HOPELESS, BUT NOT SERIOUS

A review requested by Rich B, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

Who knows how these things happen? To an average viewer, Billy Wilder is one of the most well-known directors in pre-1967 American cinema, and James Cagney is one of the most recognisable (or at least memorably-parodied) actors of his generation. The satiric farce One, Two, Three from 1961 is the solitary collaboration between these two icons, and it showcases some of the absolute best work either man ever put onscreen. And yet it's the next best thing to invisible, barring the odd Turner Classic Movies screening, and a short-lived, out-of-print DVD. You'll forgive me if I have a hard time keeping my Sagelike Critic hat on, when my Passionate Advocate hat is sitting right there, but I'll do my best.

The setting is Berlin, right before the Wall was built, a fact which severely inconvenienced the filmmakers, since the film came out right after the Wall was built. This necessitated the addition of an opening monologue spoken over a montage of life in the divided city by Cagney:

"On Sunday, August 13th, 1961, the eyes of America were on the nation's capital, where Roger Maris was hitting home runs number 44 and 45 against the Senators. On that same day, without any warning, the East German Communists sealed off the border between East and West Berlin. I only mention this to show the kind of people we're dealing with: real shifty!"

Sure, it's a little flop-sweaty, but it ends up benefiting the film anyway: it neatly sets up all the things we're going to be indundated with for the next hour and fifty minutes or so. There's the political angle, of course, contrasting the film's views of Americans and Communists: the former as self-obsessed and convinced of the absolute value of their popular culture, the latter as treacherous but not exactly wicked: more like they're annoying jerks that you can't get away from, so you have to be sure never to show them your backside and count the silver after they've left. There's also the matter of Cagney's delivery of the speech, a spectacularly quick bit of patter laced with put-upon annoyance, and between these two things - a sarcastic, cynical gloss on Cold War political one-upmanship and a take-no-prisoners pace - we've got pretty much everything that One, Two, Three has on its mind in capsule form. And oh, how glorious it is.

It's a fine successor to the genial sharpness of the great 1939 Ernst Lubitsch film Ninotchka, co-written by Wilder - with Charles Brackett, whereas One, Two, Three was co-written by I.A.L. Diamond, and the differences between the movies show a clear difference between the collaborative teams. But the core is the same, approaching the gulf between the central ideologies of the 20th Century with a bitter cynicism about both sides, though not therefore suggesting that they're morally equivalent; thus the conviction that the only way to properly address the cruelty and violence of Soviet totalitarianism is through plummy humor. If it sounds like this means that the film is dated and loses a lot of its punch without the viewer of more than 50 years later putting in the work to contextualise it: well, that's exactly the case. In fact, I can not say anything against the complaint that One, Two, Three is too much a time capsule of long-expired attitudes towards long-dead political concerns, for many of the best jokes are predicated on exactly those things. But damn, what a time capsule! Sarcastic, flippant satire and the Cold War went well together: though they're up to completely different things and have virtually no tonal overlap, I'm still compelled to put One, Two, Three alongside Dr. Strangelove as being not just a great attempt at caustic social commentary through the broadest of comedy, but also one the funniest comedies of the '60s, a decade when American films had a notable and pervasive difficulty with being funny.

Herein, Cagney plays "Mac" MacNamara, a Coca-Cola executive living in West Berlin with his justifiably resentful wife Phyllis (Arlene Francis) and their two children, attempting to break into the Eastern Bloc market; this would be an unprecedented victory for a Western corporation. His days are a constant trial of verbally fencing with a team of obstinate Soviet functionaries while prodding his assistant Schlemmer (Hans Lothar), a former SS officer desperately trying to forward the fiction that he was one of the good Germans, and flirting with his overly receptive secretary Fräulein Ingeborg (Lilo Pulver). Then one day, things explode: he's assigned the joyless job of chaperoning his boss's daughter, Scarlett Hazeltine (Pamela Tiffin), during her short German vacation. This balloons to two months (glossed over in a ballsy cut), by which point the 17-year-old has gone missing and then returned with a horrible secret in the form of a new husband, Otto Ludwig Piffl (Horst Buchholz). Mac is able to use his connections and a good amount of chicanery to get their marriage dropped into the memory hole, but then the second bomb drops: Scarlett is pregnant. And this Mac's mission abruptly changes: now he's got to mold Otto into an idealised old money capitalist, at the risk of being fired with extreme prejudice.

The opening two-thirds of One, Two, Three (as far as I took that little précis) are terrific farce, paced like lightning and embroidered with some of the best dialogue in Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond's collaboration, but it's all a warm-up for the last push. Here, the film turns into the most maniacal, unyielding high-speed comedy since The Lady Eve in 1941, anchored by Cagney's literally indefatigable performance. For all that the film is a triumph of tremendously well-paced directing and editing (by Daniel Mandell, whose abrupt clipping and diving between shots is a perfect example of how much tight cutting can do for comic timing), this is an actor's movie: nothing that goes well could be enough to save the film without a sterling performance in the central role, and nothing could go poorly enough to torpedo it with that performance in place. We can see, in fact, exactly the proof of my second point: the film does suffer from one intolerable misstep in the form of Buchholz, whom Cagney openly detested. Whether it was Buchholz's one-note portrayal of a boorish young ideologue that earned Cagney's ire, or if he retrenched to that portrayal in retaliation against his co-star, I cannot say, but the result is the same: Otto is flattened with the film's most tedious, shrill characterisation.

And it just doesn't matter. Cagney's work is so boisterous that he raises the energy in every scene he's in, which is all but two of them, or maybe three. His rat-a-tat-tat deliveries, escalating in frenzy along with the confusion and thorniness of the plot, are virtuosity and nothing less; his gesticulations are beautifully frantic but perfectly focused within that ("Cagney's finger snapping is tight as hell", I find in my notes, and that's no less than true). The work was intense enough to drive one of Hollywood's all-time greatest troupers into retirement; Cagney wouldn't appear onscreen again until he took a small role in Ragtime, in 1981. It's exactly the performance you'd like to assume would lead to such an action: there's nothing left behind, only furious activity, operatically loud line deliveries, and constant movement. This is not a cast of slouches - Francis and Lothar give particularly excellent performances, I think - but love the film or find it meanspirited and/or tiring in its relentless pace (I could never defend it against either complaint), Cagney is the focal point of everything, and his work is astonishingly committed.

Comedy being the most subjective of all things, I can do no more than posit that One, Two, Three is one of the funniest movies of its generation, and hope that's enough - it's less perfect than Wilder and Diamond's script for Some Like It Hot, but with a much greater pool of quotable lines (one of the reasons I haven't mentioned any is because I couldn't whittle my list of favorites down to less than a top 10); and not so emotionally probing as The Apartment, but it does a better job earning its sourness. And let us not compare it to the films in the director's career following it, for there was an immediate drop-off in quality from which he never fully recovered.

Unquestionably, the film is dated, and some of its finest touches no longer land: one particularly great scene is a delicate parody of the way that the word "pregnant" was once a cinematic taboo, without which it's just a protracted "the German fella can't speak English" bit that's barely even a gag. And for anything made up so completely of white-hot political references, the further we go from those topics, the less it's going to work. I suspect that much of One, Two, Three was already showing its age by the time Lyndon Johnson was inaugurated President. But what works is magnificent: the speed, the ingenious twists in the last act, the great line readings, the total lack of restraint on Cagney's part. This is as precious to me as any other midcentury comedy, and its lack of widespread prominence is a grievous lack.

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THE IMPRESSION OF NORMALCY

A review requested by Marc Lummis, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

There are many indisputably great films that it's clearly impossible for any normal audience member to complete unpack in all their nuances without the aid of some highly specialised arcane knowledge, but even then, writer-director Bernardo Bertolucci's The Conformist is a special case. It's the one and only quintessential all-time masterpiece I can name that trades, extensively, on its ideal viewer's knowledge of the history of 20th Century interior design. Cinematographer Vittorio Storaro invariably gets all of the credit, as well he might, given the relatively easy argument that The Conformist is the most impeccably-shot color film yet made. But as gorgeously lit as the film is - and that is much too weak a claim for the stunning compositions of light, shadow, and diagonal lines that dominate the film's cinematography - the engine driving the film's visuals is far less often the film's camerawork and lighting than production designer Ferdinando Scarfiotti and his team's recreation of the Modernist-derived architecture and furniture design of Fascist Italy. There is no film I know that so compellingly describes a link between the design of its world, the mentality that produced that design, and the mentality that is in turn encouraged by that design; that is to say, it is a film about the mindset of a man who wanted very badly to be a totally anonymous, perfect Fascist, and the most important way that it evokes that mindset is by containing it in distinctively Fascist spaces, distinctively Fascist compositions. And this is where I bring us back to arcane knowledge, because the simple fact of the matter is that I don't know a damn thing more about fine art under Fascism than I suppose you do (if you are some kind of design historian, I know infinitely less than you), and while the film allows us to intuit the nature of Fascist design theory, there's an enormous gap between being able to extrapolate a film's intentions versus understanding at a deep level the film's frame of reference.

