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.

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.

As Tears Go By

Wong Kar Wai's debut feature As Tears Go By is a visceral, idiosyncratic gangster picture, a raw and stylish film that balances gritty realism with bold stylization, colorful imagery and rapid leaps into frenzied action sequences or hazy, drifting slow motion. Violence in this film erupts suddenly, its impact heightened by Wong's accelerated cutting, which signals the abrupt transition from ordinary reality to the bloody, brutal hyper-reality of the fight scenes. A fight scene at a pool hall is preceded by a slow, tense buildup as the inept Triad thug Fly (Jacky Cheung) taunts a rival, mocking him by moving balls around on the pool table, brazenly cheating and essentially daring the other man to start a fight. The tension slowly mounts, mingled with uneasy humor, but when the fight itself erupts, Wong introduces the violence with a sudden shot of a pool table, a racked triangle of balls broken by the cue ball, and then a quick cut into the rapid-fire violence as Fly and the other gangsters initiate a brawl that eventually spills out into a chase through the streets.

Fly is a familiar character in gangster lore, the volatile but pathetic loser who drags down the more balanced, intelligent friend who looks after him. Wah (Andy Lau) is Fly's "big brother" in the Triad gangs, his boss and benefactor, but Fly's unpredictable behavior and tough guy attitude continually get Wah in big trouble. The film alternates between Wah's attempts to cope with the problems stirred up by Fly, and an undercooked love story between Wah and his young cousin Ngor (Maggie Cheung), who he falls in love with when she comes to stay with him. The story is familiar, of course. Wong, inspired by Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets (especially in the bold use of pop music) and working within the genre mold of the Hong Kong gangster flick, sticks to the basics of the genre but amps up the aesthetics and the emotions into a near operatic orgy of excess.

The film's action sequences are probably its most compelling moments, bloody and ecstatic scenes of carnage, mingling fast cutting with slow motion to convey the brutality of these gangsters — and of course, to convey their sense of "cool." The film is very self-conscious about "cool," because the characters are so self-conscious about it. Wah often poses in his leather jacket, his head cocked back in a Rebel Without a Cause sneer, a cigarette dangling from his lips. When he walks into a room, it's often in slow motion, his determined expression slowly drifting through the hazy, abstract backgrounds, his surroundings erased by the prolonged contemplation of his languid cool as he prepares to kill someone or beat up some rivals or shake down a resistant debtor. That coolness is why Fly looks up to Wah, why he's so determined to impress his "big brother," even as he's very aware that his own (real) little brother, Site (Ronald Wong), doesn't think that Fly is cool. Fly is obsessed with making good, with returning to his family as a big man, but he knows that he's a failure. Towards the end of the film, he visits his brother — who's now a family man, with a regular working class job — and tells him that he just wants to be a cool big brother, even if he has to sacrifice himself to do it. The scene plays out mostly in alternating closeups on the two brothers, but Wong punctuates the scene with a kind of emphatic exclamation point, abruptly switching to an unbalanced long shot of the parking lot where this discussion takes place. The two brothers are at the bottom of the frame, with Fly facing away from his brother, the lower halves of their bodies cut off by the bottom of the frame, and Fly simply hurls the beer bottle he'd been drinking off into the distance. It's such an effective moment, a rough and evocative shot that perfectly captures the tension of this scene.


The film's dialogue also has a punchy, blunt quality that enhances the archetypal story Wong is telling here. When Wah has a fight with an old girlfriend, she tells him that she recently had an abortion, and she uses the word "abortion" or "aborted" in nearly every sentence throughout the argument, wielding the word at him like a knife to keep him at bay, wounding him with the repetition, while he ineffectually bats at her with his hands. He slaps her around and then storms out, but it's obvious who's been wounded more, who's been cut deeper, and in the subsequent scenes Wah seems to be stumbling as though bleeding out from a mortal wound, with Wong's woozy camerawork adding to the sensation of disorientation. He seems drunk, but Wong doesn't show him drinking; it's more likely he's just staggering from the emotional wounds he's suffered. This is a violent, bloody film, but this scene suggests that for Wong, the unseen psychological cuts can be just as fatal as the wounds that leave physical scars, the wounds that bleed and ooze.

