Il Posto (1961) - #194

- My father says these big companies don't pay much, but you have a secure job for life. 

- Can you smell the coffee?

Just as a hiker trekking across a rugged and imposing landscape of jagged peaks and soaring vistas sometimes finds gratification at unexpectedly stumbling into a calm and fragrant meadow, so Il Posto offered a pleasant respite from some of my arduous but rewarding cinematic labors of recent weeks. Following the rigors of Bunuel's Viridiana, Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad, Godard's (even at his most playful) A Woman is a Woman, here on this blog, and hefty themes in films like Basil Dearden's Victim and Chantal Akerman's Les Rendez-vous d'Anna over on my other writing gig at Criterion Cast, a film as genial, modest and winsomely accessible as Il Posto could not be more refreshing or lighter on the palate. It's one of the relatively few Criterion films that I had practically no idea what to expect going into it, though it was easy enough to surmise from the packaging that it had to do with a young Italian man (a boy, really) landing his first "real" job. Fine, a well-crafted, fondly remembered slice of late Neorealism, I figured, a relatively minor work most likely, but hey, it's next on my timeline, I'll give it a chance. Knowing nothing about director Ermanno Olmi nor lead actor Sandro Panseri, with the DVD's release occurring way back in 2003 and practically no recent chatter or buzz related to it on any of the film-related websites as far as I am aware, Il Posto completely snuck up on me right at a moment I was fully primed to appreciate it on its own terms.

The plot is as simple and unassuming as I could have guessed, if I'd been pushed to sketch out a prediction of what would happen. A kid just coming of age, presumably from a struggling (but not abjectly poor) family, is eager to make his way out of the uptight provincial village he was born into and land on his feet in one of Italy's big cities. Kind of an update on I Vitteloni from a little less than a decade earlier, but probably lacking Fellini's bacchanalian flair, which was just beginning to emerge in that earlier film. The kid gets a job, there's a spark of romance to charm the viewers, and he winds up learning that life in the rat race ain't all it's cracked up to be, lessons that the vast majority of the audience already know but enjoy being remind of when presented humorously.  So I would have surmised and as it turned out, I wasn't so far off. But as comforting as it often is to have one's hopeful expectations validated by a quality effort, the areas where Il Posto veered away from my presumptions turn out to be some of the more fascinating and enjoyable aspects of my experience watching it over these past few nights.

Sure enough, Domenico, the wide-eyed naif depicted on Il Posto's promotional art, is the eldest son of a hard-pressed working class family living in Meda, a run-down suburb of Milan just on the verge of falling into decrepitude. But the first impression I got of him was that he'd be perfectly comfortable just hanging out at home and letting someone else take the "chance of a lifetime" (literally) that awaits him at the end of the train line he takes into the heart of the bustling and rebuilding Italian metropolis. Getting a desk job at a big corporation isn't apparently high on Domenico's list of priorities, but for lack of any counter-argument to pressures put on him by his parents, he embarks on his mission. The point is subtly made (like most other points in this film) but all the more poignant because of it, that Domenico is being put to work for the sake of his younger brother Franco, who can only continue in formal education with the assistance of his additional income. Domenico has, in fact, drawn the short end of the stick when it comes to parental support, presumably because the parents see more potential in Franco than they do in their introverted, insecure firstborn.

So even though Domenico is being sent off to work in the epicenter of Italian industry and commerce, he doesn't exude much enthusiasm at the prospect, that is, until he makes casual acquaintance with Antonietta, or Magali as she's more exotically nicknamed. They're both among the dozens of applicants - some just as fresh-faced, others a bit more weary and downtrodden after being cast off by untold numbers of previous employers - who show up that first morning to go through a battery of absurdly nonsensical aptitude tests and psychological interviews, all easily mastered and seemingly only good for filtering out the most inept or fraudulent candidates.

The mind-numbing trivialities of life in the unnamed corporation (I'm not sure we're ever told what kind of product or service the company actually delivers) serve as a prototype not merely for what goes on in the Italian workplace but what workers all over the modern world experienced then and still do now - with the pace and productivity expectations only increasing along with the obvious transitions from analog to digital technologies introduced over the past fifty years. The numerous anachronisms of office back life then as compared to now supply much of the good natured humor that gives Il Posto so much charm. Anyone who's spent significant time working in a cubicle culture will laugh but also wince in recognition of the petty diversions that the office drones resort to as they while away the hours... and the years.

But back to Domenico and Magali, whose low-key flirtations are depicted by Olmi with a discrete sensitivity that I greatly appreciated for his willingness to stay inconclusive and thus very realistic and unexpected. Their bumbling chatter during a lunch break that starts with window-shopping and culminates in a wistful hand-holding dash through a downtown park, serves as Il Posto's romantic peak moment, but it's effectively executed and memorable for its sweet brevity.

Domenico's shyness and vulnerability pique Magali's interest, though she seems less blind-sided by the stirrings of attraction than her would-be boyfriend. She just thinks he's kind of cute, that's all, and probably enjoys watching his exertions to impress - it's clear enough that Domenico is smitten but not quite capable of seizing his moment. The two actors were both non-professionals who didn't go on to do much else in the film industry (though Olmi tells a wonderful anecdote about his female lead, Loredana Detto, that serves as the punchline to his interview supplement on this disc, so I won't spoil it here.) But as it turns out, they were perfectly cast. Panseri in particular deserves a huge share of the credit for Il Posto's initial and lasting success. His large expressive eyes and bemused facial control in a nearly continuous stream of reaction shots that constitute his performance elevate us to see, through those eyes, the essential strangeness of what would otherwise seem like rather mundane scenes from everyday proletarian life. Often the effect is quite hilarious, such as the culminating New Year's Eve party, a corporate sponsored mixer that starts off with Domenico arriving unfashionably early and awkwardly unsure of what to do with himself, using long slow silence and tentative scoping out of the situation in a manner reminiscent of Jacques Tati:

Clearly Domenico has only one motivation that propels him to enter into such an otherwise uncomfortable zone of sometimes drab, sometimes ghoulish adults, and that's to see Magali (check out that fancy bouquet.) Though his quest leads to disappointment on that end, it's part of the crucial assimilation process that all those grown-ups surrounding him had to go through in order to find their niche in this creepy but economically necessary  subculture of Western industrial capitalism. Olmi perfectly captures the young man's initial reluctance to join in on the weirdness, until the pressures of a well-intended older woman gets his back off the wall and his butt out of his chair so he can join in the crazy conga line to nowhere - maybe a slight touch of Fellini influence wriggling itself into the scenario after all...