So now that I've made this sound like the most absolutely staid piece of entertainment you could ever hope to stumble across, let me promise that The Conformist is, in fact, a gripping piece of cinema, far more watchable than any description of its content could suggest. It's kind of a gangster thriller, if you allow that the Fascist party in Italy was kind of a gang, structured around the fluttery thoughts of Marcello Clerici (Jean-Louis Trintignant, who is in this film one of the greatest empty vessels ever performed onscreen) as he rides in the back seat of a fine car one wintry day, being driven by fellow party member Manganiello (Gastone Moschin) on a mission whose exact details only reveal themselves slowly, but which plainly cause Marcello no end of unhappiness to ponder. Over the course of the next hour and a half, this car serves as the movie's home base, while we follow along with Marcello's stream-of-consciousness recollection of his life, which largely centers on his emotionally flat marriage to Giulia (Stefania Sandrelli), a smart choice of spouse rather than a passionate one, as well as his relationship with anti-Facist mentor Professor Quadri (Enzo Tarascio) and his obsession with Quadri's wife Anna (Dominique Sanda).

Viewed strictly as a psychological portrait, The Conformist is fairly blunt, overly Freudian, and not tremendously imaginative. As we see over the course of those chronologically erratic flashbacks, Marcello became aware as a preteen of his homosexual urges, and in particular had a rather ugly run-in with his family's pederastic chauffeur Lino (Pierre Clémenti) that ended with the older man dead by Marcello's hand. Absorbed by guilt and repulsed by his desires, Marcello has since spent his entire life attempting to disappear his own identity into the blank facade of a perfect conformist, behaving in the least aberrant way he possibly can, based on whatever is valued by the social order of the day. And that is, let us be honest, a bit overly schematic and just-so. Films about the sexual hypocrisy of the totalitarian parties in World War II were their own subgenre around this time, and there are those which have distinctly more sophisticated and less hoary ways of approaching that topic than The Conformist's frankly hoary appropriation of homosexuality as a metaphor (for the record, Luchino Visconti's The Damned from 1969 is my personal favorite example of the form).

But who needs crafty, unexpected screenwriting, when you have this kind of extraordinary psychoanalysis through style? This is, in places, massively obvious: the film's opening scene, as Marcello prepares to commit the worst sin he can imagine, finds the lighting from a neon sign outside his room gently washing him with red at intervals. A sequence synopsising the Allegory of the Cave, punctuated with the statement that those in the cave mistake a shadow of a thing for the thing itself, ends with Marcello's shadow against a wall being blotted out by another light source, the most straightforward "his self is dissolving" image that I could imagine. Frequently, the movie is craftier than that: an early scene where Marcello spills his guts and talks about how badly he wants to be normal and nondescript takes place in a dark room, with a window to a bright white radio studio casting into stark relief just how gloomy the world that Marcello wants to disappear into is. Naked, sexualised women are shown twice in the film, both times drenched in garish, colored lighting that renders them as something almost literally inhuman and unapproachable, the feverish dream version of normalised heterosexuality that Marcello reaches for and cannot attain. And the whole movie is dominated to the point of distraction with diagonal lines in the mise en scène and the lighting, imprisoning Marcello, slashing across his world and breaking it into fragments. It is among the most Expressionist films ever made in color, both in the descriptive sense (Expressionism, as a movement, was dedicated to expressing interior emotions through exterior form - hence the name), and in the more nitpicky sense that it uses the actual graphic techniques of German Expressionism: there's a shot of Sandrelli in a striped dress under striped lighting that is the most literally Expressionist shot that I have seen in any film made after the mid-'30s.

One could go through every single frame of the film and analyse how the composition, color, and lighting all reflect Marcello's mind, the dominance of the individuality-crushing cult of Fascism, or very often both. Certainly, it would go for tens of thousands of words beyond the meaningful scope of a "review" for me to fully work through every single image that I'd like to talk about - the one with the Eiffel Tower a hazy shape in the backdrop against a featureless grey sky, that's a profound emblem of isolation! The violet-selling woman singing "L'Internationale" is purposefully murky and blue to contrast against the ungainly brightness of he and his blonde mistress! Holy balls, the pullback to reveal Giulia patiently waiting as he fumbles his way through his first-ever confession to a priest, that's why they invented camera movement in the first place! - so I won't bother trying. There isn't, however, a single frame that feels accidental, anywhere in the movie: The Conformist is a dream movie for anyone who wants to play around with image analysis, just clicking around to random frames and unpack everything communicated by that shot, that pan, that marriage of visual desolation with the exquisite pain of Georges Delerue's great score, one of the best of the 1970s.

It is a greatly, audaciously cinematic movie, The Conformist is, imposingly precise in its arrangement of individual elements, and their collective shaping by Bertolucci into one grand statement about the the way that Fascism preyed upon humans and was created and bolstered by the same humans. Praising it feels a little obvious, like bothering to point out that there's some good stuff on the White Album; The Conformist is so direct and straightforward in so much of its symbolism that watching them feels like the movie has already done your work for you. But there are many layers to it, and they are not all so straightforward; I'll admit that I don't revisit this film as often as other of the great European art house classics of that generation, but every time I do, the film seems fresh and totally new, and that's the best thumbnail description of a masterpiece that I've got.

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HAVANA GOOD TIME

A review requested by a contributor who wishes to remain anonymous, with thanks for donating to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

No film shamelessly advertised with the tagline "Part Heaven... Part Hell... Pure Havana" can possibly be all good. To be fair to 1979's Cuba, though, it's nobody's fault but the marketing department's that they heard "Sean Connery plays a British government agent..." and immediately tired to figure out how to sell this cool and slow-moving anti-romantic anti-thriller as a distaff James Bond picture. But it's unlikely that it would have been possible to sell it as the thing it actually was. Not because Cuba is uninteresting - exactly the opposite. But its interest is in part because of how thoroughly unusual it is, to the point that it sometimes breaks the movie. It is none of the things that it seems like it should be, and while that's great for its personality, it's a bit thorny for it as a movie for people to watch.

The setting is Cuba, in the weeks and days immediately preceding the revolution on 1 January, 1959 (the film has the misfortune to commit its most profound error as its first narrative gesture after the opening credit sequence: onscreen text sets the action in 1959, when virtually all of it happens in December, 1958. It's a shockingly obvious mistake that makes it hard to take anything that follows entirely seriously). Connery's distinctly non-Bondian character is Robert Dapes, a miltary officer turned mercenary, who arrives in the politically tense Havana on the invitation of Batista's government in the form of General Bello (Martin Balsam), to offer advice and support in suppressing the Communist rebellion of Fidel Castro. While there, he encounters Alexandra Lopez de Pulido (Brooke Adams), an ex-lover who has returned home to marry a wealthy plantation owner, Juan (Chris Sarandon). While in the country, Robert finds that the exploitative business classes picking at Cuba's bones are cruel enough that it's not worth using his time to help prop the old regime up, while the Communist guerrillas are too indiscriminate in their radical violence to support them. Which leaves only "stay alive long enough to get the hell out and take Alexandra with" as far as plans go.

That is, mind you, the summary version of the script by Charles Wood. The actual film has far less direction, spending a good half of its running time looking around pre-revolutionary Cuba, frequently not even using the fig leaf of Robert's presence. At times, it's barely a narrative at all, and when it is, it's a deliberately unsatisfying one, subverting the expectations of both of its main plotlines: the politically shiftless mercenary who discovers the human element of the system he's cynically inhabiting, and the open Casablanca riffing (like, really, really open) inherent to ex-lovers reuniting against a politically-charged backdrop. It's an unconventional approach to what could easily be yet another in the endless line of movies about doomed love during historical flashpoints - the approach taken in this very same setting by 1990's Havana - and the film deserves plenty of credit for its bravery.

The question, then, is whether it deserves points for its execution, and on this point I am quite undecided. It's not exactly right to say that the film's "problem" is that it was directed by Richard Lester - in fact, Lester originated the project, so the alternative to a Lester Cuba is no Cuba at all. There's no way around it, though: he's a weird fit for the material. All of the director's best-known and most significant projects - the Beatles vehicle A Hard Day's Night, Palme d'Or winner The Knack... and How to Get It, the Salkind-produced megaproduction of The Three Musketeers - are united by a goofy, kinetic sensibility, one that oozes an unspoken "holy crap you guys we're making a mooooooveeeeeee" glee, entirely about having a whole lot of broad fun even when the films in question aren't comedies (though he tends to blur "comedy" and "not-comedy" - this is the man who was assigned the scraps of Richard Donner's Superman II and figured out how to turn them into the first superhero farce). The only one of his films besides Cuba that I've seen without any meaningfully protracted comic energy is Robin and Marian from 1976, his other collaboration with Connery, and that is, when all is said and done, a Robin Hood movie.

