'Have You Seen...?'

by David Thomson

  So the series of their films was under way along with a complicated, and fairly absurd, sadomasochistic transaction which became the subject of the films. And Sternberg (who had once had much more interest in realism) shifted over to the ridiculous and the surreal. He reveled in the artificiality of this North Africa, the power of light and shadow to make a world (Lee Garmes on photography), and Jules Furthman’s cryptic dialogue. Furthman coined a way for tough love to talk that deeply affected American pictures: It’s the droll man letting himself be outtalked by an insolent woman, and it would be the making of Howard Hawks.

  Gary Cooper got the Tom Brown role (over John Gilbert and Fredric March), and he was better than them. He can stand up to Marlene because he’s as beautiful as she is. Her cabaret number, kissing the giggly girl in the audience, is revolutionary and still radiant with nerve. Adolphe Menjou is the other guy—and he looks just a little like Jo, as if to ask how can the man who made these gods actually exist with them?

  In short, one of the most influential films Hollywood ever made.

  The Mortal Storm (1940)

  On the brink of war, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer had several options to pursue: It could hope for the best, despite all reports coming in through its foreign departments, and it could look the other way, with fingers crossed; or it could adjust its own anxiety to that of the public. Not for a big studio the bold, personal confrontation of The Great Dictator, where Charlie seems to resent that another little man with a mustache is trying to take over the world. But a thwarted romance, as if to say, look, there is Nazism, which would break up families and prevent people from their heart’s desire! Of course, you can read between the lines in The Mortal Storm (you can gather that the character of the professor is very likely Jewish). But this late in the day, the Hollywood message is clear: We would rather describe this crisis in terms of blocked romance than political causation and consequences.

  It comes from a novel by Phyllis Bottome, adapted to the screen by Claudine West, George Froeschel, and Andersen Ellis. It begins in the German countryside in the year 1933, just before Hitler’s electoral victory. Frank Morgan is the professor. His daughter, Margaret Sullavan, is in love with a young veterinary student (James Stewart). But the course of romance is threatened by the Nazi influence, which is seen—very much as it was presented at the time in America—as a strident call for order and reform. It splits the professor’s family and then the professor is taken away to imprisonment. The question arises, Can the lovers stay where they are, or must they escape?

  Director Frank Borzage does not shirk showing us the mounting brutality of fascist Germany, but those scenes are pained and clipped whereas the treatment of the lovers is lyrical and profuse. It is as if film itself were persuading Borzage of the justice of their cause. William Daniels did the photography, and he understood the exceptional screen chemistry between Stewart and Sullavan (at least friends in real life): Her hushed voice seems to draw him closer until he hovers over her like a guard. She is wiser; she knows and feels more—but he is her devoted student and she has found perfection in his innocence. Their love scenes are like holiday next to the brutal scenes of official interference.

  Does it feel like Germany? No. Does it feel like a place where the police overshadow love’s light? Yes. Should the American public have been content with this limited treatment? A much tougher question—and one that still deserves an answer as political situations facing America become so much more testing and ambiguous. But the face against the state is a classic cinematic answer (Carl Dreyer opted for it with Falconetti in La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc—and the cinema loves things that it can photograph). The cast also includes Robert Young, Robert Stack, Bonita Granville, Irene Rich, Maria Ouspenskaya, Gene Reynolds, Ward Bond, and Dan Dailey.

  Mother and Son (1997)

  We hear the sounds of a sea and birds calling. Darkness gives way to a shot of a young man and an old woman. It seems as if it may be a still, but then a ghost of a smile appears on the man’s face. The woman is in bed, the man is on the bed beside her in something like the attentive position of a mother with a new infant. The woman, we will gather, is dying. The man is there for her; he is her son. They talk about dreams and it seems as if, so close at the end of life, they are having the same dreams. Then the woman asks to be taken for a walk.

