Gertrud

Dreyer, 1964, 2 hours, Denmark

This film has been variously described as a meditation on love, and a "two hour meditation on sofas and pianos". It reminds me quite a lot of Last Year at Marienbad, both in it's obsession with romantic love and it's fascination with architecture and interiors. While I cannot claim to have penetrated to the heart of the film, it was easy to watch for it's two hours worth, and it is visually and dramatically arresting and unusual. It is Dreyer's last movie, at age 75. It is indeed meditative even if it lacks the momentum and richness of plot of his three best known films (he made five in all).

Gertrud (Nina Pens Rode) is of middling age and has a beauty springing more from her narcissistic persona than physical or facial attributes. A former professional singer (we are treated to two exquisitely haunting songs in the course of the film) she is married to a lawyer (Gustav) about to be elevated to cabinet minister. "A woman's love and a man's work are mortal enemies", he ruminates at one point. Gertrud is going to leave Gustav for young and handsome rising concert pianist Erland who turns out to be a philanderer, boasting his conquest of her in a drinking party. Meanwhile, she is wooed by ex-lover Gabriel, a poet who has made it to the top. She breaks free of all three men to settle in Paris, immersing herself in a life of study (psychiatry, apparently) and we see her whitened of hair, finally breaking away even from Axel, her platonic lover. She has selected a spot for her own grave and an epitaph: Amor Omnia, "love is all".

The film has a kind of fluid formalism. Dreyer is restrained even at climactic moments, and in this film particularly, everything is on a tight leash, to the point of pantomime. The characters don't act naturally, in fact they don't even act. They strike statue like poses, as if for portraits. They are always in immaculate formal attire (except the tie-less Erland)  signifying that they are all "formed personalities", at a stage of maturity and fruition of their natural propensities, in a sense bound by their natures. Gustav and Gabriel are at summits of professional achievement, mirroring the film maker, their physical appetites very intact. Each shot is carefully framed and the camera roams over the opulent mansion liberally sprinkled with works and artifacts of art, including some very striking erotica, since the film never moves far from the carnal. Dreyer is a blend of the carnal, the spiritual and the artistic.

The film is a somewhat enigmatic conclusion to Dreyer's five salvoes in the world of film.

8 1/2

1963, Fellini, 138m, Italy

This Fellini film has a permanent berth in the top films of all time, specifically the Top Ten of Sight and Sound, which are chosen by a process of voting by many director's and critics. Fellini had completed eight films with one unfinished, hence the title. The film is said to be autobiographical. Guido (Marcello Mastriaonni) is a film director in the process of making a science fiction film in which he has lost interest.

One need not look for a narrative, since even in as much it is there it is not the main point. Guido says somewhere that he wants to make a completely truthful film, and that is what Fellini aims at and in the process structure and plot are bypassed.

He has chosen film making itself as the subject which currently occupies him, as though to say that the subject is only a vehicle for the music that plays inside him. Some of his other films are humanistic essays (The Road and Nights of Cabiria) telling clear tales but now he has left all that behind him and it is human experience, his own, in all its textured and layered complexity which he sets out to capture, a film maker's stream of consciousness. Ebert says Guido is a man without a centre, and so it seems is the real director, but he puts his artistry and command of the medium to portray this very centrelessness in a poem of tight minimalism and structural economy, with the pieces seamlessly merging into each other. Part of it's charm is in the utter effortlessness.

It's a mixture of dreams memories and the realities of the ongoing film making process, with bills to be paid and people to be hired, and prospectors for stardom to be warded off, and the women to be juggled.. There is his wife(Anouk Aimee), his mistress, and his dream woman (Claudia Cardinale). And the film ends with a triumphant, joyful procession of celebration as the movie project finally takes off.

The film is a visual delight, the figures often floating just above the ground. The one I find most inerasable is as the entire cast floats as it criss crosses in slow motion in an open space: women young and old, nuns and priests, a clown and a magician as though mankind itself is on carnival. In the opening dream/reality sequence, Marcello is trapped in a traffic jam, and the score is a furiously beating heart; the car windows won't open and he hammers desperately as he suffocates and then floats into the sky in a kind of out of the body experience, to be finally pulled down to the ground like a kite. The tragicomic and utterly lovable figure of the harlot Saraghina gazes into the sea.

The film is drenched in Nino Rota's musical score. It is in the fusion of the visual poetry with the soaring joy of music that the film touches the sublime. Ebert recently remarked that he could see a Fellini movie on the radio. Click here for Ebert's article on Rota.

CLIP

Le Boucher

Claude Chabrol (1930-2010), 1970, 93m, France

Popaul is a butcher and runs a meat shop. He is young and handsome and has an easy gait of one accustomed to swinging his arm. He is good natured and simple and well liked in the village community. He has done fifteen years of military service in Algeria and Indo-China where he was assigned the butcher's job in his units. He has seen more than enough of killing and corpses and blood.