The skill set that Lester had developed over his years as a filmmaker were, then, not by any means a natural fit for a serious drama about a real-life political event whose ramifications were still piping hot twenty years after the fact. I do not say this to beat up on Cuba, merely to point out what a peculiar beast it is, combining gorgeous Spanish locations, impressively sober and dirty cinematography by David Watkin, and meandering incidents that are more interested in the day-to-day lifestyle of the characters than the historical moment about to overwhelm them, all under the stewardship of a director who has to constantly fight his instincts. Eventually, he loses: one of the most unpredictable elements of this surprisingly unpredictable movie is that the final act turns, rather abruptly, into an action-heavy tank battle. It's staggeringly unacceptable at the level of both plot and tone; imagine Casablanca tossing in Saving Private Ryan's finale before it returned to the airport finale, and you have approximately the cinematic aneurysm that Cuba transforms into. But it's still not played for laughs.

Conceding all of that, the lumpy, internally confused Cuba that we have is rather more aggressively magnetic and compelling than a more streamlined Cuba by a more superficially appropriate director. I mean, we have Havana right there, and Havana is dullness on toast. Before its diversion to the tank finale, Wood's script is strong at the level of thoughtful observation, laterally comparing several elements of Cuban government and culture to try and paint a full picture of everything good and bad about both the pro-Batista and pro-Castro elements of life on that island in 1958. That it fails to plug these ingredients into a clean narrative structure isn't beside the point: it is the point, much as the repeated failure of Connery to ignite as the daring, competent man of action we expect him to be (until, again, that damn tank) is the point. It is a film about how the smart outside observer, virile and capable, is sometimes exactly the wrong solution to a problem, whether that problem is with the fate of nations or the life of a woman trapped in a hurtful marriage of economic convenience. With a stronger actress in Adams's place (ideally one who was actually of Latin American descent), the film could have presented quite a strong anti-romantic thread to go along with its anti-Bondian portrait of the British warrior as hapless victim of historical undercurrents.

As it is, it's more theoretically interesting than actually interesting, but it's still bracing to see something puncture its genre so fearlessly, especially one whose aesthetic is, generally speaking, so in line with conventional crowd-pleasing instincts. It's about worthy of the re-evaluation called for by Steven Soderbergh (a longtime devotee of Lester and director of his very own picture about the Cuban revolution): as a deeply flawed movie whose historical inquiry and willingness to complicate the genre it appears to inhabit make it much more valuable than its original reception was willing to admit.

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KENYA BELIEVE IT?

A review requested by a compassionate fellow, brimming with love for his fellow man, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

Revisiting a political advocacy documentary whose stated intent was to influence a presidential election years after it failed to do so probably isn't sporting, regardless of one's opinion about the politics involved. On the other hand, the 2012 essay film 2016: Obama's America does have a still-contemporary hook: it offers specific predictions about what the United States of America will resemble by the end of President Barack Obama's second term, though for a movie with "2016" in the title, that's a shockingly small part of the overall running time. I write these words with just slightly more than a year and a half in that time period remaining, so strictly speaking, it's unfair to the film's mastermind Dinesh D'Souza to point out that none of the things he has predicted has come to pass, and the one that has come closest has been for totally different reasons. But any of them could happen, even though it seems like Obama is leaving himself with precious little time to scrap 97% of the nation's nuclear arsenal, if he's actually that interested in doing it.

For most of its running time, Obama's America is actually more of a biographical and psychological sketch than it is in any significant way about policy. This is both its weirdest characteristic and its greatest liability, as a movie and as propaganda. Instead of making bold factual claims, the film structures most of its argument along the skeleton of "this seems one way, but what if we assume it's this other way instead?", a series of queries that openly confess to being baldly speculative. Late in the film, D'Souza appears on one or another of the talking heads shows and all but openly admits that the idea of the book that primarily forms the film's basis - The Roots of Obama's Rage, from 2010 - exists primarily to fill a hole in the conservative ecosystem, providing a replacement for the "Obama is a Kenyan-born Muslim" narrative to people who want all the fun of seeing the president as leader of a shadowy cabal without the embarrassment of having to believe demonstrable untruths. It's a moment that confirms that we've basically been watching a History Channel show about ancient aliens, ginning up nonsense based on evidence that, at best, doesn't not exist, all in the interest of throwing out a conspiracy theory just for the hell of it.

And so the film itself cleaves into three units: the first is D'Souza's own life story, which he sees as being enormously parallel to Obama's own (same birth year, same marriage year, both came from a multicultural international background), and which he offers for reasons that are honestly a bit obscure. At first I assumed it was a "see, if a brown-skinned immigrant like me can become a well-known political commentator and college president, America must be a great country!" riff, and the early going of D'Souza's rhetoric would appear to bear that out. But nothing in the remainder of the film follows through on that.

Meanwhile, D'Souza's way of telling his own life story is baffling in the extreme, relying on some of the hokiest re-enactments imaginable. At one point, our host recalls the time he got into an argument, as a student, with Jesse Jackson, insisting that there's no real evidence for such a thing as systemic racism (it's darkly hilarious, in 2015, to think that there was a time less than three years ago when anybody could think that they might get away with arguing for the non-existence of systemic racism), and the images drift into a peculiar fantasy sequence, in which a young black man sits down at a bar, only to have two young white men make a big show of looking disdainful and leaving. And then he looks sad, and biased-against. But look! It turns out they were just going to get his birthday cake, and they acted mean to make it a bigger surprise! Yay for post-racist America! I have no fucking clue what this is about, but it's deliriously campy.

Having thus established himself as a beneficiary of America's incontrovertible goodness, D'Souza launches into a fascinatingly off-base psychoanalysis of the president, minutely investigated his family history even when it makes no sense to do so (we're not just informed that his father had eight children by three women, we're presented the chronology of how that happened in lengthy detail), and building up the idea that Obama was so affected by the absence of his father for virtually his entire life, that he decided to take as his own worldview his father's Muslim radical anti-colonialism. Anti-colonialism! That's the sexy concept around which Obama's America relentlessly circles, with D'Souza deciding at the outset that the only possible way to interpret all the weird imbalances in Obama's behavior (which, for the most part, D'Souza does not specify) is to assume that he's a sleeper agent waiting for the perfect moment to gut the United States' standing in the world, economically and militarily. The idea that the apparent inconsistencies in the president's actions and rhetoric might be because he's a corporate centrist who says liberal-sounding lies to keep the Democratic base from acting up being much too simple and obvious, apparently; but one of the other fascinating things about Obama's America is that nearly every single specific mystery D'Souza tries to solve from the right is rather more directly solvable from the left.

The film's whole argument is unbelievably tormented, not representing the mainstream of conservative punditry at all (the best takedown of The Roots of Obama's Rage was, in fact, written by a conservative), and in the absence of facts, relying on innuendo, and in the absence of innuendo, relying on, "don't you see, the fact that no piece of evidence in existence confirms my theories about how anti-colonial Kenyan Muslim radicalism is the defining aspect of Obama's personality just shows how insidious he really is!" One badly wishes to compare D'Souza to the left's own movie essayist Michael Moore, who similarly allows implication to stand in for proof and isn't above misleading with editing when the facts aren't right where he wants them. But at least Moore makes testable claims. And more importantly, Moore is a bravura showman, plucking at our emotions, both to make us very sad and to make us very angry; and Moore is a broad entertainer, throwing comedy and music and a razzle-dazzle pacing to make his movies peppy. D'Souza has none of that - Obama's America is, in fact, deathly boring, as our host uses his warm, soft voice to run through ream after ream of dense narration, like a college professor who you find personally appealing, but completely incapable of making his lectures feel like anything but listening to an audiobook of an appliance manual.

Even setting aside its intellectual barrenness, Obama's America just isn't well-made, the chief difference between this and the equally polemical and rhetorically dubious but vastly more stylish Bowling for Columbine, for example. It's the difference between a filmmaker getting involved in politics, and a politico deciding to make a film, perhaps, and while presumably D'Souza's co-director, John Sullivan, was responsible for more of the actual nuts-and-bolts filmmaking, even he was a producer, not a director. And Obama's America is mostly a dumbshow: it's polished and sleek, and it looks more expensive than it is, but it also doesn't look like that money went to people who knew how to mix sound, for example. Or lock down a tripod. There are artistic choices that verge on incompetence, like the obviously-staged cell phone sequences in which D'Souza looks intense and troubled while his conversations are intercut with people on the other line rattling off their evidence for Obama's wickedness ("excitedly rattling off", I was going to say, but nobody in this movie is ever all that excited about anything). One of them is clearly holding his phone the wrong way.

At one point, the filmmakers commit one of the worst unforced errors I've ever seen in a political documentary: D'Souza takes the time to fly to Africa to talk to Obama's half-brother George, and attempts to goad him into admitting how furious he is at having been abandoned by his wicked anti-colonial monster of a relative. And George just won't do it; he doesn't appear to care in the slightest about American politics, or find the interview interesting at all. It undoubtedly sucked for the filmmakers to spend the resources on getting an unusable interview like that, but it was exactly that: unusable. And yet D'Souza soldiers on and sticks it in the movie anyway, like it somehow proves his point, rather than making him look like a boob. That's Obama's America in a nutshell: when the facts go square against your argument, simply point and them and declare "look, do you see how that proves me right? Yes it certainly does, and if you disagree, you just need to listen to my quiet, sleepy voice some more". This is neither printing the facts nor printing the legend: it's printing the flop sweat.