In shooting his second feature film, Olmi speaks deeply from his own experience. He filmed Il Posto as a genuine labor of love, hardly expecting anything near the acclaim the film soon won him. Working with a tiny crew and budget, on weekends in the actual office space of the corporation that employed him through the preceding decade, he had just over the past few years taught himself how to shoot film and used his abilities to create industrial documentary footage for the company. Along with all the genial levity and soft humanistic satire, he injects some weightier ruminations that don't quite rise to the level of subversive indictment, much less overt rebellion against the prevailing social order. However, Il Posto still lays down an unsettling critique, a note of warning to all who have not yet crossed that point of entry into the all-devouring vortex of corporate serfdom. That rock of stability, that "job for life" may well indeed pay the bills and provide a solid base of material comfort, but there's a high price to be paid in service to the machine. This clip, the concluding scene of the film, may not make quite as much sense without subtitles or seeing the preceding 90 minutes... but then again, the look in Domenico's eyes as the mimeograph grinds away on the soundtrack says it very clearly, no words necessary to get that point across.

Next: Leon Morin, Priest

A Woman is a Woman (1961) - #238

I don't know if this is a comedy or a tragedy, but it's a masterpiece.

A Woman is a Woman was the third feature directed by Jean-Luc Godard, but to the viewing public of 1961, it served as his highly anticipated sophomore effort, the follow-up to Breathless, a film that seemed to galvanize the Nouvelle Vague as something truly rebellious, a definitive break from the cinema that had gone before it. The film he shot between those two, Le Petit Soldat, was withheld from release due to heightened sensitivities about it's political critique of the French war in Algeria. Even though I haven't seen Le Petit Soldat all the way through, the talky, downbeat clips I've watched on YouTube create the impression that in this case, a touch of censorship probably served Godard's long-term interests rather well. A Woman is a Woman, though hardly a rousing commercial success upon release, does a better job building on the energetic abandon and playful sexiness that still makes Breathless so indelible. And with Anna Karina's first-film growing pains in Le Petit Soldat already worked through and tucked away for awhile, it made her actual debut, in Eastmancolor and Cinemascope no less, all the more visually tantalizing and delightful.

In reading up on what many others have written about A Woman is a Woman, I've seen quite a few references to Ernst Lubitsch (and his Design for Living with its polyamorous conclusion in particular), Vicente Minnelli, Hollywood musicals in general and quotes from the film's frequent and numerous inside jokes, to such an extent that I feel drained of any willingness to rephrase what's so often been observed about this film. But one of those visual gags that jumped out at me, that I haven't seen anyone else point out, occurs right toward the beginning of the film. It's a shot where the face of Catherine Demongeot, young star of Zazie dans le Metro, grins impishly from the cover of Le Cinema magazine across from illustrations of sex positions and fetus in utero diagrams found in a book titled I'm Expecting a Baby.

Besides employing the symbol of precocious sassy vulgarity that Zazie represented (and compounding it a moment later with a young boy asking a vendor if he had something more sexy to offer than the children's picture book he'd put in his hand,) Godard was rendering tribute to a film that must have exerted some influence on A Woman is a Woman's zany experimentations with sight and sound - winks and grins through the camera to the audience, brash jump cuts, reverse sequence subtitles, overly sumptuous orchestrated music that abruptly drops out and randomly restarts again, incongruous film references and quotes that only viewers as cinema-obsessed as Godard himself were likely to get without having them pointed out. And those sly digs at kids coming of age more quickly than proper bourgeois adults found comfortable are about as youth-oriented as things would get in this film, and perhaps for the remainder of Godard's career, though the playfulness would come out abundantly in many other ways - just more more cerebral, angular and increasingly abstract from here on out. But before he got too deep into the changes that the 1960s would have in store for him, Godard was still ready to cut loose with the whimsy:

While shooting A Woman is a Woman, Godard was in the fullest flush of romantic love with Anna Karina, his wife of only a few months (they married shortly after work on Le Petit Soldat had wrapped) and the star around which this film's lights, camera and action revolved. The lovers' spats and maddening disconnects that had already cropped up between the prodigiously gifted young couple added distinct layers of nuance and texture to the scenario that Godard had already drafted and published a couple years earlier, and it's fascinating to read that brief treatment and then consider the changes that were introduced to the final product (though the concluding "infame/une femme" pun was there from the very beginning.) Godard obviously hadn't factored in his experience with Anna when he wrote that vignette, but the fiery conflicts that eventually drove them apart years later were already erupting in sparks off and on the set. Given where the two of them were at in the early stages of their relationship, one can't blame either of them for clinging to the hope that a wink, a smile and a cheerful spin on the underlying discordance in their marriage would be enough to see them through the strain of intermittent crises. And regardless of whatever role pregnancy or the lack thereof might play in episodes of domestic strife experienced by most in the audience, the emotional and often irrational interplay of the film's young couple adjusting to each other on the fly is well-rendered, universal and easy to identify with. And quite funny much of the time as well:

