'Have You Seen...?'

by David Thomson

  Steven Spielberg talked to Ballard and suggested Tom Stoppard as screenwriter. Ballard was uncertain at first, but then eager to say what a fine decision it was. Stoppard made an arc of the book and simplified the narrative without subtracting from the richness or character. Above all—and I give Spielberg much credit for this—the emotional life of the boy remains central. This is a fearsome story of innocence exposed, in the violence and cruelty he has to see as well as in the lingering on the threshold of a sickly sexuality in the form of Mrs. Victor (Miranda Richardson—so good, you long for more of her in the film).

  The camp is very well re-created, not just in terms of design (Norman Reynolds) and photography (Allan Daviau), but as a place of small, vicious advantages and constant hardship. Jim (Christian Bale), the boy, is so desperate for someone to admire that the reptilian Basie becomes a laconic angel in his eyes; the rapport between Malkovich and Bale is uncanny, for this is not a common situation in life or film. Bale is widely recognized as a very good actor now, but here, as a novice, he is flat-out brilliant. You feel his giddy impulse and Spielberg trusting it. And, of course, Malkovich was already on his way toward a kind of louche genius.

  David Lean was in Spielberg’s mind, but this is far subtler than Lean ever managed. They shot in China and built the camp in Spain. But remember “the Sun,” both as the metaphor for Japan and the promise of the Bomb that ends the war. So much of this movie contrives to be hellish and radiant at the same time—and that is authentic vision, even if it began with Ballard.

  The film did not do very well, which I take as a proof of its lethal awareness of moral peril in a strange place. It came out the same year as The Last Emperor (which is fine but old-fashioned in comparison). Empire of the Sun is a great work through and through. It received few Oscar nominations, yet for anyone with a sense of film I think it was the first clear sign that Spielberg the showman was an artist, too.

  Also with Nigel Havers, Joe Pantoliano, Leslie Phillips, Robert Stephens, Emily Richard, Rupert Frazer, Paul McGann, and Takatoro Kataoka. (When Spielberg was auditioning child actors, a guy named Liam Neeson was hired to read lines with them.)

  Empress Yang Kwei Fei (1955)

  I wonder, did Max Ophüls ever see a film by Kenji Mizoguchi? In any event, in 1955, Mizoguchi and his team went to Hong Kong to research their new project, Empress Yang Kwei Fei. It was a story set in China in the eighth century, and a third of the financing was coming from the Shaw Brothers company in Hong Kong. The hope was to find a visual style or the materials of décor. But they found that Hong Kong had nothing, and so they returned to Japan and began an immense amount of research, not just on Chinese history but on the particular look of things: fabric, porcelain, skin, and hair. For, apart from other innovations, this was to be Mizoguchi’s first color film, in Daiecolor.

  The story is ancient but kept alive in Chinese culture by more modern writings. Indeed, it was a favorite tale of wistfulness and yearning, and there is little question that Mizoguchi understood that tone exactly.

  The emperor (Masayuki Mori, the expert swordsman from Seven Samurai) is a recent widower, and he is neglecting his affairs of state. An Lushan (So Yamamura), a coarse general, thinks to find him a new wife, and he notices Yu Juan (Machiko Kyo) working in the kitchens; he says she looks a lot like the emperor’s first wife. He promotes her, and in due course she becomes Empress Yang Kwei Fei.

  They are happy together for a time, but the country is in turmoil. An Lushan is at odds with the rest of his family. The people are confused and angry. An Lushan puts soldiers in the field. Disorder reigns. And so the idea is offered that Yang Kwei Fei must be to blame. She was a tool of An Lushan’s family. She must be scapegoated. And the emperor is too restricted by protocol to save the woman he loves. We see a noose set up. We see her robe and her slippers left on the floor. And then her earrings fall in the dust. We do not see the execution, but there is some sense of calm returning.

