I didn’t let Katy see the box, and didn’t tell her it was fake, to see how long it took her to figure it out. But she didn’t ever, so I told her over the end credits. She is still mad.
Codirected with Costa Botes, who I think made the Lord of the Rings making-of docs. I’d forgotten all about “Stan the Man,” the unfunny comic who attacks people then runs away, with Colin filming on hidden cameras.
Not at all surprised when the end credits told me it’s based on a novel. The novel was Herman Melville’s follow-up to Moby Dick, which according to wikipedia was “a critical and financial disaster… universally condemned for both its morals and its style.” The movie plays like a piece of tragic literature without feeling uncomfortable in its present-day setting. I mean that as a compliment, but it also means the plot, as strange as it initially seems, has a feeling of inevitability. It opens on a rich couple, happy, alive and in love, so I know things won’t end well. Maybe it would be interesting to someday make a movie that opens on a loving couple who manage to stay that way.
Anonymously bestselling author Pierre (Guillaume Depardieu, star of Don’t Touch The Axe) is engaged to marry Lucie, but already a weird incestual vibe is creeping in when he calls his mom “sister” and gets all clingy around her. His best friend Thibault returns from travels, congratulates Pierre on his engagement to their mutual childhood friend Lucie, seems sincere about it. But Pierre is distracted by a stalker, and when he finally catches her, she claims to be his long-lost sister Isabelle, hidden away and raised in Bosnia. So Pierre visits some good places to die: the highway at night, a massive unstable rock, a waterfall, then tells his fiancee and mother that he’s moving to Paris by himself.
Pierre and mother:
Pierre tells Isabelle (Yekaterina Golubeva, sinister stalker in The Intruder): “for the world, you’ll be my wife,” even though nobody in Paris knows who he is so it shouldn’t matter. They immediately run into trouble on both sides of the law, Thibault throws him out, and newly-disillusioned Pierre is having trouble with his follow-up novel. His agent: “The need to spit the world’s sinister truth in its face is as old as the world itself.” Another woman and a little girl travel with them – I was never sure who they were, exactly, but the girl dies after being smacked in the head by a passer-by, and the couple moves again.
Now they’re in a warehouse run by a drums-and-feedback noise conductor and his all-black-clothed orchestra – just the kind of thing people assume goes on in Paris – and now their public/private roles seem reversed, as they sleep together when nobody is looking, but stay in separate beds. Back in the country, Pierre’s distraught mom (Catherine Deneuve, the same year she did Ruiz’s Time Regained) gets on his motorcycle and dies on the highway at night – so it beats the massive rock and the waterfall as the movie’s foreshadowed death monument. Lucie tracks Pierre down and stays with them (“we’ll say you’re my cousin”).
More troubles: Isabelle jumps off the winter ferry trying to die, Pierre publicly identifies himself as the author of the bestselling novel but is called an impostor, nobody wants his new book (“a raving morass that reeks of plagiarism”), Thibault is harassing them, and Pierre is getting shit from his conductor/landlord, whose musicans apparently also double as his private militia. So Pierre grabs some guns, goes into town and blows Thibault’s head off, is packed into the police van as his women both run after him, then Isabelle walks in front of a speeding ambulance.
It struck me as ironic that Pierre is trying to write a great, tortured novel, seeking the ultimate truths, while all his relationships are full of lies. Watched this because I enjoyed the unhinged awesomeness of Carax’s Lovers on the Bridge and his Merde short, and I’m hearing that his new one is bananas. But this was apparently the grimly serious piece between features of transcendent weirdness, despite a blood-soaked dream-sequence or two. I was looking forward to the Dirty Three score, but it’s actually by Scott Walker – what was I thinking of?
Lucie, in happier times:
Senses of Cinema:
If compared to Jean-Luc Godard and later Philippe Garrel in his first works, in Pola X we find a Carax closer to Jacques Rivette – who, not in vain, has declared that for him this is the most beautiful French film of the ’90s. The Rivettian airs can be found, for example, in the importance of the ideas of conspiracy, secrecy and masks; in the shots of large interior spaces like factory buildings and chateaus; and, above all, in the treatment of time: so many meters of film are used to follow the characters’ journeys, living the process with them – at the beginning of the film we follow Pierre all the way from the chateau where he lives to Lucie’s home, including the ferry ride; similarly, at the end of the film Carax spends a lot of time following Pierre’s journey to Thibault.
