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.

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.

The Fourth Man

The Fourth Man, Paul Verhoeven's final Dutch-language film before his sojourn to Hollywood to direct films like RoboCop and Basic Instinct, is a typically delirious fantasia from this gleefully controversial director. Awash in lurid Christian symbolism and a fluidly multisexual eroticism, the film is a nightmarish adventure that would do David Lynch proud: a man's dreamlike, elliptical journey into strange territory, guided by a possibly deranged imagination that finds unexpected patterns and recurrences in his experiences. The writer Gerard Reve (Jeroen Krabbé) travels to a distant town in order to give a lecture. Once there, he meets the mysteriously alluring but icy Christine (Renée Soutendijk) and spends the night with her, having sex with her while praising her for her boyish body. In the morning, Gerard plans to leave but is stopped by the discovery that Christine's regular lover is a young man named Herman (Thom Hoffman), who Gerard had previously seen and desired during a brief encounter at the train station. In the hopes of seeing more of Herman, Gerard stays on, supposedly working on his next novel but mostly just drinking and bouncing around within Christine's palatial home, which is adjacent to her lucrative beauty salon.

Christine, it turns out, is a "black widow," a precursor to Basic Instinct's Catherine Trammell, another icy blonde with a predilection for devouring her mates. Just in case Christine's deadly undercurrents aren't apparent from the sinister, gloating smile she displays when she realizes Gerard is going to stay with her, Verhoeven layers on the unsubtle symbolism: the opening credits feature a nasty-looking spider crawling across Christian iconography and wrapping its victims in a web cocoon, while the sign for Christine's "Sphinx" beauty parlor keeps flashing out to read "spin" instead, the Dutch word for "spider." The film is so packed with tongue in cheek visual symbols like this that half the fun is in spotting the references and unraveling the densely tangled webs of meaning. Gerard's story is a confused mingling of Christian sin/redemption and gay fetishism, no more so than in the hilarious sequence where Gerard goes to church and finds a vision of Herman, clad only in a speedo, nailed to a cross like Christ and waiting for Gerard to unclothe him.

Indeed, Gerard's entire story is driven by dreams and visions, by his writer's imagination, which can't help but spin out wild variations on whatever is in front of him. He's obsessed with death. As soon as he steps off the train, he encounters a funeral party that he's at first convinced is for him: the letters on a wreath seem to spell out "Gerard" until the funeral director unfolds the banner, revealing an entirely different name. Later, Gerard makes the same mistake with a letter to Christine, baffled to find it seems to be from him until he smooths out the paper and finds it's from Herman. Throughout the film, appearances can be deceiving, and often the illusory surface falls away to reveal something else. In one of Gerard's dreams, a woman (Geert de Jong) who keeps appearing in both his dreams and his waking life seems to be pointing a gun at him, but then turns the "barrel" to the side to reveal it as a harmless key instead. At another point, a door Gerard sees in his dream, with a distinctive cross-shaped design, is mirrored in a cabinet at Christine's house, which holds film loops chronicling her three dead husbands. Later, Gerard stumbles upon the real door and location from his dream, discovering that it is the crypt where the ashes of Christine's husbands are kept. Dreams and reality weave into one another: a literal resting place, a grave, is echoed in a film vault, which also retains the traces of dead men.


Gerard's portents and nightmares, his outlandish fantasies, lead him through the film, slowly discovering the truth about Christine even as he tries to seduce her lover. This writer's rich fantasy life provides Verhoeven with ample opportunity for visual indulgence, and there are several marvelous tour de force scenes, packed with overt Freudian symbolism and references to the director's cinematic forebears. Early on, Gerard is pulled into a poster in a train car, a photo of a hotel: he wanders into the photo, steps into the eerily empty hotel and walks through its corridors clutching a key, looking for his room number. When he gets to his room, however, the number on the door turns into an eye which stares at him for a moment before oozing out of its socket with a trail of blood and slime behind it — foreshadowing the film's gory conclusion. The whole sequence is reminiscent of Kubrick's The Shining, with its haunted hotel and endless tracking shots down creepily barren hallways. The connection becomes particularly apparent when Gerard is snapped out of this disquieting fantasy to the realization that the poster he was staring at has been streaked with blood — or, actually, tomato juice leaking from a woman's bag in the overhead compartment.

