November 2022: Werner Herzog, Godard, Truffaut, Pasolini, Van Sant, plus Hud, The Crown 5, Blue Dahlia, and The Earth Is Blue...

 Elliot’s Watching - November 2022

Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu the Vampire (1979) is a loose adaptation of Bram Stoker’s novel (and apparently of Murnau’s silent) and it fully lives up to the standard its forbears set: Dark, creepy, ugly, disturbing, even for those who’ve read the original (I found it terribly dated) or seen any of the many adaptations. Set in a German village, Herzog’s version of the legend begins with a young man with a lovely young wife (Isabelle Adjani) is sent by his boss (they seem to be in the real estate business), a weird guy in his own right, giggling and full of ticks, on a business assignment: Go see this man who wants to buy a major property in town - Count Dracula. Wait as second, who would go on such a mission?! We want to say: Stop! Hold it right there! Go home! But, no, he’s young and ambitious and heads off on his own - a journey of 4 days, mostly on foot, as nobody he meets wants to take him to Dracula’s castle (this part of the plot veers from Stoker’s). When he arrives, he meets his nemesis - played by Klaus Kinski, Herzog’s fave villain/weirdo - who has weird long fingernails like claws, a ghastly bald dome, dark clothes, dark everything - and as he feeds the young many (Harker) a substantial dinner Drac. hovers over everything: He notes that he cannot conduct business during the daylight hours, listens to howling “creatures of the night,” and so on. In short, months, in seems, later Harker returns to his home a completely damaged and ruined man (again, quite differing from the sources), carried by a carriage that contains dirt-filled soil from Dracula’s estate - and the shipment also caries many rats, who disembark and multiply into vast swarms - the plague! Watch it for the extraordinary sense of dread and gloom, esp when Drac clamps onto peoples’ necks to draw his life-sustaining blood. Though it’s not entirely the conventional Dracula narrative, it’s a great intro to this material for those who can stomach it. 

Pier Paolo Passolni’s (short) film (30+minutes) film La Ricotta (as in the choose - 1962) which ran as part of those ominous features popular in intalian art films in the ‘60s is a sometimes hilarious bit of sisal criticism and hypocrisy and a glimpse of the prices of the art and skill or lack thereof of filming, esp crowd scenes shot en pleine aire. This shows PPP’s nihilistic and blasphemous treatment of organize (Catholic) religion, and as elements for offend just about everyone, or at least every disbeliever and skeptic. A ragtag grojp of about 5 actors, dancers, musicians are set to shoot a scene of the death of Jesus o the cross; they’re in one of those outlands, cold and muddy, with lots of new cheap high rises sprouting in the distance, an image of the rising yet still inchoate landscape of postwar industrial Rome - a setting familiar to those who’ve sene Fellini’s early works. The kicker is that as the production crew - led Orson Welles playin a type of himself, an enigmatic and querulous director who has no truck with the Italian journalist on hand to interview the great director - struggle and stumbles to get the actors to tat heron these appropriately costumed and ready at the least with their lines - as he prepares for the grand finale the Crucifixion - essentially arranging his actors into tables of great Renaissance paintings, Everything goes wrong, and in the foothills of this carefully constructed scene the troupe of actors indifferent to the artistic vision engage unjust about all of the 7 deadly sins and more, notably infidelity, gluttony, jealousy, avarice, lust, greed, sloth, wrath, coveting, et al. - all I’m high-energy scenes of hilarity played out at the foot of the Crucifixion re-enactment - with some tragic consequences. No wonder that PPP was banned by the Church of Rome - not something he feared, evidently - and the film holds up today (though what does the title mean?) and makes its point through riotous hilarity (think Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale) rather than dismal pronunciation from on high (think Chaucer’s Priest’s Tale).

Stanley Kwan’s Hong Kong set film Rouge (1987) is not the kind of film I would ordinarily care for - a rom-com/melodrama ghost story - but Kwan tells this love story with such panache and humor that it’s hard not to smile and enjoy this fantasy romp. In essence, it’s about a young woman, Fleur,  indentured from childhood to serve as a “courtesan” - i.e., prostitute - in a high-end Hong Kong brothel that caters to the wealthy young (and older) men. She and one of her clients (Chan)  fall in love; they arrange a meeting with his mother - and Fleur (Anita Mui) is obviously charming, intelligent, poised, lovely 0 but Mom will have nothing to do w/ her because of her sullied past. So - the two drink poison on OD on opium in a joint suicide pact (see R&J, Aida, et al.). Tragic - but - we pick up the story some 50 or so years later in Honk Kong with an unchanged Fleur wanders into a newspaper office planning to place a personal ad to find the whereabouts of her lost love, if he is still alive. Two reporters take up the challenge w/ her, leading to a # of complications but most important - the pursuit leads to two reporters, 2 misfits, to fall for each other (he, Alex Man, is particularly gawky and ill at ease with women) - and their sweet love story evolves out of the star-crossed lovers of the frame story. Kwan manages to find much humor and joy in what could have been a mawkish romp, and the lighting, costumery, and interior and exterior sets throughout - particularly night-time scenes in the rain on the streets of HK - are in themselves enough to hold anyone’s attention in this under-the-radar success. The score will not be to all tastes, but the passages of Chinese opera are integrated very well into the story line (Chan is a wealthy young man who somehow aspires a career as an opera singer - isn’t there a similar film concept in an early Japanese movie that I can’t quite remember?)

