The Night of the Hunted

Jean Rollin's The Night of the Hunted is a typically moody, abstractly haunting film from the idiosyncratic horror auteur. More even than most of his work, this film dispenses with any actual concrete horror in favor of a vague sense of disquiet that's almost entirely psychological and mental. This is a haunting study of the nature of memory and its linkage to identity and human consciousness, and the fear here arises almost entirely from the loss of memory, from the feeling of one's sense of self slipping away with one's memory. It's about fear of the loss of self, making this an entirely existential horror film.

The film opens in the fashion of Robert Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly: a young woman (Brigitte Lahaie), dressed only in a filmy nightie, runs out of the dark forest one night and into the path of a car driven by Robert (Alain Duclos). She tells him that her name is Elisabeth, and she's running in terror of something, but she doesn't remember what — moments later, she doesn't even remember that her name is Elisabeth. Her memories keep slipping away from her; it's not just amnesia, but the slippage of even short-term memory, so that if Robert were to be out of her sight for just a few minutes she'd forget him too. Naturally, she clings to him desperately, and he takes this confused, frightened girl back to his apartment, where he comforts her and they soon have sex, in a scene of cheesy, gratuitous softcore of the kind that Rollin almost always slotted into his films, and yet here the sex is tinged with desperation and a genuine thirst for connection. Elisabeth lives only in the present moment, she says, and she clings to each moment like a precious raft in a sea of nothingness, because each present moment is all she has to hang onto. She urges him on, demanding that he stay with her, that he not let her forget; her intense desire for a memory to cling to makes what could otherwise have been a rote, porny sex scene surprisingly poignant, both passionate and deeply sad.

Apparently, though, this whole situation doesn't leave enough of an impression on Robert, who, hapless as most male Rollin heroes, soon goes off to work, leaving Elisabeth alone to forget him, and herself, all over again. She's quickly found by the doctors she'd apparently been fleeing at the beginning of the film, and they take her to an apartment building that houses other patients, like her, whose memories are continually erased. Most of Rollin's previous work was set in the majestically ruined countryside, in crumbling ancient castles and disused graveyards, but The Night of the Hunted is an urban film, with a very different aesthetic. Rollin's haunted rural castles and fields had always been both creepy and beautiful, mingling fear and foreboding with the strange allure of death and the supernatural. In this film, though, the sinisterly blank apartment towers and concrete wastelands of the city are merely creepy, the building's surfaces and interiors as blank as the minds of the inhabitants. The building, obviously an abandoned office tower, is nearly undecorated, its walls stark white or black, and the patients, with their missing memories, wander aimlessly through these blank, sterile spaces, the austerity of their surroundings reflecting the emptiness of their lives.


It's a haunting, disturbingly poetic film, especially in its first half, before a series of pointless sex scenes and pseudo-scientific exposition dumps disrupt the poetic vibe. At the apartment, Elisabeth meets two other women who are afflicted as she is: Catherine (Cathy Stewart), whose memory is so bad that she can't even remember how to eat, and Véronique (Dominique Journet), who Elisabeth seems to vaguely remember from her previous life. The scenes between these women are evocative and poignant, as they struggle from moment to moment to remember something, to hold onto some memory, some experience, some person who means something to them. They invent stories and memories for each other. Catherine and Elisabeth pretend that they were childhood friends, though like everything else that game too soon slips away from them. Later, they encounter a woman who's constantly searching for her lost child: she remembers, or thinks she remembers, that she once had a child, but not the child's name or even its gender.

Rollin is delving into the nature of memory and what it means to the construction of one's identity: without memory these people are nothing, no one, barely even alive, their very selves erased along with their pasts. These scenes are deeply emotional, infused with tenderness and sadness, the film's opening already forgotten because these mysteriously afflicted people truly live exclusively in the present tense. In her previous collaborations with Rollin, The Grapes of Death and Fascination, Lehaie, who started her career as a porn actress, projected a fierce carnality, a feral, sexualized violence that made her the ultimate femme fatale. She seems like almost a different actress here, her intensity transmuted into vulnerability, melancholy, a sense of loss that seems to infuse her every gesture, her every fragile, innocent expression.

The film falls apart a bit at around the halfway point, replacing this moody exploration of loss and mental anguish with a number of gratuitous scenes of violence-tinged eroticism, which seem to have come from an entirely different film. Robert also returns towards the end, and the plot is needlessly explained in multiple exposition-laden speeches delivered by the sinister doctor. But the film's final image, which compares the memory-less Elisabeth to the shambling walking dead of a zombie film, provides an effective, eerily romantic finale for a strange, and strangely affecting, film. The Night of the Hunted is ultimately uneven and flawed, only sporadically delivering on its promise and its evocative study of memory and identity. At its best, though, the film achieves the haunting quality of Rollin's other films without any of the supernatural or horror elements that generally characterized his other work.

Unconscious London Strata/The Mammals of Victoria

Unconscious London Strata is one of Stan Brakhage's gloriously abstract studies of light and color, with virtually no grounding in concrete forms. The film consists of a rapidly edited montage of blurred, vague images in which any physical context has been smeared away, leaving behind only layered, overlapping colors and bursts of brilliant light. The effect is beautiful and sensual, and in this case Brakhage's layered forms specifically recall the canvasses of Mark Rothko, with sedimentary layers of colors stacked on top of one another in fuzzy strata. As the title suggests, these images are often striated, colors abutting one another in hazy proximity, those beautifully grainy color fields that convey a spiritual, moving quality remarkably similar to the effect produced by Rothko's paintings.

Only towards the end of the film do these abstract fields start to cohere, at least slightly and sporadically, into recognizable images of a building, possibly (and appropriately) a cathedral. Even here, the images are by no means concrete, and the building's form is still abstracted, split apart into momentary flashes of an angled corner or a spire turned upside down. Occasionally, the flickering, shaking images resolve into a second or two of a silhouetted skyline, blocky buildings lined up along a horizon of golden light, but that image too is illusory, gone in a moment.

For the most part, Brakhage refrains from even that much of a hint of physicality. Like his even more sensuous and beautiful light study The Text of Light, this film treats light and color as absolutes, pure visual phenomena without reference or connection to the tangible sources from which these lights emanate. As with Rothko, the effect is both utterly simple and utterly breathtaking.


In The Mammals of Victoria, Stan Brakhage focuses mainly on images of the sea. This is the second part of a four-part series based on the life of Brakhage's wife Marilyn, but there's very little human — or, indeed, mammalian — presence here. Instead, the film is full of images of water in its many forms: rippling blue waves, a black nighttime ocean with speckles of light shimmering across its surface, little wavelets lapping up against a muddy outcropping in the shallows by the shore. Brakhage returns several times to that image of mud piles sticking up out of the water, at one point showing the mud crumbling as the water licks at it, slowly eroding and erasing it. The film's contemplation of nature, with humanity at most a peripheral presence, emphasizes each individual's brief span of life when compared against the rolling, unceasing rhythms of the waves and the tides, the ancient perpetual motion machines of the natural world.

Towards the end of the film, Brakhage includes a pair of evocative, mysterious shots that appear to have been taken from a moving car. In the first, two other cars speed by, their headlights briefly flaring at the camera before whipping around the curve of the road and out of the corner of the frame. The car that the camera is in then continues along the road, turning into the sun, which cuts through the trees and washes out the image in a haze of white light. In the second, simpler shot, the camera simply gazes out of the car as it approaches a modestly sloping hill in the road, approaching this point on the horizon beyond which the road can no longer be seen. The hazy, sun-dazed shot suggests the slow progress into the unknown, a graceful glide up and over a slope into the unknown world beyond. These two images add a subtle narrative component to the film, a hint of action and agency, just as the shots of people playing in the waves, which also don't appear until late in the film, belatedly introduce characters. Before this, for much of the film there's little indication of human presence at all, only an occasional blurry, blink-and-it's-gone shot of somebody wading through the water.

Brakhage is also exploring different forms of distortion: the wavery quality of an image seen from beneath a film of water, the static and flickering of a TV set, the grainy haze of low-quality film stock. Brakhage seems to be using several different types of film, contrasting the clarity of an image of rocks jutting out of the water against blurry, nearly impenetrable landscape shots. The different film stocks contribute to the film's eclectic visual style, which explores textures both smooth and rough, as well as stitching in a few short painted segments. The painted sequences flicker by quickly, and are mostly pretty routine, not at all the best examples of Brakhage's hand-painting. (An exception is a flurry of cosmic star fields and swirling galaxy-like forms that appears towards the end of the film.) The painting in this film mostly seems like a placeholder, a brief visual palette cleanser connecting photographed images, often segueing seamlessly into an out-of-focus image of lights hovering in a dark field, drawing a connection between Brakhage's photographic abstractions of the world and his painted abstractions.