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LIVING WITH THE PAST

A review requested by Coco, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

It should be no surprise when a movie titled The Milk of Sorrow turns out to be unrelentingly bleak, but the film's opening minutes are shattering beyond anything one could be prepared for: over black, we hear an old woman reciting a kind of lullaby in a tuneless sing-song. Within moments, this bland, innocuous prattle has shot into the realm of nightmare, as she begins reciting the litany of abuses piled upon her during the period of violence that rocked Peru in the 1980s: rape, torture, debasement. All of it presented in the same flighty warble. For a film that proves to be especially muted and low-key in all of its doings, this is an outrageously "big" opening gambit, but it has the merit of setting up the parameters of the movie in unmistakable terms: this is to be a story of how past traumas can devour the present, and how society as a whole avoids a full reckoning with the ugliness of history.

That theme is borne out not just through the plot (which is, anyway, very minimal), but even more through the basic facts of who the characters are. The litany of suffering that opens the film is being sung by an old woman on her deathbed and overheard by her adult daughter, Fausta (Magaly Solier), who we quickly understand has been listening to these stories all her life. And that would be enough to give the young woman a good excuse to be convinced that all is hell and misery, even without the wrinkle of a folk belief that Fausta, along with all the other children whose mothers were subject to the rape and violence of the '80s during their pregnancies or while nursing, has been contaminated by "the milk of sorrow". Which isn't even a figurative attempt to translate the actual Spanish phrase for the condition and the original title, La teta asustada - "the frightened teat" And in fairness, it's really hard to imagine The Frightened Teat being nominated for an Oscar, or any of the other wonderful things that happened to the movie, though the distinction between the concepts is significant enough that I'm a little annoyed by the shift regardless.

The point being, Fausta's mother dies, leaving her daughter in a quandary: she's too poor to afford to bury her mother's corpse, and too convinced that the world is a depraved, rancid place to enter into it. Eventually, she finds employment as the maid to a haughty Lima pianist named Aída (Susi Sánchez), and makes a solitary friend in the form of Noé (Efraín Solís), Aída's gardner, who agrees to walk the petrified young woman home every night, where her family is busy preparing for a grand wedding. Meanwhile, Aída becomes so obsessed with Fausta's own songs, made up ditties about the pain and loneliness of the world, she offers the young woman a single pearl for every one she's willing to share. And this is all going on while the potato Fausta inserted into her vagina as a way to ward off any potential rapists is beginning to sprout roots and cause serious harm to her body.

It's not what it sounds like, at least assuming that you join me in thinking that it sounds like a gaudy melodrama. On the contrary, the dominant mode of The Milk of Sorrow is hushed, claustrophobic, and very close to neorealism in its detachment and lack of overt "handling" of the characters. Throughout, director Claudia Llosa demonstrates the precious skill of being able to set up the camera in a way that very clearly indicates how we're supposed to read the characters and the situation containing them - very very clearly, in some cases - but is also so unforced and devoid of any shine or fluidity that it doesn't feel like anything has been staged for our benefit, but we just got very lucky to happen to watch it from that angle. Mixing a very clear aesthetic style with an attempt at politically engaged realism is tricky enough; doing it in a movie where half the characters believe in the ghostly "frightened teat" and the protagonist has to keep trimming the potato vines growing out of her nether regions is halfway to a miracle. It's a combination of a lot of things that go into this: Llosa's grimy mise en scène, cinematographer Natasha Braier's rock steady control of color and lighting to give the impression of a constantly overcast world where nothing seems too vivid and cinematic, Solier's dauntlessly muted performance, the immaculately realistic sound recording. But the net result is that, for as much as it could be a basket of contrivances, The Milk of Sorrow has a casual docurealist aura about it that keeps its feet planted firmly on the ground no matter what Llosa's script has to say about it.

And that's especially good because the balance between this working versus being a goofy mess of overbaked writerly ideas is razor-thin. The 2009 film, Llosa's second - she has since made a third, Aloft - is an improvement in every way on her 2006 debut, Madeinusa, but she repeats that film's most obvious, film studenty error of treating the characters as placeholders for ideas, and foregrounding the way that the plot is a surrogate for greater societal conflicts while shortchanging it as an individual story of people. Putting it bluntly, The Milk of Sorrow is rotten with symbolism, in every single turn of its narrative and many of its visuals. I shall readily concede that some of the visual symbols are well-made enough that they still work like gangbusters: placing two characters at opposite sides of a giant X is corny, but the garish pink motif that keeps cropping up in the wedding preparations is such a striking contrast to the sandy palette that Llosa and Braier otherwise employ that it's always impressive when it arrives, and it's frequently used in compositions that are simply gorgeous in and of themselves (an overhead shot of pink spoons arranged with artful randomness on geometrically precise plates is an image that I'll carry with me a long time.

Just because the symbolism is obvious doesn't mean it can't also work: the representation of Aída as the Disinterest Bourgeoisie using baubles of know value to themselves but precious to the put-upon rural classes as a bribe to encourage Fausta, the Exploited Underclass, to keep selling her tales of woe in a purely narrative context where Aída doesn't actually have to think about the reality of the horrible history she's hearing; that's a framework straight out of '20s Soviet propaganda, but it's drawn up through the characters enough to make it feel organic and real and genuinely insightful. Other symbolism is, well, SYMBOLISM: that vaginal potato, trying to flower but turning into something pustulant and dangerous because it's being kept inside rather than expressed, that was pretty much never going to to do it for me.

The great limitation of The Milk of Sorrow, then, is that it keeps wanting to turn into an op-ed about the need to engage with Peru's sordid history and in engaging with it, stop clinging to trauma as a defining element of personality, and it wants this so bad that it chokes itself off as a movie about people. Whereas the great triumph is that it's so precise in the world it builds and the way it places characters in that world, it's still basically a solid movie about people anyway. The praise it received is maybe a bit outsized compared to the balance of its strengths and weakness: Oscar nominations are one thing, but taking the top prize at Berlin against Everyone Else and About Elly is rather more questionable. That said, the film ably gives voice to a period in history almost completely invisible to the world at large, and it does so while providing a great deal of dignity if not quite a great deal of individuality to its equally invisible central characters, and given the difficulty in finding any Peruvian cinema available in an English-friendly context, the film's values patently outweigh its flaws.

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ABUSES OF POWER

A second review requested by David Greenwood, with thanks for contributing twice to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

Knowing, as one can't help but know, that Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom is the most god-damned notorious art film of them all for its grotesque displays of violence, warped sexuality, and bottomless imagination for depicting human cruelty, the film's opening is even more disorienting than it should be. And it's nothing but black titles on a white background! But underneath plays a jaunty, jazzy tune, Franco Ansaldo and Alfredo Bracchi's "Son tanto triste", promising a breezy tossed-off insincere experience to follow. In its own tiny way, it's as perverse and excruciating as anything that follows.

Truth be told, Salò's reputation for toxic, vile unwatchability is a bit overblown. It is, beyond question, a harrowing experience, and one that is very difficult to recommend - having at last seen it, I'm comfortable calling it an absolutely vital work of cinema that I'll never recommend to anybody for any reason - but it's nothing like a non-stop chamber of horrors that, once it stops, never lets up in punishing the audience. It's extremely formalised, in fact, and takes repeated stops to shift away from its depictions or even descriptions of depravity to indulge in circular conversation amongst its villains about European philosophy. True, these narrative pauses have a tendency to feel like the film is mustering its strength and drawing its breath for the next onslaught, so it's not like we're given a chance to relax in front of it. No, it keeps us pretty tense and wired throughout. Really, the parts of it that are most explicit are in some way the easiest to take, since at least in those cases we get to have a reaction and thus catharsis.

The film was the last to be directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini, whose horrible murder came earlier in the same month as the film's November, 1975 premiere in France, giving its depiction of sexualised violence an extra charge of sickening potency - moreso when it was new than now, I am sure, and the papers aren't busily running photos of Pasolini's bloody corpse. He and Sergio Citti adapted it from the novel by the Marquis de Sade, added some of Dante's Inferno for the framework - though Salò describes only a one-way descent into Hell - and transposed the action to the Mussolini government during its final days as a puppet for the waning Nazi regime. How closely it hews to de Sade, I cannot begin to say, but taken on its own terms, the story adopts an almost poetic structure, built around four "stanzas", each moving through roughly the same sequence of events, while escalating the specific cruelty and intensity of those events. Simply put, the plot centers on a Duke (Paolo Bonacelli), a Bishop (Giorgio Cataldi), a Magistrate (Umberto P. Quintavalle), and the President (Aldo Valletti), who assemble a host of gorgeous young men and women, some kidnapped and some hired, to populate their castle on the outskirts of Salò, the capitol of the short-lived Italian Social Republic. There, they conduct an endless (or 120 days, anyway) experiment in causing humiliation and torture to their victims as a way of indulging their own pleasure. And that's basically it.