The sweetest end-of-the-world drama. Likeably lopsided Don McKellar (also writer/director) visits his family (opening nostalgia Christmas presents and having a homey diner) claims that he’s comfortable with his plan to spend the (unexplained but universally accepted) apocalypse in six hours alone in his apartment. Don is really super-depressed over the recent death of his wife, ends up helping an increasingly desperate Sandra Oh, who still thinks she can go shopping and catch taxis in the midst of societal breakdown, attempt to reunite with her intense latter-day boyfriend. This is probably David Cronenberg, a gas company manager who completes his goal to personally phone every customer and thank them for their business, before going home to await Sandra, leaving employee Donna in charge.
Sandra has car trouble:
Don and Sandra get grudging help from Don’s playboy car-collector friend Craig, who is rapidly going through a list of sexual conquests – both acts and partners (Lily, a black woman; Don, who refuses; and their high school French teacher, Genevieve Bujold).
Bujold with Callum Rennie:
Cameo by Pontypool director Bruce McDonald (with the bat)
The midnight hour approaches, but the sun is still up – apparently it hasn’t gone down in weeks. Don’s sister Sarah Polley and her boyfriend attend the final countdown celebration in the middle of town. A nerdy guy named Menzies holds a solo piano concert in an otherwise-unused theater. Cronenberg is shot by marauding youth. His employee Donna, a virgin, is Craig’s final visitor. And Sandra, losing her dream of last-second double-suicide with her beloved, ends up in the arms of Don. It seemed like a generic-indie-looking unexceptional drama in the first ten minutes, but totally hooked me and proved amazingly touching by the end. I can’t stop thinking about it.
Cronenberg gets a taste of his own horror-makeup medicine:
Polley party:
Not a bad little virtual-reality teen horror movie. Well, okay, it’s quite a bad little virtual-reality teen horror movie, but Trevor and I have sentimental attachment to the stupid thing. So how could we pass up watching the edited-for-television version (“I’m in deep stuff”) at Dolly’s house?
Edward Furlong continued frittering away his Terminator 2 goodwill after Pet Sematary II and before his brief 1998 resurgence, appearing as a troubled (dead mom, metal albums) video gamer who gets a demo disc of an immersive VR experience, a shoddy Existenz starring a punk clown called Trickster. In first-person, Eddy stalks then knifes a sleeping neighbor. His gaming buddy Kyle knows too much, so Ed goes back the next night and wakes up hearing that his friend has died (we don’t watch this part). Next he tries to rebel against Trickster and stop the killing, but Tricky wants Ed to take care of his crush Kimberly. Another killing spree ends with a vigilante neighborhood watch group shooting Kyle’s dad, I think. But Ed wakes up and everyone’s still alive – it was all part of the game experience. So he trashes his room a bit, then hands off the disc to a hated authority figure, and all ends well.
Written by Andrew Walker, who specializes in convoluted serial killer stories (Se7en, Sleepy Hollow, 8mm), mostly pretty tame but with a few scenes that seem like inspirations to later works (Lost Highway, an Aphex Twin video). The actors who played Furlong’s friends Kyle and Kimberly would go on to appear in nothing much, and nothing much, respectively, but the killed dad was in Scanners, which is the movie people always think you’re talking about if you mention Brainscan.
I have a rocky relationship with late Godard, but was determined to watch this because of its appearance on Rosenbaum’s top-hundred list, so I watched a few others to prepare: from the pre-’68 Weekend to the Criterion-issued Tout va bien to a couple more Rosenbaum-approved films, Ici et Ailleurs (hit) and King Lear (miss). Even with all those and Histoire(s) and In Praise of Love under my belt, I don’t feel like I understand or appreciate post-’68 Godard sufficiently, but I reluctantly watched this one anyway, sure that it’d be a flop. Sure enough, it’s completely impenetrable, possibly even pretentious. But I loved it.
The picture is divine, shot by the great William Lubtchansky (the year before La Belle Noiseuse) with art direction by JLG’s Ici et ailleurs partner Anne-Marie Mieville. The camerawork feels closer to the Straub/Huillet movies I’ve seen than to anything by Godard (maybe if I remembered In Praise of Love better). Sound design draws attention to itself (music cutting on and off abruptly), as do the editing and camera. The complete soundtrack to the movie (dialogue and all) was released on CD, and I think the music of both Nouvelle Vague and For Ever Mozart was compiled from the works of the ECM label – have to check them out sometime.