Godard and Karina both used their artistic intelligence to great effect in crafting the scenes where Angela and Emile strive for relational power and one-upmanship after he turns down her sudden, impulsive request for him to impregnate her. He's all about reasonableness, problem-fixing and common sense, she's an expert at dealing heart-melting pouts, alluring smiles and bewitching flutters of eyelash. Godard's contribution was to script these scenes out, practically on the spur of the moment each day, placing the lines in front of Karina and her co-star Jean-Claude Brialy mere minutes before they were supposed to recite them on camera, then skillfully frame them in the vast expanse of his 2.35:1 canvas. As unpolished as the performances turned out, whatever flaw one might find in them is more than compensated for in freshness and raw immediacy, even to the extent that Godard used some flubbed lines, clumsy stumbles and miscues in his final cut.  (For example, in Karina's emotional weeping scene after she's dropped eggs on the kitchen floor, when she responds to Emile's brusque comment that he finds crying women ugly, she misspeaks, mutters "that's not right" and regathers herself. It's not what Godard intended, but the tender vulnerability she displayed in that moment, staying in character, was too good to leave on the editing room floor.)

Though Godard's mastery of cinematic vocabulary and his relentlessly creative reconfiguration of the medium rightfully earned him credit, not only for this film but for so many others soon to follow, as one of the greatest directors of his generation, I can't help but think that he was also incredibly fortunate to have had access to such arrestingly charismatic performers as Anna Karina and Jean-Paul Belmondo in first establishing his reputation. (Brialy, for his part, is impeccably handsome and on target - but not especially charming - in his role as the boyfriend who's grown a bit exasperated by his partner's impetuous emotionalism.) Here, Belmondo gets to shine as the roguish pal of the couple who seizes advantage in the short interval of opportunity when Emile and Angela's rift is at its widest. It's a supporting role that he could have passed up since he'd already ascended to leading man status, but he was smart to take a paying gig where he could twiddle with Anna Karina's hair in bed while she sat there in her cute little undies. What kind of fool would pass up that opportunity anyway?

Even though the Criterion DVD has been out of print now for a couple of years, A Woman is a Woman is currently available for streaming on Netflix, though with a different subtitle translation, intriguingly enough. Still, this disc package is highly worth seeking out for access to its supplements. One gem is an early collaboration between Godard and Eric Rohmer on a short film, Charlotte and Veronique, or All  Boys are called Patrick, that also starred Jean-Claude Brialy (apparently leading to its inclusion on this disc.) You can find it on YouTube as well, I won't post it here, but it's good for a few laughs. There's also a nice half-hour episode from French TV featuring a Brialy interview with Anna Karina in 1966 that provides a bittersweet look back on her life with Godard (they'd already broken up by then.) But the real treasure of the DVD is a rare recording that Godard made and preserved on a 10" vinyl record that was never commercially distributed. In it he interpolates soundtrack from the film with his own summaries of the narrative that serve as a condensed director's commentary track from the period in which the film was made. On top of the glimpse it offers into Godard's creative process, Criterion's design department came up with beautiful Op Art graphics mimicking the circle designs on A Woman is a Woman's cover art, gradually shifting and oscillating in hues of blue, white and red during the musical passages of the recording. It's one of the most delightfully surprising little bonus bits I've stumbled across on a Criterion DVD in awhile.

Next: Il Posto

Last Year at Marienbad (1961) - #478

...this edifice of a bygone era...

Even though I'm probably more inclined, most of the time, to write lengthier reviews of a film than the average movie blogger, when it comes to a title like Last Year at Marienbad, I prefer to keep it short and direct, avoid the over-thinking. It's just too easy to jump hard and deep into a whirlpool of pseudo-profound philosophical verbiage, trying to decipher this infamous enigma, and there's no doubt that any effort on my part to do so will have already been superseded by dozens, if not hundreds, of commentators over the past fifty years since the collaboration between Alain Resnais and Alain Robbe-Grillet upped the art house ante higher than it had ever reached before. It may have even marked the pinnacle of a certain level of pretense and ambition in cinema, even though more radical, reductive and audacious experiments were still to come from directors every bit as highbrow and ambitious as the two Alains. Last Year at Marienbad's austere intellectualism and stylistic severity established a level of gilt-leafed splendor in  egghead cinema that seems quite difficult to match without drawing a derisive assessment of inferior imitation.

The film's notoriety is based on its innovative and pointedly influential disregard for narrative conventions, forfeiting any presumption of a typical beginning, middle and end of the story. Three characters interact sporadically with each other: a woman, referred to in the script as A, is approached by a man, X, who claims to be reuniting with her on the grounds of a lavish palace and garden, as he claims they each agreed to a year earlier. However, she has no recollection of such a meeting or commitment. But he persists with such determination that she begins to question her own memories, especially as he produces photographs and describes very specific details of their previous encounter. Every so often, their interactions are disrupted by another man, M, whose possessive demeanor toward A suggests that he's her husband, though that's never explicitly established. X and M have their own moments of tension while A is off-screen, mostly revolving around M's mastery over X in a game of mathematical logic called Nim.

This odd variation on the love triangle puts A in the middle between the pressing insistent ardor of X and the cold calculating control exerted by M. We see her experience confusion, repulsion, fear, desire, amusement and finally an inscrutable blend of resignation and resolve that leads her to depart from the suffocating environment accompanied by X, leaving M all alone to find someone else he can defeat at the gaming table. At strategic points (and really, the script is nothing if not a long series of deliberately plotted strategic points,) Resnais and Robbe-Grillet insert allusions of gun violence and erotic encounters both tenderly consensual and roughly coerced. These moments may represent hints of repressed memories of tragic events (as some interpretations propose) or they just be indicative of the numerous urges we feel every day to kill or have sex on impulse, that we've tamed through socialization and a gradual loss of urgency as we get older.

