Reviews

This is my third time through, the first having been at its US theatrical release in the early 1980's and the second on video cassette in 1994. The new DVD set confirms my feeling this is the best work of performance in German since Wagner's Ring.

I am put in a trance by the mise-en-scene, the obsessive repetition of themes and variations in music, narrative, visual detail, camera angle, color coordination.

This elegy to the Age of Reason, the illusion of progress, the delusions of civilization, to my way of seeing, killed its creator and left us with a paradox: How can a work so pessimistic of our primacy as animals prove so conclusively the very primacy it refutes?

Try watching this one without the first and last scenes. It's like they didn't give Kostner that part of the script until he finished the rest of the movie. The result is fine if you have no memory, but if you should dare to think about what you've seen, you find one huge and unacceptable flaw: The character you see acted is not the one the movie wants you to take with you when you go.

It isn't so much that the big surprise isn't fun, it's that there's too much good acting before this huge surprise happens to let you accept the humongous surprise as anything but an effort to con the audience into thinking they've seen a smart movie. Alas, it isn't a smart movie, it's a pretty good movie with a stupid device.

I'm reminded of the efforts to save a movie by inserting a narrator. Here it seems to me they've tried to goose up a pretty good movie by using a big surprise. It's a cheat.

I ran to see this at its initial release, because I'd read most of Dostoevski's work and could not resist a film with such high credentials. My second viewing confirms the film as a masterful lie like truth. It must have been this way, even if it wasn't. The scenes of the novel reflect those of the writing, but palely, as the collaborators construct an engaging and deeply felt film out of the writing of a pretty darn good work of fiction, which Dostoevski created out of his own experience and insight.

Makk and the screenwriters have followed the wise course of giving the best actors, most naturalistic style and deepest characters to the frame tale: The saga of the life-ravaged writer's race to finish his novel or lose his future. The writer's story, of obsessed gamblers at a casino in Germany, is stylistically distanced in performance as well as character depth and cinematography.

As the novelist's deadline approaches and the novel's characters meet their fates, the two merge in a delicately hallucinatory interaction which is carried into a deeply satisfying and complex conclusion.

Nothing dull about this movie, which is held together by fully realized characters with some depth to them. Even the hooded torturers have body language. Jannings' performance is brilliant, all will, want and need. A Henry VIII as he must have been. Henny Porten is, maybe, nobler and purer than Anne Boleyn, but she plays the part as written: A victim caught in the jaws of a big (huge) baby.

Sparkuhl's cinematography is gorgeous in the restoration, the tints sensuous. Lubitsch lets these characters breathe and reveal their corruption down to the tiniest of meannesses. He takes his time, which can try the patience of an audience accustomed to being carried away by action, but the time is worth spending. Slow your heartbeat and watch this minor miracle of German silent film.

If we are lucky in our youth we will meet someone whose tale of woe, of rotten luck, of good work gone for nothing reveals itself to be a consequence of self-absorbed indifference to the true lives of others.

Piszczyk tells his own story. At the outset we know he is in prison and wants to stay there. For the 108 minutes (in the Polart DVD) of Munk's farce, Piszczyk, a Harry Langdon character for all Munk's chaplinesquerie, unwittingly persuades us his bad luck is a direct consequence of his moral cowardice. From his childhood in prewar, protofascist Poland through middle age in Stalinist Poland, he hasn't a clue beyond his own immediate safety and gratification.

Piszczyk stumbles through the worst atrocities of European history without compassion, encountering the Good and the Bad, the Noble and the Ignoble, oblivious to consequence, ready to be used indiscriminately by anyone who offers him any form of reward. The sooner in life we meet such people the better our chances of escaping their fate.

Most importantly, Munk makes us laugh at him, monster though he is.

Memory and longing can make of our lives a continuous present tense in which those we've lost have dinner with us, in which we can call them from the grave whenever we wish, in which we can kill them as often as we like. And if we are the pretty, hyperactive daughter of demented (Italian? Spanish?) mother and pastis-drowned father, living in a nightmare suburban project in Marseilles among the walking driftwood and the detritus of loving humanity, in which crime is a career and rape a rite of passage, we are seven, seventeen, twenty-seven in the same moment while the hybrid sounds of Euro/Algerian/Camerounian music, chewing, cursing, laughing, fighting, sexing, loving, accompany us perpetually as in the old melodrama, except that it is so alive, funny, moving, devastating and rescuing all at once that we are enthralled and left with the happy/sad feeling of a life lived. A movie to be lived in and remembered with fondness.

The Director loves the actress and it shows. The actress inhabits the character, whom we love at first sight and sound. The character loves her jealous unprepossessing husband and he loves her. His childhood friend secretly loves his wife and the fact that his friend is a beautiful woman makes the love tragic and ironic. His wife is jealous of his childhood friend and thinks her attentions are out of secret love for her husband.