There’s as much voiceover as onscreen spoken dialogue. The characters, if that’s what they are, talk past each other in quotations and philosophy. There’s very little direct story that I was able to decipher, but apparently there’s a plot going on with Alain Delon playing identical twin brothers (or possibly not), one of whom drowns (or possibly he doesn’t). Delon hangs with rich Helene (Domiziana Giordano, the guide in Nostalghia), whose maid Cecile (Laurence Cote of Gang of Four) keeps getting hit by people. That’s all the overt class warfare I found – Helene visits a factory she owns at one point, but no Tout va bien-style uprisings occur. Oh, maybe there’s more class warfare than I realized, since apparently Delon was a drifter taken in by Helene. I caught that at the beginning, but after seeing him in all the nice suits later on, then the identical twins thing, I got thrown.
Rosenbaum on theme: “In part a sustained reverie on what it means both to be rich and not to be rich, and the contrapuntal role played here by the wealthy characters and their servants is part of what makes this film so operatic in feeling.” Elsewhere he’s called it “a meditation on the end of the world.”
M. Sooriyakumaran on plot:
While driving along a stretch of highway in the Swiss countryside, a wealthy industrialist, Helene Torlato-Favrini, finds a drifter, Roger Lennox, lying by the side of the road. They instantly become lovers, but it’s not long before they start bickering with one another. One day while swimming, Helene (accidentally?) pulls Roger into the water and then watches from her boat while he drowns. Several months later, Roger’s twin brother Richard (or perhaps Roger himself, pulling a Lady Eve) turns up at Helene’s mansion, driving a convertible and wearing a fancy suit, to ask for a job in her company. He and Helene also become lovers, but this time it’s Richard who wears the pants in their relationship.
G. Santayana:
Although Nouvelle Vague has more of a story than many recent films by Godard, it is his most rigorously composed. It is his most insistently citational. With texts drawn from William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Baudelaire, Jacques Chardonne, Rimbaud, Dante, Dostoievsky, Howard Hawks, and innumerable other sources, everything in the film comes from somewhere else.
I’d heard this – an interesting idea, making a movie using only stolen dialogue. But the dialogue is all really great, and I couldn’t identify any of its sources, so the thought that it’s stolen hardly matters. Ah, the recurring dead bee query comes from To Have and Have Not, and Helene’s last name was nabbed from The Barefoot Contessa.
Santayana again:
If Passion is about light, Nouvelle Vague is about time. It is about waves ever returning – and the gift of empty hands. Indeed, the outstretched hand is the recurring visual motif in the film. … It is the natural world to which the characters aspire – to be at one with the cyclical rhythms of nature, mute in their magnificence, like the horses ever-present beside the cars. … For all their playfulness and outstanding inventiveness, [Godard’s] late films are, however, mournful in tone. They seem like products of a civilization that is coming to the end.
“Men were vulgar. They wanted to forget their history. Only funerals seemed true, as they passed streets of dirty houses, like tombs for the living.”
Almost an anthology film – three stories with no overlapping characters, set maybe in the 1920’s or 30’s. An adaptation of three separate works – a fact I didn’t catch in the opening credits. Very strange, but as magnetic and thrilling as Non.
The Immortals
A burst of music over the opening, then the first line, from a father to his son, is “Kill yourself.” Both father (Jose Pinto of Abraham’s Valley) and son (Luis Miguel Cintra, star of Non) are the most famous scientists of their respective generation. But the father is feeling washed-up and forgotten, and urges his son to die at the height of his fame.
Time out for a picnic with Marta (Isabel Ruth of The Uncertainty Principle), an old student/flame of the father’s, then back to the apartment. The son won’t be convinced, refuses to swallow cyanide, but agrees to fix his father’s curtain rod over the back door, at which time his dad pushes him over the balcony, then jumps after, yelling about immortality.
I’d noted that the movie felt like theater, the old man playing towards an imagined crowd instead of his son, in a single location except for the cutaways to the picnic and a downstairs neighbor’s place as the men fell to their deaths – and it was theater after all. A half hour into the movie, a curtain raises, and we begin to follow a couple groups of friends who have been watching the play, never to return to the scientist family.
