DVR Diary: REVOLT OF THE SLAVES (La rivolta degli schiavi, 1960)

The Emperor Maximian never ruled the Roman Empire on his own. Made a partner in rule by Diocletian in the late 3rd century, he later formed part of a tetrarchy. At Diocletian's urging he retired with him to establish an orderly procedure for procession, but soon reclaimed a share of the throne, only to be forced out by Constantine. But from the evidence of Nunzio Malasomma's film Maximian (Dario Moreno) is sole and absolute ruler of Rome. Diocletian was a great persecutor of Christians; in this picture that's Maximian's work. It's a tough job, since a good chunk of Rome's ruling class are clandestine Christians, to the dismay of headstrong, chariot-driving Claudia (Rhonda Fleming). Revolt of the Slaves is the story of Claudia's discovery of Christian love, and her romance with a rebellious Dalmatian slave, Vibio (Lang Jeffries, early in his short stint as Fleming's husband). The title may create expectations of a Spartacus-style adventure, but there's really only a late uprising of militant Christians determined to free their brothers and sisters from the arena. We get a bit of gladiator action as well, including a whip fight over a burning pyre, but the martyrdom is actually pretty dull stuff. Each Christian is made to run for their lives, only to get a spear through his or her back. You'd think Romans would be jaded by such stuff but the crowd cheers every kill until Agnes gets them on her side by refusing to run. Instead, she gracefully walks over to pay homage to her spiritual teacher, who's being crucified and slow roasted at the same time. So impressive is her performance that when Vibio and his gang burst into the arena, they promptly decide to drop their weapons and die. Claudia decides to die as well, and it looks like we'll get the Sign of the Cross finish until the mob in the stands demands that Maximian spare the Christians. He's about to have his African personal guard massacre the Nazarenes but the Praetorian Guard, usually the bad guys in Roman stories, shows up to cancel the African threat and force the Emperor to declare a happy ending. This African element may have been the most provocative part of the film for American audiences. History says that the Praetorians lost their traditional standing as the emperors' personal guard during the Tetrarchy, but it doesn't appear that Maximian or his partners relied on Africans instead. In the film, the African commander Iface (Van Aikens) is an unprincipled schemer -- his troops are often made to look incompetent when fighting Vibio and friends -- who's willing to take a huge bribe from Claudia to let some Christians go, only to spurn her when he gets a chance to become the emperor's chief of security. He taunts and threatens Claudia (and even lays hands on her) to the point that it surprised me that he didn't suffer any real comeuppance. I wonder if those scenes were cut out in some parts of the U.S. In any event, Revolt is a well-staged, well-budgeted but indifferently performed Italian epic, worth seeing mainly for its production design and cinematography. I was glad to see TCM run it letterboxed, since it's still relatively rare to see peplum pictures that way on American TV. This particular picture might not deserve too much respect, but the genre as a whole, from Hercules knockoffs to more ambitious stuff like this, might not be so despised if more people could see them the way they were meant to be seen.

Too Much TV: THE YOUNG POPE (2016 - ?)

HBO calls The Young Pope a limited series, implying that the "The End" we see at the close of the tenth episode is pretty definitive, but Wikipedia reports that the show's production company is planning a second season, which leaves us with quite the cliffhanger and a lot of questions about the show's future direction. It's the brainchild of Paolo Sorrentino, the Italian director of Il Divo, The Great Beauty, Youth, etc. On a TV budget and schedule Sorrentino can't be as consistently "visionary" here as he's been with his more recent pictures, but overall you'll recognize it as the director's characteristic work. I couldn't help wondering whether Sorrentino originally envisioned a young Italian Pope, but with HBO investing, and with Sorrentino having worked in English before an American Pope may well have been the idea from the start. But as is often the case with American television, the American Pope Pius XIII, born Lenny Belardo, comes from elsewhere in the English-speaking world. Putting on an American voice, Jude Law's delivery reminded me of Bill Murray for some reason -- perhaps because Lenny/Pius has Murray's air of aloof smugness despite an avowed seriousness of moral purpose.

Chosen as a compromise candidate to thwart Lenny's supposedly more reactionary mentor (an envious James Cromwell), Pius proves quite the rabid conservative in some respects, and as a supposedly underqualified, abrasive boor he's been seen in some quarters as a prophecy (the series was filmed in 2015) of President Donald Trump. Some people will see Trump everywhere for the next little while. Anyway, the homophobic new pope is determined to purge all gay priests from the clergy, even those genuinely celibate. He enters into tough negotiations to strengthen the Vatican's position vis-a-vis the Italian government. His most provocative idea, however, is to turn himself into a kind of anti-celebrity. Believing that many of the most fascinating artists of modern time were recluses, e.g. J. D. Salinger and Stanley Kubrick -- and a series set in Italy might have been expected to mention Elena Ferrante -- Pius thinks that he can increase the glamor and mystery of the Catholic church by making a mystery of himself. Departing from the standard set by John Paul II, the young Pope shuns public appearances and refuses to authorize the usually-lucrative marketing of the pontiff's image. When he addresses the crowds in St. Peter's Square, he stays in shadow. On other occasions, he remains invisible while speaking over a public-address system.

Part of his idea is that Catholicism should be more difficult for people, that they should have to earn the right to see the Pope, and that more disciplined and positively fanatic Catholics will result from his strictures. But the true plot of the series shows us that Pius' authoritarian reticence also has much to do with Lenny Belardo's uncertain sense of self. He's an orphan, having been abandoned by his hippie parents for reasons that remain unknown and raised by Sister Mary (Diane Keaton), who becomes an important, worried adviser for the new Pope. There's more orphan bonding in this show than we've seen since The Dark Knight Rises; Pius even uses the "orphan sense" explained dubiously in that picture to deduce that Sister Mary herself is an orphan. Another of her charges, and Lenny Belardo's closest childhood friend, has also risen high in the church, but Cardinal Dussolier (Scott Shepherd) doesn't share Pius' fanatic preoccupations. He's actually lived a fairly carnal life in Honduras that will come back to haunt him, and for that reason, perhaps, he objects to Pius raising the bar for priesthood to a nearly-impossible high level of celibacy that drives a spurned would-be priest to suicide. Few in the Vatican hierarchy share Pius's alienating vision; fearing the consequences for Catholic congregations and Vatican revenues, the Vatican secretary of state Cardinal Voiello (Silvio Orlando) soon begins conspiring against the young Pope, sometimes with the conflicted cooperation of Sister Mary. His enemies try to lure Pius into an affair, but instead he gets credited for making a barren wife he'd befriended miraculously pregnant. One of the tricky elements of the series is that Lenny Belardo really does seem to have some sort of supernatural power. As a boy, he healed a terminally ill woman with prayer, and as Pope he will intercede with God to have an evil nun in Africa struck dead. Sister Mary sees Pius as a living saint but can't help also seeing him both as a surrogate son and as a threat to the future of the Church. Her response is a kind of psychological warfare, teasing Pius with the prospect of reuniting with his still-living parents in the hope of calming his turbulence and distracting him so that Voiello can slip through some modifications to the strict new church policies.  Pius sees through this pretty quickly, but over time he comes to see the personal consequences of his imperious attitudes, some of which strike pretty close to home, and proves himself capable of moderation. He entrusts an investigation of a powerful U.S. archbishop, an alleged pedophile with potential blackmail material on Lenny Belardo, to a homosexual priest (Javier Camara) whom he eventually names his personal secretary despite knowing his sexuality.

On a deeper personal level, there seems to be some linkage between an understanding that his parents, if living, probably don't want to make themselves known to him and a brightening of his attitude demonstrated in his first open-air homily, which just happens to be punctuated by a cliffhanger heart-attack. The moral of that story may be simply that Lenny Belardo smokes too much, but given the supernatural potential of the story the Pope's seizure could have much more significance. Of course, the show itself warns us almost every week not to vest too much significance in its fantasy. To an instrumental of "All Along the Watchtower," Pius marches through a gallery of sacred paintings, each of which is ignited by a passing meteor. At the close of this tour the Young Pope winks at us and the meteor escapes from one last painting to knock over a statue of John Paul II. The wink probably means, "It's just a show" more than "It's all a joke," but it may also mean that it's about both more and less than it seems on the surface -- less about theology and more about fame, family, etc. I'm actually glad to learn that there's going to be more, not because I'm sure it'll be great but because it felt incomplete and abrupt in its current conclusion. If everyone's coming back for more, then Young Pope still has a chance to live up to people's hopes for all the talent involved.

