The enigmas and the images in Bunuel's Viridiana

Even after all these years, Louis Bunuel's Viridiano (1961) remains a great film, totally engrossing and provocative start to finish. The plot in brief: A young woman (Viridiana) finishing her years in the seminary and about to take her vows, gets a message from the mother superior that her uncle, who has paid for her education in the seminary, has summoned her to a visit on his rural estate (set in Spain in what seems to be about 1940?). V resists, as she has had no relationship w/ her uncle over the years, but the mother-superior in effect orders her to obey the man's wishes. The uncle lives alone with servants, he's a widower I think; he makes a play for the very blond, very virginal V, which she repulses and sets off to head back to the convent - when she's summoned back to his estate w/ an urgent message and finds that he has hanged himself. The estate now passes to his completely estranged son, whom V has never met. He and his partner (not wife!) enter the scene, as V goes about w/ her own plans for the place: Inviting all of the people with disabilities, poverty, malformities, and illnesses of various sorts to live in a wing of the estate; her vision is a social commune - from each according to her/his ability, etc. - mixed with hours set aside for prayer and devotion. The motley crew that she assembles proves in short order to be anything but angelic and rarely grateful, but she persists. Eventually, and the owner, her cousin, a decadent chauvinist and would-be Don Juan, head off to the city for some overnight business, and the impoverished crew sets out to have a dinner in manor house - using the best linen and china, etc. and vowing to clean everything up afterwards. The dinner - the obvious apex of the movie - is fantastic, starting off well-mannered etc. and ending in a complete riot of sexual aggression and wanton destruction. When the "masters" return home, one of the men ties up the aggressive cousin while another one of the crew of misfits rapes Viridiana, in a horrifying scene. At the end, V is resigned to live in the manor house alongside her cousin, who has come on to her repeatedly, though she is locked in silence and indifference, obviously suffering from terrible trauma. One of the many things that makes this movie so great is that it's difficult to discern Bunuel's message and sympathies: Is it that the impoverished are a bunch of ingrates who will take advantage of any opportunity for chaos? Is it that the poor and the lame deserve and need more than condescending charity, particularly from the established church? Is it that the system of land ownership is so inherently corrupt that any efforts to alleviate poverty and inequality will fail? Is if that the church itself is feckless? Is it that the impoverished and the social outcasts will always, eventually, triumph, even via ruination? There are so many open issues and unanswered questions - that by the end - we're just left with the images: a hanged man dangling from a limb of a tree, a dinner tables littered with smashed glass and china, a creepy attic hideaway with rats, a vast and ugly chateau dining room in half-darkness as some weird American pop music plays on a turntable.

The Handmaid - a landmark in what has become one of the greatest cinema cultures in the world

Kim Ki-young's 1960 b/w film, The Housemaid (considered one of the greatest of all Korean films, and remade in 2010) is without a doubt one of the strangest films I've ever seen. It will clearly remind some viewers of Fatal Attraction, but it's more weird and spooky. The story line is pretty straightforward if extremely odd: a husband and wife (with two young children), sitting in domestic bliss, discuss the possibility of hiring a housemaid to help w/ their daily family life. We cut, then, to a scene at a factory (all women employees working textile looms; after work they all attend classes and they all live in dorms - much like American mills in the 19th century), where one of the women speaks openly about her crush on the music teacher (the husband we saw in the first shots); when this crush becomes known, the woman is fired and sent home where, we soon learn, she kills herself out for shame and sorrow. Another one of the women in the mill signs on to take piano lessons with the music teacher, and she soon brings along another woman (never clear to me whether she also works in the mill; in any event, it's clear she was never a good or serious student) to work as the housemaid. And the troubles begin: in one horrifying scene the wife in the family, looking through some kitchen  cabinets, is startled by a rat; this leads to their purchase of rat poison, which, incredibly, they keep among the kitchen condiments. So we're just waiting for the poison to play a role, which it will. The mother and kids go away for a weekend, and the handmaid comes on to the husband and he can't resist; soon, both the wife and the handmaid are pregnant, Wife tells Handmaid she can continue to work for them, but has to end her pregnancy; she hurls herself down the rickety, steep stairs in the house, leading to a miscarriage - and much more family turbulence. Ultimately, the wife tells her husband to go upstairs and sleep w/ the handmaid - but many more scenes of violence - the poison, stabbings, physical fights, threats to the newborn, horrible scenes all - take place in the small house. The house itself is a horror - the walls some kind of weird concrete w/ strange veins and bulges throughout and with scary masks hanging on the walls. Everything is too crowded and dangerous, w/ a constant threat as the children - one of who has to used hand crutches - try to manage the staircase. Plus there's a soundtrack of highly discordant music, sometimes just an awful pounding on the piano keys, particularly by the Housemaid who has no musical knowledge or skill but just needs to make a racket. There's even a strange twist at the end of the movie, which in a sense brings back to the starting point. No one would find this a pleasant movie to watch, but I'd say once you're in it's impossible to stop watching, completely gripping, unique, and surprising - clearly a starting point in what has since become one of the greatest cinema cultures in the world.