If this affair between A and X is to be considered a romance, it's one utterly lacking in interiority, as we never get an accurate read on what drives the characters, what they're really thinking. Last Year at Marienbad remains focused entirely on its immaculately sparkling surface, a pointed acknowledgement that in actuality, surface is all we ever get in the cinema anyway, by virtue of the fixed two-dimensional medium. But by presenting provocative ideas and effectively employing highly stylized male, female and cultural archetypes that resonate with our consciousness, our own emotional and intellectual interiors are stimulated and stirred up, and thus moved to respond to what we see and hear in the theatrical milieu, and in our memories of that experience.

With the prestige of a Golden Lion award at the 1961 Venice Film Festival, the secured avant-garde reputations of its author/auteur pedigree and the undeniably elegant and classy sets, fashions and mannequin-like glamour of its acting troupe, Last Year at Marienbad was equally bound to highly impress viewers of a certain sort and strongly irritate viewers of another kind. Resnais and Robbe-Grillet had to anticipate that, and they proceeded in that understanding, without hesitation or reluctance. The dividing line wasn't and isn't between those who claim to enjoy art films and those who don't, but rather between those who are willing to indulge an act of premeditated, self-congratulatory cleverness for its own sake, and those who find it simply too hard to digest the egotism that drove the film's creators without compromising some kind of aesthetic standard they hold dear. Or more blunty, those who enjoy having their minds messed with for an hour and a half and those who don't. Count me among the former, though I'm happily sympathetic to friends and colleagues who are every bit as bright, discerning and sophisticated as I consider myself to be on my best days, yet find the movie a pompous, repulsive bore. There's nothing about Last Year at Marienbad that necessarily mandates enthusiasm or even admiration. As magnificent as the aesthetic touches may be - the palaces, the wardrobes, the cinematography, the impeccably disciplined execution of scenario and staging - it's all equally undermined by the film's resilient refusal to grant favors to those seeking resolution to the deliberately scrambled narrative and other typical gratifications that we've come to expect from a visit to the movies.

I quite enjoyed the experience of psychic displacement it induced in me, a brief but lingering sensation of stepping slightly outside of time's slipstream into a parallel realm of immortal shimmering strangeness and beauty. Almost as delightful as watching the film itself is the contemplation of where Western culture was at in 1961 when horn-rimmed highbrows like Resnais and Robbe-Grillet could stir up strong arguments on both sides of the Atlantic by putting forth an objet d'art like Last Year at Marienbad. It seems to me that a film like this would have a hard time being produced nowadays, or if something like it was attempted, the spell would be broken by some unfortunate lapse into shock-value stunts of explicit sex or gore in order to jolt today's "seen it all" audience (at least those who seek to position themselves on the front edge of the avant garde.) The film is resoundingly chaste, when it gets right down to it, even though some allusions to more base instincts crop up here and there, as already mentioned. And as such, it's now apparent that Last Year at Marienbad, in its time one of the most aggressively modernistic works of its kind ever made, is now somewhat quaint and even old-fashioned, its mind-bending breakthroughs in audience disorientation providing a template that's been used repeatedly in science fiction, horror and other art house films ever since. It's a credit to the sturdiness of its construction and the ingenuity of its mechanisms that the contraption still works as effectively as it does. I'm not sure that one can expect much of a payoff to justify any extensive efforts at decoding the mysteries packed therein, but as an audio-visual diversion with a slightly psychedelic tinge, Last Year at Marienbad delivers a fun ride on a well-polished, steam driven calliope that offers the most marvelous views.

Next: A Woman is a Woman

Viridiana (1961) - #332

Hallelujah. or I've had it with all this piety.


Among all the directors who have large chunks of their filmography included in the Criterion Collection, Luis Bunuel stands out as a rare exception whose work at the end of his career serves as his representation in that formidable library of "important classic and contemporary films." Usually it's the other way around. Criterion has a noticeable predilection for sifting through the early films of great directors, when they tend to be more daring, less commercially inclined and at their most fearlessly experimental. I can only think of Max Ophuls as a peer in this regard, in that his last cluster of films, starting with his return to Europe in La Ronde up through his finale Lola Montes, got the Criterion treatment, rather than his initial efforts made decades earlier. But then again, Ophuls passed away prematurely, when he was only 55 years old. Luis Bunuel, by way of comparison, was already past his 61st birthday when Viridiana made its debut at the Cannes Film Festival, a remarkably late point in life's journey for a director to finally produce films deemed Criterion-worthy.

As Jean Renoir once famously scripted, "everyone has their reasons," and I'm sure that there are numerous plausible explanations as to why none of Bunuel's previous works have (as yet) made their way into Criterion's vaults. Un chien Andalou and L'age d'or are as notorious and emblematic as any films of their era, but they're widely available and highly familiar already, limiting the prospects for a substantial return on investment, unless Criterion was able to come up with some kind of new, unique angle on them that eluded previous distributors of these art house classics. And as for Bunuel's substantial and complicated string of films shot under varying conditions and producers during his long sojourn in Mexico from the late 1940s until the end of the 1950s, I can only imagine how daunting the challenge must be to sort out the layers of rights issues, access to original source materials and development of suitable supplemental features that swarm around such diverse potential Criterion (or Eclipse) entries as Los Olvidados, Susana, Mexican Bus Ride, El, El Bruto, Wuthering Heights, Robinson Crusoe, The Criminal Life of Archibaldo Cruz, The River and Death and Nazarin. Even the fact that quite sufficient editions of Death in the Garden and The Young One can be readily obtained by American fans of Bunuel hardly resolves the larger problem of what exactly we should make of the discrete charms exerted by those obscure objects that he produced in that period commonly referred to as his "exile." (As if simply living in Mexico implied some kind of substantial loss on Bunuel's part - I rather think of it as a loss on the side of those living in Europe and the USA at the time... though it remains regrettable that so many wonderful Bunuel films from that decade are still so hard to find in quality presentations.)