On the Big Screen: SILENCE (2016)

Martin Scorsese has made films about Jesus Christ and the Dalai Lama. Silence, adapted from a novel by the Japanese Catholic Shusaku Endo, sometimes seems like an attempt to reconcile or synthesize Christianity and Buddhism in the historical context of the persecution of Christians by Buddhists in Tokugawa Japan. Two young Jesuit priests, Rodrigues (Andrew Garfield) and Garupe (Adam Driver) sneak into Japan to investigate reports that one of the last remaining priests, Fr. Ferrera (Liam Neeson) has apostasized, renouncing the faith. They minister to underground congregations who revere "Deus" and cherish any material artifact of faith, from crude tiny crucifixes to rosary beads. These people face terrible torture and certain death if their faith is discovered and they refuse to recant by trampling icons. The priests are in constant danger from betrayal, especially from the man who ferried them to Japan, Kichijiro (Yosuke Kobozuka), an abject character whose family was slaughtered despite his apostasy. Kichijiro in many ways is the worst sort of Christian, one who wallows in his weakness just so he can confess it, yet we will see that his faith is in some sense the strongest of all. Ultimately it is Rodrigues whose faith faces the sternest test after Kichijiro betrays him into the hands of Inoue (Issey Ogata), ironically designated an "Inquisitor." Inoue sees Christianity as the foot in the door for unwanted European influence in his country, and claims that it may be "true" elsewhere but not in Japan. He respects the power of symbolism, telling Christians that they don't have to sincerely recant so long as they go through the motions he hopes will demoralize others by undermining respect for the clergy and their sacred symbols. One can also see an ideological threat to the shogunate, at least as seen by a Japanese believer and a Catholic filmmaker, in the Christian insistence on the value of every human life, while Japan's feudal culture -- as shown in many a Japanese film -- holds much life worthless. You can understand the preference for a Buddhism that aspires to the nullification of self and implicitly acquiesces in feudal tyranny, as well as the significance of the apparent conversion of Fr. Ferrera to Buddhism. He claims to be convinced that real Christianity can get nowhere in the "swamp" of Japan, and tries to convince Rodrigues that keeping the faith is worse than futile. He employs moral blackmail, holding Rodrigues responsible for the torture that the audience more likely will blame on Japan's vicious rulers. But if unassailable power holds innocent lives hostage against the priest's apostasy, Ferrera claims they'll be sacrificed to Rodrigues's pride. Through his ordeal, Rodriguez aches for divine guidance, but the film's title tells you what he gets until the climax.

Apart from a couple of pretentious shots early on, this is a relatively austere film for Scorsese, and that may explain why some reviewers find its length oppressive. It's also unavoidably an intellectual if not theological film, for all the gruesome poignancy of the tortures inflicted on Japanese Christians, and for that reason Silence has probably lost some reviewers' attention. One particularly philistine pan asks why everyone makes a big deal about trampling icons, but this issue really is -- pun intended, I guess -- the crux of the film. Ultimately Scorsese and co-writer Jay Cocks, if not Endo before them, are critiquing a materialist element of Christianity that arguably can be done without. Investing these symbols with such crucial significance leaves the faith vulnerable to the sort of hostile iconoclasm Inoue practices. Rodrigues's initial dismay at the Japanese Christians' devotion to symbols proves the right instinct, and while we see that Christians ultimately can't do entirely without such symbols, it looks like the key to the survival of Christian people is their readiness to sacrifice symbols, on the understanding that the symbols aren't the faith itself. The less Christianity takes the form of idolatry, the less vulnerable it is to Inoue's sort of propaganda. It's an oddly Protestant note to sound as an important theme of a Catholic story, but there it is.

If Silence convinces people of anything, it's that Andrew Garfield still has a future in movies after the Amazing Spider-Man debacle, though Hacksaw Ridge may already have convinced some people. The film ends up on his shoulders and he bears it well. I was even more impressed by the Japanese performing in English. Kobozuka goes all out as Kichijiro, giving the story's Judas a pathetic grandiosity that might remind you of Akira Kurosawa in his more Dostoevskian moods. Issey Ogata gives an eccentrically gnomic performance as the Japanese inquisitor (credit is also due to Tadanobu Asano, more fluent than ever, as his slick interpreter) both verbally and physically creepy. There's a moment where Rodrigues seems to have the upper hand in a debate when Inoue seems to deflate in stages before our eyes; the only missing effect is the steam coming out of his ears. He makes a great villain, though Neeson, in a smaller role than his billing suggests, is arguably more effective the sort of devil's advocate the story really needs. It looks like the film will prove a flop at the box-office, and that makes me wonder why Paramount didn't promote Silence more to the apparently growing audience for religious pictures. It certainly would strike a chord with those Christians who for whatever reason feel persecuted today, but perhaps the film is too specifically Catholic for the faith-based audience here, and maybe some still hold the allegedly sacrilegious Last Temptation of Christ against Scorsese. That'd be unfortunate, since Silence is really a more effective Christian film than that earlier effort. It's still far from Scorsese's best, but it's one of the better pictures of 2016.

DVR Diary: RISEN (2016)

Tensions are high in Judea as occupying Roman armies fight pitched battles against insurgent Zealots while a cult leader is crucified in Jerusalem. Procurator Pontius Pilate (Peter Firth) oddly wants a quick end to the spectacle of Yeshua's (Cliff Curtis) expected slow death and sends Centurion Clavius (Joseph Fiennes) to hurry things up. By the time he arrives at Golgotha, having not long before led the troops to victory over the Zealots, Yeshua has been up only a few hours, but appears to have already died. Clavius orders the other condemned men's legs broken so they'll die quicker and he can shut the site down. Without thinking much about it, he acquiesces when Joseph of Arimathea (Antonio Gil) claims Yeshua's body for burial in his own sepulcher. That should end the matter, but the local Jewish authorities warn that since Yeshua predicted his own resurrection, his fugitive disciples may try to steal the body and claim that he rose after all. Clavius assigns two guards to the sealed tomb who promptly get drunk, and somehow the body disappears from the tomb. It becomes Clavius' mission to find the body, or the disciples who might lead him to it, before rumors of Yeshua's return from the dead further inflame a volatile province.

That's the setup for Kevin Reynolds' Christian procedural, written by Reynolds with Paul Aiello. Taking the police-procedural approach to the mystery of mysteries is an ingenious idea, though it's inevitably compromised by a Christian production company's imperative to affirm Yeshua's divinity. There's a specific moment when Risen stops being a procedural, when Clavius possibly prematurely abandons his investigatory skepticism. This is when his detective trail leads to a house where Yeshua, apparently alive, presides at a giddy gathering of his disciples. Clavius is understandably gobsmacked by the site, since he'd last seen Yeshua as a corpse, but there should still be room for skeptical suspense. After all, to this day people still speculate that there may have been a switcheroo somewhere, a lookalike dying in Jesus's place or an imposter passing for the risen Christ. The sight of Yeshua displaying his wounds for a not exactly doubting Thomas might preempt such doubt, especially in a more credulous age, but viewers may have developed enough respect for Clavius's intelligence by this point that they'd want to see him hold out a little longer. Instead, he follows the disciples to the Sea of Galilee after Yeshua pulls a vanishing act, in hope of meeting the living-dead man again in the disciples' old fishing ground.

Until that turning point, Risen is admirable for its unconventional presentation of a sacred story. I especially appreciated how the writers and actors transcend the performance cliches of Bible movies. You don't get the glassy-eyed heavenward gaze that often makes early cinematic Christians look brainwashed rather than converted. Instead, Clavius's first encounter with a disciple is with a rather goofy Bartholemew (Stephen Hagan) who seems to have been driven just a tiny bit crazy by the ecstatic news of Yeshua's return. There's a welcome consistent note of uncertainty among the disciples, since for all that the resurrection was prophesied, it's still hard for them to fathom in all its apocalyptic implications. It's fun to see an exasperated Simon Peter (Stewart Scudamore), probably still chagrined by his misadventure at Gethsemane, nearly go apeshit on Clavius when the Roman, startled awake by the disciple's offer of water, nearly hamstrings the big fisherman with his sword. You get the sense that these guys (and Mary Magdalene [Maria Botto], in her popular guise of former prostitute) are disciples, but not yet saints. As for their faith, Risen (like this year's Ben-Hur) soft-pedals Christianity as some vague philosophy of love, with no doctrinal strings attached that Clavius or the audience can see. That's probably necessary to attract as wide a Christian audience as possible, not to mention agnostics and secularists. I count myself in the latter category but I've always enjoyed Bible movies for their spectacle and have never felt threatened by their explicit or implicit messages. Risen is a perfectly unthreatening film, unless the mere reiteration of the Jesus story offends you. As a Bible movie fan, I appreciate this film's attempt to view familiar events from a fresh vantage point, if not from an actually different perspective.