Dark Habits

Pedro Almodóvar's fourth feature, Dark Habits, was also his first commercially produced film after a few independent works. The film has a campy, absurdist premise — a nightclub singer hides out from the police at a convent with a group of very strange nuns — that it never quite lives up to. Yolanda (Cristina Sánchez Pascuel) flees when her boyfriend dies from heroin that had been laced with strychnine, and she remembers some nuns who run a refuge for prostitutes and drug addicts. She goes to stay with them but finds that the place is a rather unconventional convent, struggling and in danger of closing, with nuns who all have their personal vices and idiosyncrasies. The Mother Superior (Julieta Serrano) is a lesbian who adores Yolanda and shoots up heroin, plying her new charge with drugs as well. Another nun trips on acid (which Almodóvar represents through point-of-view shots with garish colors). Another secretly writes trashy romance novels, and another raises a full-grown tiger in the yard, playing bongo drums for it and feeding it chunks of raw meat.

With all this weirdness, gay desire and drugs in a convent, it's hard to imagine how Almodóvar managed to make a boring movie, but somehow he did. This is a dull and unevenly acted movie in which Almodóvar seems desperate to be wild and crazy, but the whole thing just plays out as flat. Most of the performances are sadly lacking in charisma, especially Pascuel, who seems to simply drift aimlessly through the film. There's not much of a plot to speak of, either: the convent is in danger of closing, and Yolanda has to hide out, but for most of the movie nothing much happens, and these conflicts are only developed sporadically and lazily. It's a weirdly inert and unsatisfying film that's lacking in the spirited, lively humor that always flows through Almodóvar's best work.

There are scattered enjoyable moments, though, especially centering on the relationship between the Mother Superior and Yolanda, which is hardly developed at all, unfortunately. In two separate scenes, Yolanda sings a song directly to the nun, and Almodóvar switches between closeups of them; the nun's beatific smile and tranquil expression is very moving in these scenes, a lovely expression of desire and contentment. Following the second of these scenes, after Yolanda has performed a song at a convent party, singing directly at the Mother Superior the whole time, the nun gushes to her that she was "so obscene." The nun then lingers in the room a moment while Yolanda, her back turned, strips off her dress, turning and revealing a single bare breast, a shocking moment of sexuality for the lovelorn nun. Even funnier is the blasphemous moment when the nun places a towel over the singer's face, taking an imprint of her like the Turin Shroud; when she pulls the towel away, it is coated with a delicate painting of the singer, a ludicrous secular, and sensual, miracle.


Indeed, the film's final act offers up a few sudden resolutions that are fairly satisfying even if the rest of the film doesn't build up to them in any real way. One of the nuns has been nursing an unspoken desire for the parish priest, and at the end of the film they decide to run away together and forsake their vows, adopting the tiger as their "son" to form a happy nuclear family. The nun compares her love for the priest to the tiger, growing unseen and unsuspected, but dangerous, within the supposedly safe walls of the convent. The final scene, in which the Mother Superior finds out that Yolanda has left and screams in anguish, is also affecting, perhaps because Serrano delivers the best performance in the whole cast. In the final shot, Almodóvar pulls away from the Mother Superior being embraced by another nun, the camera floating out the window to observe the scene from a distance, framed through a window.

Also compelling is a scene where Yolanda, going through drug withdrawal, spends a restless few days haunted by religious images, which Almodóvar superimposes over closeups of a haggard-looking Yolanda. At one point, a statue is being lowered into position with a rope around its neck, like a noose, and it twirls in the air, so that whenever it faces towards the camera its face is juxtaposed with Yolanda's, briefly superimposing the blank, at-peace expression of the religious figure with the tortured face of the drug addict.

Such moments hint at the visual imagination and feel for expressive, bold images that Almodóvar would develop much further in his later work. Even just a few years later he'd be making uneven but undeniably potent camp melodramas like Matador and Law of Desire, but here he still seems tentative. The nuns-doing-drugs-and-having-sex material is curiously restrained for a director who usually has no fear of pushing beyond the boundaries of good taste, and it hurts the film, making it seem as though it wants to hint at offensive content without actually doing much to offend anyone.

Three Kurt Kren shorts, 1969-1982

[This is part of a sporadic series in which I explore the work of the Austrian DVD label Index DVD. This company has released a great deal of valuable European experimental cinema onto DVD, naturally focusing on the Austrian underground but occasionally branching out as well. Index's DVDs are distributed in the US by Erstwhile Records, so anyone intrigued by Index's catalog should take a look and support the fine work both these companies are doing for obscure and avant-garde cinema. The three films reviewed here appear on the Kurt Kren collection Which Way To CA?.]


Underground Explosion is Kurt Kren's approximation of the feeling of being frazzled and high at a rock concert. Kren was recording a performance by Krautrock band Amon Düül II at a 1969 underground music festival, but the recording is anything but a straightforward documentation. Instead, the frenzied, fragmentary nature of the film captures the drug-fueled, hazy nature of the music itself, communicating the confused, confusing sensation of this music and these kinds of experimental 60s festivals. The images are shaky and rapidly collaged together so that the action is often unclear: lights, mobs of people, a stage full of musicians, men slow-dancing with one another, performers stripping down at the microphone, a guitar, someone singing. Only sporadically does the frantic flow of images slow down, and then as often as not it's only to photograph some near-empty corner of the auditorium, the camera not settling down on anything in particular. The jagged pace of the editing is what really counts, the shapes and colors that go flying by, rather than the actual content.

Similarly, the soundtrack seldom provides much of a clue as to what the band actually sounds like, their spiky, dissonant rock jams only occasionally coming through clearly. Most of the time, the sound is as unpredictable as the images, giving the impression not of listening to a rock band but of listening to their bassy, distorted pulses through thick walls in a room next door to where they're actually playing. The soundtrack is muted, distorted, sometimes seemingly even reversed and manipulated, the sound occasionally fading out almost entirely to a dull headache-like throb at the edges of awareness.

Like Andy Warhol's famous deconstructive portrait of the Velvet Underground, this film is unsatisfying as a concrete document of a performance, but very satisfying indeed as a blurry, subjective suggestion of the feeling of being there.


Auf der Pfaueninsel is a devilishly simple conceptual joke told with Kurt Kren's characteristic deadpan wit. The film is a minute and 21 seconds long, which consists of a solid minute of methodically displayed credits followed by a few short snippets of "home movies" showing members of the Vienna Aktionists and family members at leisure. The joke is one of expectation, as Kren's opening credits lists the names of Günter Brus and the other Aktionists who will appear in the film. One expects something like Kren's other Aktionist films, a frantic collage of horrifying excerpts from the group's scatological, provocative performances.

Instead, Kren shows the provocateurs offstage, outside of the theater, as family and friends. They're taking a walk, visiting the zoo, goofing around a bit. Brus sees a van with some writing on the side and uses his hands to cover up some of the letters so that it spells "Brus," the kind of goofy, self-conscious joke that anyone would do in a home movie made while hanging around with friends. The other shots in this quick flash of footage are even more mundane, showing the members of the performance art troupe standing around looking at zoo enclosures or just walking along; most of the people named in the credits are never even seen clearly, just appearing from behind as they stroll with their family and friends. It's a very simple gag but a very clever one as well, a way of interrogating the public/private divide. Just because this is a film introduced with a cast list, does that make it every bit as much a performance or a piece of art as the Aktionists' usual displays? Or is it merely a "home movie" like any other?


Getting Warm was the third and best of the three self-described "bad home movies" that Kurt Kren made on a 1981-82 trip to the United States (the other two films in this trilogy of three-minute shorts were Which Way To CA? and Breakfast im Grauen). Shot in New England and Austin, Texas, this is the only one of the three films to be in color, and the change in film stock makes a big difference, giving the film a sensual, evocative quality very different from the dull, quotidian, washed-out grays of the other two films. Kren has said that these films are purposefully more amateurish than real amateur movies, the joke of the "bad home movie" description being that even amateur home documentarians usually edit their tapes a little, whereas Kren leaves in everything he shot. All the banal moments are left in, creating a home movie that simply captures a string of disconnected, soundless, usually quite unassuming moments. At one point, Kren even leaves in a shot in a room where it's too dark to see anything, and the frame goes entirely black for a few moments, the darkness too a document of something that happened, something seen and experienced and captured for posterity on film.