Not all of the film's emotions are extravagant and noisy, however. One of the film's most affecting shots is a lengthy closeup on Ngor's face as Wah leaves her to, once again, help his loser friend out of trouble. The look on her face is subtle, but the longer Wong holds the shot, the more sadness seeps into her expression, until her eyes seem to be on the verge of tearing and, overwhelmed, she looks away, as though she can't stand holding the camera's gaze any longer. It has a feel of finality to it; one knows instantly and instinctively that the lovers will never see one another again. It's not entirely an earned moment — the romance is underdeveloped and generic — but Cheung makes the most of her scant screen time so that her character is poignant and memorable, if not exactly deep. Wong makes the romance potent through searing imagery, like a passionate kiss in a phone booth, a kiss that's nearly violent in its intensity, so hot that it burns up the screen, burning even the image itself, which is eventually erased in a white-hot burst of overexposed film stock. The individual scenes become emotionally affecting even though the romance is cursorily developed in comparison to the storyline of Wah's entanglement with Fly. The film has more of a feel for the romantic image of the gangster than it does for actual romance, which means that Cheung has little to do other than patiently wait for Wah to return to her every so often, to briefly delight in his presence before he races off into the bloody revenge storyline at the center of the film.

For what it is, though, As Tears Go By is a fairly satisfying genre picture, a gory and energetic thriller in which Fly's provocations set Wah onto a collision course with the nasty gangster Tony (Alex Man), a sadist who takes obvious joy in the increasingly elaborate beatings he hands out to his rivals. Not that Wah is actually that much better: the film places the audience on Wah's side, but only because he's portrayed as a romantic gangster, even though his violent streak is every bit as ugly. In one scene, he breaks a beer bottle over a debtor's head, the gesture fast and unflinching, a fearsome slash across the fabric of the film, drawing bright red blood. The hero's violence and amorality are simply taken for granted, so that he becomes the hero simply by default, by virtue of the fact that he's the gangster the film focuses on, the gangster with heart.

Films I Love #24: Dead Ringers (David Cronenberg, 1988)

Much of David Cronenberg's career has been devoted to fearlessly excavating the strangest, most unsettling corners of human psychology and sexuality, expressing primal emotions through the grotesque "body horror" for which the director was, until recently, best known. In many ways, though Dead Ringers is one of Cronenberg's tamest 80s films in terms of its visceral imagery (admittedly, "tame" is a very relative word here), it's possibly his most disturbing inquiry into the lower reaches of human consciousness. It's the story of twin gynecologists Elliot and Beverly Mantle (both played, via special effects, by Jeremy Irons) who are so close that their identities are intertwined. Indeed, they take advantage of their identical appearance to swap places with one another at will, taking turns giving public appearances, performing surgeries and research, and even switching off with the women they date. The arrogant, confident Elliot and the shy, sweet Bev are two sides of the same personality, complementing and completing one another, together forming a whole person; neither of them could really exist independently.

Nevertheless, Bev decides that he wants to try severing this intimate bond between the brothers when he falls in love with the movie star Claire (Geneviève Bujold), who starts out as just another of the brothers' mutual conquests. As usual, the more confident Elliot seduces and sleeps with her, then allows Bev to take his place the next night. But when Beverly's bond with the needy, masochistic Claire begins to threaten the connection between the brothers, things start falling apart for all three of them. The film is a nightmarish study of psychological dependency, of unhealthy bonds between people — symbolized by the horrifying dream in which Bev envisions himself and his brother joined together by a meaty umbilical cord, which Claire tries to bite through. The film certainly doesn't lack Cronenberg's signature disturbing imagery, but for the most part its "body horror" is more psychological and internal rather than being inscribed in blood and gore. When Bev, driven mad by isolation and grief, simply unveils his set of tools for operating on "mutant women," it's a visceral chill on par with any of Cronenberg's more grisly set pieces. By locating the film's horror almost entirely in the minds and personae of these twins, Dead Ringers becomes one of Cronenberg's finest, most creepily incisive works.

Gang of Four

Jacques Rivette's 1988 film Gang of Four is a kind of summation of the elusive auteur's style and thematic concerns, a skillful variation on the various threads that wove through his work of the preceding three decades. It encompasses his passion for the theater, his taste for esoteric conspiracies with many dangling loose ends, his way of using acting and dramatization to peel away the layers of a character over time, his playful improvisatory spirit and fondness for whimsical ghost stories. The film is a deliberately paced — but never plodding — character study of a group of young girls studying acting under the watchful eye of the demanding instructor Constance (Bulle Ogier). The main action especially centers around one particular quartet of girls living in the same house: Anna (Fejria Deliba), Claude (Laurence Côte), Joyce (Bernadette Giraud) and Lucia (Ines d'Almeida). When the film opens, Lucia is just moving in, replacing Cécile (Nathalie Richard), who is moving out but not leaving the acting class.