On the Big Screen: BEN-HUR (2016)

I was probably the youngest person at a screening of Timur Bekmambetov's film this afternoon, and I am not a young man. The word is that Ben-Hur is bombing, and I think I understand why. This third Hollywood version of Lew Wallace's "Tale of the Christ" is by no means a B-movie, but for anyone to whom "Ben-Hur" means anything, the fact that a remake of the Oscar-winning 1959 blockbuster is not being treated as a tentpole event must make it look sight-unseen like a poor imitation of both the William Wyler epic and its 1925 precursor. In 1959 there was no bigger tentpole than Ben-Hur; probably something bigger couldn't be imagined. Biblical or Bible-era epics were the superhero films and CGI extravaganzas of their day, just as contemptible in many critics' eyes and just as compulsively spectacular for the masses. By then, Ben-Hur had set the standard for spectacle for generations, in theater before movies. If you had a big action climax in a movie you called it your "chariot race." But when was the last time your chariot race was a chariot race? Movies can soar in so many ways now that they'd seemed to pass Ben-Hur by, so that to remake the story again with such inevitable modesty as one must have in the 21st century must seem like an insult to those for whom the Wyler film was the biggest thing ever.

By now, you've probably detected a note of regret implying that the 2016 film has gotten a raw deal. So let me end the suspense by saying that Bekmambetov's movie is an often-worthy remake into which a lot of creativity has gone, that it shouldn't be judged by comparisons of scale to previous versions of the story or the hype surrounding them, and that I recommend it despite the way it trips across the finish line and falls on its face.

While some people may dismiss the new Ben-Hur in advance as another product from Bible-film purveyors Roma Downey and Mark Burnett, it's still a film from the director of Nightwatch (and, alas, Wanted), co-written by the screenwriter of 12 Years a Slave. It is no mere "Bible movie," though the biblical parts are certainly its weakest. Inevitably it embraces Christianity, but it does so almost in pragmatic rather than proselytizing fashion, its message being that Jesus's message is the only thing to keep people from destroying themselves and each other. But it's a minimalist, theology-lite Christianity that boils down to little if not nothing more than "Forgive Your Enemies." Unlike the previous Hollywood Ben-Hur films, this one looks Jesus in the face and lets him talk, but in the most perverse casting choice of the year the actor who played Frank Miller's god-monster Xerxes in the 300 films here plays Our Lord & Savior. While the new film departs from its cinematic predecessors in normalizing Jesus -- watching the Wyler film I can't help wondering whether Jesus was horribly deformed, given the way one Roman reacts to that face we can't see, though a Roman in a similar situation reacts the same way to Rodrigo Santoro here -- it also departs from Lew Wallace's story (or so I assume, not having read of it) in important and interesting ways.

Part of the modesty of scale that has handicapped the new film is that it comes in at nearly 90 minutes shorter than the 1959 film. Keith Clarke and John Ridley do this by eliminating the Nativity prologue and, more significantly, the whole storyline of Quintus Arrias, the Roman admiral who adopts Ben-Hur as his son and secures a pardon for him after the wrongly-condemned galley salve rescues him during a sea battle. The new writers prefer to have Judah Ben-Hur (fourth-generation film dynast Jack Huston) a criminal and fugitive when he returns to Jerusalem for vengeance on his enemy Messala. As for the Roman antagonist, his is the most dramatically altered storyline. In the new film, Messala Severus (Toby "Koba" Kebbell) is Judah's adopted brother, his own family having been disgraced, if not condemned, for its participation in the conspiracy to assassinate Julius Caesar. Some wags have speculated that Messala has been made Judah's brother to preempt the homoerotic reading of the story inspired by Gore Vidal's  purported injection of subtext into the 1959 screenplay. But given that Clarke and Ridley have Messala fall for Judah's sister Tirzah (Sofia Black D'Elia), establishing a family tie need not rule out any shipping or slashing between the men. In any event, brotherly love prevails until Messala, feeling alienated as a practicing pagan among Jews, enlists to reclaim his Roman heritage. Before that, to show what a good guy he is, we see him and Judah drag racing in Bronson Canyon until Judah's chariot hits a rock and tosses him headfirst to the ground. Messala's own ride having run away, the Romano-Judean carries the unconscious Judah all the way back to the city. Throughout, we're reminded of the almost unbearable pressure Messala is under to prove himself and restore his ancestral family's good name by getting tough with Judean insurgents. Even past the point of no return, certain moments illustrate his horror at what has happened. Just before the chariot race, as Judah guides his team to their starting position, we see Messala in the foreground, leaning his head forward on his arms as if struggling to absorb what's about to happen. Even during the race, the film softens Messala by having him do without the scythes on his chariot wheels that did so much damage in the 1959 race. In sum, the new Messala is an intriguingly, evocatively ambiguous figure, at once embodying the arrogant occupier and the unassimilable immigrant. He threatens to be irreconcilably Other, except that this Ben-Hur is doggedly dedicated to reconciliation.

Meanwhile, Judah starts out dangerously ambivalent toward the enduring Zealot insurgency against Roman rule. He doesn't believe in violent resistance himself -- and for that is accused of privilege -- but can't bring himself to rat out Zealots when the returned Messala, now the right hand of Pontius Pilate (Pilou Asbaek), asks for help in pacifying Judea. Judah believes in peace but has no clear idea of what peace requires. He's unimpressed by his first encounter with Jesus, who you may be surprised to learn plied his carpentering trade in Jerusalem for a time. When Jesus tells him that God has a plan for everyone, Judah asks how that's different from slavery. Perhaps tellingly, Jesus doesn't have an answer to that just yet. Whatever Judah's plans are, they begin to unravel when he ends up reluctantly harboring a wounded Zealot who takes the place of a loose roof tile as the instrument of doom for the house of Hur. When Pilate and his army make their entrance into Jerusalem, after Judah and Messala have tried to discourage violence, the Zealot can't resist the opportunity to take a pot shot at Pilate and incriminate his hosts. The entry into Jerusalem is one of the new film's best scenes. Because the script has emphasized the importance for both Messala and Judah of the event going off peacefully, tension is established early. It's heightened when the Romans come in chanting belligerent sounding marching songs in Latin, almost as if daring the Zealots to do something. Making Pilate the victim of the roof incident rather than some pointless, otherwise nameless Roman also helps tighten up the plot.

From here the plot develops in familiar ways, apart from Judah washing up after the sea battle directly into the custody of Sheik Yilderim (Morgan Freeman). The sea battle has been the most acclaimed part of the new film so far, since it's probably the easiest part of the 1959 film to top. However, the CGI skies and waters don't look that much less fake than the studio tank Wyler had to use. On the other hand, Bekmambetov's strategy of staying inside the doomed galley, with only fleeting glances of the action through oar windows until the ship is rammed, earns the scene some honest suspense, as does Judah's climactic escape, which requires him to unchain himself underwater from a line of drowned men. Freeman's Yilderim is a more ruthless character than Hugh Griffith made him in his Oscar-winning 1959 turn. The sheik is ready to turn an escaped galley slave over to the Romans until Judah shows some horse-whispering and horse-doctoring skills that will make him useful to a breeder of chariot-racing animals. Yilderim is a realist whose cynical wisdom comes from futile experience as an insurgent against Rome. The most you can do to Rome, he advises Judah, is humiliate their champions in the no-holds-barred environment of the chariot circus. Since chariot racing is for all intents and purposes a death sport, racing for Yilderim gives Judah an opportunity to embarrass Rome and kill Messala, especially after Yilderim makes immunity for Judah part of his bet with Pilate.

The 2016 chariot race has been criticized, mostly, as a poor, CGI-fake imitation of the 1959 race contrived by Wyler, Andrew Marton and Yakima Canutt. But I don't think Bekmambetov need be embarrassed by comparisons with 1959 or 1925. While CGI allows him to come up with plenty of new stunts, the 2016 race is also soundly structured dramatically. Yilderim has advised Judah to hang back for the first half of the race, since the front of the field will be a demolition derby early on. Since Messala heads for the front immediately, this means the two antagonists will be separated for half the race. The new film solves this problem by giving each man a preliminary antagonist, Judah a bald Egyptian in the back of the filed, Messala a turbaned lunatic up front prone to yelling "I kill you!" These early rivalries are punctuated by disasters befalling other drivers, all of which sets us up nicely for the main event. Some of the stunts are frankly preposterous. To top Charlton Heston's somersault bump, Huston actually falls out of the chariot and is dragged for a seemingly-lethal period of time before he pulls himself back in by the reins. Other moments are brutally spectacular, and one of my most vivid memories of this movie will be of one chariot tumbling into the seats and the horses running amok in the stands as spectators flee in all directions. Overall the 2016 chariot race works as a climactic action scene, and thematically as well. In a way it exposes Judah and Messala's feud as irrelevant and petty, since all the other drivers seem ready to kill each other with nothing personal entering into it. It also exposes the hollowness of the symbolic vengeance on Rome Judah and Yilderim hoped for. As Yilderim enters Pilate's box to collect his winnings, he sardonically consoles Pilate over the Roman's defeat.  Strangely, Pilate doesn't feel defeated at all, apart from the money he's losing. Surveying the Judean mob that's swarmed onto the track to celebrate Judah's victory, some of them bouncing a seemingly-lifeless Messala about like a meat puppet, Pilate observes that they're all Romans now.