At another point, Kren cuts from night to day and back to night again, with three consecutive shots of a Safeway sign, glowing an eerie neon blue in the darkness, one of the only points of light, but rendered ordinary and unremarkable again in the light of day, in the daytime shot sandwiched in between those two quick slices of neon-lit night. Similarly, a television set flickers and glows, sometimes a square of light surrounded by black, sometimes just a focal point for the bored gaze of a reclining man on the nearby bed. Kren cuts in different views, different times of day and different lightings, to show how ordinary objects can shift and change depending on context, sometimes acquiring a weird prosaic kind of beauty for a few brief moments before a cut.

Inferno

Dario Argento followed up his eerie, beautiful masterpiece Suspiria with something of a sequel, Inferno, which expands on the previous film's mythology about witches and evil forces, focusing on another member of a trio of sinister "mothers" who are spread out across the world. Like its predecessor, though, Inferno is more concerned with atmosphere and a general mood of dread and terror than it is with narrative sense; this film is even less coherent than Suspiria, its plot laughably fragmented and bizarre, placing the emphasis entirely on Argento's typically chilling set pieces, his gorgeous lighting schemes and cinematography.

Inferno never even quite settles on a central protagonist: instead, a number of people begin investigating strange occurrences in both Rome and New York, including Rose (Irene Miracle), her brother Mark (Leigh McCloskey), and Mark's classmate Sara (Eleonora Giorgi). Argento jumps back and forth between multiple potential protagonists, but few of them stick around for long, except for Mark, who's a curiously passive character, plagued by fits and ailments that prevent him from doing much more than stumble aimlessly and ineffectually through the film, following a strange and unsettling trail of clues to the film's fiery climax.

The emphasis here is not on the plot or the disposable characters, but on the beautifully disturbing imagery that Argento (in collaboration with his mentor Mario Bava, who crafted many of the film's optical effects and set designs) applies to the film's series of creepy murders. There's an almost surreal sensibility to the film at times. At one point, as a prelude to a murder, Argento cuts in a never-explained series of shots — a lizard eating a moth, gloved hands cutting the heads off paper cutouts, and a woman being hanged — that suggest the violence to come but are otherwise all but non-sequiturs.

This nonsensical strangeness reaches its apex with a grisly, torturously prolonged sequence late in the film, when a man is attacked by rats at a pond in Central Park, the rats swarming over him and gnawing at him as he splashes about in the water. Argento allows this grisly death scene to stretch out for a long time, until a nearby hot dog vendor suddenly hears the man's screams and goes running towards (and then, magically, across) the pond, seemingly to save the floundering victim — until he pulls out a massive butcher knife and begins hacking at the man's neck instead. It's darkly comic and utterly unexplained, beyond the fact that the malevolent "mothers" can apparently possess and control anything and anyone, from rats to people to the cats that tear apart another of the film's victims.


This was a troubled production for Argento, who fell ill during filming and was not even on-set for some scenes, turning parts of the film over to assistants (apparently including Bava). And yet the film is unmistakeably steeped in the same aesthetic that drove Suspiria, associating death and terror with the distinctive red and blue colored lights that bathe so many of Argento's sets, even when it makes no conceivable sense — when Mark pries up the floorboards of his sister's apartment, he climbs down into a crawlspace that is, unaccountably, lit with that same eerie, striking primary color palette. The film's opening scenes, in which Rose prowls through the dilapidated basement beneath her towering, gothic apartment building, memorably evoke the same slowly accumulating tension as Suspiria, with the wide-eyed heroine stalking through pools of shadow and colored light.

The sequence climaxes with a stunning underwater scene (apparently not even directed by the ailing Argento) in which Rose descends into what looks like a little puddle of water but opens up into an entire underwater room. Like a lot of things about this movie, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense, except as a dreamlike passage from ordinary life into the unsettling other world that lies beyond our own. Something as prosaic as dropping one's keys leads to an eerie encounter with death, and the heroine can step into a puddle and emerge into a submerged chamber, a remnant of another time, offering grim portents of the fate awaiting her if she continues her investigation. The sequence has the slow, dreamy quality of an underwater ballet, the fear and tension of the sequence eroticized by the way the woman's clothes cling wetly to her body, her skirt billowing up around her, her lithe form diving and slashing through the water as the suspense builds and builds. There's an almost fetishistic quality to the scene, which is also embodied in the way that Argento abstractly associates injuries to the hand with impending doom — for no apparent reason, throughout the film, seemingly innocuous hand injuries almost always precede death and terror.

Inferno is a worthy follow-up to Suspiria. It is even more reliant on atmospheric imagery than its predecessor. It's a pure mood piece that's all about its lurid lighting, crisp sound design (including a score, by progressive rock legend Keith Emerson, that builds to operatic prog-metal bombast at the film's climax) and grotesque set pieces. Argento, in these films, is abstracting horror until the silly, hole-ridden plot is irrelevant, and all that matters is the eerie beauty with which the film presents its suspense and its bursts of violence.

La vie est un roman

Alain Resnais' La vie est un roman is another curious experiment from the restlessly inventive director, whose work has always been concerned with the nature of the mind and the imagination, with the fluid nature of reality, time and space under the influence of the human mind. This film, built on a script by Resnais' frequent collaborator Jean Gruault, weaves together three separate stories, three separate times and layers of reality, all unified by a shared location. A remote castle in the country, part of an unfinished project by the eccentric Count Forbek (Ruggero Raimondi), is the setting for three stories that together form a dazzling, ambiguous study of love, childhood, and imagination. Forbek builds his castle as a palace of happiness, but is interrupted by World War I, and after the war reunites his surviving friends on the half-completed grounds for a strange experiment. Later, in the 1980s, the castle has become a school, where a group of educators with unusual ideas are holding a conference on teaching methods. Running throughout both of these stories is a fragmentary, theatrically stylized ancient tale of a Robin Hood-like warrior of the people rescuing a damsel and leading a rebellion against a cruel king.

That fairy tale narrative often seems to emerge from the fertile imaginations of the children who run around the school's grounds, oblivious to the seriousness and fractiousness with which the adults approach the subject of guiding children. While the other two stories here are as real or as fake as any fictional narrative within a film, the heroic story is self-consciously presented as a work of imagination, taking place within a dreamlike, surrealistic, brightly artificial world that seems to intersect with the reality of the rest of the film at right angles. A woman carrying a baby, rescued from the vicious king, climbs out of a hidden passage in a tree as a car passes by on the nearby road, heading towards the school. As Resnais' camera pans to follow this woman from a fairy tale, the naturalistic scenery of the forest surrounding the school is interrupted by the intrusion of painted sets that look like animated images inserted into the real world, as jarring as the intersection of drawn and filmed worlds in Who Framed Roger Rabbit?. This tale of knights and kings and monsters and beautiful damsels in distress is obviously the outgrowth of the children's imaginations, as they run around the school, mostly unheeded by the adults, their imaginations running wild, creating exciting scenes of battle as the hero vanquishes a humanoid lizard, saves the woman and wins her love, and sets off towards his destiny.

The other stories here are just as fictional and as artificial, even if they seem to have a mostly more "realistic" sensibility to the way they're filmed and presented. The World War I story is a lurid melodrama of rejected love and betrayal, as Forbek, after the war, finds that his fiancée Livia (Fanny Ardant) has left him for another man, their mutual friend Raoul (André Dussollier). Forbek invites the couple, along with the rest of their friends, back to his castle, where he proposes a strange experiment: he gives everyone a potion that sends them into a deep sleep, and begins what he calls a process of rebirth, brainwashing his guests into childlike, innocent new people of pure love and happiness. The modern-day story is similarly about the implausibility of romantic notions like "true love," which the naïve teacher Élisabeth (Sabine Azéma) believes in despite her own troubled history with romance. The more cynical Nora (Geraldine Chaplin) proposes a bet with her friend Claudine (Martine Kelly): that they can get the idealistic Élisabeth to fall in love with a man of their choosing — the goofy, childlike Robert (Pierre Arditi) — and thereby prove that "true love" is a construct, subject to manipulations and misdirections.