Suzy
Square-jawed Diogo Doria of Non and his friend David Cardoso are paying as much attention to a pair of courtesans/prostitutes in another box as to the play. Cardoso meets the girls and reports back, having claimed Gabi (Rita Blanco) as his own, and later, Doria starts spending much time with Suzy (the ever-present Leonor Silveira), though he remains rational when he sees her out with other men.
All along, I’m suspicious that this will be another play, even though the atmosphere has changed – it’s more realistic, mostly shot in long takes (as was the first episode), but still held at a strange remove, with ellipses of undetermined lengths between scenes.
Suzy: “I have wealthy lovers, dresses by the best seamstresses, everything, except happiness.” Eventually she’s seeing Doria less often, though they exchange letters. In the end, Suzy has died in hospital during an operation (“she said: it’s a small thing”), but he keeps writing the letters. Cardoso stops by to visit his pathetic friend, and tells him a story.
Mother of the River
Young Fisalina (Leonor Baldaque, star of The Portuguese Nun) is in love with Ricardo Trepa (who played her husband in Christopher Columbus, The Enigma). But it’s not that simple: there are customs, rules, meddling parents and a small, stifling village. So she sneaks off to see the Mother of the River (Irene Papas, greek singer in A Talking Picture, also star of Z). “I love a boy with pretty teeth. I do not know how to marry him… curse me, but set me free.” So the mother takes Fisalina through a candlelit cavern to the edge of the water.
The next day Fisalina notices her fingertips are golden. She hides them from everyone, but no longer feels urgent towards her boy, and seems at peace with the village. During a candlelight festival, the light shines off her fingers and she is discovered, a witch! “Fisalina, reckless, fated, has chosen to live beside the deep water, where she will wait a thousand years before swapping lives with someone else.”
Goldfinger:
Trepa, despondent:
Oliveira has returned to these writers: his A Caixa was a play by Prista Monteiro (The Immortals), and he’s done at least four major films based on stories by Agustina Bessa-Luis (Mother of the River).
D. Kehr says the segments are “all centered on themes of death and eternity and presented sequentially as social comedy, existential tragedy and lyrical epic,” but Rosenbaum, more correctly I think, says it’s “the theme of existential identity” that unites the stories.
Watched for Resnais’s 90th birthday. One of the most excellent, entertaining and moving Resnais films I’ve seen. Too bad it’s five hours long so I won’t be able to show it to anyone else. Just two actors (Sabine Azema, recently great in Wild Grass, and Pierre Arditi, her resurrected fiancee in Love Unto Death) play about four characters each. Each movie begins with Sabine thinking about grabbing a cigarette – in one she does, in the other she doesn’t – and builds from there, branching into multiple stories based on different decisions made by the characters, all of them more meaningful and consequential than the cigarette, rewinding to show the opposite decisions and their outcomes, building a structured mega-narrative, showing how the same characters deal with different circumstances.
Smoking
Cartoon character intros. School principal’s wife Celia Teasdale grabs a cigarette, and school caretaker Lionel Hepplewick shows up to look at her garden. Lionel flirts with Sylvie, the Teasdales’ maid.
Five Days Later: the Teasdales admit their marriage is over. Red-cheeked principal Toby decides to leave for a while.
Five Weeks Later: Celia has started over as a caterer, is working her first event with Lionel, who proves a poor business partner. She loses her damn mind, very amusingly, and Toby feels awful and returns to her.
Five Years Later: funeral of local poet Joe Hepplewick, Lionel’s father. Toby has quit drinking, and Celia is still troubled after her catering breakdown. Lionel succeeded in the food industry, married a businesswoman and runs a thriving cafeteria, while Celia, whose idea it was, is a shell of her former energetic self, cared for by her sad husband.
OR IT WENT LIKE THIS
Back at the catering job at the tail end of the breakdown, Lionel comes running up and assures Celia that she can count on him.
Five Years Later: Poet Joe’s funeral, Toby and Celia barely recognize each other. She’s still partnered with Lionel running their successful business, and Toby is a drunken mess. “At each funeral I feel like I’m being buried myself.”