By the way, this film's Pilate is rather unbiblical in one important respect. In the Gospels, you get the impression that Pilate doesn't know Jesus from Adam when first presented with the prisoner, and of course he famously states that he finds no guilt in the man. Here, Pilate actually witnesses an impromptu Jesus sermon after the carpenter rescues some petty thief from a stone-throwing lynch mob. Hearing Jesus preach forgiveness, Pilate advises Messala that the carpenter will prove more dangerous than any Zealot. Violence can be answered by violence, after all, but what is Rome's answer to Jesus's message. The answer, of course, is crucifixion, and since the Sanhedrin isn't shown at all in this picture, there's no doubt where it places responsibility for Jesus's execution, which has been foreshadowed both by Judah's march to the galleys, arms tied behind him, which Jesus witnessed, and Judah's floating on a cruciform fragment of a ship's mast.

Jesus's capture at Gethsemane begins Ben-Hur's death plunge. I suppose there was no way to escape the ending we got given how the screenplay had harped on forgiveness and reconciliation, but even if you still believe that Christianity is capable of achieving those results you'd probably concede that this film's resolution is way too good to be true. Lew Wallace himself would probably think so. For the most part, of course, the denouement follows the familiar story. Judah tries to intervene during Jesus's march to Golgotha but is told to stand down by the condemned man, who goes to death willingly. Judah watches the crucifixion and hears Jesus's dying words, "Father, forgive them..." making an especial impression by provoking flashbacks to better times with Messala. Upon Jesus' death a healing rain falls, curing Judah's mother and sister of the leprosy they contracted in a prison where they were sent by Messala's subaltern without his commander's knowledge; the man had explained to Judah that he'd wanted to save Messala from himself on this point. Yilderim uses some of his race winnings to pay for the Hurs' release. Judah heads to the Roman barracks to see what became of Messala. He survived the race (as he does in the novel, though he doesn't survive the novel) but has lost a leg. He deliriously vows revenge, promising to grow his leg back the better to kill Judah with, until Judah reminds him of the time he carried Judah home after the chariot accident. After everything, this suffices to reconcile the brothers into a sobby embrace of mutual forgiveness, and that brings Messala back into the family fold, and back into Tirzah's embrace, all of them presumably Galileans now. Obviously the writers wish this to happen, and for the film they are God, but they're the ones in a delirium for the last five minutes or so of the movie. It's an embarrassingly bad finish given how good most of the movie is, but it's not enough to sink the film, especially if you concede that this version of the story probably couldn't end any other way. If no other Ben-Hur movie existed, I suspect most people would think more highly of this one. As it is, in some respects it's better than the Wyler film or the 1925 picture. None of them are truly great films because, or so I infer, Wallace's novel isn't really great source material. But as a Ben-Hur for our time, Bekmambatov's film will do -- or it would have had people really wanted one.

DVR Diary: STRANGE CARGO (1940)

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer released this adaptation of a novel by pulp headliner Richard Sale -- later to have his own Hollywood career as a writer and director -- during the era of Code Enforcement. The film was condemned by the Legion of Decency, a Catholic organization, and banned in Detroit, Providence, and probably other places. The studio cut the film and the Legion modified its rating. I don't know if the version available today through Time Warner and Turner Classic Movies is the cutdown or a restoration. Either way, it illustrates how alien a time like 1940 is to us in some ways. The Legion condemned Strange Cargo in part for "A naturalistic conception of religion contrary to the teaching of Christ," but most modern viewers will miss whatever nuances disturbed the Legion and see Frank Borzage's picture as unabashed Christian propaganda. The alienation goes deeper than that; there are moments when the characters in the story behave in ways that probably were easily comprehensible to the original audience, yet may be hard to understand today. The whole motive of the story will seem strange to a lot of people. Think of it as a fantasy film, however, and it has something going for it.

The setting is a prison camp in French Guiana, where we first see Clark Gable released from the darkness of solitary confinement. He's an unrepentant criminal in a world apparently without hope of repentance or even reform. His fellow convicts are a rogues' gallery of heavies. Eduardo (Kali guru from Gunga Din) Ciannelli is a bitter Bible-reader, the wrong kind of Christian, as we'll learn. Albert (Dr. Cyclops) Dekker is a British con with a plan to escape and a reluctance to let Gable in on it. On the outside looking in is Peter (needs no introduction) Lorre as "M'sieu Pig," a professional informant, and Joan Crawford, a drifter of dubious occupation who risks expulsion from the island merely by talking to Gable, who strays from his work detail to hit on her, despite ratting him out when he goes AWOL to visit her room. The guards didn't notice him missing at first because another man, Cambreau (Ian Hunter) actually infiltrates the prison at the right moment to keep the count right.  None of the other cons know him but they don't question his presence or his willingness to aid the escape.

Gable misses the breakout because Dekker had knocked him out with his boot in the middle of the night, but takes advantage of the confusion to make his own escape from the infirmary. Cambreau has helpfully left him a map showing the rendezvous point, where a boat will take the fugitives off the island. Along the way he re-encounters Crawford, while Ciannelli is beaten and left for dead by two fellow escapees who resent his hoarding food. They all make it to the beach, however, where Gable beats down Dekker and declares himself in charge. Ciannelli doesn't make it to the boat, however; he dies in an epiphany after Cambreau sets him straight about the word of God. Cambreau has an odd effect on people. His gentle manner at first disturbs, then inspires people. The weird thing it that he inspires some people to die. In a paranoid fit, one con throws the gang's only keg of fresh water overboard because he thinks they're out to steal it from him. After a few gentle words from Cambreau, he jumps into the sea to retrieve the keg and gets eaten by sharks. Feeling bad over the death of his protege (the Sale novel apparently hints at more to the relationship), Dekker, under Cambreau's influence, volunteers to taste-test the recovered keg for leaked sea-salt. One swig proves a death sentence. Of the escapees, only a smug Bluebeard type (Paul Lukas) seems immune to Cambreau's spirituality, though Gable and Crawford struggle hard against it, as they do with their attraction to each other.

The film builds to a climax that modern viewers might agree would have seemed blasphemous in 1940. The boat has reached safety, and after Lukas has gone his way and Gable has left Crawford behind, our protagonist and Cambreau sail out again into a powerful storm. Throughout the picture, Gable has been a mocker of Christianity, the kind that knows the Bible and can pick out its weak points, who scoffs at the idea that man was made in God's image, who uses the Song of Solomon's description of the human body as a "temple of God" as a come-on line to Crawford. On this new boat, he's finally had enough of Cambreau, and during a struggle Cambreau falls overboard. A triumphant Gable has a Colin Clive moment. As Cambreau bobs helplessly in the waves, his arms symbolically draped behind him, cruciform, across a piece of driftwood, Gable mocks him with possibly the most over-the-top acting of his career. "I'm your God, now!" he roars at Cambreau. In a pantheistic fit, he points to the boat captain -- "He's God!" -- and to himself -- "I'm God!" But when he takes the obvious next step, telling Cambreau, "You're --" he suddenly stops as if he's suddenly realized something. He gets it! -- whatever it is -- and dives into the raging sea to save Cambreau. From there, a final reconciliation with Crawford (and a final rebuke to Lorre, who's been lusting after Crawford throughout) is inevitable, if its consummation will be deferred until Gable serves out his prison term, as the Code required.

One of the old-time conventions of cinematic Christianity is the idea that there's something about the mere presence of a true Christian (and let's face it, Cambreau is something more than a mere Christian believer) that affects people whether they like it or not. The Christian's implacable serenity has a compelling power -- or repelling for exceptions like the Lukas character, who jokingly identifies himself as a son of Satan -- like that of Dracula when he gets into his pitch about the strange twilight world. The Christian exists in a state of peace that is implicitly available to anyone and desirable for nearly everyone. Unless you understand this concept a lot of the action of Strange Cargo will make no sense. To be fair, it's not so much Christian propaganda as it is a story that takes a lot of Christian mythos or sensibility for granted in a way we don't expect from Hollywood movies now. Reviews of the novel Not Too Narrow, Not Too Deep, suggest that Sale sustains suspense for a while over whether Cambreau himself is angel or devil, but in the movie his affiliation is unmistakable from the start, despite the sometimes-fatal consequences of his ministrations. Borzage, an arch-romanticist of the screen, no doubt intended Strange Cargo as an uplifting experience, but something that seems old-timey now struck certain powerful people as unacceptably unorthodox in 1940. The film retains some interest today despite its questionable theology as a showcase for Gable, who plays as unlikable version of his usual rogue character as he could get away with for much of the picture, and a jamboree of character actors, even if most of them go soft along the way. One thing's for certain: they don't make 'em like that anymore.