With his keen eye and slow, sweeping camera moves, Rivette methodically explores the characters of these disparate young women, weaving serpentine plots around them and suggesting vapor-like hints of back stories. Anna, it turns out, is actually named Laura; she's taken the name of the vanished sister who she has been searching for. The bisexual, androgynous Claude is tormented by unrequited love and is desperate for meaningful connections. The tiny, porcelain-pretty Lucia is exiled from her home in Portugal, where she disgraced her family by refusing an arranged marriage and drinking down a few sips of poison in a suicide attempt; she keeps the unused portion of the bottle in her room as a "souvenir." These hints of the past remain largely unresolved, peripheral elements in a film dense with detail and nuance. The girls are soon drawn in by a mysterious plot of some kind involving their friend Cécile's boyfriend Antoine, who's involved in some shady and possibly criminal business. The girls can see that Cécile is increasingly distracted and upset, her acting affected by the troubles of her outside life, and their suspicions are heightened when a cagey guy (Benoît Régent), possibly a cop, starts snooping around and asking questions about their friend. Not that he's any help, really: he keeps changing his name, before finally settling on Thomas, and tells each of them in turn a different outrageous story about what underworld activities Cécile and Antoine are involved in (fake IDs, gun smuggling, art thievery).

Rivette, of course, is sympathetic to the chameleonic Thomas, even though he's kind of a manipulative jerk. Rivette also cares little for the concrete details of such conspiracies; all that matters to him is the suggestion of something there, floating like smoke on the fringes of the narrative, a catalyst for everything that follows. As the girls dance around this mystery, trying to help their friend, art and life blend into one another. The play they're rehearsing — Marivaux's La double inconstance — comments obliquely on the lives of the girls, with its themes of double identities, unconsummated desires and imprisoned lovers.

Thus, when Constance leads her class through rehearsals, she is preparing them not just for the play but for life — towards the end of the film, she abruptly departs, leaving them on their own, as though she had been leading them towards this self-sufficiency all along. Rivette's emphasis on acting similarly blurs the line between what's artifice and what's "reality." He views acting, not as pretend or lies — as the bitter Claude does — but as a way of getting at deeper truths. The rehearsals cycle around endlessly, with Constance instructing her students in seemingly contradictory ways: pay attention to the written lines, put more emotion into it, tone it down, make the ideas obvious even to the back rows, don't be so obvious. Her mode of instruction frustrates the girls, who are paying a lot of money to be enrolled in the best acting class in Paris, but they seem to understand that she is pushing them towards something concrete, trying to get out of them performances that feel real.


On a metafictional level, Rivette is doing the same thing, and he lets his film's narrative ramble at a leisurely pace in order to give the actors room to breathe, time to fill in the nuances of their characters. Their personalities come out equally whether they're on stage for Constance or simply on screen for Rivette, and one senses multiple levels of acting filtering through each of them: the film actress playing another actress who's playing a part in a theater. And at the same time, these levels are also one, with no distinction made between the woman on stage, the woman in Rivette's film, and the woman who, presumably, exists off the set when the filming stops. Rivette is, as always, interested in these intersections of identity, and Gang of Four, as with all his films, gives the impression of watching something slowly take shape over the course of nearly three hours. Rivette's films are as much about the process of making themselves as they are about anything; Gang of Four is equally about producing a play, creating a film, and solving a mystery, not necessarily in that order. Indeed, Rivette purposefully leaves most of the film's mysteries dangling, unsolved, giving the final word instead to the play within the film: when the play ends, so does the film.

All of this metafictional gamesmanship is accomplished with Rivette's usual playful brio and understated humor. The acting class is always lively, and Rivette's camera wanders freely around the room, sometimes framing those on stage in strikingly dramatic compositions, other times darting off into the theater seats, where the girls who are watching whisper and joke. Rivette's compositions shift fluidly between very rigid formalist constructions and looser, more relaxed arrangements. Often, there's tension within the frame between the stagey blocking of the actors and the casual scattering of background details. There's even a running gag with one punky, disinterested student who's always either stumbling in late or sneaking out early in the background of the shot.