Later, during an even more horrifying sequence, Gerard wanders down a tree-lined path in pursuit of a woman wrapped up in a cloak — the same woman from the train and elsewhere, who he comes to think of as the Virgin Mary, sent to save him. She gives him a key and leads him into a crypt where three slaughtered pigs hang above buckets, their blood dripping out of their flayed carcasses. Finally, Gerard seems to wake up in bed only to experience an even more Freudian nightmare: he is literally castrated, his organ snipped off with Christine's scissors. The scene recalls both the most excessive moments of Fassbinder's oeuvre — especially the slaughterhouse sequence of In a Year With 13 Moons and the hallucinatory epilogue to Berlin Alexanderplatz — and the languid, dreamlike imagery of Maya Deren's avant-garde classic Meshes of the Afternoon. These disparate influences bubble through the film, much like the blending together of ordinarily incompatible elements like religious allegory, dark comedy and the sexual thriller genre.

Of course, this confusion of moods is typical of Verhoeven: he's definitely a genre director but is seldom content with mining just one genre at a time. The Fourth Man is a fun, ridiculous farce, a self-referential loop of a movie that revels in the blasphemous, erotic chaos of its imagery. The film evokes a multitude of potential readings, dealing as it does with gender confusion, male fears and insecurities about women, the complicated intersections of sex and religion and the ways in which ideas about death color and inform all of these things. Verhoeven irreverently throws all these loosely developed ideas together, allowing them to flutter like ribbons through his colorful, visually sumptuous and unforgettable entertainment. Verhoeven defies the usual template of the genre director who smuggles his themes into his films beneath the cover of surface thrills and shocks. With Verhoeven, surface and subtext are flamboyantly united: the ideas of his films are impossible to miss, scrawled as they are with the brightest possible crayons right on the most apparent layer of his films. Verhoeven is not a smuggler, preferring instead to amplify his subversive subjects, to make them entertaining in themselves. In Verhoeven's best work (a long list which surely includes this stunner) he is able to take the subversive and mold it into something garish, beautiful, exciting and viscerally entertaining. He takes the dark undercurrents of other films and lets them out into the sunlight to play.

Films I Love #19: First Name: Carmen (Jean-Luc Godard, 1983)

First Name: Carmen is one of Jean-Luc Godard's greatest films, a fragmentary retelling of the classic opera Carmen, with its tragic tale of the seductive title character (Maruschka Detmers) who earns the love of a soldier named Joseph (Jacques Bonnaffé) only to betray and discard her sensitive lover after not too long. Naturally, Godard uses the familiar story as a thin thread running through a film which would seem quite abstract without this narrative throughline to hold it together. The formal properties of cinema are laid bare, as they often are in Godard's films, and the soundtrack is particularly unpredictable, sometimes falling completely silent even when the characters are speaking onscreen, while at other times introducing non-diegetic sound to disrupt the reality of the image. Carmen's early line that she would like to make a film set near the beach is taken as a cue to introduce the harsh cawing of seagulls onto the soundtrack at random moments; Godard apparently liked the sound so much that he continued using it, with even less narrative justification, in many of his later 80s and 90s films. The soundtrack's construction is made a part of the film, as the narrative is intercut with scenes in which a string quartet rehearses the music for the soundtrack. These rehearsals are not only a typical metafictional intrusion, but provide an alternative narrative, complete with a heroine, the violinist Claire (Myriem Roussel), who becomes every bit as much of a character in this story as Carmen and Joseph. Even Godard is a character in the film, appearing as Carmen's half-crazy uncle, a retired director who now pretends to be sick so he can stay in a hospital; when the doctors try to kick him out, he solemnly promises to get a fever soon. Godard loves to cast himself in these kinds of slapstick parts in his later career, continually reminding his audience that he's the disheveled fool behind this chaos.