Pasolini's essays and interviews conducted in the last few years of his life leave virtually no ambiguity as to what he wanted to accomplish with this film, particularly in relationship to the three immediately preceding it in his career, the "Trilogy of Life" - The Decameron, The Canterbury Tales, and Arabian Nights. Those films, the sunniest of his career, cumulatively present an idealised vision of pre-capitalist society, using primitive film technique and ancient storytelling style to depict sexual and social freedom, something not entirely unlike Rousseau's swoony Enlightenment-era adoration of noble savagery. In that way, it makes perfect sense that Pasolini would turn to de Sade, whose work was an explicit and purposeful contrast to Rousseau's optimism, showcasing the darker side of human possibility. For Pasolini, who had abandoned Marxism but not anti-capitalism at this point, the kind of joyful sexuality he had explored in the trilogy was fundamentally implausible in the corrupt capitalist world around him, based on relationship of power and the exploitation and ownership of the lower classes by the upper classes. It's not unusual to see Salò described as an anti-Fascist parable, using humiliation, torture, and rape as metaphors for the exploitation of a whole country by right-wing authoritarians during the war, but it's more the case that Fascism itself is also a metaphor, and the whole thing is a more general parable about the inherent abuses meted out by the self-indulgent leadership classes against the rest of society, baked into The System The Way It Is Now. This approach itself led to the film being attacked by the Italian intelligentsia, notably Italo Calvino, who viewed Pasolini's appropriation of Mussolini's real-life abuses to serve as an extreme parody in a provocative movie to be dangerously amoral.

That might very well be the case - the last thing I'm qualified to do is tell the intellectuals who lived through Fascism that they don't understand Fascism. Morally, I am genuinely uncertain what we should do with Salò, other than to firmly declare that it's grotesque excesses have very little in common with the like of torture porn or the Nazi sexploitation films of the same era. As cinema, though, the film is ingenious - one can debate the merits of Pasolini's intentions, but not the skill with which he carried them off, and even if we allow for Death of the Author and Intentional Fallacy and the like (and we should), there's no denying that the movie and themes the director described in the last year of his life is precisely the movie that we can watch today, those of us who don't live in countries where it's still illegal.

It's a marvelously crafty picture, Salò is, an enormous shift away from the artful crudeness of the Trilogy of Life and mostly unlike anything Pasolini ever did. It's a mercilessly aesthetic piece: the all-star team of production designer Dante Ferretti, set decorator Osvaldo Desideri, and costume designer Danilo Donati, in concert with Pasolini and cinematographer Tonino Delli Colli's proscenium-like framing along strict gridlines, gives Salò the polish, richness, and geometric precision of classical art; for a film so jam-packed with ugliness, it's gorgeous, like, constantly. But also chilly and mechanical: what none of the visuals do is give any life to the movie, and the customary hollowed-out sound design of Italian film production does nothing to combat that, nor do the dispassionate performances which (much like the sound), only really have much vibrancy to speak of during the cruelest acts depicted. The film is so sharp and precise that it feels totally artificial, and the whole time one watches it, one is first and always aware of the artifice on display: the fussy staging, the inorganic cutting, the way that depravity turns on and off like a light switch.

It becomes uncomfortably clear, in other words, that the film anticipates an audience - ourselves, and probably Pasolini too, whose sexual proclivities weren't entirely unlike some of the ones being depicted in the film as so ugly. Particularly viewed in the context of Tree of Life, Salò is obviously a scream of primal rage, directed at a world where everything is cruel and even something as beautiful as sex has been curdled and turned into a device for the powerful to assert their control over the powerless (I'm not sure that I've ever seen a movie that so bluntly insists on rape as a totally de-eroticised act). But it is not righteous. It indicts itself, its maker, and its viewers for existing in the same system of abuse and exploitation as its subjects; even as the victimised characters start to become increasingly complicit in sustaining the sordid world they're suffering through, it grows harder to deny that Salò isn't letting us off the hook. Isn't it a beautiful movie to just look at? Aren't the many young men and women seen naked throughout the film attractive? Yes and yes - that's the movie's trap for us, for even though it's as thoroughly unpleasant as any film that does not depict actual dead humans or animals could possibly be, Salò anticipates its status as an unspeakable provocation, one of those movies that we all go see precisely because they're so shocking and upsetting and horrible. The film tricks us, though: first by including so much material that's upsetting without being shocking, its long passage of depressingly violent stories and shitty jokes and its slow-paced development of the visual and narrative rules, and sitting listening to its characters talk about how utterly vile they are without punishing them for it. And then when the shocks start to come, they're staged in a way that makes us feel like voyeurs - explicitly so, in one of the final moments. It's a film that indicts everything, up to and including itself for existing in the world it depicts.

It's a one-of-a-kind mixture of rarefied intellectualism and disgusting visceral spectacle, and its themes are so severe as to feel like a howl of despair more than an articulate statement of radical politics. But it is pure cinema. I was not glad to see it while I was watching it, but I'm glad to have seen it; it is quite a thing to grapple with. Movies like this simply don't exist: that's arguably a good thing, but it certainly makes Salò stand out as a singular artistic accomplishment.

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UNSPEAKABLE FILTH

A review requested by David Greenwood, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

L'âge d'or, an hour-long 1930 feature, is the second of the two collaborations between France-based Spanish surrealists Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, and it is certainly less jam-packed with iconic "every film buff alive knows this shot" shots than their 1929 short Un chien andalou. But it also better - oh, fuck me. "Better" is a word that has no place in this conversation at all. Buñuel and Dalí were, quite specifically, not looking to do things that would get them praise for being "good". Using "better" is exactly missing the point. L'âge d'or is, let us say, the more complex of the two, and the more thematically probing, which is probably inevitable given that it's four times as long. It is absolutely the more naked political film - Dalí was an iconoclast who just wanted to up-end people's expectations, Buñuel a committed radical who wanted to tear down the Catholic Church and and the right-wing European governments of that period with all the force and rage he could muster. In its combination of rabid left-wing politics and vigorous surrealism, L'âge d'or is the first truly "Buñuelian" film, then, and it is not surprising to learn that the relationship between the two artists had deteriorated to the point that Dalí had virtually nothing to do with the film's production once the screenplay was completed - according to a deliciously tawdry but hard-to-verify legend, Buñuel chased Dalí off the set on the first day with a hammer.

The film has a scenario that starts to reveal itself more and more explicitly as it moves along, but for a healthy span of the beginning, it doesn't seem that way. Instead, L'âge d'or picks up right where Un chien andalou left off, as a series of seemingly disconnected visual gags, though "gag" is in the eye of the beholder. Violent shocks of aggressive absurdity is probably closer to the mark. The first of these is a series of images of scorpions, taken from a nature documentary, stitched together with large blocks of intertitles - the movie is a sound/silent hybrid, but more on that later - which pretty neatly sets up the mood of the film as a series of lashing, defensive attacks by venomous arthropods. Which is about as nice a sentiment as anything Buñuel and Dalí have to spare for the twin targets of their ensuing satiric broadside, the bourgeoisie and the Catholic Church.

The nature of that attack is two-fold: first in the accumulation of random startling and blasphemous imagery, second in the details of its story - perhaps surprisingly, given how cozily L'âge d'or fits into even the most proscriptive definition of Surrealism. But for as madcap and what-the-almighty-fuck-is-going-on the film's barrage of visual non sequiturs no doubt is, L'âge d'or actually tells a rather clear, straightforward story: they want to have sex (they are played by Gaston Modot and Lya Lys), and circumstances keep preventing. At first they can't because the city of Rome is founded on the exact muddy patch where they were trysting. Afterwards, they can't because of the censoriousness of Rome's most noteworthy export, Catholic morality. Finally, they can't because of psychological symbolism. Meanwhile, Jesus Christ (Lionel Salem) is raping young girls in a monastery. Only it's possible he's just a man who look as and acts uncannily like Christ. It's also probably not the case that Rome was founded in 1930. But that is when it was foundered, anyway.

So, fair is fair, it gets less clear the closer you look at it, but at the broadest possible respect, the film is first and above all about the importance of openly and honestly engaging with one's libido, and the way that all of Polite Western Upper-Middle Class society is structured to make that engagement specifically impossible. It's a randy film, with seductive blow-jobs delivered to the toes of statues, and the man feverishly imagining that advertisements are depicting abstract, disembodied vaginas, and all that good stuff; and while it presents sex as the stuff of loopy comedy, it also presents it with good-natured humor. The rest of the film, though, is pure, rage-filled mockery of the stifling rules of society, opening with a bleak joke against a quartet of bishops, ending with a nasty attack on Christ as a hero-villain out of de Sade's 120 Days of Sodom, and middling with a stuffy bourgeois party that's pelted by absurdities and anti-social provocations like something from a more sexually-charged Marx brothers movie. For anti-social behavior is presented in L'âge d'or as an aphrodisiac; both in a nod to the erotic nature of the taboo, and a clear implication that everything about this society is worth being anti.