What Nora and Forbek have in common is a desire to shape reality to their own whims; they are the writers, the creators, of their own private stories, with real life as the raw material for their dramas and love stories, except that life isn't so malleable, and people seldom follow the predictable dramatic arcs of fictional characters. Forbek and Nora are, in their own ways, and for their own selfish reasons, trying to tell a story using other people, but their plans don't play out with the iconic narrative flow of the hero's legendary slaying of the evil king. This is the essence of the film, an inquiry into the relationship between reality and the art that supposedly mirrors it and influences it. Are the stories we tell reflections of reality? Or are they ideals that we then aim for in our lives, desperately and fruitlessly trying to make life conform to the logic of a story? Life might be a novel, a story, a fairy tale — or, as in the English version of the title, "a bed of roses" — but it's not necessarily the story we want or expect. As the audience, we might believe that the hero or heroine of the story has chosen incorrectly, that the happy ending is not quite the happy ending we thought was coming, that this isn't the love story we thought it was. Those who try to shape reality into a story of their choosing, meanwhile, find reality resisting, the branches of its stories extending in unpredictable directions, refusing to be trimmed into the neat shape of a novelistic structure.

At the same time, the film is very much shaped as a narrative, if not by Nora and Forbek, those would-be storytellers, then by Resnais and Gruault, whose control over this fictional construction purposefully frustrates the characters' illusions of control. Resnais continually announces the film's fictional nature by increasingly styling it as a musical comedy, having the characters break out into song. The music creeps into the film, at first appearing only sporadically in strange little fragments of singing, often with an offscreen voice repeating a phrase that had just been spoken, as though hinting at an alternative realization of this story in which the characters express themselves through song. The music takes over more frequently as the film goes along, occasionally interrupting the diegesis entirely for proper musical numbers, like Élisabeth's passionate defense of the concept of "true love" against the skepticism of Nora and Claudine. "The man I'll fall in love with isn't a bar of soap," she sings fiercely, angered by Nora's comparison of love to picking out household goods in a supermarket — she's romantic and sentimental, possessed by ideas handed down by romantic novels, grand romantic fictions, great love stories. Nora, in contrast, seizes on the comparison to commercial products, believing that love is as susceptible to marketing as anything else. In the end, neither of them is quite right: the reality isn't quite as romantic as Élisabeth thinks it is, which gives the happy ending a bittersweet undercurrent, but Nora is also proven wrong in her belief that people can be moved around and forced into playing roles in stories right out of fiction.


The film is thus both a tribute to the imagination and, perhaps, a consideration of its limits, of the failings and boundaries erected by human flaws and the pettiness of so many dreams and desires. It's all about the unfettered imagination of a child versus the limited, constricted perspective of an adult, locked into rigid ideologies and ideas about how things should be. When Élisabeth unveils the giant model landscape she uses as a teaching tool, after an initial period of awed murmuring, the other teachers in the audience begin criticizing her from their many perspectives — she's blocking children's imaginations, she's too neutral politically, she's not pragmatic enough — and the conference degenerates into splintered arguments and a chorus of chattering, singing voices. Only the children, and Robert with his childlike sense of imagination, ignore all this discord and begin happily playing with the model, exploring its layout and its interchangeable parts, eagerly constructing new combinations of modules. The conference attendees say they're only interested in the happiness and success of children, but their various theories and ideologies are developed seemingly without any regard for actual children, with little true understanding of their charges. At one point, one of the educators, who professes libertarian beliefs and claims to encourage freedom in the classroom, gets interrupted when one of the rambunctious kids runs into the room and throws a tomato at the teacher's face, expressing exactly the freedom that he says he wants.

This is another typically thought-provoking and challenging experiment from Resnais, whose formal experimentation has always mirrored his films' themes of artifice, memory, thought, history and time. Here, he weaves together three separate stories that seem to share only a common locale, but actually are linked, much more interestingly, in terms of Resnais' thematic focus on the nature of storytelling and its relationship with "reality." At the same time, La vie est un roman is also, itself, a grandly entertaining set of stories, from its theatrical legend to the lavish, elegant style and B-movie sci-fi trappings of the post-WWI story to the musical romance of the modern story. Resnais is deconstructing the form and purpose of narrative and fiction, but crucially, he's not denying the pleasure and the imaginative potential of these stories, which is perhaps why he ends the film by giving the last word to the playing children, singing a song that hints at an adult "understanding" that's always just out of reach, no matter what one's age is.

Story of Women

Claude Chabrol's Story of Women is an excellent satirical drama that explores life under the German occupation of France and the Vichy government that served as puppets for the Nazis. Like Chabrol's Violette, made a decade earlier, this film is based on a true story of an infamous woman, in this case Marie Latour, who performed abortions and rented rooms to prostitutes in order to support herself and her family during the Vichy era. As in Violette, Isabelle Huppert again plays a woman whose amorality and self-interest come into conflict with a hypocritical morality that's especially difficult for women to navigate successfully.

Marie starts the film as a typical housewife of the era, scrounging and struggling to provide for her two children while her husband Paul (François Cluzet) is a prisoner of war in Germany. Paul's return doesn't change things much for Marie, since he can't hold down a job and is, understandably, interested in reuniting carnally with his wife after his time in the camps. Marie isn't interested, though, and seems to resent Paul for returning while others, like her Jewish friend Rachel and the men sent to Germany to work as an exchange for the returning prisoners, were sent away. While Paul wastes away at home, unable to work, making cutout pictures to pass the time, Marie gradually begins earning money by performing abortions — for prostitutes, women who have slept with German soldiers, and women already overburdened with children — and renting her room out during the day to her prostitute friend Lulu (Marie Trintignant).

Marie is doing what she can to make her way through a difficult and desperate time. Food is scarce, and before Marie begins bringing in a real income, the family lives in a cramped apartment and subsists on thin soup that Paul says is as bad as the food he got in the camps. Marie seems to have nothing but contempt for men, except perhaps for Lucien (Nils Tavernier), who she eventually takes as a lover, presumably because he's as much of a self-interested opportunist as she is, since he openly collaborates with the occupying Nazis. Otherwise, Marie knows, men don't understand, especially not her ineffectual husband. She justifies her actions with the rationalization that she's feeding her family and doing valuable work to help struggling women, and when she's faced with the consequences of her actions — in a powerful scene where a woman confronts Marie about the death of her sister from a botched abortion procedure — Marie is only briefly affected before she's able to move on cheerfully and blithely with her life.


The film is very much about the moral cost of surviving in a time when morality has been twisted and corrupted, and especially about the specific dilemma of women in this situation. One of the film's most emotionally intense scenes is a prolonged closeup on the face of a woman who explains to Marie why she wants an abortion: she's been pregnant six times in seven years, and resents her children, hates the way her body has been changed by these constant pregnancies, hates how she's been made to feel like an animal whose only role is bearing children and producing milk. It's an astonishing moment, and though Marie doesn't seem to have any feminist motives for her actions, there's no mistaking that her work is an expression of the helplessness of women in this time, in this system. Other women come to see Marie after sleeping with German soldiers, refusing to have children resulting from the occupation of their country — and the occupation of their bodies.

The real stakes here become especially clear in the film's powerful final act, in which Marie is arrested for her crimes and tried by a hypocritical Vichy court that's eager to make an example of her, to reassert French morality and regain some of the national self-respect lost by the country's military defeat and occupation. The judge tells Marie, with a self-satisfied smirk, that her actions reveal "a certain cynicism, a certain debasement" that is, of course, the debasement of France itself beneath the Vichy regime. The judges speak of morality while shipping out Jewish prisoners to Germany to be killed, while engaging in cowardly trades by which French prisoners of war are returned to France but other French citizens are sent to work in Germany, effectively trading one set of prisoners for another. The male tribunal that sits in judgment over Marie is eager to condemn her, eager for some sense of morality and justice, and she's an easy target: an uneducated woman who acted in self-interest to provide for herself and her family, to elevate herself above the generally miserable conditions afflicting the country.

This is a specifically Christian hypocrisy, too, and the Vichy court is intimately linked to Christianity. In the women's prison, nuns preside over the prisoners, and some of the women prisoners condemn Marie for her sins while others seem more understanding. There's cruel irony in Vichy swathing itself in Christian morality, speaking of the souls of the unborn while shipping thousands of living souls off to the death camps. In one fantastic scene, Marie spits out a bile-encrusted prayer that expresses her contempt for this religious sham: "Hail Mary, full of shit. Rotten is the fruit of your womb." Huppert delivers a fantastic performance throughout, but especially in the harrowing final act, as all the luxuries and fineries she'd accumulated throughout the film are stripped away, leaving behind a vulnerable, confused woman who doesn't entirely understand why she's being punished in this way. Marie isn't always an especially likable character, but Huppert perfectly captures the complicated psychological makeup of this woman, while Chabrol contextualizes her as a product of her times, a reflection of the warped morality instituted by the very people who ultimately punish her.