So in order to get an adequate grasp on just what it was that Bunuel achieved when Viridiana was finally unleashed upon the world in the spring of 1961, I've spent the last few weeks (by far the longest silent stretch on this blog since January 2009) watching as many of Bunuel's 1950s films as I could get my hands on. And it has been quite a rewarding experience, illuminating my understanding of what the great Spanish director had to work through in order to obtain his ultimate freedom to make the movies that would bring his career to such a glorious climax over the next two decades. Working with multiple producers and a panoply of actors from Mexico, Europe and the USA, across a variety of genres, taking assignments in a seemingly haphazard manner on projects of sometimes dubious potential, Bunuel's run of Mexican films stands as a monument to sheer artistic determination when it seems like the rest of the world could hardly care less. I won't (because I can't, and shouldn't) take the time to provide mini-reviews of those films here, so let it simply suffice to say that any energy expenditure that results in greater familiarity with Bunuel's output from this era will be amply rewarded. And I can only hope that whether it's months or years in the future, I will someday be able to look back with satisfaction in the knowledge that Criterion did what it had to do to bring at least a sampling of Bunuel's 1950s oeuvre into the popular discourse generated by a selection of these titles, whatever format they finally settle upon in order to do so.

OK, then let's set all that to the side and talk about Viridiana. It's a gorgeous, heartbreaking, entrancing, voluptuous, wondrous and vibrantly liberating film.

For anyone who's bothered to check it out, Viridiana's production history is already pretty well known: at long last, Bunuel was allowed by Franco's quasi-fascist regime to come on back home after decades away, in order to produce some kind of home-grown trophy film that would help install Spain back into the broader European cultural community of nations. Without sufficiently grappling with Bunuel's essentially subversive point of view, the Spanish authorities allowed him free reign to subtly violate their taboos (beyond their ability to detect a priori) and in the process reinserted him among the preeminent critics of conventional bourgeois Western morality. It's quite an amazing development, when considered in the abstract, since  Bunuel was already so conveniently tucked away in Central American obscurity and presumably positioned to be generally ignored for the rest of his life. But his belated re-entry to the European stage, coupled with the alarming artistic upheavals about to be unleashed as the 1960s truly got underway, let that particular genie out of the bottle, never to be stopped up again.

As for the story itself... oh my, there's so much in Viridiana to unpack, to explore, to commentate upon. Maybe I've already worn out your patience leading up to this point, but let me just say that Fernando Rey, Silvia Pinal and the cast of lesser lights that Luis gathered here unleashed enough raw supple energy to fuel another decade or more worth of uproar, not that Luis was done with generating it himself by any means. But they did indeed kick off Bunuel's final phase with admirable gusto, as the lecherous conflicted uncle and the virginal idealistic innocent, respectively - pitting fundamental archetypes against each other in a compelling and humorous scenario, at least until the middle-aged man hangs himself in a lustfully frustrated fit of pique.

As a narrative, Viridiana is delightfully base in it nature. A young novice, just on the brink of stating her final vows of renunciation, is compelled by her Mother Superior to pay one last visit, rather against her wishes, to an indulgent uncle whose generous bankrolling has enabled the young woman to pursue her ambition of leaving the cruel corrupt world once and for all. We never really learn what drives Viridiana toward this end, but it's apparent enough that a fearful reluctance to be tainted by sin and lust lurks just below the surface. She's a beautiful young woman who's been repulsed by her discovery of masculine intentions toward someone as alluring and innocent as her. Even her most solemn vows and protestations, as earnest and heartfelt as she's capable of producing, turn out to be not quite enough to secure her virtue.

Meanwhile, Bunuel's camera lasciviously slithers around Don Jaime's estate, capturing small snapshots of petty domestic melodrama and potentially embarrassing fetishistic kinks well before we've reached Viridiana's halfway point and its irrevocable shift away from the intergenerational erotic entanglements and toward a supposedly more spiritual perspective as Viridiana is freed up to follow the path of discipleship that she believes to be her true calling. Don Jaime/Fernando Rey exits the scene before even forty minutes have passed, but we'll see plenty more of him, in various manifestations of character and Bunuelian alter-ego, over the next 16 years so don't worry about that. To fill his void for now, Viridiana must reckon with a more virile and single-minded pursuer, Don Jaime's cousin Jorge, who arrives in the nick of time to inherit the estate and size up whatever goods are worth taking into his possession. Embued with a sense of entitlement befitting young aristocrats, Jorge patiently bides his time as Viridiana chases down one last noble ideal, feeding and sheltering a motley crew of beggars she's gathered from the nearby streets in order to fulfill the vows she's spoken in unacknowledged silence, outside the formality of church or convent.

Small pebbles of provocation are gathered and heaped, piled high enough to eventually amount to an outrage impossible to ignore in 1961 for anyone responsible for speaking on behalf of repressive authoritarian regimes. Dogs on leashes tied to axles, switchblade crucifixes, trash trove attics filled with the detritus of a dying generation, the elemental simplicity of a cat pouncing upon a mouse... Bunuel understands the cumulative effect of these gestures, so innocuous on paper when the script is submitted to the censors but unmistakably infuriating when strung together on film and viewed by the uptight hypocrites whose tyrannical fear renders them incapable of recognizing the lighter qualities of Bunuel's observant eye.

But just in case the powers that be are too dense or too bedazzled by whatever artistic reputation or sophisticated panache Bunuel had accumulated by that point in time, he leaves no doubt about his intentions of sabotage and insubordination over the course of Viridiana's final fifteen minutes, a sprawling beggar's banquet that secured the film's lasting notoriety. The mocking sacrilegious spectacle culminates in a burlesque reenactment of the Last Supper presided over by a blind  and bestial messiah accompanied by the strains of G.F. Handel's most recognized masterpiece.

Upon entering the chaotic scene, Jorge and Viridiana quickly realize that however sincere her intentions were to serve and empower the poor, things have gotten much too far out of hand for simple purity of heart to prevail. Brute force needs to reassert itself for some semblance of order to take hold. The crown of thorns must be burnt, Viridiana's hair has to be let down, cares need to be shaken away. The deck requires shuffling, and Luis Bunuel is back at the table, ready to deal for all the world to see, at long last getting the hard-earned recognition that a sliding cloud over the face of the moon and a quick slice of blade across eyeball first won him lo those many decades ago.

