Elliiot's Watching 

Elliot’s Watching  - August 2024

Ingmar Bergman’s (w&d) A Lesson in Love (1954) may not be his best film and it includes a few lifeless passages but it also has one of the best and funniest mental breakdown - a would-be groom is jilted at the altar and goes wild, absolutely destroying everything in the formal pre-ceremony club room. Much of the film centers on infidelity, one of Bergman’s great obsessions (part of his ties to his predecessor, Strindberg). There are no happy marriages, it seems. And there’s a lot of behavior that is apparently intended to show the sexual freedom of Swedish adult women - whether it’s true of not it helped form a mistaken if exaggerated idea in the mind of the world that all/most Swedish women are free and frank about their sexual drive. In a way, that’s  cliché, or has become one - but there are some breakthroughs, too: the gynecologist and the patients who fall in love and tempt him, in violation one would think against all codes of medical ethics; also the film was way ahead os its time in recognizing and accepting of trans teens - treated sensitively and sympathetically a young woman who senses the she/he is a man in a girls body - she she’s not criticized or mocked, although not fully comprehended, either. There’s all kinds of love - and hatred - this film opines. 

Ingmar Bergman’s 1955 film, Dreams (w&d) tells two stories running parallel and erring essentially one day in the Swedish city of what we call Gothenburg - as a small team of fashion models and their entourage (director, photogs….) to complete a photo shoot for a high fashion wedding gown (I think?). Two of the women get involved in love sagas - simultaneous and in parallel, but quite different from each other: In one the young woman  is accosted by a rich but creepy older stranger who buys her a dress, jewelry, and other expensive trappings and she, the youngest o the “crew” is wept along but at what cost? When the creepy man’s daughter shows up unexpectedly we learn that his wife has been for years in a mental hospital- not enough to make him sympathetic, he’s a creep and a letch. In parallel, the leader of the fashion team, a slightly older and more established figure on the fashion world, struggle to decide whether to call the man with whom he’d had an affair, she calls, he visits, but says their relationship can never resume - and then his wife shows up and all hell breaks loose. The women return to Stockholm, chastened but safe and, perhaps, wiser, leaving behind two cold-hearted, perverted men: good riddance. A movie of great unhappiness and loneliness. 

Adieu Bonaparte, a 1985 French-Egyptian film by Egyptian director Youssef Chahine (writing credit also to Yousry Nasrallah), tells of French incursion into Egypt in hopes of expanding the Napoleonic French empire and met with fierce resistance from various Egyptian factions, Frankly, it’s a subject I know nothing about - my bad - but YC and cohort seem to have no interest in introducing non-Egyptians to the forces at work during this tie of chaos. It’s extremely difficult to keep the characters in mind much less to understand the various factions at work anyhow and with whom they form alliances. You don’t get any serious insight into Napoleon’s thoughts, fears, dreams, et al. nor do relearn much about the families opposite to N’s forces. That said, from a technical POV the film is fantastic - one of the elaborate and majestically choreographed of any military film - truly incredible how YC usable to work with such large entourage in a range of settings. Visually and viscerally Adieu N. is an excellent film- though it’s difficult and elusive and I wish he could have paid attention to character establishment and development and to clarification of what’s at stake in the various battles and abductions and who the poepleare whom we pretty much see only en masse. 

The docudrama Cowboy Cartel (2024, Apple) from Castor Fernandez and Dan Johnstone presents the extremely difficult and sometimes dangerous effort of=ver 3 years or so by a multi-agency — FBI, State Police, local police et al - in what amounts to a primer on exactly what’s legal and  what’s illegal specifically in the buying and selling or race horses in Texas and Mexico, which they manage to pove was a thinly veiled system of “laundering” US dollars - a racket run strictly and violently by the Zeta cartel in Mexico. It amounts to a great victory for American agencies, but of course Mexican gangs get flushed out of one p lace and spring up in another. In any event is a detailed look at the complex process of proving that the $ was “dirty” and than - over 3 years - pinning the crime on the Z gang. If this were truly a seminar, I’d scare about a C+. The only flaw, really, is that the whole story is be necessity told introspect through interviews with many of the (American) participants - and thus with little live action - a good but not great series. 