Mon oncle d'Amerique

Alain Resnais' Mon oncle d'Amerique is a fascinating narrative experiment from the director who, more than any other, has always been concerned with the workings of the human mind. This film takes as its subject the biological processes by which the mind and personality are shaped, the ways in which one's persona is formed from the sum of one's experiences and the neurological foundations governing our reactions in various situations. The film is narrated, sporadically, by the French neurosurgeon Henri Laborit, who discusses the film's three interconnected stories in terms of behavioral biology ideas that explain the actions of the characters in these dramas. Laborit discusses fight-or-flight in a human society in which the "fight" component of that response has been rendered largely unacceptable. He analyzes careers and relationships in terms of systems of reward and punishment that are ingrained from very early in childhood. He observes the ways in which psychological stresses related to these biological underpinnings are expressed in anxiety and psychosomatic illness.

It's a potentially reductive and limiting rubric, pulling apart these dramatic stories and discussing the action in terms of biology and behavior. In fact, though, Resnais, working from a script by Jean Gruault, is after something far more complex. Gruault had also written the script for François Truffaut's The Wild Child, and at one point Laborit's voiceover mentions that when a human child grows up in isolation, without any human contact, he will be like "a little animal" with no language or other human behaviors. Resnais, much more powerfully and inventively than Truffaut, is exploring what it means to be human, exploring the essence of humanity as a sum of experiences, biology, and most crucially, one's interactions with other people. A core idea of the film is the concept that the individual human mind is actually formed from contacts with other people, from ideas learned from others, experiences, memories. An individual human, then, is actually comprised of the other people he or she has come into contact with, the experiences they've shared, the memories they've formed together. Resnais and Gruault, in collaboration with Laborit, have rendered science and biology as poetry, discovering that to analyze and dissect the nature of human behavior is not to render it cold and clinical, but to make the mystery all the more remarkable.

As Laborit says towards the end of the film, implicitly responding to such criticisms of science, "knowing the laws of gravity doesn't make us free from gravity." In the same way, the film's analysis of its stories in terms of behaviorist theories doesn't render the stories abstract or rob them of their power as human dramas. Indeed, what's quite remarkable about the film is that despite its constant breaking of the narrative illusion with explanatory voiceovers and comparisons to animals and laboratory experiments, the film remains consistently affecting on a human level. These are simple stories of disappointment, anxiety, and desire. René (Gérard Depardieu) is plagued by anxiety about his career; he's dedicated himself to his work but a series of mergers and shake-ups at his company put him in ever more precarious situations, ultimately forcing him to choose between his career and his family life. Jean (Roger Pierre) is a politician and aspiring writer who starts an affair with Janine (Nicole Garcia) just as his own career starts going through some trouble. And Janine has her own story, about her dreams of being an actress and her up-and-down romance with the married Jean.


It's not only biology that drives these stories. People learn from experiences, from the models provided by parents and other relatives — and also the models provided by the cinema. Throughout the film, Resnais cuts in excerpts of black-and-white films starring Jean Gabin, Jean Marais, and Danielle Darrieux, who provide templates for the actions of the three protagonists, cinematic role models whose behaviors are often echoed in this film's stories. The cinematic reference points parallel the biological ones, suggesting that just as biology contributes to the shape of a person's life and soul, the things that a person sees and experiences also add to the person they might become.

In the film's second half, Resnais shuffles the structure and begins interspersing the dramatic scenes more and more frequently with scenes of laboratory experiments featuring mice, scenes from the protagonists' childhoods that connect back to their later lives, and, hilariously, inserts in which men in rat masks enact scenes of love and competition. Those surreal interludes simultaneously buttress the theme of biology and behavior and undercut it, since they emphasize the gap between the biological foundations of behavior and the actual complexity and variety of human behavior. This is why, far from reducing humanity to a series of programmed responses, what Resnais, Gruault and Laborit are doing here is really all about the complexity and mystery of behavior, the intimacy between science and poetry in creating a full portrait of humanity.

In the film's powerful, mysterious final sequence, Resnais shows an urban building that has an image of a shady green forest covering one of its walls. Resnais cuts to successively closer and closer shots, and in each one the illusion of a tree growing from concrete is shattered more and more decisively. First the texture of bricks can be seen in the image, which is a mural painted on the wall. As Resnais cuts to even closer views, the overall sense of the image is compromised, and it stops looking like a tree at all — in the closest shot, the film's final shot, the image has become abstract smears of paint on bricks. At that intimate distance, it is impossible to tell that from afar the paint creates a rather convincing illusion of forest greenery; up close it's just paint, seemingly splattered on the bricks with little care, just a splotch that looks like nothing at all. It's a startling and ambiguous metaphor, suggesting that the closer we look at something — like human behavior — the more mysteries are introduced, even as looking closely increases understanding about how things are put together.

Inspector Lavardin

In 1985, Claude Chabrol's Cop au vin reinvigorated his career at a time when he'd been struggling and floundering. A darkly comic murder mystery set in a small town where everyone had secrets to hide, it was especially notable for the twinkly-eyed presence of the comic actor Jean Poiret, playing the cheerfully brutal and unethical Inspector Jean Lavardin, investigating a murder with wit and excessive methods. The film was such a success that Chabrol immediately followed it up with Inspector Lavardin, which as the title indicated shifted the inspector to the center of the story. There's some continuity with the first film, in that Lavardin's excessive brutality in dunking a suspect's head underwater had got him transferred even further into the country, but otherwise he seems none the worse for wear, every bit the same mischievous, wickedly clever bloodhound from the first film, digging up trouble and mystery that stretches well beyond the murder mystery that he's ostensibly solving.

Like the first Lavardin film, this one is all about ferreting out the weirdness and wickedness of the supposedly respectable, and in this it's a specifically Christian, Catholic form of hypocrisy that Lavardin's investigation is uncovering. The opening scenes, before Lavardin's arrival, introduce the respected Catholic writer and moralist Raoul Mons (Jacques Dacqmine), having a joyless lunch with his family. Mons hilariously tells his maid/cook that they're just "simple folk," that she can place the food on the table rather than serving them, which already marks him as one of Chabrol's typical comically clueless bourgeois figures. His family — wife Hélène (Bernadette Lafont), stepdaughter Véronique (Hermine Clair) and his wife's brother Claude (Jean-Claude Brialy) — doesn't seem to have any more respect for him than Chabrol does, and they take any opportunity to have some fun when he's out of the room. While Raoul's not around, Claude entertains the women with Chaplin's famous dance of the dinner rolls, and then Raoul heads off to lead a movement to ban a blasphemous play called Our Father Who Farts in Heaven.

Needless to say, this is a richly, darkly funny film, and once Lavardin arrives on the scene, his deceptively casual form of investigation only adds to the fun. He's not quite as charmingly fascistic as he was in Cop au vin, but he's still a little light on ethics, especially when it's revealed that Raoul's wife is Lavardin's former lover, and the detective promptly moves into the dead man's home. The more he investigates, the more he finds out about Raoul's hypocritical life. Chabrol really pours on the outrage: this supposed Christian is a drug dealer and user, a philanderer, and eventually it turns out, a blackmailer and rapist.


Lavardin, who's long been nursing some pain over Hélène leaving him long ago, seems less interested in the mystery, more interested in protecting Hélène and her daughter, who's named Véronique just as Lavardin had once wanted to name his own daughter, if he'd had one. He quickly becomes paternal and protecting towards the girl — who even shares the inspector's piercing blue eyes, though there's no indication she's actually his daughter — and there's a sense of yearning for family in the dogged inspector, who towards the end of the film suddenly claims that he has a family, then admits with a shrug that the photo in his wallet was not of his family but of a woman who'd killed her kids.