BLACK JESUS (Seduto alla sua destra, 1968)

The Italian title of Valerio Zurlini's African allegory means "Seated on his right," but the U.S. blaxploitation title, coined for a 1971 American release, gets to the point clearly enough. We're in central Africa, presumably the Congo or a thinly disguised equivalent. White troops fight for a black ruler against dissident followers of one Laloube, the price on whose head grows from four to six figures in a course of months. At first we don't see this mystery man. Like the Jesus in many an early biblical epic, his presence is established only by his smooth voice -- in the English dub rather like a solemn radio pitchman -- and the awed gaze of his acolytes. The authorities can't lay hands on Laloube until an African Judas rats him out for a reward, and for personal reasons he keeps to himself. The white troops shoot their way through a village to reach the rebel, leaving carnage in their wake, but Laloube himself puts up no resistance -- and it's only when the soldiers find him that we see, for we couldn't tell it from hearing, that the man is played by Woody Strode.



Despite his college education, Strode is not the actor you think of casting as a nonviolent politician, yet Laloube, more than his presumed prototype Patrice Lumumba, abhors violence. Yet throughout his acting career Strode projected a stalwart stoicism that seems right for this role. He had played a kind of martyr before in Spartacus, as the gladiator who casts his spear in vain at Crassus rather than kill the title character. For Zurlini Strode's resistance will be entirely passive, his martyrdom a transparent Passion.

Laloube is questioned by the white commander (Jean Servais), to whom the prisoner reveals strange intuitive powers. Laloube simply knows that the commander is Dutch rather than Belgian or French, and knows the exact number of children he has. It's curious, and perhaps a little troubling, but neither here nor there. The immediate business at hand is to get Laloube to sign a statement repudiating the rebellion, but this he will not do. The commander defends the continued European role in Africa, predicting a lapse into barbarism should his kind pull out of the continent. If that happens, Laloube replies, it proves either that you taught us nothing or that what you taught was worth nothing.

Meanwhile, a European, Oreste (Franco Citti), is being interrogated for his alleged role in the theft of a truck. Suspected of ties to Laloube, Oreste is beaten brutally, but is left in an unlocked cell as everyone rushes to see Laloube brought in. By the time Oreste gathers the courage to sneak out, he's caught again and driven back to his cell. Laloube hears Oreste's screams during his chat with the commander and pleads for the stranger not to be beaten. Shown Oreste, he attempts to exculpate him, claiming never to have saw him. It does neither man any good. Soon they're sharing a cell; Laloube has an hour to sign the document or else face the torturers. In that time he befriends Oreste and convinces his fellow captive of a better world they could both live in.



Laloube is tortured; we don't see too many details in the American cut, which seems to be ten minutes short of the original version, but the ordeal seems to involve nails being driven into his fingers or fingernails. His screams are worse than Oreste's, and when Laloube is returned to his cell Oreste barters desperately with a guard for ointment to treat his friend's hands. A third prisoner joins the pair and watches indifferently as Oreste struggles to comfort Laloube. Oreste begs this newcomer to give up his shirt so he can bind the wounds on Laloube's hands. Instead, the third man beats the crap out of Oreste, knocking over the oil tin. The battered Oreste gathers as much of the oil in his hands as he can and lets it drip back into the tin.



The commander meets with the ruler, who insists that Laloube be killed despite the usual pragmatic warning against making martyrs out of people. If the commander can't bring himself to do the deed, someone else can be found for the job. There's nothing to be done, and the three prisoners are conveyed in a jeep to a remote village, where the man who betrayed Laloube waits with a dagger in a hut. Oreste races to the hut to witness the scene, sealing his own fate. The third prisoner simply lounges in the jeep, but that won't save him. He may not have seen anything, as he insists, but he heard the shots and has to go. That leaves a small boy, garbed in white. The soldiers open fire on him with a machine gun, but the child -- I fear the adjective is necessary -- miraculously escapes. Why the soldiers don't simply chase him down, if they're so concerned about witnesses, I can't say. Maybe that was a miracle too.

Take a look at that poster above and imagine how disappointed American audiences must have been when Black Jesus played ghetto grindhouses. With the tag, "He who ain't with me is against me," audiences may well have expected an American film in an American setting. What they got was a rather dubious vindication of non-violence -- but should we share in their presumed disappointment? I'm afraid I do. I've admired the other Zurlini films I've seen -- the WW2 coming-of-age drama Violent Summer and the existential military drama The Desert of the Tartars. But while Seduto alla sua destra is handsomely shot (evident even on YouTube) and Strode is effectively sensitive in what's effectively a pantomime performance for the twice-dubbed actor, Zurlini is left with a high concept and little more. Restaging the Passion in Africa, with new emphasis on Jesus's interplay with the two thieves, does little to enhance our appreciation of political conditions in Africa or the relevance of Christianity to the continent's conflicts. It may work for some viewers as a plea for plain compassion for suffering humanity, but did we really still need Jesus in 1968 to teach us that? If anything, the story's allegorical nature undercuts its relevance by making everything seem more mythological than immediate. It's even arguable that reducing war-torn Africa to a backdrop for a Passion Play is as patronizingly exploitative of the continent's agony, at least, as Jacopetti and Prosperi's infamous yet infinitely more eloquent shockumentary Africa Addio. I don't doubt that Zurlini's heart was in the right place, but I fear his head was elsewhere.

THE CHRISTIAN REVOLT (Amakusa Tokisada Shiro, 1962)

Outsiders often think of Japan as a homogeneous nation and culture, but the Japanese themselves are often quite conscious of the problems minorities face in their country. Throughout his career, the director Nagisa Oshima has shown a special concern for the mistreatment of minorities, particularly Koreans. In Amakusa Tokisada Shiro, Oshima took up the topic of the persecution of Christians under the Tokugawa Shogunate. The best known Japanese work on this subject outside Japan is probably the Catholic author Shusaku Endo's novel Silence, an adaptation of which has long been a dream project for Martin Scorsese. While Endo generously focuses on the persecution of European missionaries, Oshima looks at the suffering of Japanese Christians and their conflicted response to persecution. He also strives for a critical synthesis of Japanese and European models of artistic representation while questioning in an almost postmodern way exactly what in people's hearts can be represented pictorially at all.

Oshima's protagonist is a historical figure, Shiro Amakusa, but seems to have taken liberties with history by making a character who supposedly died while still in his teens a former samurai (Hashizo Okawa) who's regarded as a leader of his peasant community as well as a charismatic prophet. His people are being pushed to the breaking point by a rapacious nobility that blames inadequate tax revenue on Shiro's religion. The local samurai, with one noble exception, compete to devise ways to torture Christians and terrorize them into recanting their faith. One such turncoat, Emosaku (Rentaro Mikuni) has become a court painter, specializing in European-style oil painting which he claims represents a subject's actual personality better than traditional Japanese art. He balks, however, when commanded to paint Christians performing the "straw dance," -- they are wrapped in husks of straw, set on fire and set running -- and is suspected of remaining a Christian. Desperate to save himself, he rats out Christians inside the local lord's household. This undermines Shiro's long-term plan to stage an uprising within the castle to overthrow the oppressive lord, though the plan often seems like little more than a promise of redemption to his angry co-religionists.

Shiro is a conflicted hero with an uncertain understanding of his own religion, despite his mother's constant tutelage. He sends mixed messages to his people, assuring them that their persecution is not the will of God but that an enraged peasant going on a foolhardy mission of revenge was God's will. As the pressure builds for an uprising, he rationalizes it by saying that his people will fight as oppressed peasants, not as Christians in violation of the turn-the-other-cheek rule. Once the fighting is underway, it threatens to get out of his control when a charismatic ronin offers his assistance and more ronin join him. Still straddling the fence, Shiro defers to the ronin on military matters until several setbacks -- including the hostility of European military advisers to the shogun and an alleged excommunication from the Catholic Church -- forces a decisive three-way choice on the Christians. Shall they continue to fight the samurai head-on, as the ronin wants, disperse into smaller inconspicuous groups, as some others want, or fortify themselves in one place to resist a samurai assault, as Shiro wants. When Shiro is finally driven to assert himself violently in a showdown with the ronin, who has called him out as a coward, the feeling is unmistakable that there's nothing left for him to do but die -- and take thousands with him....

Oshima maintains a critical but not negative attitude toward Christianity, but constantly reminds us of the samurai cruelty that drove so many to become Christians as well as revolt against the social order. While many of the "history of cruelty" movies made in Europe focus on the atrocities perpetrated by Christians on others -- witches, heretics, etc. -- in Oshima's film the shoe is on the other foot. The effect is largely the same, however, since for the Japanese filmmaker Christians are the other made objects of empathy. His film really transcends my theoretical genre, rising from a litany of torture to the level of epic tragedy, filmed in appropriate long-take tableaux with theatrical intensity and chiaroscuro cinematography. Scenes often develop in slow-burn fashion, but the payoff, especially in the final confrontation between Shiro and the ronin, is tremendous.