A series that truly gets better as it moves along, after a dubious start

Four types of TV miniseries: Some you know are great from the first episode and you'll want to stay w/ them to the end; some you know from the first 10 minutes - or at least the first episode - that this show is either a dud or at least is not meant for you; some seem good at first and you want to like them and give it a chance but after a few episodes it runs out of gas or ideas and seems to be going nowhere so you go elsewhere. The rarest form, however, is one that starts off unpromising, upsetting, or disappointing but for some reason to stick with it - maybe there's just a flare or excitement or a flash of humor - and over time the series grows on you and your in for the long haul: that's Schitt's Creek, which in the first 2 or so episodes seemed to be an unpleasant series about a wealthy family, snobbish and privileged, who lose all their money through some scam or scheme gone wrong and have to relocate to the one piece of property they still own, the eponymous Creek, a rural dump where they stay in a grungy motel w/ connecting rooms (and leaky plumbing) and find themselves interacting w/ a cast of rural Yahoos. Not promising - but I've always liked the Best in Show crew, and Eugene Levy in particular, and he (along w/ son and co-star Dan) created, wrote, and star (alongside BiS alum Catherine O'Hara and the hilariously whiny Annie Murphy as the Rose family of 4), and even in the first episode there are a few good laughs. Then, quite surprisingly, the show surreptitiously grows on you - or maybe just plain gets better as the crew gets into form - and we get to really like these hapless characters and, as they themselves do, get to care about and understand the people who've built their lives in this out-of-the-way community. By the end of Season 1, we're involved in the lives of all of the folks, and we've seen them grow and learn as they get to know one another, and it feels as if this series - which is actually entering its 6th season - is in for a good run. Bonus: The episodes are only 21 minutes each (13 per season), so very bingeable, though I don't recommend that, or alternately easy to find a personal time slot for a daily check-in (recommended approach).

Fassbinder's first great film, groundbreaking in many ways: Fox and His Friends

Fox and His Friends (1976) stands as probably Rainer Werner Fassbinder's first great film, groundbreaking in many ways and a film that established RWF as a master at staging and composition - and also a multiple threat, director, writer, lead actor. In particular, the film is groundbreaking as one of the first honest and non-exploitative films about gay culture - as almost all of the lead characters are gay, and we see that they are flamboyant, catty, vindictive, jealous, spiteful, in other words pretty much like characters/couples in any movie. You could imagine the entire film done with hetero characters, and it could be pretty much the same - though in depicting a gay culture there's a constant element of danger and marginalization that gives the film a sharp edge. In essence, the plot involves RWF's lead character, the eponymous Fox, a working-class guy from a family troubled by alcoholism who wins a huge prize in a lottery and from that point forward is taken in by a set of artistic and wealthy homosexual mean and painfully exploited by a man with whom he, supposedly, falls in love. It's awful to watch as this so-called partner takes advantage of Fox's naivety, and in particular how he humiliates Fox for what he considers his uncouth manners and plebeian taste. The film flirts with the idea of a Pygmalion story - the wealthy sophisticate bringing culture and manners to the working-class beloved - bt RWF is far to shrewd and honest to build such a fake drama: We quickly suffer with Fox as he suffers condescension and humiliation. Pretty much every scene is beautifully staged - and its hard to underestimate how important RWF's blocking can be; like most of his movies, this one verges on the edge of stage-play, and in lesser hands it would feel static and "talky," but RWF uses each scene to show us part of a world and a culture, without the dialog or the movements (of characters and of camera) ever feeling forced or unnatural. The great scenes include shopping for furniture and clothing, the transformation of the new apartment, the party to celebrate the new digs, visits to the small and discrete gay bar, the long scene on the ramps in a parking garage, and the famous ending scene in what appears to be a subway concourse (though I wonder why there's so little foot traffic), and many others. Many, perhaps most, of RWF's great films are about woman protagonists; this is a rarity in the canon - though we'll see throughout many of his staple of actors - and well worth watching.

An early film shows some signs of Fassbinder's genius

Katzelmacher, from 1969, was one of the early works of the prolific filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder (director, screenwriter, actor - as in many of his films) and by no means his best, but it shows his emerging talent and some of the cinematic skill that he later developed into some fine dramas and melodrama. Like much of his later work, Katzelmacher (I looked it up: the title is loosely translated as Troublemakers, but a literal translation would be Cat-fuckers!) is deliberately stagey: It feels like a series of snapshots or blackout scenes of interaction among the, I think, 9 main characters. They also show RWF's genius for staging. He was obviously working here on a limited budget, so the sets are often bare and many of the longer scenes are staged with the characters in front of the stucco wall of an apartment building, shoulder to shoulder leaning against or perched on a railing, looking straight ahead and making no eye contact w/ the other characters. The weird staging gives us a sense of the emptiness of the lives of these characters, none of whom seems to have any career or aspiration, other then sex with one another - often for pay - smoking, drinking. The film appears to be going nowhere for quite some time - perhaps recalled a Beckett play or more likely the deliberately stilted staging of a Cassavetes or early Godard film - until about 30 minutes in a new character appears (one of the main tropes of narration: A Stranger Comes to Town), a Greek "guest worker," who stirs up hatred and animosity and sexual jealousy and rivalry among all of the characters. The movie never becomes overtly polemical, but of course there are political implications even more resonant with us today than 50 years ago. The one hang-up, however, is that all of the characters seem too old for their parts - and not sufficiently menacing; no doubt RWF was working on a shoestring w/ fellow film students - you play with the cards you've got - but if anyone were to remake the film or stage it as a play you'd want these Katzelmacher to be scary and brutal. Here, they seem just feckless.