OR IT WENT LIKE THIS
Back in their garden, Toby Teasdale doesn’t leave his wife but proposes a vacation. Lionel is crushed that Celia’s leaving, and tells him the catering thing was just a pipe dream.
Five Weeks Later: comic scene at a hotel terrace. Lionel has followed them, got a job as a waiter, and keeps trying to secretly speak with Celia, bringing her desserts as a pretense. Toby finds out and has him fired.
Five Years Later: funeral for Toby. Celia is accompanied by Toby’s friend Miles, and obsessed Lionel is there working as a gravedigger, still following Celia.
OR IT WENT LIKE THIS
Back at the hotel, Toby restrains himself after learning that Lionel has followed them. Celia admits she encouraged him and Lionel agrees to leave her alone.
Five Years Later: commemorative service to celebrate the school’s anniversary. Celia is still with Toby and they’re unhappy again/still. Lionel pops by, married and successful with a taxi business.
OR IT WENT LIKE THIS
Back at the Teasdales’ garden when Lionel was flirting with the maid Sylvie on the first day of the fateful cigarette, he agrees to go out with her if she’ll stop dating other guys – so he never ends up involved with Celia at all.
Five Days Later: After their date, Lionel starts working on Sylvie, telling herself she needs to improve herself if they’re ever going to make something of themselves. She gets principal Toby to agree to help her learn about literature. Toby’s wife Celia comes home, complains at Toby to stop drinking, saying Miles saved his ass from getting fired. Lionel is pleased that Sylvie is taking her self-improvement seriously.
Five Weeks Later: town festivities and a rare sighting of poet Joe Hepplewick in a wheelchair, talking with Celia, then with Sylvie about her future with his son Lionel. She’s testy when talking with now-unemployed Lionel. Toby is looking better, inspired by his new role as Sylvie’s mentor, but she tells him she’s stopping the lessons because there’s no point. Sylvie gets stuck in the stockade, where she’s to be pelted with sponges later during the festival, and Lionel hits her with one instead of freeing her.
Five Years Later: Lionel and Sylvie have two boys, are christening their young daughter. Lionel is still kind of a fuckup, and he tells Celia that Sylvie is boss in their household. Toby is feeling better since quitting his principal job, acting as godfather to the baby girl. “I’ll personally keep an eye on her education.” “I thought you were fed up with education.” “This is a special case.”
OR IT WENT LIKE THIS
Back at the festival, Lionel frees her after all, and Sylvie says she won’t marry him, then tricks him into the stockade.
Five Years Later: Principal Toby is sick-drunk at the school’s anniversary celebration. Sylvie is a reporter now, arrives to interview the principal, says Lionel married someone else. “She wasn’t as lucky as you were.” Sylvie thanks Toby for his lessons years earlier. “You showed me the way so I could escape,” and makes the principal feel happy again.
No Smoking
Celia decides against that cigarette, and misses Lionel’s visit, is visited by Toby’s friend Miles instead, who tells her that the school board is about to fire her husband for being drunk and erratic, that Miles is trying to save him. Celia says don’t bother, tells Miles that she’s leaving Toby anyway for being a shitty husband. But when she goes back in the house, Miles tells maid Sylvie to deliver the message that he’s going to try anyway, and that the four of them (he has a rocky marriage to serial cheater Rowena) should have dinner this weekend.
Five Days Later: in the garden, the only two who show for dinner are Celia and Miles – who recently saved Toby’s job at the school. Turns out Toby stayed away on purpose, wanted Miles to talk to Celia, deliver the message that Toby still wants to stay with her. But Miles is in love with Celia. Awkward dinner becomes stranger when Celia’s mom Josephine shows up, asks Miles a lot of questions (but she is very discreet). He is fed up, goes and hides in the shed, as Toby stumbles home and eats with Celia.
Five Weeks Later: confessions on the golf course. “It’s only gotten worse since he stopped drinking.” Red-haired Rowea taunts husband Miles, then gets him to read her a poem.
Five Years Later: Easter, and Miles sees Celia in the churchyard. Toby died years earlier and Miles and Rowena moved away. Back visiting now, but nobody seems especially happy.
OR IT WENT LIKE THIS
Back at the golf course, Rowena tells Miles it’s not going to work out.
Five Years Later: School’s 50th, both couples are broken up, Miles and Toby have moved away and live together, with difficulty, and Celia has scored a job at the school.