The film is confusing and densely packed, but one thing it's surely not is subtle: there's no way to watch it without being repeatedly hit in the face by the filmmakers' disgust with the puritanical conformist urges that are linked through bizarre staging, crafty editing, and ironic sound cues with cruel exploitation of a working class that the wealthy ignore completely, with sublimated violence, with feces - much like the then eight-year-old Ulysses, another work of art to fearlessly confound social satire with pornographic depictions, L'âge d'or wants us to see and hear and think about shit, the great unifying element of all humanity and animals, that Nice People Never Talk About, and can be made to look ridiculous simply by placing them in its metaphorical proximity.

Is it all a bit puerile? Aye, undoubtedly - the 26-year-old Dalí and 30-year-old Buñuel weren't kids but they were close enough anyway to have the enraged snottiness of youth, and that's the clear animating force underneath L'âge d'or: the young person's snarl of contempt to an older generation that has massively ruined everything, "fuck you for this, and fuck you for that, and just fuck you". By drifting from boldly authoritative documentary footage and narration to cheap visual and audio gags to startling, often upsetting weirdness that seems to come from no place but a chaotic dream, the film connects the real, tangible world (the documentary) to a frolicking hell of random nonsense (the rest), and it does this with the unchecked, self-confident gusto of untried, undisciplined youth. I freely admit that it's largely for this reason that, as easily as I find myself whipped along in the film's frenzies, I can't find it in me to regard it as top-level Buñuel; most of his career later, the director would revisit much of the same ideas (the need for sexual openness, the totalitarian hypocrisy of the Catholic Church, parodic religious iconography) in Viridiana, a film as controlled and clear as L'âge d'or is freewheeling, and directly because of its greater maturity and more precise presentation, it's a far nastier and more piercing satiric assault.

But by no conceivable means does the existence of that later film mean that L'âge d'or is redundant: it has a vitality and insane level of visual creativity that are all the justification it could possibly require. As a document of capricious madness turning the world into a pile of steaming shit and then declaring things a Golden Age, the films' unpredictable shifts in tone and content, and the inexplicable content of its various jokes, could not have been bettered. It was the film that 1930 needed, and decades upon decades later, it still has potency to shock the squares like almost nothing else out of entire generations of the avant-garde.

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HITLER? I HARDLY KNOW 'ER!

A review requested by Jenny B, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

I have been guilty of this sin as recently as in the middle of re-watching the film for this review, but I think I can still say without hesitation: it's much, much too easy to overlook how bold To Be or Not to Be is. The 1942 film, that is, not the 1983 remake that paired married couple Anne Bancroft and Mel Brooks in their only co-starring lead roles, and is in all ways a genial comedy that replicates its source material without any of the same fire. That, of course, is what happens when you treat World War II as a 38-years-gone historical event where the good guys won, instead of the thing happening literally right now to actual living people. To Be or Not to Be went into production before America had entered the conflict - it is vital to remember that about it. While the random American plucked off the street in 1941 surely favored joining the war on the side of the Allies, thanks to a lingering kinship with the United Kingdom, a meaningful segment of U.S. citizens favored siding with the Axis right up until the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Hollywood threw a lot of energy at the pro-Allies side of that argument in the months preceding that (if there's such a thing as a major studio film from '40 and '41 making a pro-fascist declaration, I'm unfamiliar with it, though between 1933 and 1939, there are some here and there that present that belief in quiet and implicit ways), but even in that exciting atmosphere of righteous propaganda, To Be or Not to Be stands out. It is one of the vanishingly small number of movies to look at the pomp and pageantry of Nazism, the passionate furor of Adolf Hitler, and the terrifying ease with which Germany absorbed huge swaths of Western and Central Europe, and conclude that braying, derisive laughter was precisely the right weapon. Offhand, I can only point to the 1940 Charles Chaplin film The Great Dictator as another example of staring straight into Hitler's face and snorting, "That man is a fucking clown".

Divorced from its immediate moment, it's all too easy to find To Be or Not to Be a somewhat weirdly-shaped object, and by no means one of the highlights in the career of director Ernst Lubitsch. That man's stock in trade was, of course, a succession of the most effervescent, elegant sophisticated comedies produced in the '20s and '30s. The famed, seldom-defined "Lubitsch Touch" broadly referred to his ability to express his characters' sexual ardor and inner monologues through clever, witty visual touches and sparkling dialogue that glancingly touched on seriously adult topics, resulting in some of the most disarmingly grown-up movies that have ever been made, and always in a register of deeply intoxicating good humor. To Be or Not to Be doesn't have the luxury of delicacy; there are long stretches that feel more like Lubitsch Thumb pressing down on the scales. Not unfairly: the Berlin-born director, who'd been in Hollywood for almost a decade when the Nazis came to power in 1933 and never returned home, undoubtedly had some very pronounced and very angry thoughts about what was going on back in Europe (he wrote, uncredited, the story for the film; Edwin Justus Mayer wrote the script), ones that he hadn't nearly exorcised in the 1939 romcom Ninotchka, his only other openly political movie during the war years, and that focused more towards the Soviet Union, with only a handful of nods towards Nazi Germany.

Still, this is an odd fit for the agreed-upon definition of a Lubitsch movie, and his immaculately well-honed skills in making sophisticated romantic comedies aren't always what the movie needs. As the title implies, To Be or Not to Be has a little something to do with Shakespeare: its central figures are a troupe of actors working out of Warsaw in August, 1939, led by the vain ham Joseph Tura (Jack Benny), playing Hamlet and present, and his diaphanous, bored wife Maria (Carole Lombard, extraordinary in her last role - she died in a plane crash before the film opened), whose role isn't specified, but as the solitary woman in the company, it makes sense to assume she's playing an experimental hybrid of Gertrude and Ophelia. Something has gone out of the Tura marriage; it seems easy to assume that Joseph's preening and neurotic, needy self-regard are at least part of it, which is why we simply can't feel too bad when Maria agrees to let a handsome young admirer, the pilot Lt. Stanislav Sobinski (Robert Stack), into her dressing room during her husband's angst-filled rendition of the "To be or not to be" monologue one night. And other nights, and some afternoons. This hasn't actually turned into sex yet when a performance of the play is interrupted by the German invasion of Poland on 1 September. And from there, everybody's lives go to hell; the film flashes through then-recent history until winter, when Stanislav has become one of several Polish airmen attached to the RAF, and Warsaw is home to a robust resistance movement trying its best to shake the Nazi grip of its beloved city.

This triggers a chain of farcical events that wouldn't be remotely worth recapping; it's enough to say that the Turas, as well as the other members of their troupe, including the Jewish actor Greenberg (Felix Bessart) and Bronski (Tom Dugan), who has been working on his Hitler impersonation, are obliged to stage a hectic series of cons and tricks to help Stanislav keep the turncoat Professor Siletsky (Stanley Ridges) from meeting with the puffed-up Colonel Ehrhardt (Sig Ruman) and revealing devastating information about the Warsaw underground. That provides a lot of material for the Lubitsch Touch to work on, with the Turas' strained marriage and Maria's eminently sophisticated approach to play-acting at having a lover even without the real intent to have an affair working in exactly the area of intelligently sexual comedy that was home to the director's very best work, and the pile-up of farce showcasing his ability to keep timing and pacing under ruthless control, while letting the audience get out just far enough ahead of the characters that we can be really surprised when they go a direction that we didn't anticipate.

It's not all-time championship Lubitsch: he was a filmmaker uniquely dinged by the coming of the Production Code and its clamping down on even the most erudite, classy lechery. But the film is operating in two totally distinct comic modes and both of them are executed perfectly, with the naughty marital comedy sneaking and slinking along with Lombard's breathy voice and Benny's huffy over-reactions (there's a special kind of genius in dropping an overacting broad comic like Benny into an elegant comedy, and then re-casting his broadness as a failure of the character, not the actor), and the brute-force gags of the more direct screwball comedy blasting forth like cannon fire. For example, the film's gotcha opening, set during rehearsals for a play about Nazi venality that's presented to us as actual Nazi venality at first, is overclocked so slightly and flawlessly that Lubitsch is able to wring genuine laughs out of a series of rapid-fire "Heil Hitler"s. Or there's the way that the line "So, they call me 'Concentration Camp Ehrhardt'" can be repeated numerous times throughout the movie, always in just enough of a different context that it can be funny for a totally different reason. Hell, there's the way that the line "So, they call me 'Concentration Camp Ehrhardt'" can be played for laughs in the first place.

All well and good, and the big hole in the side of To Be or Not to Be is that it's a full-on spy thriller that has been engineered into a comedy about a low-rent acting troupe tricking the Nazis. And this finds Lubitsch... not failing. Like comedies, thrillers are dependent on pitch-perfect timing, so the skill sets involved aren't totally incompatible. Lubitsch's directorial style in particular was always based in large part on the arrangement of people within rooms, so we can see what's going on between them more clearly than they can; this is a skill that's arguably even more important for thrillers than comedies. And yet the thriller elements of the film feel a bit roughly grafted onto the comedy, even though at the level of writing, it's the thriller that drives the plot.