He meets Helene, the young and beautiful headmistress of the village school, at a wedding celebration, and a friendship is struck. This wedding feast serves as a prelude to the story and we get to know the community by participating in this intimate celebration. Helene is not inclined to romance and the friendship proceeds along platonic lines. The butcher sometimes brings along a choice cut of meat for her. She presents him with a cigarette lighter, which is to play a significant role in the plot like Othello's handkerchief. He often visits her during school hours and lends a hand with the kids and evenings for a drink in her apartment on top of the school. He is strongly attracted to her but she wants to hold on to her celibacy chosen after the trauma of being ditched by her guy ten years ago.

And then a young woman is found murdered in the surrounding woods, which naturally causes ripples in the peaceful community. But the first half of the film is a relaxed savoring of the aromas and flavors of this French hamlet with its steeples and woods. There are also the prehistoric grottoes with otherworldly streams and formations of stalactites, with the art work of Cro Magnon Man on the walls. Helen is a popular and loved teacher and finds much satisfaction in caring for her herd.

It is during a picnic which proceeds through the ancient caves and out into the hillside with sunshine pouring from the azure sky that the second murder is detected when a few raindrops of blood fall on a piece of chocolate in the hand of a child. A bleeding hand is protruding over a ledge above. The needle of suspicion hovers towards Popaul.

The movie now turns into pounding suspense drama reminiscent of Psycho and Wait Until Dark.

It seems that the violence and suspense is only a MacGuffin to support this lyrical movie about people living in the lap of this bounteous region, with the camera lazily dwelling on each detail. The violence is only hinted and what we get is an exquisite and delicate liqueur of visual delights well supported by a quiet and delicate score. This is a film to roll over the taste buds and to allow the taste to linger.

From the Life of Marionettes

Ingmar Bergman, 1980, 95m, Germany


Suicides are generally a complete mystery since the chief witness has disappeared. The chain of events and the mental processes which finally precipitate the drastic action remains forever a matter of conjecture and surmise. Marilyn Monroe is a case in point. Murder can be subject to closer scrutiny, both from the forensic as well as the psychological viewpoint.

This is a movie with perhaps too heavy a baggage of psychiatric jargon and narcissistic introspection. The film opens with the seemingly motiveless murder of a street-walker named Katarina by Peter Egermann, who is having having a disturbed relationship with his wife, also named Katarina.

The film takes an objective view of the cataclysmic event examining it from different angles: his interactions with his wife in the preceding period; his dreams, in one of which he kills his wife; interviews with the psychiatrist, who also is emotionally entangled with wife Katrina; interviews with Peter's mother before and after the event; the eloquent outpourings of a gay family friend and of course the omniscient director-narrator's observations..

Why does Peter Egermann do it? The course of events is unshapened even in the last fifteen minutes. He wants to run away from the prostitute's den but the doors are locked. It is as though the floodgates of his lifelong turmoils suddenly creak apart--was it a glance, a word, a gesture or simply the spontanous consummation of an inner process that triggered the sudden eruption of violence?

Ingmar Bergman was in "tax-exile" in Germany when he made this German language film. Bergman is a person with appreciation for the complexities of the mind, specially in it's less wholesome manifestations. As Tolstoi says in the opening lines of Anna Karenina, misery is a far more heterogeneous commodity than happiness. Bergman experienced a sadistic upbringing under a bigoted father. With his precocious intellect and artistic talent he rocketed to dizzy success early in life. Thus he was uniquely placed to chronicle some of the more exotic blooms of human torment.

Rarely does a shaft of light penetrate into the dark landscapes of Bergman's inner world. The only redeeming feature is the privilege and power of articulation his characters enjoy to endlessly dissect themselves. But they are talking into the void, and rarely do they make mutual connection. As Peter Egermann says, they are mangled by surfeit.

One more litany of despair from the dour Swede.

Janet Jaslin NY Times

Mon Oncle Antoine (My Uncle Antoine)

Juttra, 1970, 105m, French-Canadian

This is sometimes praised as the greatest Canadian film. All I can say is that it is perhaps so local in it's meanings and evocations, that it's nuances and impact are lost on others from warmer climes, as they are for the most part on me. Many a time I was inclined to give it up as a lost quest but somehow hitting the half way mark, I just as well decided to do the rest.

The film is set in the 1940s in French speaking province of Quebec in an asbestos mining area, where the mineral noxious to human health takes it's toll on the labor community. We see the life of a family in a desolate hamlet through the eyes of a pubescent orphan. There are many human touches but the whole just does not seem to add up, at least not for me. It gathers momentum towards the end as we are taken on a journey through a snowstorm in the terrifying bleak Canadian snowy desert of ice on a coffin bearing horse carriage in the company of sozzled Uncle Antoine and his nephew Benoit, who is the protagonist. The situation is ludicrous, terrifying and pathetic in the sheer helplessness of the human midgets trapped in this icy hell.

The film does convey an image of the vast sparsely populated volumes of Canada and the struggle of settlers in former times.

Roger Ebert's Great Movie