  Hiroshi Mizutani was in charge of design, and Kohei Sugiyama did the photography. This is a film of enclosing interiors, long corridors made for rules and ritual. We see very little open air or country. It is as if the world is a work of decorative art, full of soft, pastel colors. But the beauty it cherishes is also a reflection of the imperial helplessness. It is rather less art for art’s sake than art as an abdication from responsibility. And a living person is sacrificed because of it. The lack of natural backgrounds and the very formalized story have put some people off—this is an artificial tragedy, whereas in Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu and Sansho the tragedy is full of spilled life. But the abdication is a measure of fatalistic love and duty, and of the terrible lack of freedom in this China for even an emperor. You may recall the climactic episode of Ophüls’s Lola Montès, in which Lola goes away rather than bring about the end of Ludwig’s reign. Empress Yang Kwei Fei and Lola are films from the same year, filled with the impossible balance between authority and despair, beauty and prison.

  Les Enfants du Paradis (1945)

  As you grow up with film, people will tell you that you must see Les Enfants du Paradis (The Children of Paradise), and they are right. The virtues of this policy are many: First, you will encounter the vision and the style of Marcel Carné, a small master of film at the very least, and terribly neglected nowadays. You will see the beauties possible in black and white and in a world made through art direction, on sets. You will learn to love Paris. Above all, you will encounter the theater—and one of the most absurd, self-denying heresies prevalent among filmgoers is to disdain the theater.

  In Paris and in Nice (at the Victorine Studios), in 1943, despite the many local difficulties, Carné set out to make a movie about French theater (or show business) of the 1840s. And though I doubt that it was the original intention, as the film grew it became the embodiment of French patriotism under occupation and, to a degree, the spirit of resistance (though later Carné would suffer charges of having been a collaborator). In any event, the first screenings came after the Liberation, and they helped the picture feel like a brave flag. A similar thing happened in Britain with Henry V.

  The filming is itself the subject for a film. Vichy regulations at the time declared that a movie could not be longer than 2,750 meters (5,000 feet). The script (a masterpiece of wit and eloquence) was by the poet Jacques Prévert (who had been Carné’s associate on many films). Roger Hubert was the director of photography. Alexandre Trauner was in charge of art direction, and his achievement is as outstanding as the task was difficult. This is a 3-hours15-minute film, full of sets and clothes. The music was by Maurice Thiriet and Joseph Kosma.

  The film is a panorama of theatrical enterprise, from the lowest street performers to the loftiest actors, and Prévert’s screenplay is a masterpiece that keeps everyone in action, or in mind, at the same time. Moreover, the warmth and kindness of the film is not easily separated from the fluency of the style, the movement of the camera, and the use of space. It is the simple truth that Renoir or Ophüls would have been proud to sign this film.

  The cast is a record of Paris under the Nazis, and one can only regret that some of the players did collaborate, while some were falsely accused of it. It is hard when actors are held up to the standards of human beings. But “les enfants” include Arletty as Garance (very close to the spirit of France), Jean-Louis Barrault as the mime Baptiste, Pierre Brasseur as Lemaître, Marcel Herrand as Lacenaire, Pierre Renoir (Jean’s brother) as Jéricho (it was to have been Céline’s friend Robert Le Vigan, but he took cover after the Liberation), Maria Casares, Étienne Decroux, Fabien Loris, Léon Larive, Pierre Palau, Marcel Pérès, Albert Rémy, Jeanne Marken, and Gaston Modot. Bless them all.

  Les Enfants Terribles (1950)

  At the time it was made, fights and controversies hung over Les Enfants Terribles. Director Jean-Pierre Melville and novelist Jean Cocteau were not on the same wavelength politically. Melville had been in the Resistance, while Cocteau had been a cultural figure in occupied France. There was also dispute o
ver control of the film. On the first day on set, Cocteau—having just shot his own Orphée—was heard to say “Cut” at the end of a take. And when he sought to make changes in the script he and Melville had worked on together, Melville retaliated, “No changes. I signed on to do Cocteau’s novel.”

  Enough time has passed for the film to be seen as a masterpiece, and as something really made by Melville. But what is masterly is the delivery of a rare, ambiguous atmosphere—that of teenagers who refuse to “grow up” and seek to inhabit a pretend world in defiance of adulthood. It is a natural thing, charming yet dangerous: You see it obliquely in Rebel Without a Cause (a far more prosaic film in many ways) when the three kids play “house” in the deserted mansion. I am bound to say that part of the fascination of Les Enfants Terribles lies in the way this precious, theatrical world may have as its corollary, in the lives of most teenagers, the cinema itself. (This was treated very well in Bertolucci’s The Dreamers, from a Gilbert Adair novel that consciously plays off Les Enfants Terribles.)