Then there is a murder and the investigating police lieutenant, who loves only his bi-racial son, and resents being taken from his company by the above characters, who have had some unpleasant contact with the deceased and are all lying to one degree or another, unravels the mystery with some of the most precise and authentic procedural detail ever captured on film.

And then there are the atmospherics of a post-war Paris, where coal is in short supply, music is filled with erotic longing and wistful memory, and innocence has long ago been washed away by the rain.

All of this in a milieu of magicians whose tricks don't always work, dogs who walk on their hind feet and express music criticism, hungry news reporters and exhausted cops.

And then there are many of the finest actors of their generation who have been through some very bad years directed by, to come full circle, a man who is in love with his lead actress and who, with full justification, was a respected friend of Picasso.

I've seen this film often and I love all of them and it.

What a ride! Multiple betrayals. Chases on horseback. Scenes out of Schiller. Bad guys identified with mustaches. Good guys with beards or clean shaven. Heroic women. Dastardly villains. Silly villains. Even a disgruntled sidekick for comic effect. A rare chance to see Ruan Ling-yu, whose short life and cruel death gave Stanley Kwan his film, Center Stage.

We see lovers and friends betraying and betrayed, a society whose corruption has a Felix-The-Cat simplicity, a bureaucracy flawed by nepotism and cruel whim. It is China in 1931 as interpreted by a Hollywood-influenced Chinese film industry. If we look between the frames we can see a piece of the future as one would wish it to be, with goodness sleeping somewhere in every human heart.

But we cannot help but know better. It is before Manchukuo, before the civil war, before Nanking, before the Great Leap Forward, before The Cultural Revolution.

The film is mostly just escapist fun, but the context, and we can sense the context, and the future, from Ruan Ling-yu's suicide to China's half-century of unimaginable suffering, make this moment of fun worthy of reverence.

There may be an element of atonement in Mizoguchi's films about exploited women. It is most powerful in "Street of Shame" but plays a role in "Gion bayashi" as well. The exploiters are bad indeed, though Mizoguchi gives them humanizing motivations; the exploited, while not too good to be true, are much better than most of the people I know.

What makes this visually beautiful film unforgettable and worthy of repeated viewing is, first, the evolving relationship between Older and Younger Sister, which is sufficiently imitative of life to satisfy the most rigorous champion of Kurosawa's "Lower Depths." As life happens, these two women evolve. It is this evolution which is the secret heart of "Gion Festival Music." Second, importantly, it is the nuanced, understated, but heroic performance of Michiyo Kogure as Miyoharu. Her artistry becomes manifest when her character portrait here is compared to her equally successful role of Taeko in Ozu's "Flavor of Green Tea over Rice," made the year before. The two women could not be more different, and she accomplishes the differences with bare flickers of change across her face and almost imperceptible alterations in body language.

These qualities inspire me to forgive the overly schematic plot and excessively contrasting portraits of the very good and the very bad.

At the end "Gion Festival Music," "A Geisha," or whatever title translation one wishes to use, is not principally about the cruel exploitation of women. The film has a secret. It is a love story. And I love this movie.

This is the U of Tenn/Kennedy Center production of 1982. Jeffers' translation is as evocative as any I've heard for the Greek plays. I was perpetually stunned by its power. Caldwell's performance burns at white heat beginning to end. I saw Mitch Ryan hold his own against James Earl Jones in play after play in the sixties and seventies, from Baal at the Martinique, to Coriolanus at Papp's Theater to The Great White Hope, but Caldwell turns him into Ralph Bellamy. All he can do on this is what he's told to do. Competently but outclassed. Pleasure also to see Judith Anderson at her most neoclassical. The entire cast is strong. Robert Whitehead's work as the stage director is manifest in their uniform quality. It's all Euripides, of course. And I am grateful for this reminder of who and what he was, and how alive his work and his ideas remain.

M. Chabrol has done a strong, creditable job of transferring the powerfully discomforting world of Patricia Highsmith to the screen. Highsmith's characters become moral monsters through a condition of absolute confidence in their own warped psyches. These characters never learn, or understand themselves. Their lies to each other are absolute because they lie to themselves absolutely. No cliché goes unpunished. Characters become moral monsters without losing their sense of rightness. They seem powerless not to act in self-destructive ways.

The film is not equal to "Strangers on a Train" or "Purple Noon," other adaptations of Highsmith's work. But it is faithful in spirit to a novel which is itself not equal to the literary sources of these films. See it with an open mind and revel in the creepiness. Chabrol is a sufficiently great artist to allow another great artist her night cry.