  Her son carries her out into a world of waving grasses, green and sere, like a young person’s hair. There are blond tracks. There are trees and what may be white cliffs. The son carries the mother on her walks. Sometimes he rests with her beside the track, or in the grass, or in a birch glade.

  The house is made of stone. There seem to be very few modern facilities there. No one else is in sight. Some admirers of the film have spoken of its sense of loneliness. But maybe they mean isolation. For there is a pact and closeness between the mother and the son that are the opposite of loneliness. Still there is no backstory or explanation offered. We do not know the family history, and I have heard some people deduce from the few words spoken that there may have been incest between the mother and son. I do not hear or feel it that way, but I cannot be sure.

  The film is only seventy-three minutes long, and there are many long takes in it, time for us to feel the color, the composition and the inwardness of the whole enterprise. For I think the director, Aleksandr Sokurov, believes in an ineffable rapport between the landscape (including its texture and color) and the couple. And I think he is content for that bond to be classic, universal, and idealized. I don’t think this is a particular story so much as a dwelling on the bond asserted in the film’s title.

  Critics say the film is painterly. They refer to Caspar David Friedrich. This is useful, and the stillness and the very muted colors are all tributes to the slow, imperceptible growth of nature—with the stirring of sea and wind as its music (though we do hear fragments of classical music far away in the distance). But there is something happening to the image. I cannot explain it, but I think that a painted glass or sometimes a distorting glass is being put in front of the lens—not to be puzzled over, but to take us ever deeper into the visceral nature of the dying. In some ways I am reminded of the opening of Dovzhenko’s Earth, where an old peasant dies as if it was a very natural thing. The death here is regretted—the film is an act of mourning—but never disputed or argued against. The mother is Gudrin Geyer and the son is Alexander Anaishnov. The cameraman is Aleksei Fyodorov. Mother and Son is a masterpiece and in its tranquillity I think it surpasses even Tarkovsky (the most obvious influence). There is more Sokurov, including the one-shot Russian Ark. It’s hard to think of him making a film not worth seeing.

  The Mother and the Whore (1973)

  I hope you won’t be shocked by this, but people (even actors and actresses) are not always that good, or sophisticated, at kissing each other on camera, and going very much further, without becoming emotionally involved. I have no maps or diagrams to offer as evidence, but Jean Eustache’s The Mother and the Whore is one of those films where one shudders at the vulnerability of the people. Is it that they are so very good as players, or so helpless as people? The Mother and the Whore trembles with its own damage, and delight. It is 219 minutes long—as long as Gone With the Wind—but not because it has an immense amount of story to tell. It is long because these people will talk themselves into silence over sex and love, and the uncertain hope that they can be kept separate.

  The length is vital, not just because the spectator should be exhausted at the close of the film, but because it concerns lives that think they may go on forever—in other words, they catch youth at that tyrannical moment when it can believe it will never have to yield. So Alexandre (Jean-Pierre Léaud) does nothing but live in the St. Germain part of Paris, sitting in cafés, reading or arguing, and measuring the women in his life. He lives with Marie (Bernadette Lafont), divorced and a boutique owner (Lafont is six years older than Léaud). One day, Alexandre sets out to meet Gilberte (Isabelle Weingarten), an ex-girlfriend whom he abandoned when sh
e got pregnant. Now he asks her to marry him. She refuses. Later that day, he sees another girl, Veronika (Françoise Lebrun), and he falls in love with her. As the affair builds, so Marie becomes more disturbed. Veronika tells Alexandre off in a most complete way, in language full of sexual contempt and violence, but she admits that she may be pregnant by him. He asks her to marry him.

  The Mother and the Whore is not prurient or pornographic, but it is about people whose lives are more completely fulfilled in sex than anything else. It was also made in that fairly short interval between the collapse of movie censorship and the coming of AIDS. In other words—to quote Renoir’s language from La Règle du Jeu—we are in that period when the collision of two epidermises (or more) and the friction of two fantasies was in the open, free and wild, and seemingly guilt-free—or at least free from all those guilts applied by society as braking impulses.