  The place is Paris, just after World War II (it was the 1920s in the novel, published in 1929). Paul and his sister Elisabeth (of a certain, vague age) take refuge from the world in an apartment. Paul is ill: He has been wounded in a fight with Dargelos, a schoolmate, whom he loves. They play games, and in time they are joined by Gerard and Agathe. Gerard falls in love with Paul, and then Elisabeth. But Paul is drawn to Agathe, who looks like Dargelos. Elisabeth tries to rule the group, but the tensions are too great, and in the end both Paul and Elisabeth die. It is their secret alternative to adulthood.

  A synopsis can make it sound confused, yet the flickering of attraction is so close to adolescent experience, so secretive and exultant, and so subject to power plays. The film’s intensity begins in the exquisite gray imagery by Henri Decaë and by Émile Mathys’s work on the prop-room sets. But it’s the faces that are haunting, above all Nicole Stéphane as the empress figure Elisabeth. Cocteau’s lover, Éduard Dermithe, is Paul (Melville fought this casting). Renée Cosima plays Dargelos and Agathe, and Jacques Bernard is Gerard.

  Just as fascinating is the harmony or the counterpoint between Cocteau’s voice as a narrator and the lovely, simple camera movements that are characteristic of Melville. One has to say that the world is not one to which Melville will ever return, but was there another occasion when Cocteau’s vision was delivered with such strength and such intimations of a lost life? Enmity is not the worst breeding ground for a great film. Love and friendship may be deceptive and overrated.

  The English Patient (1996)

  The English Patient is the kind of picture that some people say David Lean used to make. It starts as something very small and particular—a lovely stone found in the desert. In this case, it is an adulterous love affair and its gamble with tragedy. Gradually the film lets its natural scene expand, or open out, and we see the desert and the relationship of Africa and Europe, the war, modern history. The key is the direction. Start small and grow. Whereas Lawrence of Arabia, say, is about the size of the desert, offered with the hope that some seed, some precious stone, will be there at the back of the cave. But working that way, it is far easier to discover… nothing.

  Beyond that, The English Patient was in every way a triumph. It took a novel, by Michael Ondaatje, that even, or especially, its greatest admirers said could not be filmed—should not be tried. But encouraged by the novelist and by his producer, Saul Zaentz, Anthony Minghella embarked on an outstanding job of adaptation. And the key to Minghella’s work, dramatically, was separation (I suspect it is his true subject): the way the world can organize itself so that beloveds are forced into their imagination, the natural home for love. And so we have a patient, terribly disfigured, Count Lazlo de Almásy (Ralph Fiennes), and a nurse, Hana (Juliette Binoche). And as she treats him flashbacks uncover, unflawed still, his love for Katharine Clifton (Kristin Scott Thomas).

  Then, on the point of shooting, the picture’s financing fell apart, because the committed parties believed the venture had no chance of success. Saul Zaentz then took it to Miramax, where the Weinstein Brothers (not without a tough bargain) took it up, enabled it to be made as Minghella wanted, and carried it through to modest but happy box-office success and a cascade of awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, and seven other Oscars.

  This is also a film that believed in craft of the highest order, thus superb photography by John Seale (and Remi Adefarasin), editing and sound by Walter Murch, production design by Stuart Craig, costumes by Ann Roth, and a score by Gabriel Yared (with inspired use of popular songs).

  At a key point in film history, David Lean believed that “epic” had to be for everyone, yet his films are hollow. Minghella, it seems to me, has seen that this is a myth: Nothing is for everyone. Works of choice rely on discrimination. But the epic genre—so long as it is founded in love, and probably unhappy love—can be for enough people for the venture to be worthwhile.

  The playing is as modulated as the construction: Fiennes is mysterious, damaged, and charming; Scott Thomas (a limited actress) is artfully used; Binoche was a revelation; and there is terrific work from Willem Dafoe, Naveen Andrews, Colin Firth, Julian Wadham, Jürgen Prochnow, and many others. Not an easy film—but why should films be easy? Not a difficult film—how could so much revelation be obscure?