OR IT WENT LIKE THIS
Back at the beginning, Miles says he’ll defend Toby to the school board and doesn’t propose any dinner with Celia. Later, arguing with his wife on a walk through the Teasdales’ garden, Rowena locks him in the shed. Sylvie the maid lets him out, and he spontaneously invites her on a walk around the British coast, which he’d always wanted to do with his wife but never got the chance. Celia comes out to talk, says Sylvie left a message that she doesn’t like long walks, and that Rowena is out with another guy. Miles decides to go back into the shed.
Five Weeks Later: Miles is still in the shed, much to Toby’s annoyance. Rowena messes with Lionel, throws his pants in the fire when he removes them to show off, then talks her husband out of the shed, but he says he’s leaving to start over somewhere new.
Five Years Later: midnight mass. Sylvie, now married to Lionel, sees Miles in the churchyard. He’s waiting for Rowena. “You were right. You can’t start over again.”
OR IT WENT LIKE THIS
Back at the shed, Rowena is nicer to Miles and gets him to come home.
Five Years Later: party at the school, Rowena scares off Lionel, is completely nasty to her husband.
OR IT WENT LIKE THIS
Back at the shed, Celia delivers the message that Sylvie loves long walks.
Five Weeks Later: Sylvie lied, is complaining about her shoes and the cold and leg cramps on the first day of her hiking trip with Miles. They are infatuated though, and share a kiss, rare in this movie, but they’re also getting on each other’s nerves. They talk it out in a travelers’ cabin. “I always have my worst moments in sheds.” Sylvie wanders off, and Rowena arrives to collect her husband.
Five Years Later: Sylvie is just marrying Lionel, and Miles is walking her down the aisle. Rowena comes by in a red Devo hat and is pretty nice to her husband for once.
OR IT WENT LIKE THIS
Back on the hiking path, Miles refuses to follow Rowena and falls to his death in the fog.
Five Years Later: a memorial ceremony for Miles led by Toby. “His widow told us he has a preference for sheds,” so they dedicated a shed in the churchyard in his memory. Sylvie and Rowena separately tell Toby that they’ll come at times, sit in the shed and think of Miles. “Incredible, what a story. Hard to understand.”
Nice movie, with good music and a surprisingly strong endings to each title. Not shown above: Irene Pridworthy, school vice principal. Based on a play by Alan Ayckbourn (Coeurs) in which a different series of variations is performed every night, so it takes sixteen performances to catch them all. Resnais and his writers cut it down to twelve for the film. Won an award in Berlin, and best picture at the Cesars, also best director, screenplay, production design and actor, but actress went to Binoche for Blue.
Ayckbourn in 2007:
They all finish with a certain dying fall, except for a couple that go up in mood. In general, the point is that we do have free will and we can choose, but we can’t change unless we make a huge effort. Only Sylvie makes a big change; she’s the one who changes the most. If you don’t change, you just end up in the same place. How many men do we know who end up marrying the same woman again and again! At the end of their lives, people who have unsuccessful relationships will say weren’t they unlucky in love but maybe they were impossible to live with. Anyone who would marry Lionel Hepplewick in Intimate Exchanges must be mad!
I looked up five reviews, and each said the movie grew tiresome and wasn’t inventive enough with its premise – except for J. Rosenbaum, of course.
Resnais’ fascination with a highly theatrical cinema, first broached in Mélo, gets freakishly extended here, with two of the same actors running brittle, virtuosic relays between multiple roles. On the stage, Aykbourn’s plays were meant to be performed over eight consecutive evenings; eliminating the two most “English” scenes — a medieval pageant and a cricket game — Resnais commissioned Jean-Pierre Bacri and Agnès Jaoui, his subsequent writers on Same Old Song, to squeeze this into two two-hour features, to be seen interactively in whatever order the audience prefers. In practice, Resnais reported that most French viewers hedonistically opted for Smoking first. And it appears that what they found more palatable than their Anglo-American counterparts is a principal identified by critic François Thomas as pivotal to Resnais’ later films — an alternation between affection and recoil, identification and distance, sweetness and bitterness reflecting the influence of Follies and other musicals by Stephen Sondheim.