What it is, I think, is the film announcing itself a bit too loudly as wartime morale-boosting: "Yes, it's good and necessary to make fun of these Teutonic blowhards and their idiotic beliefs and merciless dominance of beautiful Europe", it says on the one hand, before flipping abruptly into "and don't forget the incredible bravery of those on the front lines fighting to cut Germany off at the knees, despite horrible danger". That's a rough tonal switch to handle, and with cinematographer Rudolph Maté doing such an outstanding job of making the nighttime Warsaw of spies and counterspies look so moody and grim, the film's reversions to deft comedy feel awfully damn weird.

But that's if we're watching the film solely through the lens of Lubitsch's other films, or as a comedy film divorced from anything but the most generic considerations of comedy form, and that's why I started by pointing out how inseparable the film is from its moment in history. In that light, it's a satiric marvel, mercilessly lampooning the cult of personality that Nazism had burned into its core - I unhesitatingly prefer it to The Great Dictator, which roundly mocked Hitler without seeming to have quite as clear a sense of just how horrible he and his regime were - and then skittering into a gloomy depiction of what those buffoons were capable of. Mockery, bleakness, mockery, bleakness; it's more a rhetorical structure than a cinematic one, but it is outstanding in that regard.

Not that audiences or critics thought it of it as such in 1942, when its message was freshest. Audiences knew damn good and well what kind of wickedness the Germans were up to, and didn't need to be confronted with it in a comedy; the consensus at the time was that the film was making too light of the real situation in Poland, and that presenting a comedy about vain actors alongside a satire of German militarism was in deeply questionable taste. Let me not tell the good people of 1942 what they should think about wartime satire. They were living through wartime, and know more about it than I. But it's tremendously difficult to look at this movie and think it's making light of the occupation of Poland. I find the message of the plot, driven by sexual jealous and the professional frustration of actors with more ambition than talent, to be that people are always going to people, even in the grim mire of occupied Warsaw; and how marvelous that these messy, difficult, tetchy people could still be raised up to do their best when faced with evil; that even in the face of the worst humanity has to offer, life still goes on in whatever ways it possibly can, and that people can be brave and heroic even if they're vainglorious twerps most of the time. It's optimistic and heartfelt without bopping us over the head with it - okay, sometimes it bops us a bit, like the increasingly obvious references to Greenberg's love of the "Hath not a Jew eyes" speech from Merchant of Venice. But having presented us with the cruelty of the Nazis and the ludicrous absurdity of Nazis in a barrage of the most pointed English-language film satire of World War II, I appreciate that the film has that kind of essential belief in humankind, and while it's not close to my favorite Lubitsch film, I am absolutely glad he made it exactly how and exactly when he did.

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CHICAGO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL '14: TIMBUKTU (ABDERRAHMANE SISSAKO, MAURITANIA / FRANCE

Reposting on the day of the film's U.S. theatrical release, because it was one of the clear highlights of my very satisfying 2014, and it never hurts to remind people when a masterpiece is hanging around, waiting to be seen.

Winner of the Silver Hugo for Best Director
Screens at CIFF: 10/15 & 10/16
World premiere: 15 May, 2014, Cannes International Film Festival

There is a heightened irony at the heart of Timbuktu that is completely obvious, and which fuels the rage that drives every moment of Abderrahmane Sissako's first feature in eight years, following the great and underseen Bamako: that forcing religious piety onto a population is a one-way ticket to creating Hell on Earth. And thus it is that one of the most visually beautiful films of 2014 (cinematographer Sofiane El Fani has made every single frame positively vibrate with precise compositions, lighting, and use of color) tells one of the most severe, ghastly stories. It creates a totally disorienting clash of sensations, like watching Terrence Malick make a torture porno: how can such flawlessly beauty harbor such casual, unforced cruelty? The film's signature moment is one breathtaking image of a river at sunset, an extravagant wide shot that lingers and lasts and sinks into your eyes with grandeur, both natural and cinematic. And what occurs in this long, long shot? A character we've come to like and respect as a decent man in an indecent world kills a man. Not deliberately nor in malice, but that's of little matter once the deed is done.

The film takes place in Mali (it was shot in Mauritania), during the 2012 rebellions and coups and all manner of dismal conflicts that put a fundamentalist Muslim party in control of the north of the country, instituting sharia law over the population under its control. For our purposes, that mostly refers to the city of Timbuktu, an ethnic polyglot whose openness makes it a prime target for fundamentalist ire; over the objections of the local imam (Adel Mahmoud Cherif), the jihadists wage a kind of urban war against anything that exists outside of their narrowly-defined rules of propriety and morality: artists, athletes, and people who just want to enjoy the outside air despite being women, are all taken down in the raging sectarian violence. Meanwhile, far outside the city, a domestic drama plays out quietly: nomadic cattle rancher Kidane (Ibrahim Ahmed), of the Tuareg people, his wife Satima (Toulou Kiki), their daughter Toya (Layla Walet Mohamed), and adopted ward Issan (Mehdi A.G. Mohamed) do their very best to live peaceably in their isolation, but even in the earliest moments we see them, there are encroaching threats from the jihad's reign of terror, and Kidane's prideful refusal to move, against Satima's urgent counsel, is plainly incapable of doing much other than to hasten his and his family's fate.

For Sissako, one of the great humanists presently at work in world cinema, the obvious approach to depict this misery and nastiness was through great restraint that implies the worst without being remotely exploitative or undignified to the suffering of those who ended up on the bad side of the jihadists. Case in point: one of the main events that triggered the director's decision to make this film was when he witnessed footage of the stoning of an unmarried couple, buried up to their necks before being executed. That event is re-created in Timbuktu, and it is grueling and horrifying, but not because it is grotesque and explicit. In fact, by refusing to give the audience any sort of release along those lines, the sequence - which takes place in a wide shot and cuts short long before things get too violent - is even more distressing and brutal, since it is so painfully objective and matter-of-fact. The complex, geometrically pleasing compositions remain in this moments of appalling violence; in refusing to sensationalise the acts, the film avoids reducing them to the level of entertainment, but instead demands that we consider them as part of the same flow of life that can produce intimacy and beauty. And that is the worst thing of all.

It is quite impossible to consider Timbuktu to be anything but a great work of art, with its intensely moral worldview and the complicated, hugely rewarding relationship between its beautiful images and its bottomless awareness of human misery. And it also represents an interesting turn in the director's career, though one about which it is easy to be leery: it's the most explicitly "art housey" of his movies so far, and in this case, that means terrific things: marrying the hallmarks of great African cinema (the strong use of contrasting colors as a storytelling and character-building element; terrific sense of humans as a function of physical place) with European art cinema (the narrative structure, the way the politics are expressed ironically). But it also feels far more conventional than the other Sissako I've seen, and I'd hate to think of him ceding the unique personality that led to Bamako and Waiting for Happiness, films that absolutely could not ever have been made in Europe. That's the pessimistic outlook, of course; nothing in Timbuktu gives us any cause to fear that the director is compromising his visions in the slightest, only augmenting them with slightly more stock-issue aesthetic choices. It's still one of 2014's very best films, and that's what matters most of all.

9/10

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EVERYONE POOPS

It is easy to first focus on how Goodbye to Language is yet another film in Jean-Luc Godard's late career collection of essay films describing morality, culture, the state of modern Europe, how cinematic images produce and limit meaning, because that's what it is. It's not at all unlike a remake of his last feature, Film socialisme, in fact, only with a different form of moviemaking technology being turned inside and broken (prosumer cameras there, prosumer cameras and 3-D here), and less of a focus on audience-punishing impenetrability. And even that's not saying much, given that Film socialisme is about as impenetrable as anything Godard has made since the beginning of the 1980s.

The danger of over-emphasising that, though, is that it pulls attention for how disorientingly fun and funny Goodbye to Language can be, though I concede that one has to meet the film much more than halfway for that to be true, and even then it's a kind of fun that's certainly only for a very self-selecting audience. Although it has fart jokes, and not even, like, heavily abstract, theoretical fart jokes. Jokes wherein the punchline is, if a person is saying something very serious and philosophically impenetrable, it is funny to show them talking while gaudily foleyed-in wet farts play on the soundtrack.

While I think that the film has a plot - in fact, I think it even has a twist ending - trying to go back over it is grounds for nothing but a headache. Like most of Godard's "narrative" films in the last couple of decades (as opposed to his pure essay films), it's made up a series of vaguely united vignettes, during which complicated, self-referential conversations about theory play out between people who may or may not be capable of acting in other contexts, but really only serve as props here. The academics in the audience might be horrified by what I'm about to say, but I think the trick with most late Godard is to let the dialogue happen and catch what one can, but not really worry about working it all out. Not, at least, the first time, and while I look forward to spending many long years with Goodbye to Language, I've only seen it but the once, at this point. So if this is a bit of a thinnish review - well it will be, there's little doubt of that. But hopefully enthusiasm will count for the lack of depth.

