just hovering over the keys. He is happy for the few minutes he “plays”.

I have uploaded the video in Youtube for your convenience:

Polanski, who has been in the industry big time, is at home directing the film. Though the scene has not a word spoken, it conveys so much about an artist and the influence of political situation on his work. In contrast to Dorota, who is free from any trouble from the Nazis and is playing her music peacefully, Wlady is under a pressure from the ruling government and is unable to produce his music. This is true of any artist who works within the boundaries of political restrictions. Not all of the artist’s true intent is put forth to the world. Right from the medieval (even before that, in fact) painters (featured in the Tarkovsky classic “Andrei Rublev“) to film makers such as Kieslowski, artists have not been given freedom of expression owing to the clash of ideologies of the creator and the ruler. This scene sums it all up with effortless ease.