  As I said, I do not know what happened during the filming. Yet I think that the quality of performance—the identification, the accusation, the vituperation—is as personal and as actual as the attraction being mimicked. This film puts us in the room or in the bed with the people. Above all, it puts us in the conversation. The impact is convulsive and complete. The feeling of complicity and touch is unique: you can ascribe it to Eustache for provoking and writing the conversation. But you cannot credit that these people are not speaking for themselves.

  Mouchette (1967)

  Mouchette has dark hair and a darker stare—she knows more than is proper for a child of fourteen. But does she know enough to be a character with more depth than, say, Balthazar, the donkey, in Bresson’s previous film?

  When the poacher rapes her in his hut in the woods, she does not know what “rape” is in any legal sense; she hardly understands the process that carries her from protest to acceptance. She only knows that the poacher—though he is an outcast, who suffers fits—is one of the few people on earth who offer her any tenderness. And it is not clear, finally, how far she realizes she is “committing suicide,” or has she only come to see herself as a speck of vulnerability who might be carried off in play? So she ignores the responsibility of rolling down the slope and into the lake. But she practices the roll until she moves at speed, out of the frame—and we hear a heavy splash. Bresson does not show the splash—it is as if the rolling has carried Mouchette into peace and dream. And there is a suggestion that that splash would be too vulgar a piece of action in which, for a moment at least, the child or the actress would have to determine how to “receive” the water. In the rape, as it is, Mouchette’s small hands clasp the rapist’s back—and that is an unusual gesture in Bresson toward the inner life.

  The film is taken from a novel by Georges Bernanos, Nouvelle Histoire de Mouchette, published in 1937. And it shows the decline of a girl living in poverty in rural France. She has a sick mother whose sickness has precluded family life. It means that Mouchette is not noticed. She is teased by the other children at school. But she is not stupid and not without appeal. Nadine Nortier plays her in the customary Bressonian manner, as blank as possible, but in her voice and bearing there are hints of intelligence and sensitivity that keep coming through. So its easiest to conclude that Mouchette is misunderstood, and that her escape from the world is desirable.

  But is that quite enough? Or has something been lost since the profound commitment of the priest and the escapee in Bresson. Those men were in terrible situations, but they were driven forward by spiritual energy. In contrast, Mouchette seems filled by lassitude or vacancy. And I wonder if a kid that resolute would simply roll down the hill—or would she fight back?

  Of course, the film is meticulously made, with the gravest mise-en-scène and a feeling of making a mosaic of the 80 minutes—the stepping stones of Mouchette. But there are real people in the film—the mother, the poacher, the waitress, the shopkeeper—and there are a few very modest efforts to rescue Mouchette which seem to be resolutely ignored by the aesthetic of the film. In other words, Mouchette’s dark gaze is greedier and more curious than the camera’s calm. I think she yearns for a contact that has been forbidden her. And it is a first ominous note of stifling arrangement shutting out life.

  Moulin Rouge (2001)

  Moulin Rouge divides people like an old-fashioned God muttering “Loves me… loves me not” as he sorts the saved from the damned. For anyone who has contrived to read this book in such an order that Moulin Rouge comes last, or even in the last hundred, it may be clear before you say “Mou…” to yourself that I love the musical, I am very fond of the idea of Australia, and, if you want a third lost cause that flies my flag—try Nicole Kidman.

  All those things aside, I love the history of film in the spirit of one who respects history as much as cinema, and so I cannot watch Moulin Rouge without thrilling to the tradition of Michael Powell pictures, of French Cancan, The Blue Angel, and Lola Montès, to say nothing of the work of Jacques Demy. Do not be surprised if, when the next great thrust forward by film occurs, it is borne on the wings of music, and if not exactly what Arthur Freed would have called a musical, still a melodrama in which the music and the story are not to be separated.