“A terrible word is the NON”
A film with a stagy, heightened atmosphere in which you plainly see things happening though you somehow come to believe that these things are not happening. It’s a feeling I’ve had before with Oliveira, and with some of my favorites by Ruiz, Bunuel and Resnais, a slippery strangeness which I suppose most critics call surrealism.
Obvious predecessor to A Talking Picture, a movie full of narrated history lessons ending with a moment of violence, history’s revenge on the present. Portuguese soldiers on a troop truck, out defending the colonies, chat about politics. Lt. Cabrita (Luis Miguel Cintra, scary uncle in Pedro Costa’s O Sangue) tells them stories of their country’s past defeats, which are played out for us in full costume using the same actors as in the truck.
Two of my fave soldiers: at left is Manuel, Diogo Doria of Manoel on the Island of Wonders
Flashback, B.C. 130’s: Viriato, a successful defender of Portugal (then Lusitania) against the Romans, an icon of Portuguese independence, killed by his own Roman-bribed men while he slept.
Flashback, early 1470’s: Portugal fights Spain on two fronts. King Afonso V is defeated in a chaotic battle, while his son Prince John fought and won a battle that was apparently tactically brilliant but seemed strange to me. So, “There were neither victors nor vanquished.” Symbol of the battle was “The Mangled Man, who, in his chivalrous ardour, refuses to let the nation’s symbol fall” – a flag-bearer who kept holding the flag after having both hands cut off by the enemy. “King Afonso V’s image is belittled compared to The Mangled Man’s, whose courage the king himself didn’t deserve.”
Flashback, late 1470’s: John of the previous battle is now king, and his son Afonso is married to daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, so the children would have united the Iberian kingdoms, had Afonso not died during a horse race. Zodiac-like, this episode adds up the details of the suspicious/tragic event without drawing clear conclusions.
Time out for Cabrita to speak of Portugal’s discoveries and art, how they are more meaningful than any military achievements. This features a song, baby angels, much nudity, and Leonor Silveira.
Flashback, 1578, Alcazar-Quibir, the War of the Three Kings, a disastrous battle fought in northern Morocco. Cintra/Cabrita plays Alexandre Moreira, head of the adventurers’ regiment, who attacked first, to no avail. Three kings were killed, the nobility slaughtered, the army defeated, and Portugal was taken over by the Spanish government for the next sixty years.
Cintra/Cabrita/Moreira:
The next day, out on patrol, they’re caught in Portugal’s latest military defeat – Cabrita is shot, taken to a military hospital populated by mutilated men. He dies in the hospital on April 25, 1974, the day of the Carnation Revolution which ended the colonial war.
Acquarello: “By juxtaposing history-based fiction with historical non-fiction, Oliveira illustrates the process of mythologization, where history becomes refracted and idealized in times of crisis and upheaval. However, rather than engendering a romanticism for the past glory, Oliveira dismantles the myth of conquest, reframing history as an elusive (and delusive) quest for fleeting victories and unsustainable empires.”
Oliveira quoted and took inspiration from Portuguese poet Camoes and his Lusiades. When asked to think back on the film: “The NON. . . you don’t have to go back, because the NON goes forward many years, therefore we are late compared to the NON.”
Sometimes called In The Hands of a Puppetmaster, presumably to distinguish it from the terrible Donald Sutherland movie The Puppet Masters and Full Moon’s Puppet Master series. Another Taiwanese-occupation historical drama, the center part of a trilogy with City of Sadness and Good Men, Good Women. City of Sadness seems more memorable than this one did since I had ol’ Tony Leung to latch onto. This one is more detached from the action, which is broken up over a longer timeline.
A true-ish story narrated by the film’s real-life subject, who appeared as an actor in previous Hou films. We don’t see him on-screen for the first third of the movie. His appearance brought to mind American Splendor, only with less humor and no cartoons. Wiki: “Based on the memoirs of Li Tian-lu, Taiwan’s most celebrated puppeteer, this story covers the years from Li’s birth in 1909 to the end of Japan’s fifty-year occupation of Taiwan in 1945.”
Real Mr. Li:
from V. Canby’s original Times review:
His story is revealed in a succession of short, often oblique but vivid vignettes. These begin with a dramatization of a family row about whether the baby is to bear the name of his mother’s or father’s family, a tale cut short by the real Mr. Li’s terse soundtrack interjection: “That’s how I was born.”