Next: Last Year at Marienbad

Yojimbo (1961) - #52

I'll get paid for killing, and this town is full of people who deserve to die.

Because I'd seen Yojimbo before, and thought it was a pretty fine film based on that original viewing several years ago, I wasn't quite prepared to be as thoroughly impressed, even overwhelmed, as I was after watching it again, a few more times, over the past week. Part of my enhanced assessment of Yojimbo's greatness is due to my first impression being unknowingly diminished by watching it in a badly letterboxed format on my old 27" CRT TV. Even with the decent job that Criterion did in upgrading the Yojimbo/Sanjuro box set from their original DVD release, I wasn't able to sufficiently appreciate Kurosawa's masterful widescreen compositions until I had a chance to see it on HDTV in Blu-ray - and I can only hope to have the chance to check it out on the big screen in a theater some day. But even more crucially, watching Yojimbo now, after I've made my way through all of the available-on-DVD  Kurosawa films he made preceding this one, simply leaves me gape-jawed as I marvel at the great Japanese director's ability to set an objective for himself, his cast and his crew, then go right out and achieve it in such a way as to alter the course of cinematic history afterward.

By this point in his career, Akira Kurosawa could have easily, and without deserving admonishment, taken a comfortable path of least resistance, cranking out formulaic pictures of just about whatever sort came easily to him. But his restless creative ambition wouldn't allow that. Even as the Japanese film scene was going through a process of upheaval, with new voices and visions emerging from a generation just coming of age, Kurosawa found a way to break new ground, not content to let his trail of 1950s classics do the talking for him when facing the challenge of upstart rivals. The provocative roiling instigated by directors such as Nagisa Oshima, Koreyoshi Kurahara, Shohei Imamura and Seijun Suzuki, among others, clearly signaled a new era in Japan's cinema, but Kurosawa was still at the top of his game, as Yojimbo clearly demonstrated. Not only him - Yasujiro Ozu was operating at an exalted plane of artistic perfection, Mikio Naruse was at the height of his powers and Masaki Kobayashi had just established a firm foothold at the summit with his epic work on The Human Condition. This was an artistically verdant time indeed in Japan's movie culture.

As much as I enjoy and applaud the works just cited, I think it goes fairly without debate that Kurosawa's achievements in Yojimbo left a deeper, broader and longer lasting impact than any other film produced in Japan during this era. It turned out to be the most financially lucrative and widely popular movie he ever made. It served as a template for Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars, basically launching the "spaghetti Western" subgenre and putting Clint Eastwood on his path to stardom that continues to bear fruit to this day (regardless of the dismal consensus generated by his most recent effort J. Edgar.) More crucially than that, I think a case can be made that Yojimbo essentially solidified the archetype of the modern antihero persona, a rootless drifter without a past or future, no relational entanglements to tie him down and unfettered freedom to fight or move on however he pleases, that is now so widely utilized in contemporary cinema that it's hard to imagine it ever having a specific beginning point in the not-so-distant past.

Of course there are precursors to Yojimbo's innovative blend of unfettered lethality, cocky insubordination and casual indifference whatever harsh reversals fate may have in store for him at the next moment of conflict. Maybe others who've done more research into the topic than I have can make the case more persuasively than I will here, but the lack of nobility and humility shown by Sanjuro, the wandering samurai who takes it upon himself to deal cold calamity upon the wretched gangsters he stumbles upon in his travels, marks a definitive break from more traditional hero figures who were routinely driven by an earnest moral impulse that never makes its presence felt here. An apt comparison from the samurai genre would be Hiroshi Inagaki's Samurai trilogy that Yojimbo's star Toshiro Mifune began seven years earlier. In those films, the protagonist Musashi Miyamoto was a relative paragon of virtue, despite the deadly efficiency with which he wielded his sword. By contrast, Kuwabatake Sanjuro marks a further plunge into cynicism somewhere past Musashi's self-denying idealism and the grim, duty-bound general Mifune played in The Hidden Fortress three years prior to Yojimbo. As great as those performances were (and let's throw in his turns Tajomaru in Rashomon and Kikuchiyo in Seven Samurai while we're at it,) Yojimbo turned out to be Mifune's career-defining role, one that he was called upon to reprise in the sequel Sanjuro, and more indirectly in the 1970 spinoff, Zatoichi Meets Yojimbo.

That's quite a bit said about Yojimbo's legacy without saying all that much about the film itself. My presumption here is that this is probably one of the most widely seen titles in the Criterion Collection, but in case you need a summary, here's one: The nameless protagonist, who impulsively names himself Sanjuro a third of the way into the film, is introduced with suitably awesome opening theme music and filmed from behind as he makes his way down a dirt path through the wilderness. Here's the American version of the opening credits (not available in the Criterion editions,) complete with a bit of spoonfed written introduction to set the stage:

Coming to a crossroads, he impulsively tosses a stick in the air and directs his steps in the direction it happened to point toward after landing. That trail leads him to a miserable little frontier town, circa late-1800s, that's being overrun by two competing gangs. Though Sanjuro has no serious intentions of settling down for the long haul, he needs to make a little money and get a bit of food in his gut. So he offers his services as a yojimbo (the Japanese word for bodyguard) to the gang bosses, smartly playing them off against each other as he patiently awaits the time when he can unleash his killer swordplay skills to dispatch the whole wretched lot of them. It's a task he calmly anticipates, becoming only more dedicated to its completion as he endures a hard beating, numerous taunts and despicable betrayals by the men who pledge their support to his face but plot his murder behind his back.