  So yes, this is as postmodern or as camp as Montmartre in Sydney (or wherever they did it), and a turn-of-the-century romance requiring a medley of pop-rock love songs delivered with such excitement by Ewan McGregor and Ms. Kidman that they might have been high on something—and not just each other. The surge, I think, is show business, the chance of art or fun, and doing it for an audience. Moulin Rouge is a delight in that its creator, Baz Luhrmann, knows that the audience is the vital part of the process. And in this very silly working out of its love story it is, really, the audience that chooses the ending it wants.

  The craft here goes very deep: to a screenplay by Luhrmann and Craig Pearce; to ravishing production design by Catherine Martin—the heart of this movie beats and flutters in its clothes and décor; the photography from Don McAlpine and Steve Dobson; the music arrangement by Craig Armstrong; costumes by Catherine Martin and Angus Strathie; choreography by John O’Connell. Look at the colors bolder than color in any contemporary film save for some from China. Look at the convulsive stagecraft—the inspired grasp of all the action in one great set. Listen to the natural melodrama of song. And feel the pressure of the film—it’s that of a heart striving, and Satine, our heroine, will kill herself finally from overexertion. I know sane people who said the film was too busy, too much, and I can only respond, Look at the control. Feel the pleasure. You must see the frenzy of action, being, and performance, to say nothing of the innocence of such full-blooded pretending as Jim Broadbent (Zidler), John Leguizamo (Toulouse-Lautrec), Richard Roxburgh (as the Duke of Worcester), and McGregor and Kidman, who may never be as wild again.

  Mr. Arkadin (1955)

  It was called Confidential Report when it first appeared in 1955, and it did not open properly in America for another seven years. There could be no clearer measure of what had happened to Orson Welles in just ten years. He was no longer regarded as being exactly American, and he had spent much of the fifties based in Europe, roaming around, doing all manner of projects despite lacking the proper financial basis. So Mr. Arkadin has an insouciant air of what Welles might have done at a weekend house party if admirers asked him, Could you do a Citizen Kane again? And so the picture is hurled together with available talent (or the lack of it), with shortcuts and omissions where he didn’t have all the footage he needed, and cooking the sound track as he went along. It’s a kind of amateur tour de force, the work of a master who no longer has the patience or money to indulge in mastery. And as such it begins to show a new way of making films—fudge the preparation, shoot it fast and faster, and cut it together for the hell of it. These are New Wave energies in a movie that also seems bored with film.

  Gregory Arkadin is rich and powerful and mysterious—he likes it that way because almost certainly his past is unsound. And don’t forget the abiding rumor that Welles himself did write this as a novel
first, though it seems more likely that disciple Maurice Bessy wrote it, just to cash in. Anyway, Arkadin hires a piece of Eurotrash, Guy Van Stratten (Robert Arden), to investigate his life. But as Van Stratten takes on this task, he begins to notice that the witnesses he discovers are being murdered. In other words, Arkadin is employing biography to make sure obituary stays blank. But Arkadin has a daughter (played by Welles’ new and third wife, Paola Mori), and his very existence may depend on her reaction.

  The attitude of the film is mocking yet ambivalent: Is Welles saying that Kane was just a bag of tricks, or is he putting himself more and more in the role of the magician? But the set pieces are intoxicating, and they include the story of the scorpion and the frog, with the final toast: to character.

  To this day, there are different-length versions, to torment historians and critics. Jean Bourgoin did most of the photography, Welles himself was the art director; Paul Misraki did the music. The body of the film is made up of expert yet lurid cameo parts—Akim Tamiroff, Michael Redgrave, Patricia Medina, Mischa Auer, Katina Paxinou, Jack Watling, Grégoire Asian, Peter van Eyck, and Suzanne Flon.

  So there isn’t really a story so much as the return to a myth. The tattered nature of the film, and the dispute over lengths and which version is most itself, seems to suggest the deliberate, provoking policy of making the remains of a film—to that extent, Mr. Arkadin is a prediction of those films Welles would leave behind, unfinished yet unmistakably himself.