As much as Rivette worships the theater and the art of acting, he's not afraid to be irreverent and silly as well. One of the film's best scenes is a hilarious sequence in which Anna, Claude and Joyce act out a trial for the benefit of Lucia, each of them taking on multiple parts and signifying their role reversals by placing one of several multi-colored coffee mugs on top of their heads like hats. It's a great scene that encapsulates one of Rivette's most endearing qualities, his willingness to let his actresses have fun and cut loose; there's a semi-improvisational quality to this scene, and especially to the halting, off-key song they sing at the end of it, that makes it feel a break in the film's narrative. And yet this scene's broad satire of the justice system also ties in with the story of Cécile and Antoine, as well as with the Marivaux play the girls are rehearsing with Constance.

Gang of Four is a typically enthralling and enchanting film from Rivette, a complex game of a film in which the rules are obscure and the pieces move unpredictably. More than anything else, however, it's a showcase for the charming young actresses Rivette has cast here. Their smart, witty performances are never less than fun to watch, and as the film progresses, each of these girls invests her character with greater and greater depths. This is a pure celebration of acting as the finest art: the art of finding (and embracing) the mystery and drama in life.

Damnation

Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr is often compared to Andrei Tarkovsky, with whom he undeniably shares a certain Eastern bloc minimalism, an extreme formalist austerity expressed in a languidly moving camera that creeps through one long take after another. Tarr's images, as gracefully slow and dark as a molasses river, owe a great debt to Tarkovsky, and his film Damnation is in some ways an extension of the moody black and white opening scenes of Stalker drawn out to feature-length. In other ways, however, the more salient reference point for Tarr is perhaps Michelangelo Antonioni, who like Tarr was arguably concerned with the aestheticization of boredom, lending a certain sleek, awful beauty to the utterly dull and drab. Tarr, despite his film's references to scripture and an apocalyptic atmosphere of doom hanging over his characters, lacks Tarkovsky's overt spirituality. He's more concerned with reality, with simply staring at a scene for long enough that the viewer has time to be enthralled, bored, mystified and provoked in succession by the image. Tarr's seemingly endless takes, his extreme patience for letting a scene's natural rhythms play out — a static view held for an uncomfortably long time, a camera that creeps in a slow sideways pan to reveal the blank expanse lurking around the corner, the way that characters step out of a shot only to be picked up again, long minutes later, when the camera's slow glide finally catches up to them somewhere else — encourage a depth of focus and concentration on the material reality onscreen. This is not always true of Tarkovsky, who despite the superficial similarity in aesthetics was often reaching for something beyond the surface image, but it often is the case with Antonioni, who saw truth and beauty and depth, paradoxically, in surfaces and appearances.

Damnation is all about surfaces, too, all about the material substance of life for a rather ordinary man in a drab, lifeless, perpetually rainy Hungarian village. Karrer (Miklós Székely), growing old and alone, is disconnected from life, aimlessly wandering through his town's muddy, puddle-filled streets. He hits five bars in a single day, drinking his way through his declining years, monosyllabically grunting his way through conversations with a loquacious bartender (Gyula Pauer). He finds some peace and comfort in his desire for a singer in one of these bars, the very Lynchian Titanik with its neon sign above a simple blank storefront. The unnamed singer (Vali Kerekes) unfortunately has a husband (György Cserhalmi), and Karrer wants only to get this man out of the way, to be able to spend time with his lover, who despite her fickle transitions from solicitous to dismissive and cruel, represents his only real reason for living. This simple description of the film's story is not, however, a summary; it is, more or less, the complete content of the narrative. Tarr spreads this narrative material out so sparsely that it nearly threatens to vanish, to evaporate along with the rain that's falling almost constantly in this town. The story has no forward momentum, no detail, because its characters are so iconic, so minimal: even Karrer is little more than the sum of his damp trench coat, his thin, uncontrolled wisps of hair, the hard stubble along his cheeks, the shadows that make his eyes so difficult to read.


Tarr is not concerned with deep characterization here, and Karrer remains as much of an enigma as any of the other characters, most of whom go either unnamed or introduced so casually and obtusely that they might as well not have names. Karrer opens up only once, during a long and heartfelt monologue in which he tells the singer that she is the only one who inspires him to speak, the only person who convinces him that communication can be worthwhile — and yet what she inspires him to relate, as it turns out, is mostly a lengthy description of an old affair, a time when he tormented and ridiculed one of his lovers until she committed suicide. Why he tells this story — either to the singer or to the film's audience — is unclear, except as evidence of his profound lack of ordinary morality, his total disinterest in the vast majority of his fellow human beings. Tarr presents this shocking monologue with his characteristic straightforwardness, with a direct, unmoving single take of Karrer and the singer sitting at the breakfast table, while above the ubiquitous mining cars, hauling coal from a nearby mine, creak by on overhead cable lines. Tarr seems as interested in the rhythmic, mechanical sound of the cable cars, or in the bemused expression of the singer as she munches her breakfast, as he is in the actual content of Karrer's speech. This scene should be startling, horrifying, emotional, something; Tarr places it at such a cold, static distance, however, that it's simply numbing, just another unpleasant tangent in the story of an unpleasant life.