There are harrowing tales about his mother’s death, his unloved stepmother, his disinterested father and his rebellion as an adolescent, when he was apprenticed to a traveling puppet-theater troupe. From time to time, the audience is given long, wonderful chunks of Mr. Li, as a boy and as a young man, working his delicately fashioned hand puppets during performance.
A synopsis can’t convey the particular quality of “The Puppetmaster”; that is, the seductive way Mr. Hou takes the audience into a world of arcane rituals and rites. The director’s fondness for the meditative, stationary camera, which was favored by the Japanese film master Ozu, no longer looks borrowed but reimagined. The lack of camera movement and the long takes, in which an entire scene is shot without a cut, reflect the searching manner of an old man as he tries to make sense of the past.
The camera occasionally simply stares at a room or into a series of rooms that open one out of another before a character has entered or after a character has departed. It’s as if the mind of this singularly alert survivor were dealing with Proustian associations, memories uncovered by a kind of afternoon sunlight, or a cooking smell or the touch of someone long gone.
Young Fake Mr. Li:
I had trouble keeping up from the very start, when the old man narrates his own birth and explains why he’s got his mother’s last name. Obviously a movie that rewards a second viewing, once you’ve got a basic grasp on the plot. Neither am I sure which actors played what parts – usually I can use the IMDB cast to help figure out which characters were which, but not today.
Older Fake Mr. Li:
N. Schager:
That Li ascribes his origins to a set of legal provisions immediately connects him to his occupied homeland—a disempowered territory now defined by the rules and regulations of a foreign party—just as his age-old profession ties him to the ancestral traditions of Taiwanese culture. Such associations run throughout Hou’s biographical tale, with Li’s rebellion against his abusive father and stepmother, his exile from puppeteering after the Japanese forbade public performances, his compulsory work for a Japanese propaganda puppet troupe (part of the government’s “Japanization movement”), and his ultimate triumphant rebirth as a celebrated artist all designed to reflect the upheaval of a country in which the indigenous population was forced to accept that, as one drunken Imperial Army soldier tells Li, “You can never escape the fact that you are a colonized islander. A third-class citizen.”
…
By having Li relate altered versions of things we’ve already witnessed, Hou strikingly points out how the act of remembering invariably sparks a metamorphosis of what’s come before. Yet just as importantly, such a device allows the filmmaker to express the passage of time by asking viewers to experience the film’s occurrences in both real-time and, through our own reliving of certain scenes more than once via Li’s delayed annotations, the past. This process of experiential repetition is the film’s most arresting and vital structural component, linking now with then, the real with the semi-real, in a web of era-intertwined symbiosis.
I wish our gov’t would put on propaganda puppet shows:
When he’s eight, his grandmother gets sick, but as she’s recovering his mother dies instead. His girlfriend Big Eyes is sent away. Grandfather dies and little Li is beaten by his stepmom. But he gets his dad to let him join a puppet troupe, after which he’s traded away to other troupes for years and finally founds his own (called Also Like Life – so that’s where Shooting Down Pictures got their domain name from).
Japan starts interfering, prevents all outdoor performances in Taiwan, killing puppetry dead. Li moves in with an opera group, meets a prostitute named Leitzu. “I had told her before that I was married with children. But what about us? We are travelers that meet on a path.” Back into puppetry (and back with his family), he joins a couple of Japanese propaganda puppet theater groups, gets into a scuffle with an occupying officer, but gets away with it because of his fame and regard.
At the end of the war he has a terrible evacuation from Taipei. The whole family catches malaria and his youngest son and father-in-law both die. He joins a new theater group – the final shot is of the townspeople disassembling Japanese planes, after he’s told that the money to pay him comes from selling scrap metal.
Grunes: “The title refers to both Li’s profession and Taiwanese history under the Japanese, who appropriated Taiwanese puppetry for their own propagandistic purposes and who otherwise impressed their own culture on the Taiwanese, making puppets of them.”
T.M. Hoover:
It’s long but not big, complex but not epic, morally committed but not given to proselytizing, and offers no grand spittle in the face of the cruelty of colonization. Instead, it gives us the story of a man who had to organize his life around circumstances he did not want and, through the juxtaposition with the source of those trials (some of which had nothing to do with politics or other alterable conditions), talks of what one has to do when the gods throw thunderbolts at inconvenient times.