  The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974)

  Maybe no other director has the genuine, mad fascination for marginal creatures that has compelled the career of Werner Herzog. Through fiction and documentary alike, in Germany and now living in America, for more than thirty years he has been obsessed with those figures who stand upright, make noise, but do not seem fully aware of the pedantic human code—thus from Kaspar Hauser to Klaus Kinski to Grizzly Man. One can’t help feeling that Herzog, a most amiable man, is secretly wistful that he came into the world complete, unflawed and unburdened. Or is he keeping some secret?

  Kaspar Hauser is based on fact, or history’s taste for story. In Nuremberg in 1828, a sixteen-year-old appears. He has been kept locked up all his life, but now he wants to join the cavalry. He is a savage, in the sense that he has had no education. He is put in jail, and the inexorable attempt on his being and soul begins. He learns some words. He is put in a circus. A wise teacher takes him on. Kaspar becomes unhappy. He is attacked. He is murdered. The autopsy reports that he had brain damage.

  Coming just a few years after François Truffaut’s The Wild Child and a decade after Arthur Penn’s The Miracle Worker, Herzog’s film afforded easy distinctions: Truffaut and Penn had been at pains to prove the educability of their outsider figures, but Herzog sees l’enfant sauvage as a disconcerting comment on all our alleged codes of intellectual and sentimental order. In the sane way, years later, Herzog understood very well that the vainglorious white expert on bears in Grizzly Man was insane and self-destructive while the grizzly was simply the “other.” In short, Truffaut and Penn both love society and uplift, whereas Herzog is not as convinced.

  Of course, it matters a great deal in these arguments that Herzog was using not an actor but Bruno S., a real reject of society and a youth of uncertain disposition. Was Herzog exploiting Bruno? The question could not be avoided. And his answer was that there must be an authentic inner spark—no matter how damaged—in someone like Bruno, which was reason for making the film. That argument became a great deal more complicated if one paused to consider whether Klaus Kinski was acting mad, like a fox, or was someone who was both mad and an actor.

  In an opening dream sequence, beautifully shot by Klaus Wyborny, Kaspar (we presume, we do not see him) is floating on a lyrical river, being stared at with mounting hostility by people. And I think that that “civilized” reaction is what amuses and bewilders Herzog. There is enough of the anthropologist in him to see that one abnormality is much like another. So how do we make rules that must be observed?

  Most of the film was shot by Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein, and edited by Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus. For me, this is one of Her
zog’s most successful films, but some sign that his lifelong pursuit of the same type of specimen has not always avoided monotony.

  Erotikon (1920)

  Mauritz Stiller’s Erotikon is the earliest film in this book that the modern viewer has to watch with a modern sensibility—by which I mean, in the fear that you might miss something. Yes, it is a silent film, made in Sweden, with clothes and décor of the period—and very handsome clothes, I might add. But concessions need go no further. For it is a story about four absolutely modern people: a professor of entomology, his admiring niece, his distracted wife, and her romantic interest, a sculptor. It is a film about love, marriage, outside attraction, and flirting. And just as it accomplishes a neat ironic flip in its arrangement—two couples change partners—it leaves you in no doubt about the stability or permanence of the new partnerships. Flirting, curiosity, being alive—call it what you will—leaves these people as vulnerable to looking at fresh faces as any of us. Why has Cupid wings? is a question asked in La Règle du Jeu (though it comes from Beaumarchais). The answer: to fly away again.

  So the extraordinary refreshment of Erotikon after the American silent film is the freedom from guilt or gloom in people moving on. Moreover, the game is played with degrees of irony, impishness, teasing, and sheer naughtiness in which—most notably—women take the lead and men reclaim that stodginess that is so often theirs in life. Watching this film is like watching real people alive today, and hardly a line or a situation comes without at least a double meaning. And so whether Professor Leo Carpentier (Anders De Wahl) is lecturing on tree beetles or the characters are attending a strange theatrical performance, it is taken for granted that the “act” reflects upon their lives and behavior.