For much of the film, in fact, Tarr seems totally unconcerned with pleasure of any kind, perhaps because there's so little to be found in Karrer's life. Even lovemaking is boring, just something to do to fill the time, and in that respect no better or worse than Karrer's far more common habit of hanging around behind walls on rainy afternoons, voyeuristically peering out into empty space. When Karrer and the singer are having narcoleptic sex at one point, Tarr's camera grows bored and wanders off in a 360-degree spin around the room instead, crawling over the surface of the objects in the woman's room; when a mirror catches sight of the couple for an interval in the camera's radius, they seem to have just barely picked up the pace a little, so that from a distance it might even be thought that they were actually enjoying themselves. Tarr's camera simply meanders on, past the mirror to linger on the rest of the room. The film has a similar attention to sounds, to the scrape of Karrer's razor on his wiry stubble, the mechanical loops of the mining cars, the various sounds of the rain falling in puddles, on roofs, on already-damp ground, or dripping in sheets from off windowsills. The town's music also plays a crucial role in the intricate, carefully designed soundtrack, with the phlegmatic wheeze of the accordion and the sleepy pseudo-jazz of the bar bands adding to the general atmosphere of intense ennui.

The film is intimately involved with its location, with the objects and atmosphere of its place, in ways that it is not with any of its actual human characters, who serve more symbolic functions. Tarr betrays little interest in their individual psychologies. It is a cliché to say that the town itself is a character; perhaps not as much of a cliché to point out that in this film, the town is the only real character. Tarr is tracing out, through Karrer, the story of all the town's inhabitants, charting the town's moods, which based on the amount of rain that falls and the mud and muck it produces, are mostly black, foul moods. The references to Biblical plagues and destruction sent down from God do not mark out Karrer as Lot or a similar figure of Biblical misfortune; it is more likely the town itself is Gomorrah, smote for the sins of its inhabitants, plagued with gray ugly weather and congenital ennui and smileless faces. At one point, Tarr pans across a blank exterior wall that is every so often interrupted by a door. Inside, crowds of people, their hard faces as expressionless as the wall, stare disinterestedly out at the pouring rain.


And yet, strangely enough, Tarr's vision is not entirely bleak, not as long as he has room for such images of surrealistic joy as the long shot of a man dancing manically in the rain, playfully splashing in puddles and creating rhythms with the slap of his shoes on the watery ground. The film culminates with a group version of this solitary celebration, a typically languid and pedestrian dance that nevertheless offers the film's sole vision of community solidarity, of fun and pleasure. It is a moment of respite, an escape from the utter nothingness that is life for these people, a chance to seize something good. Tarr does nothing to make this moment extravagant, shooting it from the same anesthetized distance with which he captures the more prosaic events of the rest of the film. The image is static, the perspective as disinterested as ever, and yet the light and motion within the frame, the sense of measured excitement and understated happiness that's as close as these people get to celebration, communicates that this is a special moment for the village.

This vision of communal togetherness is tempered by the film's overall doom-laden atmosphere, and by the especially bleak tone of its denouement. Betrayed by his lover, Karrer betrays his friends in turn, and in an image of startlingly direct symbolism, literally descends to the level of a dog, getting down on all fours and barking and snapping at one of the mangy, ferocious-looking black mutts that roamed the town's rainy streets throughout the film. Forsaking his fellow humans and the shabby but nonetheless sincere solidarity they offer him, Karrer chooses to isolate himself for good, becoming in the process less than human, an animal fighting only for itself. This ending suggests Tarr's overriding philosophy of humanity, his belief that what truly separates us as a species is not any of the ordinary signifiers of human uniqueness, as important as they can be — not our capacity for speech or complex thought, nor our ability to build and design (industry serves as a grim backdrop in this film, not a sign of progress), nor the institutions of government and order we create, which Karrer ultimately turns to only as a hypocritical tool of revenge — but our ability to socialize, to form true connections, to exist as true communities rather than mere packs of wild dogs. When this communitarian impulse breaks down, when the bonds of human connections are severed, then humanity, like its symbolic representative Karrer, descends to growling in the streets, running mangily through the harsh elements with no protection and no hope.