The documentary feature feature fro New Zealand, Mister Organ (2922, Netflix) fro David Farrier proves a detailed account by Farrier, a documentary filmmaker, to get to the bottom of of a strange led=gal dispute centered on the eponymous Michael Organ who runs security for an antiques dealtler - 20-something older than he and his romantic/sexual (?) partner; Organ clamps a lock on the wheel of cars parked in front of the business (marked no parking) and then demands ransom $ in the thousands to unlock the cars - a story that attracted local media for a day or two - but Farrier took this on as a cause and examined the complex history of illness, addiction, violence, harassment, and worse going back into the public records on Organ’s troubled life. in doing so Farrier become the object of Organ’s obsession (to say nothing more about why Organ was such a fascinating subject for Farrier) - harassing him with phone calls and threats over several years. As the two men get to know each other, the only read mystery was: Why did Farrier allow this to happen? Change your cell #, move, block phone calls and just get this guy out of your hair, dude - the fit would be better had Organ been a more interesting character but instead he’s the world’s biggest bore and Farrier should have dropped his investigation years bak and gone on to other work. 

Good luck following the plot - young man comes home to Egypt (I think) where he falls in love with and marries  a beautiful young woman (the Other, I guess) who in some obscure (to me) involves him in a plan to upend the national governance - I recommend that you look up the plot on Wiki because I can’t remember the details but what I do remember and recommend is the director (Yoursef Chahine, cowritten by Khaled Youssef) uses music and special effects to create a great Bolllywood-style marriage ceremony in the midst of a grim plot that involves terrorism and mayhem - a strange, nearly unique jumble of genres, so it’s worth a look but it’s also a challenge - definitely watch it (on Criterion) in one sitting if possible. 

Rene Clement’s Purple Noon (1960, in French) is one of several  film versions of Patricia Highstreet’s novel The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955), and what it lacks in terms of clarity (It’s a really complex plot that centers on an opportunist who kills his friend/love rival and takes over the identity and money and the girl and walks off the stage smiling) the ’55 film more than makes up for in excitement and visual interestL: most unforgettable is the contretemps on the rented yacht during a storm when Ripley disposes of the body of his feckless and inexperienced rival. This exciting sequence alone could make you sea sick. Then we follow Ripley (played very well by Alain Delon and co-author Paul Gegauff) through some really tight squeezes as he balances his suave persona and fades many scrapes with the law and authority figures as he pulls off his scam and walks off with the $ and the girl (Marge! Marie Laforet). Exciting to watch, but the English-language adaptations - 3, I think, make the plot a little more lucid. 

Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1962 French film Le Doulos (w&d by Melville,, based on a novel by Pierre Lesou) - don’t be confused, Melville is a movie name, a tribute to the American author, from this French director - is one of the typically dark, mostly in night time, violent and tough French gangster movies, one of several about complex robberies that run off the rails - and ultimately to a tough police interrogation- that brings the perps to their rightful end. The fun in watching this dark if familiar film unfold its leaves confers from the incidentals, many dark-night scenes, an omnipresent jazz piano scores (we see the pianist himself only briefly, the aptl translation of the argot (personally, I think the most t accurate translation of the title would be The Rat or The Snitch - as the film is about a gang’s undoing from within the ranks, a must-see for followers of Policiaires. 

The first (of 4) seasons of Ewa Ornacka Polish crime drama (2021), The Convict, (now on Max?) is a terrific version of this genre as we feels the fear and terror and development of survival instincts when the tough-on-crime judge is framed, convicted, and imprisoned among many women in her corrupt prison who hate her because of her verdicts - some were even sentenced by her (Agata Kulesza, as Judge Mazur). The prison includes beatings, tortures, killings, suicides, corrupt guards and warden, and complicating things further Mazur’s husband runs a sleazy nightclub where prostitutes and gangsters hang out - w/out her knowledge? The only flaw in this tense and engaging drama iS that she’s naive if not willfully blind to her husband’s behavior and it’s impossible to believe that he would ever have married her - he’s a despicable rat and she would see what we see - I know love can be blind but in this case it’s perverted not not credible. Still - I await season 2.