Does (Jean-Luc) Godard’s film Weekend (1967) stand up after so many years? Pretty well, I think, in that it’s just as odd, at times hilarious, at times boring and off-putting, but for whatever reason, good or bad, my reaction today is much like my reaction 50 years ago. It’s worth watching if only for the great “traffic jam” sequences, an incredibly long set of 4 (I’m told) shots of cars and truck stuck on a freeway, in which everyone’s blasting away as if that will do any good. Then we get to some really gory sequences, many bodies strewn along the roadside - and what does it mean? You have to be totally “square” or out-of-it even to ask: It just is. We (loosely) follow our protagonist couple on their weekend adventure, during which they make several encounters during which the conversation explores: Are we real people? Or actors in a movie? A very 60s kind of question and dilemma - seems quite antiquated as well. And then two migrant laborers talk at great length direct into the camera about their revolutionary aspirations - again, very ‘60s in the days of idolatry of Marx and Mao. And they film wraps with a Western-movie shootout at a pastoral retreat of some the characters we’ve met en route. And it all amounts to? A critique of society? Not really, but maybe a glimpse of what it would be like 50 years hence, i.e., today, with our over-dependence on gasoline-powered cars and with the remnants of colonialism still hovering over the African nations. Godard was no seer, but he broke the rules of narrative and made viewers think and react, if not with any of the Marxist fervor that he would have liked or anticipated.  

Traces Series 2 (we missed the 1st season but each season stands alone successfully. In this series, set in beautiful Dundee, Scotland (the Scots are really showing their stuff via crime series of late), the main strand of the plot involves the search for a serial bomber who threatens to create more havoc. What’s good is that the pursuit is intense and along the way we learn a lot about forensics and crime investigations, thanks largely to the clear accounts of the ongoing pursuit Laura Fraser (Professor Sarah). What disappoints a little is that - as in far too many crime thrillers - there are about a thousand things that could have gone wrong in the investigation, arrest, and interrogation but - miracle of miracles! - ever guess pans out and everything works. Put aside any skepticism and enjoy, I guess. A more troubling aspect is the absolute and complete mystery of the attraction between Sarah and the lead investigator - possibly the most off-putting and incomprehensible office romance ever filmed, not that I’ve seen them all. 

I had never seen Hud and had consigned it in my mind to a typical American Western, centered on a larger-than-life tough guy (cf Liberty Valence, High Noon, for some better examples). But, prompted by reading a review of  PN’ auto bio, I thought I’d take a look at Hud on Criterion before it was too late (it will drop from Criterion library next month). Wow, was I surprised: Martin Ritt’s Hud (1963) is a really great American film, right from the first frame, when we know this will not be another dull, drab Western exterior. The film, shot by JamesWong Howe extreme Panavision (ie the vantage is always wider and narrower than convention letter-box framing), a great way to feel from the first immersed in aTexas landscape. Plus, filming in b/w - an homage those who shot thousands of oaters - but here the b/w gives the film the look of classic - just beautiful. We see life in a hardscrabble farm house where Newman lives and runs the farm with his grandfather and with his late brother’s teenage son - 3 generations of guys in the one meeting - + plus the girl, Patricia Neale. What a set-up: we could be heading toward Tennessee Williams, or other films of ne’er do well bros and struggling farm fams, see e.g. East of Eden. And in the desolation of the nearby town, where there doesn’t seem much to aside from drinking and fighting; the landscape will remind many of Last Picture Show and maybe the novel Lonesome Dove, both by Larry McMurtry, a genius, and the author the excellent screenplay for Hud. Hud as played by Newman is a vile, sexist, angry, and dangerous man; his smoldering temper - which leads to a brutal assault on Neale and much peril for Hud’s nephew, who worships Hud - and follows him down a path could lead to much self-destruction. One thing curious about the plot, however, is that Hud’s nephew seems to have no friends - a sad side-note that the film never quite recognizes or resolves. As with so many great dramatists - compare Pinter, Strindberg, O’Neill - everyone suffers. 

Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho (1991), aside from its great title, did little for me and I quit on it about 40 minutes in. I found the whole production to be in some ways self-conscious and cute and imaginative but to no good cause; in other ways, the characters are repulsive and dangerous and I just felt the whole movie, or the half of it, was an unpleasant place to be. If you’re interested in the community of dropouts, drifters, drug addict of there Pacific NW, a far better film is Streetwise, which is much more realistic (it’s a documentary) and much more sympathetic to the lives of its participants. It’s note exactly a feel-good movie, but it’s straight=forward and honest and not filled with visual pyrotechnics and other distractions. 

George Marshall’s noir LA film The Blue Dahlia (1946) is best known and appreciated today, to the extend that it is known and appreciated, for the Raymond Chandler screenplay - which I think is one of his few writing credits for original work rather than adapted from one of his novels or stories. The film isn’t great - a far too complex, head-scratching who-dunnit  - but any Chandler project will have some great dialog and this one also  has some fine moments such as the Alan Ladd Veronica Lake drive up the dark coast to and past Malibu, or the opening scuffle in a downtown LA diner, where we get the first sense that one of the characters, William Bendix as Buzz - shows himself to be mentally disturbed - specifically, by a wartime head injury that leaves him with serious PTSD, though the term came into use only later; credit here to Chandler and Marshall for a film that recognizes the price of war on civilian life, even after the armistice, and without a mawkish or melodramatic tone. 

Filmmaker Iryna Tsilyk was traveling/working in Ukraine ca 2020 when she met a family (a single mom and her 4 kids) that was making a film about their life during the war - mostly directed by the teenage daughter who, with some friends, aspires to become a filmmaker herself; IT decided to make a documentary film, The Earth Is Blue as an Orange, about the film - which seems as if it would be a precious, ironic venture - but, no: by filming the fledgling efforts of these teens and their mom and younger sibs and neighbors, we get an intimate portrait of what the family is living through, coping with, and in a real sense triumphing over during the war - which had been ongoing for five years at the time depicted. We see both the spirit and energy of the young filmmakers - for ex., gaining cooperation from some Ukraine tank soldiers for a short staged sequence - and some harrowing accounts of how the family copes with the constant night-time bombings: they hide in a cell in the basement, for the most part. In one interview with children talk about how they’ve learned to distinguish incoming from outgoing missiles. Many winter exterior shots show us the grim, post-Soviet, ugly cityscape - and then there will be a patch of beauty - bridge, a neighborhood along a greenway; and then, worst of all, bombed out apartment buildings, charred beyond repair. The movie is uplifting in the end - but of course that’s not the end, and we have to wonder: What has become of this family, and so many others, since 2020? A scary thought. 

I had to watch it, just because - so into it after 4 seasons, so how can you not watch Season 5 of The Crown, especially as we know what lies just over the horizon: the specter of Diana, pursued by the media and the public, dead on a speedway in Paris. But not yet - that’s for season 6. And Season 5? Just not quite as good, engaging, varied, and lavish as the first 4. What went wrong? top of the list would be the casting of Domenic West as the most un-Charles-like Charles as possible; could not in any way fathom Charles as a handsome, cocky, ladies man, no way. And the conflicts in most of the season were muted and peripheral, unlike the first 4 seasons that really developed a character over time (Eliz. seems the same as in season 4, and not too different from the Queen we all know in her final years, decades. What’s good about Season 5?: the 8th episode that traced the manipulations by the BBC in getting Diana to tell her story via one of its news programs - great look at the Diana phenomenon and at the workings and working-overs of the media; and episode 9, in which Charles and Diana seem to reconcile into a friendship post divorce - but not for long. The last episode seemed a stasis, with the Queen lamenting the retirement of the royal yacht about which who cares? Are 5 castles or whatever enough? Boo hoo.  

Francois Truffaut’s best-known film, Jules and Jim (1962), based closely on the 1953 novel by Henri-Pierre Roche, is the classic love triangle - J&J being the two best buddies who fall for the same girl, Catherine (Jeanne Moreau). Over the course of some years or so - beginning with the protagonists as easy-going young men living the vie Boheme in Paris before the Great War - their friendship interrupted by the war (Jules is German, and served on the Russian front; Jim is a journalist who is assigned to write about post-War France) - until, after a gap of some time, Jim visits the now-married Jules & Catherine in rural France. Thus begins Catherine’s on-again, off-again relations with each of the two men, plus at least one outside fling - none of which, at least at first, provokes the jealousy and vitriol that one would expect. But this triangulated marriage/friendship cannot endure forever, as we see in the last third of the film, in which it becomes every more obvious thatCatherine is more than just a flirt but also a seriously deranged and dangerous woman. The great success of this film is that it hovers between romantic idle - esp with Truffaut’s beautiful wide-angle b/w film and topography - and tragic cruelty; try as we might, we can’t truly identify with or aspire to this kind of relationship, so cruel to those so close. If J&J were to be re-made today, of course, the erotic attraction between the two men would be explicit rather than implied or suggested (a recent streaming series from Mexico, Everything Will Br Fine, touched on similar themes).