Chabrol brings a typically sharp visual style to this farcical murder mystery. There are numerous shots that highlight the theme of surveillance and witnessing running through the film: shots through binoculars, through the viewfinder of a camera, from a high vantage point where a hidden recording device sits, and through a magnifying glass that expands the inspector's eye to massive size, because of course he takes in everything. (That last shot is referenced in Chabrol's final film Inspector Bellamy, whose titular cop is a descendant of Lavardin.) Claude has a bizarre hobby that also relates to seeing, painting glass eyes that copy the eyes of famous people (Salvador Dali, complete with a set of eyebrows) and people he knows, like his sister. In Claude's room, surrounded with shelves on which pairs of eyeballs sit staring, raised on stalks or hidden behind masquerade masks, one can't help but feel that one is being constantly watched, but the same impression dogs the inspector and the other characters throughout the film. A pair of tabloid photographers prowl around everywhere, snapping pictures and mirroring the sneakiness of the inspector himself, who also watches from in hiding, seeing things he's not supposed to see. And in the film's final twist the mystery is solved through a surveillance video tape, a hidden eye looking down on the action and revealing the truth.

Not that Lavardin is especially interested in the truth, because as soon as he learns it, his efforts shift to covering it up, which makes the film's ending strangely hilarious and ironic. Chabrol is clearly having fun here, and though the film is concerned with the usual Chabrol theme of digging into the seedy underbelly of things, it's obviously in a much lighter context. Part of the fun is reuniting Brialy and Lafont, who'd appeared, together and separately, in some of Chabrol's earliest features, and here provide some continuity with the director's past. There's also continuity with the previous Lavardin film, especially in the inspector's obsessive breakfast habits, here indicated with his scolding of the cook for her overdone eggs. Chabrol's second outing with the clever, amoral inspector is as delightful, and as delightfully perverse, as the first.

School Daze

Spike Lee's second feature, School Daze, is a fictionalized reflection of the director's experiences at the historically black Morehouse College, here renamed Mission College. It's a loose-limbed musical satire of various attitudes and types within the black community, especially the conflicts between the politically conscious, radicalized students led by Dap (Laurence Fishburne) and the party animal fraternity Gamma Phi Gamma, led by Julian (Giancarlo Esposito, a weak link in a generally good cast). Dap (and presumably Lee as well) is disgusted by the whole Greek system, which he sees as a repudiation of his own radical activism, a way of involving young black students in inconsequential showmanship rather than something that truly matters. This point is driven home early on when Julian's Gamma Dogs interrupt a rally that Dap is giving to convince the university to divest its holdings in South Africa, since ironically Mission has been lagging behind white colleges in sending that anti-apartheid message. The Gamma Dogs, including Dap's cousin Half Pint (Lee), barge onto the scene, distracting from Dap's oratory with their goofy, ridiculous antics and pointless histrionics.

For Dap, and for Lee, the Gamma Dogs represent the subjugation of black male identity, particularly by the military. The Gamma Dog initiation rites, like those of many fraternities, involve the pledges acting in emasculating ways, but there's an especially degrading component to the way Julian has the pledges act like dogs, dragged around on chains by the accepted frat members, barking, eating dog food from dog bowls, and engaging in militaristic rituals. This imagery resonates with the history of slavery, putting black men in chains and teaching them to obey authority, to willfully humiliate themselves in public. Later, during a sex scene between Julian and his girlfriend Jane (Tisha Campbell), she licks his fraternity brand; he's willingly branded himself the way slaves were once branded by their masters. The Gamma Dogs' chain of command and the military discipline they impose on pledges also suggests a connection with the military, as though they're preparing these young black men for a life of obeying orders, submitting to their superiors, and sacrificing their self-respect in order to be accepted into society.

The conflict between Dap and Julian extends to their respective girlfriends, Rachel (Kyme) and Jane. Jane is a member of the Gamma Rays, the organization of the Gamma fraternity's girlfriends, and they're very different from Rachel and her friends. Lee stages a musical number set in a hair salon, dramatizing the conflict between the glammed-up Gamma Rays and the politically conscious, Afrocentric women associated with Dap's activist crew. The Gamma Rays are seen as the women who want to be white, with generally lighter skin, poofed-up hair and even, in at least one case, blue contact lens. They're contrasted against the women who have darker skin and who don't try to hide or change their nappy hair. Lee stages this conflict between different conceptions of racial identity like something out of West Side Story, a break in the reality of the film that recasts this battle of ideas in frenzied choreography.


This is the only musical number in the film that really breaks the diegesis. The rest of the film's music is posed as actual performances as a part of frat rituals, parties and school rallies. Some of the music is wince-inducingly saccharine, which might be intentional, especially as juxtaposed against the soulful gospel number that accompanies the opening credits' black-and-white photos from the history of civil rights. At one point, Lee cuts between Dap and Rachel having sex and a lame song being performed at the Gammas' party, drawing an implicit contrast between this whitewashed music and the passionate relationship of this couple who shun the Gammas' frivolity. Other performances, like the chants incorporated into the Gamma Dog initiations, are grating and annoying by design. The point is, much of the music in the film seems intended more to deliver an idea or underscore a polemical distinction than to simply exist as good music. As interesting as the film is in terms of the ideas it's exploring and the racial hot buttons it's fearlessly pushing, it kind of fails as a musical because the music is so secondary to the politics.

Even if a lot of the musical numbers are unsatisfying — a dance party towards the end of the film seems to drag along forever with little purpose or effect — the film remains an interesting early sign of Lee's preoccupations and the brash style he's crafted to explore the sensitive areas of race and intra-race politics. What's interesting about the film is that, though Lee is unquestionably on Dap's side in this debate between African identity politics and frat bro ignorance, he doesn't entirely let Dap off the hook. Dap's arguments with Rachel push him to think about his approach to women and to question his own judgmental tendencies, like his distrust of lighter-skinned black people, a form of racism as insidious as when the judgment flows in the opposite direction. Even more provocatively, there's a scene where some local men (led by Samuel L. Jackson in an early role) confront Dap and his friends, revealing that they see Dap much as Dap himself sees the Gammas: as wannabes, trying to be something they're not by educating themselves. It's the extreme version of Dap's ideology, as regressive as the Gammas' desire to assimilate and ignore their heritage, and Lee's inclusion of this scene complicates the simple dichotomy that exists in the on-campus scenes.

The film ends with a jarring, fourth-wall-breaking sequence that abruptly all but dispenses with the narrative in favor of a literal "wake up" call, with Dap running around the campus, screaming for everyone to "wake up." This summons is directly addressed to the audience far more than it is to the film's characters, who seem to suddenly and passively accept Dap's wisdom after rejecting him throughout the film. It's not a narratively believable or satisfying ending — Julian's sudden reawakening in the finale is especially unconvincing — but it doesn't seem like it's meant to be: after the Gamma Dogs' antics reach a truly despicable climax that reveals their abysmal attitude towards women, some kind of "wake up" call was obviously needed. Dap's turn to the camera explicitly implicates the audience in the behavior they've just seen, forcing those watching to think about which roles they'd inhabit, which side they'd choose.

The Draughtsman's Contract

The nature of power, as played out through a sexual and economic game of class, property and inheritance, is the somewhat obscured subject of Peter Greenaway's masterfully baffling, frequently hilarious 1982 film The Draughtsman's Contract. This is a film in which surface appearances are very much set off against the reality underneath, a reality that can never quite be seen directly, head on, but only glimpsed out of the corner of one's eye: truth, like the living statue that mysteriously moves around the grounds of a rural mansion, rude and naked but mostly unseen by the mannered aristocrats who inhabit this estate circa 1600s England, is so elusive that one is never quite sure if one has actually glimpsed the truth or merely a figment of the imagination. Right from the beginning, Greenaway is hinting at the disconnect between presentation and truth, as during the credits he cuts away to a high society party at which the bewigged, heavily made up guests tell charmingly scatalogical and urinary anecdotes that seem to be very much at odds with their elaborately sophisticated appearances and the bemused titters with which they relate these stories of bodily function. Rarely again in the film do they ever seem to have their guards down so thoroughly, do they ever acknowledge the workings of the body so directly, but even here, their language is so ornate, their refinement so complete, that they manage to make these bawdy tales of diarrhea and peeing vigorously in buckets sound like delightful chatter over tea.