Transcending his historical subject, Oshima also invites his audience to question whether his eloquently exquisite or brutal images can truly capture the spirit of the time or the personality of the players. This proposition is put forth explicitly in Emosaku's explication of the relative virtues of Japanese and European art. He tells his patron that Japanese painting is best for landscapes and "beautiful figures," while the European style is best for portraiture that evokes a subject's true self. Over the course of the film, it becomes clear that Oshima himself is testing these premises, switching frequently from huge close-ups designed to catch profound emotion to vast landscape long shots that reduce armies to ants against the mountains.

Cinema itself is a third thing entirely, and in one sequence of visually "rhyming" shots Oshima implicitly asks whether cinema can catch emotional truth any better than painting.

Between the subject and its representation stands the subjectivity of the artist, and that's what Emosaku really seems to stand for. Does his portrait show the truth of the lord -- the lord himself asks, "Are you trying to say I look repulsive?" -- or only Emosaku's opinion of the man. The question rises again when, after repeatedly refusing to paint a straw dance, Emosaku appears to have a real religious experience during the crucifixion of Shiro's mother and sister, along with Shiro's one samurai ally and his wife on either side of a single cross.

Oshima has illustrated Shiro's reaction, and that of the other Christians, by bathing them in floodlights and leading the camera through a lengthy tracking shot of dozens of despairing or prayerful close-ups.

The painter responds to the scene with a picture of Christ crucified amid a field of crosses as doves rise heavenward and the Virgin watches in the sky. Depending on the witness, his may have been as "true" a report of the event as Oshima's cinematography -- Shintaro Kawasaki did the brilliant actual work. In the same way, perhaps, Christianity is one thing to Shiro, another to his mother, and something else yet to someone else. All of this is a possibly pretentious way of saying that there's a lot going on in Amakusa Tokisada Shiro to make it interesting if not compelling for people without any special sympathy for Christianity. It seems to be a relatively unknown item for Americans in Oshima's filmography -- ignored even by the otherwise Oshima-rich Criterion Collection -- but its neglect is unjustified. The Christian Revolt is a dark epic that deserves wider renown.

No English subtitles on this trailer -- uploaded to YouTube by WorldCinemateque -- but it'll give you some idea of the moving images and the terrific score by Riichiro Manabe.

OF GODS AND MEN (Des Hommes et des Dieux, 2010)

In 1991 an "Arab spring" came to Algeria in the form of a free election apparently won by an Islamist party. It was snuffed out when the government voided the election, provoking a violent uprising and a reign of mutual terror, with the common people caught in the middle. Also caught in the middle were the French Trappist monks of the Tibhirine monastery in a village in the Taurus mountains, a vestige of France's colonial presence in the country. As portrayed in Xavier Beauvois' film, the monks are a welcome presence in their village. Brother Luc (Michael Lonsdale) runs a clinic for the poor, while the other monks earn their living by making jelly and other foodstuffs to sell on market day. At no time does the movie show them proselytizing to the Muslim natives. The villagers invite them to weddings and are entirely comfortable with the Christians' presence among them. Some even say that the monastery is the heart of the village. When the threat of terrorism closes in and some of the monks contemplate quitting the village, they describe themselves as birds on a branch, undecided about whether to leave or not. A village elder corrects them: they, the monks, are the branch, and the villagers the birds. The common people think the monastery offers them more protection than a government most despise. The monks themselves would rather not have the protection of a "corrupt" regime. Who'll protect them, then, when the terrorists come?...

Knowing little about Algeria except what I'd read about the civil war as it was happening, I don't know whether Beauvois painted too idealistic a picture of Christian-Islamic harmony in the mountain village, but it certainly is an appealing picture. I can imagine critics questioning the extent to which the village is portrayed depending upon the monks -- it could be called colonialist paternalism, I suppose -- but the monks themselves seem to live up to whatever vows of humility and service they took. They don't lord it over the villagers and clearly aren't out to convert anybody, based on what we see. Nor are the villagers uptight about their own religion; they're disgusted by the crimes of the Islamist terrorists, questioning whether the killers have read the same Qur'an they have. Some of them have, as we learn in a scene when Christian (Lambert Wilson), the monks' leader, persuades a guerilla leader to spare him with a quote from the Qur'an in French translation, which the militant finishes in the original. For the film's purposes, Islam is a religion of peace and tolerance, as Christianity is also at its best, until political fanatics distort its message.

Of Gods and Men makes a point of not just avoiding but repudiating the obvious parallel that might occur to viewers watching the monks stand their ground without government protection despite the increasing hopelessness of their situation. Unlike the terrorists, the monks don't intend to be martyrs. When they finally decide to stay, they don't do so to seek death. Christian makes clear that they should do everything possible to avoid death -- and one of the monks will survive the picture because he finds a place to hide at the right moment. But they also admit that their calling comes with a risk of death, and that, too, they should not avoid. Each feels called to serve God by serving the poor in a distant land, and they owe it to God and the poor to stay on despite the risk. The best argument against staying, at least without protection, may have been made by a government official who warns the monks that their deaths would only be exploited, presumably for propaganda purposes, by other parties. Some critics might say that Beauvois himself and his collaborators have exploited the story, but they may have intended it as a corrective to other, arguably more exploitative accounts -- those that portray the monks as religious martyrs, for instance.

There's no plot to the picture apart from the monks' dilemma and its resolution. It accumulates detail rather than build up narrative momentum, establishing the monks' place in the village and the routines of their private devotional lives. The early part of the picture has an almost documentary quality before the monks develop distinct personalities and individual issues like Luc's declining health and some slight resentment by the others of Christian's dominance. The story develops into a kind of spiritual Alamo, as each monk has to decide whether to stay or flee. The actors, led by Lonsdale and Wilson, are convincing as aging, intelligent men who've known each other for many years. As fate closes in on them, the film seems to grow in scale with sweeping helicopter shots of the village and hosts of soldiers swarming and scrambling nearby. It becomes a kind of epic without conventional action -- we get one shot of throat-slitting to establish the nature of the threat -- with the monks as nonviolent heroes facing inevitable doom as a matter of duty. The epic feeling is only enhanced by the final scenes in a snowy landscape that I, in my geographic ignorance, didn't expect to see in Algeria. But the epic retains an intimate scale in which the fates of nine men mean something, however relevant the episode may have been to the larger conflict.

Beauvois doesn't try to overdramatize this, with one awkward exception: a "last supper" scene in which the monks share wine and listen to a cassette of Swan Lake. This play for pathos seems superfluous and its focus on misty-eyed close-ups deprives the monks of their main strength as characters -- their intelligence. Worse, at least for some American viewers, the excerpt from the ballet we hear is the one long associated with the Universal Horror film cycle and now with the madness of Black Swan, so the effect for me was probably something different from what Beauvois intended. But this is an exceptional false note in an otherwise judicious portrait of men who became martyrs of a kind whether they wanted to or not.

LOURDES (2009)

The pilgrimage shrine at the spring where St. Bernadette is said to have seen the Virgin Mary, where the waters are reputed to have healing powers for the faithful, has been a ripe subject for satire almost from the beginning. In Austrian director Jessica Hausner Lourdes has found a relatively benign satirist. She avoids what might look like the obvious object of satire from the secular humanist perspective, the mythos of heavenly visitations and miraculous healings. Instead of an attack on faith and spirituality, Lourdes is a critique of the de-sacralization of the pilgrimage experience through custom, bureaucracy and commodification.

Hausner follows a tour group of pilgrims, who look much like any tour group found in any tourist trap, except for a disproportion of wheelchairs. They're thoroughly supervised, with the most handicapped assigned "helpers" who feed them and wheel them around if they haven't loved ones to do that for them. For the helpers, in many cases, working at Lourdes is just another job and not the most appealing among all those available to young people. For the clergy, too, a certain institutional cynicism sets in after a while. A priest tells this joke: Jesus, Mary and the Holy Spirit are discussing where to go on vacation this year. The Holy Spirit suggests Bethlehem and Jerusalem, but Jesus shoots down those ideas because they've gone to both places so often. How about Lourdes, then? The Blessed Virgin thinks that's a great idea -- "I've never been there before!"

One of our tour group is Christine (Sylvie Testud), who suffers from MS. She isn't the most enthusiastic or the most devout pilgrim, especially compared to her roommate, Frau Hartl (Gilette Barbier), who often proves more of a helper to Christine than the young woman who actually holds that job. The Lourdes environment isn't exactly conducive to spirituality, except perhaps for the most simplistically devout. Frau Hartl will make her devotions to a life-size Virgin statue in a hotel lobby, but pilgrims in town can pass souvenir shops filled with thousands of smaller-scale statues without batting an eye. If anything, the clergy seem determined to dampen expectations of miracles. We learn over the course of the film that the Church is actually admirably objective, though almost to a demoralizing degree, about appraising healings. They don't want to jump the gun before a relapse; to qualify as a miracle, a cure has to be permanent. As if to foreshadow the main event of the film, characters discuss a reputed recent miracle in which another MS patient rose and walked. A priest cautions them that with MS especially remissions and relapses are frequent.