The strange and offbeat success of Fassbinder's Lola

One of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's last films, Lola (1981), is presented as a remake/update of Joseph von Sternberg's classic Dietrich classic, The Blue Angel (which has been adapted/updated elsewhere as well, such as in a novel by Francine Prose). I have to rely on my shaky memory of Blue Angel (funny how the title is reversed in the name of the current Met Opera lead singer in Porgy & Bess), but it seems to me that RWF doesn't update the original - he reverses it. In Blue Angel an elderly, strait-laced, "respectable" university professor goes into a cabaret/night club where he is mesmerized by Dietrich's performance, leading to his degradation, humiliation, and ultimate ruin. In the RWF update, the eponymous Lola is much more of an active, scheming presence. As in the original, this version depicts a 40-something civil servant, newly arrived in this small West German city not long after the war (the 1950s it seems) to serve as the new building commissioner; a straight-arrow, he's an immediate threat to the corrupt builder-developer and to his cronies in the government. They devise a plan to bring the straight-lace to ruin, and Lola (Barbara Sukowa) agrees to meet the commissioner and seduce him; they meet outside of the club, and he's smitten, and sees Lola as a sweet innocent: on their first date the visit a rural church, kneel in the pews, and sing hymns!). Only later does a co-worker, who wants the commissioner to know the truth, is he led to the nightclub where he sees Lola perform and learns that she's not only a chanteuse but a prostitute as well. At that point his mind falls apart, but further plot developments, which I won't reveal, leaves Lola in charge at the end. Most who see the film will remember Lola's riotous performances in the nightclub and the commissioner (Armen Mueller-Stahl) losing his mind and his bearings. What's most striking of all is how RWF depicts the whole movie against type: it's not at all noir, dark, gloomy as is the original, but it's filmed in almost lurid tropical color (the commissioner's office in city hall is done in all bright hues), w/ odd decor such as a line-up of dolls and stuffed animals in Lola's den, and with a classical score so out of keeping w/ the mood of the film as to work beautifully by keeping us always on the verge of disruption. RWF also includes a few touches that remind us of Germany emerging from the time of war: many of the characters, including the commissioner, have either served in the war or lost a spouse in the war; there are signs all around of war damage (broken and shattered walls), so we see the need for new construction as a necessary and inevitable post-war force; he also shows us some signs of the nascent West German economy, comic in its limitations - such as a new TV set that someday may be able to get not just 1 but 2 channels! - all told, a strange and strangely successful movie, all playing against type.

Should Porgy & Bess be part of the repertoire?

The Met HD Live broadcast of the Gershwins' Porgy and Bess was fun to watch start to finish and had some really find musical moments, in particular the PB duet (their only one in the opera I think!) "Bess, you are my woman now." Of course there are also the other arias that make this show so well-known beyond the opera world: Ain't Necessarily So, I Got Plenty o' Nothin', and Summertime, which actually opens the opera (and comes back in 2 reprises). Great performances all around, especially Angel Blue as Bess (Eric Owens, Porgy, was fighting a cold, as announced before the program, and he couldn't project as well as he might have otherwise - plus he blew a lyric). The crowd scenes are terrific and some of the more complex musical #s in the show; less successful, the various fight scenes, never really convincing to the the audience. The is by no means the most complex or challenging for 20th-century operas - at times it feels closer to music-hall reviews - but it's fun to see and hear an opera that draws so heavily on American blues and jazz. And, thanks in large part to HD Live broadcasts, it's great to see such a good-looking cast and a cast so well suited to their roles (though wonder if it's possible to cast someone with disabilities in the Porgy role?). Of course this opera always raises the issue of cultural appropriation: Is it right for a couple of Jewish guys from New York to write and compose a work about a Southern black community? (Thought exercise: How would I feel about Fiddler on the Roof, or Portnoy's Complaint, had either been written by a black man?) No doubt there is a degree of condescension and stereotyping - but there is also a great deal of love and sympathy: The characters, like most in opera on in tragic drama, are struggling to make a life, to find love, to endure. The Catfish Row culture is rough and crude, but also loving and nurturing and communal/familial. It's not exactly realistic, nor is it meant to be - but I'll go so far as to say creative artists have the right to depict cultures other than their own done with empathy and openness. Catfish Row isn't social realism, nor is it meant to be - but it's not exoticism, either, or at least not entirely so.