Language is very important to this film, which boasts a marvelously clever script by Greenaway in which every word, every circumspect and torturously polite turn of phrase, disguises some secondary meaning, often a naughty bit of sexual double entendre — lots of appreciative banter about fruit, ripeness, fecundity, and "the maturing delights of her country garden" — or a sly insinuation about someone or other's reputation, or a threat so carefully hidden in banal chit-chat and freighted symbols that its more sinister meaning might utterly pass over the head of the one being threatened. There's a very complex game being played here, hidden away beneath all the ostentatious politeness. The artist Mr. Neville (Anthony Higgins) is invited by Mrs. Herbert (Janet Suzman) to undertake twelve drawings of her husband's lovely country estate, which, she implies, her husband prizes as his property even over his own wife. After much persuasion, the two sign a contract that, in typically circumspect language, promises both sexual and economic remuneration for Mr. Neville's artistic services, and the arrogant young artist installs himself at the Herberts' estate, in Mr. Herbert's absence, for a period of twelve days to complete the drawings, earn his pay, and help himself to the sexual favors of the lady of the house.


Though Neville believes himself to be the one in control, the one benefiting the most from this arrangement, the reality proves to be quite different from the appearance. There is definitely an uneven balance of power here, but contrary to Neville's confidence in his own prowess, both artistic and sexual, he is not the one with the power. He is lower-class, despite his finery and his polite manners, and none of the aristocrats ever truly accept him into their class even as they welcome him into their homes. And it turns out that they are playing a game at a far higher level than he had imagined, a game that increasingly entangles him helplessly because, not being of their class, he is utterly unequipped to engage in these games involving property and parentage. Very suggestive in this regard is the scene where Mrs. Herbert's daughter, Mrs. Talmann (Anne-Louise Lambert) explains to Neville the identity of a young boy who wanders the grounds under the care of a tutor. He's an orphan, she says, whose father died and mother converted to Catholicism, so he needed to be cared for by relatives here. "An orphan, madame," Neville sputters, "because his mother became a Catholic?" Indeed, and Neville, with his Scottish sympathies and incomprehension of the aristocrats' religious bigotry, simply proves again and again that he does not belong here, that he is not truly a part of this milieu.

No, he is simply a tool to be used, and his drawings increasingly begin to seem like they are meant to play an important part in an elaborate plot being concocted, possibly by everyone except Neville, behind the scenes. There is considerable debate within the film, amongst the aristocrats who are privy to the drawings' contents, about precisely what kind of an "allegory" Mr. Neville is attempting to convey with these seemingly symbol-laden depictions, and one suspects that Greenaway is trying to excite the same debate regarding the film as a whole. Neville, for his part, continually insists that he simply draws what he sees, that he's merely an objective documentarian of reality, but Greenaway is undermining that artistic innocence, that naïve understanding of how art works. No drawing, no piece of art, can (or maybe should) passively document the world as it is, no matter how mechanical and purely visual Neville tries to make his art with his rigidly selected views, his viewing grid that breaks each scene into carefully composed rectangles, his totalitarian insistence that his views be uninterrupted, everything laid out exactly as he demands.


Like Mr. Herbert, who'd shaped his land into a structured, carefully manicured and maintained geometric layout in order to tame nature itself, Neville believes that he can control the world, that he can dictate what he sees and doesn't see, and thus what will appear or not appear in his drawings. But circumstances and the subtle interventions of various unknown conspirators shatter this illusion: his work is not merely innocent documentation, and his static, controlled views are increasingly disrupted by changes mysteriously wrought from one sitting to one another, clues planted, bits of evidence suggesting various covert conspiracies and activities, details pointing to murder or adultery. In other words, the carefully laid out gardens, so meticulously planned by Mr. Herbert and so thoroughly documented by Mr. Neville, are disordered and littered with evidence that the placid surface of things in only a thin, all too easily broken barrier separating polite society from all the messiness, dishonesty and ugliness of life, which keeps impolitely depositing obstructions into Neville's view, forcing him to make concessions to change and impermanence and imperfection rather than being able to craft, uninterrupted, a static, lifeless, unpopulated vision of the estate's grounds, blissfully undisturbed by any actual evidence of life or humanity.

The film is formally laid out in such a way as to both superficially confirm Neville's seeming mastery and subtly undermine it. Greenaway sticks almost entirely to static, carefully composed shots, often shot at least in part through the viewing grid that Neville uses to impose geometric order on what he sees so he can render it in his drawings. And yet Greenaway undercuts this rigidity at every turn, constantly having Neville's view obscured or interrupted by intrusive figures walking across his field of view, marring the unmoving beauty of the landscape. At one point, the director holds a shot of an unpopulated landscape long enough for the sun to be hidden by clouds and then break free, so that a long dark shadow passes across the green grass and then vanishes again, even the sky itself introducing movement and change into what Neville would like to freeze and order. When a thick gray fog rolls across the estate, Neville is unable to work, pacing impatiently back and forth while he waits for his view to clear again; if sinister aristocratic conspiracies don't undercut his dominion, then the elements conspire to remind him of his helplessness. Michael Nyman's enthralling score, appropriately enough, embodies the same dichotomy, combining courtly elegance with a propulsive, lively quality that suggests all the skullduggery and mystery lurking within the film's surface depiction of aristocratic refinement.

Greenaway's love of lists, as seen in his early avant-garde shorts and his exhaustive, exhausting first feature The Falls, persists here in the narration that meticulously describes the conditions for each of the twelve drawings. So perhaps, to some extent, Greenaway is poking fun at his own pretensions to artistic control, his own fussy obsessive-compulsiveness about naming things, about grouping objects and people, sights and sounds, into categories and descriptions, creating order through art. Key to the film is the question of the artist's responsibility to do more — as Greenaway, certainly, always has — than simply document and observe.

She's Gotta Have It

Spike Lee's debut feature, She's Gotta Have It, is a quirky, interesting view of sexuality and the double standards applied to men and women. Nola Darling (Tracy Camilla Johns) is sexually liberated, and she makes no secret of the fact that she's not a one-man woman. She's going out with three guys at once: the narcissistic, shallow Greer (John Canada Terrell), the earnest Jamie (Tommy Redmond Hicks), and the brash, funny Mars (Lee). The guys think she's a slut, or a nymphomaniac, that there's something wrong with her, even though of course they're all just as promiscuous; when Nola rejects Mars one night, he immediately dials up another girl and tells her how much he misses her. Nola's simply refusing to live by anyone else's rules, refusing to want or to do what she's supposed to do just because someone tells her to. "I don't believe in regrets," she says, and she seems to mean it. She's her own person, resisting conventional ideals like marriage and monogamy.

The first shot of Nola shows a bed with the covers rustling, as though in the midst of passionate sex, but then Nola sits up, alone, addressing the camera. It's an appropriate introduction for a character who's often defined by others (including Lee as the director, at times) strictly in terms of her polymorphous sexuality, but who just wants to be appreciated on her own terms, not judged just because she enjoys sex and doesn't want to be tied down to any one man. Lee probes this icon of female sexuality with a pseudo-documentary style in which Nola and her three men all talk directly to the camera, as does Nola's estranged friend Clorinda (Lee's sister Joie), who's disgusted by her friend's attitude towards sex, and the lesbian Opal (Raye Dowell), who wants Nola as badly as the men do. As Nola herself explains towards the end of the film, all of these people might understand parts of her, but they don't understand the full woman, and they all try to get her to conform to a role that she's not ready to fill.

The multiple perspectives and direct, casual addresses to the camera give the film a loose, jazzy vibe. Indeed, it's a pretty loose film all around, as one would expect from an early feature. Lee's style is already vibrant and punchy, scattering the film with stray fragments of New York street photography to ground the story in his beloved hometown. But the performances are unfortunately inconsistent, and the direct addresses are often awkward and poorly acted. Even Johns, who is a charming and expressive screen presence, with a radiant smile and an ability to say a lot with her eye movements, is mostly flat in her line readings. Terrell is probably even worse, though at least it seems like his character is supposed to be a stiff killjoy. Lee himself gets an easier time, basically playing his own goofy self, hiding behind tremendous glasses, wearing his grungy, scuffed-up sneakers even during sex. At one point, Mars excitedly raps with Jamie about a Knicks game, channeling the director's well-known love of basketball, ripping on Larry Bird — "the ugliest motherfucker in the NBA!" — and briefly finding some common ground with the otherwise aloof Jamie. Mars' enthusiasm is so infectious, his character so outrageously funny, that it's easy to miss the somewhat hateful things he says about Nola, slipped seamlessly into his patter.