Naturally, it's Christine who rises and walks. The news is received with skeptical tentativeness by the authorities, with reflected glory by some pilgrims, and with barely-concealed jealousy by others. The fortunate one gets a particularly dirty look from one mother whose daughter experienced a sort of near-miss earlier in the pilgrimage, recognizing and responding to her parent before lapsing back into unresponsiveness. The ways of God being, as ever, inscrutable, people wonder how Christine, of all pilgrims, deserves His grace. The mystery of His ways grows deeper as a helper suffers a seizure and is hospitalized, freeing up a spot for Christine, who had been disqualified earlier due to her disability, to go on the group's mountain-climbing trip. The group is eager, of course, to have their picture re-shot with an ambulatory Christine for the historical record. The lucky woman herself seems bemused rather than transfigured, and the story of her fellow-sufferer from the earlier pilgrimage clearly troubles her. Still, she takes advantage of every opportunity to climb mountains, dance with the uniformed male helpers and eat dessert with her own hands. Will it last? Christine takes a tumble on the dance floor, but she's still on her feet to accept the Best Pilgrim award at the end. Beyond that?...

Lourdes leaves the final answer ambiguous. To spoil things, it ends with Christine settling back into her wheelchair, which Frau Hartl has thoughtfully kept near, but that alone isn't enough for us to conclude that she'll never walk again. Taking her seat may be an act of simple weariness -- the spectacle of the helpers performing like asses at a final party is admittedly wearying -- or it may be a gesture of resignation. The most troubling thing about it is the sense that it doesn't matter one way or the other, to Christine or the other pilgrims. From a spiritual perspective, one of several from which viewers can choose, the message may be that the "miracle" itself doesn't matter, that there's no point to Christine staying on her feet because no one, her included, has responded to the healing with the appropriate reverence. An alternate message can be that Christine may as well sit down because the cure hasn't really changed the empty life to which she must return now that the pilgrimage is over. I don't find the ambiguity frustrating; it actually testifies to the subtle realism of Hausner's narrative. There may or may not have been a miracle, but Lourdes takes place in an environment where theme doesn't impose a single meaning on events.

Give our star a round of applause; Sylvie Testud, ladies and gentlemen!

Had this film been made in the United States, Sylvie Testud might have been a front-runner for the Oscar last year, since her role is what we tend to think of as awards-bait. I say "might have been" because she gives a nicely understated performance, unburdened by vocal tics or the need to give revelatory speeches, that might not have set off the Academy's master-thespian meter. As it is, Testud won a European Film Award for her trouble, which may prove that the less-is-more principle is appreciated somewhere.

The film itself plays out with commendable clarity, making its satirical points obviously enough but not blatantly. The nature of its satire reminded me a little of Robert Altman's movies, though Hausner does largely without the American's diffusive sprawl, keeping us consistently focused on Christine while emphasizing a few supporting characters enough to cinch the sense of a realistic social environment. Lourdes might have made a great subject for Altman (not to mention, closer to home, a subject for Jacques Tati), while the closest American equivalent to its concern with recovery and relapse is arguably Penny Marshall's Awakenings. Hausner's Lourdes is better than that and deserves some belated recognition in the U.S. as one of the better European films of the past year or so.

In Brief: AGORA (2009)

Alejandro Amenabar's latest film is an intellectual peplum, an old-school costume epic on the old theme of intolerance and the struggle of faith against free inquiry, a film almost guaranteed to fail at the American box office and one to make the blood boil. It's the story of Hypatia of Alexandria, one of the ancient world's exceptional female philosophers, and her doomed struggle against the rising tide of Christianity. I wouldn't be surprised if some folks who caught it during its short stay in U.S. theaters took it as an anti-Christian film. By the time it was done I was in a mood to burn a church myself, but Amenabar is actually quite careful, especially during the first half of his story, to establish, small comfort though it may be to Christians, that religion itself, and in particular the temptation of blind faith, was the problem in Hypatia's time. In the first act, the Serapis-worshippers who run Alexandria's famous library, where Hypatia teaches, are just as eager for a fight as the Christians are, just as bigoted toward the once-persecuted, now flourishing faith as its adherents are toward the pagans.

Serapian: Where's your carpenter god now, Christians?
Christian: Making coffins for you pagan scum!

This charming exchange takes place the morning after a bloody battle in the agora, the marketplace that serves as the focus of public life in Alexandria. The Serapians tried to avenge an insult, found themselves outnumbered, and fought their way back to their fortified temple, while the enraged Christians settled down for a siege. In a sign of the changing times, the Roman authorities reach a settlement that'll spare the pagans, but forces them to abandon the temple and the library to the wrath of the Christian mob. Their triumph closes the first act of the movie.

The story picks up "some years later" and catches up with Hypatia (Rachel Weisz) and two erstwhile students: Orestes, once a disappointed suitor and now the Roman prefect, and Davus, once a slave with a crush on his mistress, now a Christian and part of the taliban-style street patrols who make life miserable for non-Christians, including an influx of Jews. In this case, too, both sides prove equally capable of atrocity. Tired of attacks and insults, a gang of Jews lures some Christian goons into a deathtrap, turning it into a stoning gallery. History, however, is overwhelmingly on the Christians' side as Bishop Cyril threatens to grow more powerful than Orestes and uses the prefect's continued loyalty to the "witch" Hypatia against him. Orestes has become a Christian himself, but will not kneel before Cyril when the bishop wields the Bible (an epistle of Paul specifically) as proof that the "witch" should be silenced. Orestes and another former student who has become a neighboring bishop urge Hypatia to at least go through the motions of Christian conversion, if only to save her life, but her classical integrity won't allow it. In a scenario imagined by the screenwriters, Hypatia is on the brink of discovering the elliptical orbit of the Earth centuries ahead of schedule when the reckoning finally comes. When it comes, it's Davus, once resentful of her for treating him like the slave he was, who has the only chance to spare her death by torture, though he doesn't have much to offer besides....

The Hypatia-Davus storyline serves to show that not even our heroine is perfect -- or even necessarily a heroine by 21st century standards. For all her enlightenment and commitment to reason, she never questions the institution of slavery. Davus's resentment also represents in miniature the resentments of the poor and oppressed that betrayed Christianity's call to peace. Agora strives to show that its Christians are driven by conflicting impulses. Ammonius, a kind of fakir who proves his faith by walking across fire, appears sincerely dedicated to helping the poor. He's also a vicious bully who achieves "martyrdom" by hitting Orestes in the head with a rock. The film consciously and provocatively invites viewers to equate the worst 4th century Christians with the worst 21st century Muslims. The Christians are the swarthier, dirtier, bearded ones, the ones in turbans, the ones with semitic accents, the quickest to anger when their god is insulted, compared to the more Euro or Anglo-style pagans. For some viewers, the message will be lost, since it will prove to them only that today's Muslims are about 1600 years behind Christendom in temperament and tolerance. How many will perceive a deeper message, one that suggests that inequality and oppression are the real causes of the violent resentments that find expression in intolerant religion, the provocations that make some people want to make everyone else kneel or bow or prostrate themselves, if only to prove that no one is better than anyone else? Not enough, I fear.

Agora is a beautiful film done the old way with real sets where and when it counts and a modest degree of CGI enhancement. It's story structure is awkwardly split in half, with a leap in time between two acts, but a handful of primary characters hold the story together. Some judicious telescoping of events may have made things flow more smoothly; as it is, Amenabar admits on the DVD that he mucked with history to keep one character alive past his time for the story's sake. The cast is good with the arguable exception of the star. Rachel Weisz isn't a bad actress, but she comes across too much like a Victorian bluestocking rather than the intellectual amazon Hypatia should seem to be. Her performance is constrained by the dispassionate character the screenplay gives her. The story (and the modern audience) needs a more fiery personality to express our outrage at the injustices playing out on screen. We're meant to celebrate her triumphs of reason and experimentation achieved despite mortal peril, but those scenes make her seem indifferent if not oblivious to the danger she's in. I don't know if the real Hypatia was a Stoic, but the film could have benefited from a Stoic perspective from which we could see that her approach was correct and her indifference to death admirable. Weisz might still win viewers over, however, if only more people gave Agora a chance. When I was a kid I always enjoyed watching "Bible" movies during the Christmas season. Agora probably doesn't count as a "Bible" film, but it's close enough for me this December.

SON OF MAN (2006)

Mark Dornford-May's movie, only his second feature, is a retelling of the Jesus story in 21st century Africa. Stylistically it's most likely inspiration is Pier Paolo Pasolini's Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964), which, while ostensibly set in the correct historical period, embraced anachronistic elements (like American gospel songs on the soundtrack) while paring away the opulent details that characterized Hollywood gospel films. Son of Man is a very musical film, its range extending from spiritual ecstasy to choral defiance. The music carries much of the burden of the film's spirituality. The story, as told here, is arguably more mundane.