Criterion's commentary track is loaded with historical footnotes and detailed explanations of Sanjuro's martial techniques, Kurosawa's camera placements, the jaunty musical soundtrack composed by Masaru Sato and the disruptive cultural shifts that Japan went through as the nation transitioned from a rice-based to a money-based economy in the latter half of the 19th century. Stephen Prince's observations are helpful and well-informed to the extent that one is interested in the plethora of topics he raises, but Yojimbo is first and foremost an invigorating, highly entertaining blockbuster meant to be enjoyed on its own terms, before the scholars and critics start carving it up. Featuring a memorable first collaboration between Kurosawa and future mainstay Tatsuya Nakadai (taking on a villain role almost as an antidote to the excruciating martyrdom he personified so magnificently in The Human Condition) and appearances by faces familiar from many his earlier films, Yojimbo represents yet another mountain peak in the career of an artist capable of creating films of the most transcendent sort across a broad spectrum of dramatic settings. As averse as I generally am when it comes to listing my "favorite" movies, directors, etc., I don't think I can name a film maker who has impressed me more profoundly with the consistent excellence and grandeur of his works. Other Kurosawa titles hit more sublime and profound philosophical notes than this one, I'll make that clear. But this is the one that I think makes the best first introduction for a novice, and I doubt it can be beat in terms of the sheer confidence of its execution.

Among other notable highlights, Yojimbo stands out prominently among mainstream films of the era in its willingness to push blood and gore in the face of its audience, with severed limbs, spurting blood and rapacious killing sprees not only portrayed in greater graphic detail than most viewers of its time had ever seen, but also with dark comic effect. Kurosawa's boundary-pushing may not be as apparent when viewed by today's audience, accustomed as we are to that sort of bleak humor, but it's pretty noticeable, even when seen in the context of what his Japanese New Wave peers were doing as they explored the limits of permissible explicitness in their own way.

As Stephen Prince points out several times in his commentary, Yojimbo is a fantasy portrayal of a society that's gone badly off track but is at least partially capable of being restored by one tough, disciplined man who dispenses of the subtleties and takes care of business without stopping too long to ponder more diplomatic or merciful options. Reflecting the contempt for gangster values that informed his previous film The Bad Sleep Well, Kurosawa concocted a persona that dropped deadly vengeance on the crooked scumbags intent on exploiting the rest of us honest, law-abiding working class types. Given the corruption and fecklessness of so many around us, especially those who seem to have the most control over resources and their distribution, it's no wonder that a freewheeling character like Sanjuro continues to exert such a powerful attraction, and spawn so many imitators even to this day.

Next: Viridiana

Blast of Silence (1961) - #428

They all hate the gun they hire. When people look at you, baby boy Frankie Bono, they see death. Death across the counter. Remembering...


Remembering... Though Blast of Silence begins with birth imagery (impermeable darkness save for a single pinprick of light that eventually expands to become the open mouth of a subway tunnel,) the film plays out like a mournful final reminiscence, that trembling awful moment of helpless remorse experienced by sad lost souls as they realize their appointment with death is upon them and all that comes to mind is a flood of regrets they are now powerless to address. A short, sordid peep over the shoulder of Frankie Bono, a hate-filled hit-man, sent on a job to kill a man he's never met but soon deeply despises based on nothing more than offense at his appearance, Blast of Silence has a lot going for it for film noir aficionados - vintage New York street-level cinematography, an acute visual sensibility deriving from its director/writer/star's background in comic book illustration, as existentially bleak and dour an outlook as one could ever ask from the genre, an evocative and varied musical soundtrack capturing cool jazz, rolling marimbas and conga beats of the era. The atmosphere is dank and the characters are, without exception, rough hewn, taking us on a harsh plunge into some down and dirty business that delivers many gratifying moments when you're in one of those moods to wallow in alienation and self-serving rejection of all things warm, fuzzy and sentimental. But what lingers longest in my imagination, a couple days after watching it through for the second time, is the palpably ashen aftertaste of a life wasted and acutely aware of its own predestined failure from the moment of first encounter with the cold hostile world it dropped into. 

The most unique characteristic of the film, both then and now, is the use of an unattributed second-person narrator (as demonstrated in the lead quote above.) The speaker is never revealed, and his perspective remains mysterious as it speaks in mocking tones to Frankie, tossing off incisively withering taunts with just a tinge of sarcasm and irony. Is it a "Voice of God," rendering a Judgement Day closing argument as if to prove Frankie deserved the damnation that collapsed upon him after he flawlessly - except for one slight wobble and an unplanned execution - carried out his murderous  commission? Is the Voice that of Frankie himself, an outgrowth of his inner conflicts that divides him against himself? Either could be the case, since the Voice knows things about Frankie that no other human ever would - painful memories, trivial bits of information that would lie dormant in the subconscious until triggered into awareness by odd inexplicable associations with seemingly insignificant events. 

The corrosive litany of contempt, projected toward his connections, his past and future victims, the crowds of nameless strangers he weaves through... the mantric repetition of words like "hate" and "remembering"... the circuitous pacing, clandestine driving, and aimless time-consuming wander down cold, windswept streets ... the ritualistic invocation of "Baby Boy Frankie Bono" even though by now he's a grown man, now dreadfully nearer the end of his days than he quite imagines (though inwardly welcomes and is ready for, so he thinks)... the derisive congratulatory salutation, "that's just how you like it"... smug, malicious jabs about roads in life not taken, delusional notions of careers as an architect, an engineer... all delivered with a sneering wise-guy lilt by the Voice. These characteristics all point to a fractured, self-absorbed infantilism that gnawed at the core of Frankie's being. Unmet needs that go way back in his life, a back story only hinted at as the anti-hero recalls his youth spent in an orphanage much like the one he spies from his perch atop the building where he waits to fulfill his contract. Blast of Silence, an deceptively quiet little film that was quickly lost in the endless shuffle of popular entertainments, full of iconic urban wasteland imagery, calmly plucks its deep psychological notes like the bass player fingering his strings in the Village Gate nightclub, proving to be more dangerous and devastating to the fraudulent attainments of middle class prosperity than one might imagine at first glance. Frankie Bono is out there, watching and waiting for that moment when your guard is dropped, your protection is parked out on the street, when you're more vulnerable than you'll ever realize... until it's too late.  