The chief charm of Goodbye to Language is its interrogation of how cinema works in the age of digital media production, movies shot on phones and screened in tiny windows over the internet, and of course, 3-D. This overlaps a bit with Film socialisme, but where that was an angry work, trying to break the new medium, Goodbye to Language is a good deal more playful, trying to push the new technologies into extreme corners to find out what happens there. Even the politically and morally laden dialogues have a certain self-aware winking quality that makes this, at any rate, much more watchable than much of the director's recent work. It's still fairly pessimistic - that title didn't just come along out of nowhere, and it has exactly the implication of "goodbye to language, because pop culture has murdered you and the possibility of meaning along with you" that it seems to - but Godard's pessimism has been married to exhilarating cinematic experimentation at least as far back as Week End.

Not everyone would sign of on the word "exhilarating", I am sure - it's an inherently divisive movie - but for myself, I was delighted by Goodbye to Language fare more often than not, certainly more than I expected to be. Aye, delighted; with the giddy amazement of a baby looking at a Christmas tree. There are too many different things happening in the construction of the film's images for it to be pinned down to "the main idea", but one of the strongest ideas is to challenge digital 3-D as a medium and meaning-creating element, finding out what happens in its extremes. The most celebrated moment involves a long shot during which the two cameras capturing the image are split off the rig holding them in the correct relationship to capture a realistic 3-D image, each going one direction to record entirely different actions before being reunited. It's a spectacular moment, as viscerally dumbfounding as anything in the glossiest effects extravaganza, with different goals, of course - it's a basic Godardian gesture in reminding the viewer that movies are made because of cameras, that cinematic images are inherently fictitious constructions which are reconstructed in our minds as movement - and it's an experiment whose time had long since come. It's hardly pleasant, trying to reconcile the fact that your two eyes are seeing completely incompatible images, but it is pleasurable in its way, and makes stronger claims to seriously investigating how movies work than anything else in the year, or the decade, or probably the century.

But just because it's the film's most famous moment, doesn't mean it's the only great gesture in that direction. Later on - I wonder if this even deserves a spoiler warning, since I was surely excited to see it unawares - two static shots of still lifes are overlaid in much the same way, with each eye receiving totally different information, and a few moments later, the same two shots are combined using normal editing techniques, so both eyes receive the same flat double exposure. Comparing and contrasting the way that the two experiences work in the eye and in the brain is at least as telling as that first amazing break when the 3-D image splits.

Mostly, the film's struggle with imagery is of a much simpler sort: exaggerated moments of objects poking way the hell into the audience's space, making it impossible to look at the screen without your eyes watering slightly; nude bodies positioned in space to be as distracting as possible; hoary gags about objects interrupting three-dimensional space to interrupt what we want to be looking at, which are frequently nude bodies. Without being so angry about it as to turn into a provocation, the film invites us to consider how meaning can be swallowed by visuals, how words can be turned into buzzing noise that doesn't connect to image - goodbye to language, and goodbye to film language, in effect. With its nods towards YouTube culture in the preponderance of cute animal footage and low-res images breaking into digital blocks, and its implicit demonstration of how easily we can be distracted by a barrage of disconnected stimuli, it's an indictment of the shortened attention span of the 21st Century that also panders to that attention span, and not, apparently, in an ironic way.

It is a self-contained contradiction: it wants us to have constant fun while demanding at every step that we think about how terribly shallow it is to want to have fun constantly; it's a critique of dehumanising politics and culture that openly finds the dog to be the most interesting character. It's capital-A Art made by an angry old man, driven by a constant bro-ish fascination with "wouldn't it be cool if...?" moments. Most importantly, it's the single film I have seen from 2014 that most actively tries to find a new language for filmmakers to inhabit, and honestly, it might be the most consistently captivating one as well.

10/10

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PUTIN UP WITH ALL THIS NONSENSE

I don't know where the line is drawn between a story that has metaphorical aspects to it, and metaphor that is happens to take the form of a narrative, but I know that Leviathan is way the hell on the far side of it. To say that it is about corruption and cronyism in the Russian government under Vladimir Putin is on the same level as saying that it's a sound film in color. And its satiric intent is carried through on the back of the drama of one man's life that one could, I suppose, find interesting and enjoyable to watch on its own merits, but it must take a great deal of effort to divorce from its frenzied, viscerally angry political undercurrent. Certainly by the time it gets to the scene where Mistreated and Ignored Young Generation (Sergey Pokhodaev) has run away from his father, Middle-Class Striving to Find Economic Dignity (Aleksey Serebryakov) and his step-mother, Opportunistic Attempt to Exploit the Middle-Class's Desire to Rebuilt (Elena Lyadova), in order to weep in front of the Denuded Bones of the Old System that Beached Itself and Died, you'd have the be the most stringent literalist in the world not to be a bit whammied by the symbolism.

So it's not as schematic as that, though certainly, any film called Leviathan that features a scene of an adolescent crying next to the bones of a long-dead whale, when those bones have not previously figured into the film in any way whatsoever, that is a film that's a little a little bit schematic (so to is the moment when a priest reads from the passage in the Bible naming Leviathan - a passage from the Book of Job, that favorite of metaphorists everywhere). That being said, Leviathan is still a pretty great work of cinematic storytelling, with a particularly Russian affection for grandiosity and probing hopelessness. The actual plot centers on Kolya (Serebryakov), the owner of a small patch of land which has been claimed by the municipal government, attached to a much-too-small payoff. Doggedly attempting to work through the system to retain what's his, Kolya and his lawyer Dmitriy (Vladimir Vdovichenkov) are steamrolled by the local courts in one of the earliest scenes, and from here, they fence hopelessly with the boundlessly corrupt mayor (Roman Madyanov), while Kolya is busily trying to put out the domestic fires of a contemptuous, rebelling son, Roma (Pokhadaev), and an increasingly disinterested wife, Lilya (Lyadova). So disinterest that she's having an affair with Dmitriy, in fact.

It's a pretty simple parable about the impossibility of fighting the system when the system can bury you in bureaucracy, then intimidation, then actual violence; Kafka's The Trial with the stakes shifted to land ownership and presented with burly Russian realism that would happily fit in with the narratives of that country's great novelists of the 19th Century. A comparison that maybe starts to explain how such a simple fable could end up clocking in at 140 powerfully ponderous minutes - Leviathan is a good title for just all sorts of reasons, really. Writers Andrey Zvyagintsev (also directing) and Oleg Negin do not hold back on cramming all kinds of life and problems into their movie,. After indicting governmental bureaucracy, along with the Orthodox Church, and the basic greediness of humans, Leviathan still leaves time to focus its attention on the ways that people live and entertain themselves, finding meaning where they can even as life conspires to crush them. Literary sprawl rarely translates to cinema with such impressive cinematic presence and captivating humans; it's turning into a pretty reliable truck for Zvyagintsev, though, whose work as director has been consistently that. Leviathan is in some ways a step back: it's not as radically different as his first, best film, The Return, and as a domestic drama with politically symbolic overtones, it's neither as insightful nor graceful as Elena. But taken on its own terms, it's rumbling and impressively solemn and heavy with the weight of its grey skies and cloudy landscapes, a gorgeous marriage of landscape, narrative, and tone to create an overall sense of implacable fatalism in even as simple a thing as a drunken picnic.

It's all profoundly depressing, sure, though threaded with just enough of a sense of mordant humor (something almost totally absent from The Return or Elena - I haven't seen Zvyagintsev's second feature, The Banishment, but I have my suspicion that it would be about the same) to keep it from being an unpleasant slog. And the film's sudden and repeated shifts in the second half are slithery enough that the film transforms into quite a sharp little thriller, on top of everything else it has going on. There's a level of absolute confidence on display that's tremendously energising to watch, for such a long, slow, grim affair; it's a movie sure of its social ideas, sure of its visual motifs, sure of its echoing sound mix, and sure of its tightly controlled tone. The actors are uniformly outstanding, bringing particularity and personality to even the most oddly-conceived parts (there are characters with enormous swatches of screentime who simply don't seem to do anything), and helping not only to flesh out the film's world, but also to temper its novelistic severity with warmth and that same mordant humor; the way that the cast times their reaction throughout the movie almost suggests that the whole thing is a comedy which just happens to lack jokes.

It ends up feeling a bit oppressive, sure, and far more cynically hopeless than most movies would dare to be ("let me tell you about a situation you already recognise, which neither you nor I can change" - not exactly the stuff of rousing political commentary), and for these reasons its hard to claim for it the masterpiece status that has been tremulously hovering around it ever since its 2014 premiere in competition at Cannes. It doesn't do anything new: and other than some surprising plot developments late in the game which seem to vaguely want to raise some ambiguities that really aren't ambiguous at all, the film you expect it to be by the one-fifth mark is pretty much exactly the film it proves to be. But it's a stellar execution of that movie, and if it represents a dip in Zvyagintsev's career progression, it's an awfully minor one.

8/10

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