The opening promises something less mundane. We start with the temptations in the desert, Satan goading a Jesus in robes and whiteface to make stones from bread, jump off a cliff, etc. Jesus (Andile Kosi) has enough, finally, and shoves the Evil One off a sand dune. "Get thee behind me Satan," he says -- familiar enough. What follows isn't: "This is my world!" Satan disagrees, of course.

It looks like we've been dropped in the middle of a familiar story in well-established modern cinema fashion, but this opening proves more of a prologue, a preliminary to Jesus's decision to be born in the African kingdom of Judea, a nation torn by strife pitting King Herode against a shadowy foreign-backed Democratic Coalition. In a village a woman flees from machete-wielding dancing killers. She plays dead in a schoolroom full of massacred children, and the soldiers (and Satan) miss her. Just when she thinks she's safe an angel, a child adorned with white feathers, performs the annunciation. She and her husband (his role as minimal as ever) become refugees, and she gives birth in a shed as a host of child-angels summon shepherds to the scene. A few years later the family barely escapes a massacre of children at a checkpoint. The child angel appears again, offering little Jesus his protection. The boy rejects it, reaffirming: "This is my world!"

From this point, Dornford-May and his writing team try to have things both ways. Jesus retains his own divine powers, enabling him to heal, exorcise and revive. But while he's clearly a supernatural being, his kingdom is very much of this (or "my") world. In fact, he hardly talks of a "kingdom" at all, of God or otherwise. His is a political mission. He denounces Herode and his foreign-manipulated successors in turn; he denounces the imperialist mentality that dismisses Africans as mere tribal savages; he denounces the U.S. for blocking the production of cheap medicine through the use of commercial patents. "We have been lied to," he repeats, "Evil did not fall." His answer is solidarity, justice and nonviolence. Some of his own disciples have been guerrilla fighters (some of the others are women); he makes them give up their guns. As videos of his sermons circulate and stories of miracles boost his credibility, the Democratic Coalition sees him as a political rival. They want their inside man, Judas, to get the evidence they need to justify taking Jesus down. The Passion, or at least the opening act, will be televised -- or at least it could be later....

As a non-believer, it may not be my business to say whether Son of Man gets Jesus "right" or not, but two things about it struck me as peculiar. First, the concept of Jesus as a primarily political actor is bound to be controversial. The idea of a Jesus who really says nothing about God or God's supposed love for man, will be a deal-breaker for many Christians. For my part, I do wonder whether it misrepresents the historical Jesus, but some people say the Gospels misrepresent him, also. Second, Christianity is going to have a very different history in the video age. The African Jesus is sometimes surrounded by camcorders, and some of his sayings, at least, can be recorded indisputably. But because the filmmakers are bound by the traditional Jesus narrative, they don't really explore the implications of an Incarnation in the Information Age.

Son of Man is ultimately a cultural rather than a religious document, though it could be described as liberation theology. Its effort to make Jesus relevant to contemporary Africa tells us as much about the filmmakers' vision of Africa as it does about their idea of Christianity. As a Jesus movie, some viewers will find it more palatable than the more gruesomely faithful Passion of the Christ. People who admire the Pasolini Gospel may find Son of Man a natural next step, though they might be surprised to see the end borrow the long shadow symbolizing resurrection from the Nicholas Ray King of Kings. For people who are students or fans of the Jesus genre, as I am to an extent, Son of Man is obviously worth seeing, but I'd also recommend it as a film of interest, if not necessarily a great film, to anyone interested in politically-committed African cinema.

This trailer, uploaded to YouTube by AiMfilmfest, gives a good idea of the mix of modernity and archetypes throughout the picture:

THE POPE'S TOILET (El Bano del Papa, 2007)

I couldn't resist the title when it leered out at me from an Albany Public Library shelf, but this collaboration by writer-directors Cesar Charlone and Enrique Fernandez, though often funny, isn't nearly as sacrilegious as one might want. The Pope is the long-lived but unimaginatively-named John Paul (or Juan Pablo for our protagonists) II, but the toilet isn't meant for him to leave relics in. The setting is Melo, a Uruguayan town near the border with Brazil. One of the few booming business sectors there is smuggling consumer goods by bicycle across the border, presumably to avoid import duties, and selling them to local stores. There are many small-time operators, most operating on simple pedal power, a lucky few with motorbikes. It's a risky vocation. If you try to cross at the official border crossing, you may have to deal with the military. Try to cut through farmland or pasturage and you have to deal with the customs police. It's not clear which is worse, but Meleyo, the local customs cop, is corrupt. In practice, that means he'll take your stuff and keep it or sell it himself. It also means you might be able to do business with him.

Beto, our protagonist, is one of the humble pedal-power smugglers, a little smarter than the others, knowing to hide behind a big rock when Meleyo descends on the others, but not exactly the brightest star in the sky either. He's a poor man in a poor town. He has to use an outhouse at the house he shares with his wife Carmen and his daughter Silvia. He dreams of getting a motorbike to make his smuggling errands easier, while Silvia dreams of being a radio announcer. Her dreams are stoked by the Uruguayan media descending on Melo in the year of our story, 1988, to report on an impending visit and speech by the Pope during a South American tour. The Papal pilgrimage is a potential bonanza for the whole town. At a minimum, 20,000 people are expected to come to hear His Holiness. Everybody seems to be looking for a way to exploit the expected tourists. People are going into debt, taking out second mortgages, etc., to buy supplies to make cakes, chorizo sausages, etc., to sell to the hungry crowds. Beto has an even better brainstorm. With all these people noshing in the name of God, isn't there likely to be a demand no one's thought of meeting yet? That's where our titular toilet comes in. Beto intends to build a pay toilet for the tourists. He could well make enough to afford his motorbike, but he needs money up front for the toilet and building supplies. Never mind plumbing; he and his family can take care of changing the water and so forth. Still, it's going to be expensive, and some recent screwups have made many people reluctant to stake him for smuggling trips. He may have to tap into his wife's savings, which are meant to pay for Silvia's college education, and he may have to cut a deal with the devious Meleyo, the persecutor of his friends, with no guarantee that the customs cop can be trusted....

Beto is an Uruguayan Ralph Kramden, albeit in better shape thanks to the bicycle, and The Pope's Toilet is a classic get-rich-quick scheme narrative in a fresh setting. It's also an amusing but not overstated social satire in which everyone thinks of a visit by the unwordly pontiff as a chance to strike it rich. Carmen is just as much an Alice analogue, often scathing in her criticism, sometimes treated more roughly than Alice Kramden ever was, but just as worldly wise and just as devoted to her man. There's a "Baby, you're the greatest" moment when, with Beto's dream dashed because she shamed him into refusing to accept Meleyo's money, she wordlessly puts her jar full of savings on the kitchen table so Beto can make a last-minute run across the border to buy a toilet and race back in time for the Pope's arrival. Beto's run provides the dramatic climax as Meleyo catches up to him, having intended to pay him after all, only to take umbrage when Beto definitively refuses his money. In his petty wrath he does the one thing customs cops supposedly can't do: he confiscates Beto's bicycle, forcing our hero to lug the toilet the last miles back to Melo on foot, in what might be seen as the most sincere pilgrimage of this supposedly special day.

While I began to anticipate how the story would turn out, I imagine that Uruguayan audiences watched the whole film in a different way if they remembered the Pope's visit to Melo. From the standpoint of the cottage tourist industry that sprung up there, it was a fiasco. Instead of the estimated 20,000 or the hoped-for 100,000, the film tells us that only 8,000 people attended the papal speech. There's a poignant montage of all the leftover food from all the stalls that ends up dumped for dogs and pigs to eat, followed by a hint that Beto may have made a better investment in the long term. Meanwhile, the TV reports as if the papal visit had been a triumph for Uruguay. As a host urges the Pope to come back soon, Beto throws a drink at the barroom TV set.

As represented by The Pope's Toilet, Melo is a modest but gratifying stop on my itinerary around the wild world of cinema. The film features a striking combination of realistic grunginess and vivid cinematic landscapes. The co-directors have a strong pictorial sense (Charlone did the cinematography) and an eye for following action that comes through best in the opening chase with Meleyo in his truck pursuing the bicycling smugglers. The acting is good across the board as far as I can tell from listening to the Spanish dialogue, with Cesar Trancoso as Beto naturally standing out. The film has collected a lot of awards from Latin American festivals, deservedly so in my opinion, and it comes to American DVD via Film Movement's "movie of the month club," to which the Albany library admirably subscribes. This isn't the sort of extreme experience of one kind or another that many movie bloggers seek out, but I think it would have held its own had it appeared in the golden age of international art-house cinema on big screens across America.

An Uruguayan landscape with two bicyclists (lower right) by co-director/cinematographer Cesar Charlone.

Film Movement has an English-subtitled trailer for the movie on YouTube, so here it is.