As funny as Lee is, Greer is the richest target of mockery in the film, providing comic relief with moments like his earnest monologue about the "three penis monster." The best scene, though, is the one where Nola seduces him and he responds by slowly, methodically undressing, carefully folding his clothes item by item as he takes them off, smoothing out the wrinkles, taking so long that by the time he's ready to get into bed Nola is bored and frustrated, rolling her eyes. Lee deliberately extends the scene, letting Greer's fastidious stripping play out in plodding real time, the joke getting funnier and funnier the longer he stretches it out. In scenes like this, Lee's goofy humor and stylistic restlessness recalls early Woody Allen, an obvious reference point for this film.

She's Gotta Have It is much less assured in its serious moments. A sex scene between Jamie and Nola late in the film is especially uncomfortable because it pretty much plays out like a rape except that Nola, uncharacteristically, submits to it. It's an ugly scene that seems to undermine Nola's sexual independence and leaves a sour taste in one's mouth during the film's final act, which stutters to a halt rather than really wrapping up the film's many provocative threads.

The film's flaws are indicative of a young filmmaker just finding his voice, but in many other respects Lee is already fully formed here. His love of New York and his love of the cinema shine through in a big way, especially during a playful and unexpected musical interlude, in bright color, when Jamie has some dancers perform an allegorical love story for Nola as a birthday present. It's a bit of a French New Wave meta diversion that briefly hints at the bold colors to come in Lee's later films. But the film's black-and-white cinematography is actually one of its best assets, switching between a functional, low-key style for the "documentary" sequences and gorgeous, stylized noir-esque imagery during the film's lushly erotic sex scenes. In these scenes, naked bodies seem to shine brightly against a black background, with candlelight flickering over bare skin and every intimate contact charged with pleasure. The film's occasional eroticism jars against its goofier tendencies — never more so than when Lee's Mars is involved in the sex — but this sensual aesthetic is actually a perfect way to privilege the perspective of Nola, who genuinely loves and enjoys sex, having fun with her body and her lovers. She's Gotta Have It is an interesting early work from Lee, a bold, provocative, uneven examination of sex and gender that's as funny as it is thought-provoking.

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade

The third film in Steven Spielberg's Indiana Jones series was Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and after the strange, overblown tone of Temple of Doom (which chronologically serves as a prequel to the series), this film continues much more directly from Raiders of the Lost Ark. Once again, Indiana (Harrison Ford) must try to track down a legendary Christian relic — the Holy Grail this time — before it falls into the hands of the Nazis, even though one would think that the Nazis would have learned their lesson after the last time they actually got a hold of what they'd been searching for. The film is more than just a repeat of the formula from Raiders, though, because this time around, Indy's no longer a solitary adventurer, but is instead surrounded by both a literal and figurative family. Of course, the first two Indy films had sidekicks and accomplices who tagged along with the hero, but this time around he's gathered together a more substantial crew.

Foremost among them is Indy's father, Henry Jones (Sean Connery), who's been searching for the Grail for his entire lifetime, and who's been kidnapped by the Nazis as part of their quest to discover the source of eternal youth. Indy must rescue his father and find the Grail, aided by Raiders returnees Sallah (John Rhys-Davies) and Marcus Brody (Denholm Elliott), who in Raiders had been Indy's office-bound acquaintance, sending the adventurer off on his missions but never coming along himself. These men form a loose masculine family for Indy, a rough and ready band of friends and family. The film's last shot shows the four men riding off into the sun and the blood-red sky, an image right out of a Hollywood Western. This is especially appropriate because, more than in the other films, Spielberg is making Indy a cowboy archetype, with his signature hat and his horseback heroics.

The Western references start right with the film's first moments. The clever opening sequence is a referential, and self-referential, tour de force that continually subverts expectations with clever visual gags in which things are seldom what they seem. The first shot evokes the imagery of John Ford's Monument Valley, with a line of mounted riders winding through dirt trails between massive cliffs and red rock mountains. When Spielberg cuts in for the first closeup, though, he reveals that the riders are not Ford's cavalry but a troupe of Boy Scouts, even though they do have the yellow scarves that recall the uniforms of Ford's She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. Soon after, two of the Boy Scouts, hearing strange noises, wander into a cave and find some men eagerly excavating ancient relics from the rocks. One of the men has the familiar fedora of Indiana Jones, but Spielberg keeps his face hidden, first by shooting him from behind and then from slightly above, so that the brim of his hat shades his eyes, showing only the man's unshaven chin and square jaw. He looks like Indy, but it's not him: when he finally looks up it's a different man, and Spielberg quickly reveals that one of the Boy Scouts observing this scene is a young Indiana (River Phoenix), as an onscreen caption identifies the time and place as "Utah, 1912."

The subsequent chase scene, in which Indy boldly steals a valuable relic from the fortune-hunters, is full of in-jokes for fans of the franchise, suggesting where Indy's famous fear of snakes came from, showing the first time he experimented with using a whip, and tweaking audience expectations of Indy's flawless feats by having the young Indy leap off a rock to land on the back of a horse, only to miss and stumble as the horse simply steps forward. The whole sequence is relentlessly meta, building on the history and iconography of this character from the previous two films.


This is everything one would expect from an Indiana Jones movie, all staged with Spielberg's typical panache for action set pieces. There's a thrilling boat chase, and then later in the picture, Spielberg fakes out the audience by hinting that there's going to be a second one, only to have Indy and his dad jump on a motorcycle instead. There's a brief aerial dogfight, followed by a sequence — nodding to Hitchcock's North By Northwest, an obvious touchstone for this film's dashing, globe-trotting adventures — in which Indy and his dad flee on the ground while fighter planes swoop by overhead, raining down machine gun fire. There's a battle in which Indy, riding a horse, manages to outwit and take down a squad of Nazi soldiers and a tank. There's a trawl through underground catacombs filled with rats and a river of petroleum, which of course soon gets set afire. Indy even comes face to face with Hitler himself, in one of the film's more absurdly funny moments. There's a hilarious scene that wouldn't be out of place in a Marx Brothers spy spoof, where Indy and his dad keep spinning around as a secret panel opens up on a Nazi communications room. The thrills are perfectly paced, and the film barrels along at breakneck speed, with crackling dialogue to break up the action scenes.

Connery's Jones Sr. is especially compelling in that respect, perhaps because his dry wit and unflappable demeanor are linked to Indy's unhappy childhood with a mother who died young and a father who was distant and immersed in work. As the opening scenes show, Indy struggled to get his father's attention as a boy, and when he reunites with his father as a grown man, their relationship is uneasy and marked by dark humor. When Indy breaks into a Nazi castle to rescue his dad, Henry hits him over the head with a vase, at which point the two men immediately begin talking past one another: Henry is upset that he shattered what seems to be a valuable Ming vase, while Indy (incorrectly) reads his father's words as guilt over hurting his son. There's a lot of humor like this in the film, built around this father/son disconnection — even Indy's avoidance of the given name he inherited from his dad is evidence of their fraught relationship — and Indy's boyish desire to please his father. At one point, after father and son have evaded the Nazis during a violent and frenetic chase sequence, Indy lets out a whoop of excitement as they leave the last of their pursuers behind, but his smile fades when he sees his father's unimpressed, stoic expression and total disinterest in his son's love of adventure. Indy is a grown man but he still thirsts for fatherly approval, and because of this obvious subtext the film's bantering dialogue often has real bite.

The father/son dynamics are complicated by the presence of Elsa Schneider (Alison Doody), who turns out to be a Nazi but first sleeps with both father and son, which confirms the theme of Indy following in his father's footsteps. Schneider is an interesting character even beyond her importance to the father/son relationship. She's a surprisingly sympathetic Nazi whose allegiances are somewhat ambiguous; it's not at all clear just what she really believes or if her alliance with the Nazis is just a marriage of convenience to get her closer to the Grail, which she desires for her own unstated reasons. Even after she reveals her villainy, her affection for Indy and, to a lesser extent, his father isn't diminished at all. Her best moment, though, is a silent closeup as she watches Indy uncovering clues and preparing to break into a hidden passage through a wall in an underground chamber. She smiles sweetly and affectionately, her eyes shining with warmth: it's a very affecting and mysterious shot, because it suggests a depth of feeling in her that makes the revelation of her true nature somewhat hard to believe. Later, though, when she reveals her betrayal, her smile becomes crazed and sinister, her eyes wild.

The Last Crusade is a worthy successor to Raiders of the Lost Ark, abandoning the darkness and lurid violence of Temple of Doom in favor of the spirited adventure of the first Indy movie. Spielberg successfully channels the tone and the pleasures of that first film without simply duplicating it. It's a fun and exhilarating adventure flick and a worthy addition to the Indy canon.