As for the central love story, the doomed romance of Carmen and Joseph, it proceeds in a series of isolated moments, broken up by Godard's frequent formalist diversions: cutaways to the ocean or the rehearsing musicians. Even when the lovers are onscreen together, their love seems transitory and fragmentary, split between periods of tenderness and furious altercations. Godard films them together in ways that abstract the relationship between them. They are often close, crowded together in the frame, but they can't quite connect. Their faces are turned at awkward angles from one another, or shadows obscure their expressions, or they turn away completely. In one infamous sequence, Joseph smokes and eats breakfast while Carmen sits nearby with no pants on, her bushy pubic hair directly in the frame's foreground while Joseph sits in the background, not looking at her. The film is about sex and disconnection, those perennial subjects for Godard, as well as the intimate relationship between passion and violence. The couple meets when Carmen is robbing a bank where Joseph is stationed as a guard, and their wrestling and fighting for a rifle changes abruptly into kissing. For Godard in his late period, cinema is still about a girl and a gun after all.

Films I Love #10: Three Crowns of the Sailor (Raoul Ruiz, 1983)

The hallucinatory, poetic visuals of Raoul Ruiz's Three Crowns of the Sailor slowly unfurl the contours of the chilling story that a sailor (Jean-Bernard Guillard) tells to a fellow nighttime wanderer (Philippe Deplanche) over the course of an evening of drunken conversation. As befits this boozy storytelling, the film is continually adrift, its narrative as hazy as Ruiz's sun-drenched visuals, which bathe the film in bright, brilliant sun glare that obscures more than it illuminates. The fractured narrative conspires with this gauzy aesthetic, and with Ruiz's self-consciously quirky sense of camera placement, in order to thoroughly destabilize the viewer. There is no steady mooring, and the viewer quickly becomes as lost as the man who is hearing this story. Over the course of the film, as the sailor describes his adventures aboard a mysterious vessel, the story's outline and purpose become clearer, evoking various seafaring legends while leading towards a final moment of recognition that's narratively satisfying but somewhat beside the point. This fractured story is, at most, a foundation for Ruiz, who uses the sailor's tale of woe primarily as an excuse for his dazzling flights of visual imagination.

Films I Love #1: Sans Soleil (Chris Marker, 1983)

I first saw Chris Marker's Sans Soleil, somewhat perversely, in a class on documentary film. It was an interesting setting in which to see the film because, though Marker certainly uses the documentary genre and its conventions, the film is anything but a conventional documentary — which is not, of course, to say that it's fiction. Among the film's many interlocking layers and themes, one of its ideas is the interchangeability and fluidity of document, reality, and illusion. As a female narrator (Alexandra Stewart in the English version) reads a series of letters sent to her from around the world by a cameraman friend, the film is constructed from images ostensibly captured by this filmmaker on his travels. This loose structure provides ample opportunity for Marker's rambling thoughts on cultural difference, memory, mortality, and especially filmmaking itself. This latter subject announces itself not only in the profession of the letter writer, but in numerous references starting right from the very first image (above). In between long stretches of empty black space, a brief image of three blonde-haired children walking along a road flashes onto the screen. As the grainy footage appears and disappears, the narration describes the image as originating from a trip to Iceland, and the cameraman writes that this will be the first image of his film — he'd tried to link it to other images (a shot of a military plane descending into a carrier) but in the end he decided it'd have to appear on its own, separated by strips of black leader on either side. He's describing, of course, the opening of this film, and also the process of creation that led to the film's genesis, from the act of capturing the image, to the thought that goes into the structure, to the actual editing of the image into the film.

Later, Marker's film will embark on one of the best works of criticism ever made in the film medium, a free-associative analysis of Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo that revisits the San Francisco sites at which the film was made while drawing out the themes of warped memory and resurrection within Hitch's masterpiece. Marker recreates a film that is, itself, about the re-creation of lost memories, about living in the past — Jimmy Stewart's "Scottie" goes through a kind of time travel that Marker explicitly links to his own La jetée (1962), which itself references the sequoia tree from Vertigo. The dense web of referentiality and association in this brief segment establishes many of the themes of Sans Soleil, and especially of the unmade movie synopsis that Marker delivers in the next section, about a time traveler who seeks to regain the memories of his culture's past.