Next: Yojimbo 

The Human Condition Part 3 (1961) - #480

The country you were taught to know will be dead... and that's how it should be.

After filming the first two parts of The Human Condition (No Greater Love and The Road to Eternity) in close succession, Masaki Kobayashi and his crew took a well-deserved and presumably much needed respite from their labors before undertaking the task of shooting the excruciating finale, A Soldier's Prayer. Given Kobayashi's faithful adaptation of the popular novel on which the films were based, everyone involved - cast, crew and audience - knew they were in for a gut-wrenching ordeal when the time came to put the remainder of poor Private Kaji's sad story on screen for the ages. A substantial break, not to mention a lot of planning and technical coordination, was needed to bring this magnificent (though draining) epic to its devastating conclusion. After taking viewers on a journey through forced labor camps, military exercises and front-line battles in the first seven hours of the trilogy, A Soldier's Prayer thrusts us into the brutal aftermath of the Pacific War, as Kaji and various companions scratch their way through tangled forests, barren deserts, refugee hideouts and a Soviet P.O.W. camp, persistently struggling to stay one step ahead of death's shadow for the simple sake of witnessing another day.

Murder, starvation, imprisonment, suicide, depression, abandonment, isolation and betrayal. Debasing shame and humiliation, loss of hope, groveling in filth, fire and freezing snow... deprivations of every sort imaginable - even inconsolable screaming babies in the middle of the night! - all this and more press down relentlessly upon our protagonist and his unfortunate fellow survivors of Japan's disastrous defeat after its occupation of Manchuria. The spectacle is riveting, the cinematography luminous in its horrific splendor, and every performance impeccably captures the unique angles on misery experienced by soldiers, peasants, old men, young women, confused and innocent children as they scramble over the war-swept plains in their visceral fight for life.

I don't know if the casting for A Soldier's Prayer had already taken place prior to the release of the earlier sections, but the appearance in this last part of a pair of familiar actors, Chishu Ryu and Hideko Takamine, whom I highly respect from their work with Ozu and Naruse, seems to indicate that the success and massive sweep of the trilogy made it an attractive project for high-profile performers, the kind they like to have on their resume, even if it's just a bit part. Certainly, the list of acting credits included in this handsome box set is among the longest one will find among any Criterion films, and I imagine that others more familiar with Japanese cinema of the late 1950s find it a fascinating "who's who" of actors from that period. 



In the meantime, The Human Condition's first two installments went on to become box office sensations in Japan, establishing Tatsuya Nakadai as a major star for years to come. The process that led to him landing the role of Kaji, and his later-in-life musings on the impact that role had on his career and personal development, are given good long looks on the supplemental features disc included with this package. It was a coveted role with many aspiring actors in pursuit, but Kobayashi saw something special in Nakadai, who hadn't done all that much to distinguish himself from the pack up to that point and seemed mystified by his selection both before and after the production wrapped up. The story goes that in his screen test, Nakadai made a certain facial expression, one capturing the crazed delirium that overtook Kaji at the conclusion of The Human Condition, that sealed the decision.

There's no doubt that Kobayashi got it right. Nakadai absolutely emptied himself in order to take on Kaji's metamorphosis from a stubborn, intellectualized and ultimately self-serving idealist to the haunted, shell-shocked and war ravaged soul who knew no rest in his pursuit of a reunion with his wife Michiko. The physical ordeals he underwent as an actor included weeks of boot-camp intensity military training, as well as taking real beatings from his fellow actors in various fight scenes and coming close to clinical hypothermia as he laid motionless on the ground in an actual snowstorm in the film's conclusion.

No less demanding than the hardships he experienced in the varied geographic settings of The Human Condition was the intense psychic and emotional topography he had to navigate as we see Kaji gradually but inexorably reduced by circumstances and grief to a staggering husk of a man. In that process, he's still called upon to be a leader and a protector of those who look up to him, and to most observers there's no obvious fault to be found in how he discharges his duties, guiding his various companions through hostile forests, dangerous homesteads inhabited by vengeful Chinese peasants, barren deserts and innumerable other dangers. And yet Kaji finds himself repeatedly facing situations in which his noble convictions and simple reverence for life are forcibly compromised or sometimes simply overwhelmed by the furious emotions stirred up by an overload of stress and futility.

Part 3 opens with him carrying out a premeditated act of murder in order to help his companions avoid detection by an enemy patrol. Near the end, Kaji kills again in raw vengeance, falling far short of his lofty principled pacifism of just a few years earlier. Conscious of his failures throughout, Kaji's quest is to achieve some sort of redemption, some way of atoning for the disappointments and squandered opportunities that he knows are attributable only to him. As admirably heroic as Kaji may be when comparing his deeds to the conduct of others around him, he's much more complex and intricately rendered than your standard war-movie protagonist. That's partly due to the fact that we spend so much time seeing the war through Kaji's eyes - this is a nearly 10 hour movie in which the main character dominates almost every scene, after all. But Kobayashi's deep grasp of Kaji's motivations, and his courageous exposition of the man's irreconcilable interior conflicts, makes Kaji a truly transcendent figure who convincingly embodies some of the most troubling yet invigorating characteristics of human nature.

As I've said in my reviews of the first two parts, there's more breadth and levity to our common "human condition" than this monumental work chooses to portray, but in giving a profound articulation of the power that love and a quest for moral purity can exert in resistance to extreme hardship, after the idols of nationalism and political ideology have been stripped of their delusional powers, A Soldier's Prayer is practically without peer. The high artistry and depth of detail that went into its production adds to the sobering inspiration that this masterpiece delivers.

Next: Blast of Silence