It was a picture made for RAI (Italian television), and while it ran a full three hours, it could have been longer—or almost a daily account of life in the compound. In the long term, it declines to be angry or radical. Instead, it has a feeling that everything will work out for the best, that reflects Olmi’s own allegiance to the Roman Catholic Church and which makes far too modest or polite an issue of ownership, authority, and disobedience.
Instead, a kind of sweetness prevails. Don Carlo, the rather absentminded landowner (he would prefer to play music all day), advises one of the peasants that a young son should be sent to school. But school requires shoes for the boy. And the father cuts down a tree on the estate to make wooden shoes. One day, the master sees the cuttings from the destroyed tree and wonders what happened. The father is fined and expelled from his home. No, Olmi does not believe that this is “right or wise,” but neither is it the occasion of some radical dismay. It is assumed to be part of progress, and almost of a natural process as trees make way for shoes.
If you were a filmgoer at the time, you could have wondered how this version of history was meant to fit in with Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1900, made only two years, before, in which there was hideous violence and deep-seated antagonisms. The answer may simply be that Bertolucci was a Marxist and a city boy talking about country life. In turn, that is why the heroes and heroines from London or New York want to buy a hovel to improve in the right part of rural Italy—where the visitor has no real need to get caught up in local troubles.
Written and directed by Olmi, but also photographed and edited by him, The Tree of Wooden Clogs is a dramatized history inquiry—it’s rather as if Ken Burns had made his Civil War out of lots of short stories instead of still photographs and contemporary letters. How you proceed says a lot for the cultural traditions in place, or the attitudes being gently imposed. The film was made with amateur actors, but that is a custom that seems inspired by the natural acting to be found in any Italian hill town.
The Trial (1962)
There were projects that Orson Welles nursed for decades, and carried with him through life changes, the death of some of his actors, and immense obstacles. But you get another side of his impetuous creativity when you realize that one day the Salkind brothers came to him with money for a modest film and a list of titles to choose from. Seizing upon the abandoned Gare d’Orsay in Paris for most of his sets, and going to Zagreb for the rest, Welles made a very complex film in just over two months, and had the film done and ready to show by December 1962. What’s more impressive is that the view of Kafka is consistent throughout, faithful to the book and very compelling for young viewers who previously found Kafka “obscure.” This is a film made with such control and panache. And it is pretty good Kafka as well as major Welles. Grant the popular image of Welles in the 1950s as a wandering wreck, and you have to admit that somehow he made three masterpieces in eight years: Touch of Evil, The Trial, and Chimes at Midnight.
Of course, Welles remains Orson. He introduces the story of Joseph K. with the story of the Man of Law—and he has this story delivered by the Advocate (a character played by Welles). In the book, this story comes in its place. In the film, it is clearly meant to be the explanation of the mystery that dogs Joseph K. and inasmuch as it is delivered by Welles personally it does suggest an omniscience that is not exactly Kafkaesque. On the other hand, it is a device of adaptation, especially if Welles had let another actor play the Advocate. As it is, the decision taken speaks volumes to his emotional need for positions of authority.
That said, the vision of Kafka’s world is haunting and ingenious to a degree. This is one of the great paranoid films, because of the way space is stretched and insidious sound (whispers and creakings) seems to be creeping in through the cracks left, like a drug called radio. Edmond Richard did the photography. Jean Mandaroux was art director. Still, it’s hard not to think that Welles’s great experience at distorting space wasn’t the key design element. It is as if the film was set in the Ambersons’ house after it had suffered fifty years of rats and ghosts. As you tour the Gare d’Orsay in its modern manifestation as sophisticated art museum, it’s a model of lateral thinking to remember what Welles saw could be done with its waiting neglect.
Anthony Perkins is Joseph, and it’s a great, jittery performance, albeit one guided by the soft voice of Norman Bates throughout. In the scenes with ravenous women—Jeanne Moreau, Elsa Martinelli, Romy Schneider—one can feel how far it is also a homosexual horror story. The cast includes Akim Tamiroff, Arnoldo Foà, William Kearns, Jess Hahn, Suzanne Flon, Madeleine Robinson, Wolfgang Reichmann, Thomas Holtzmann, William Chappell, and Fernand Ledoux.
The Triplettes of Belleville (2003)
I’m not sure if I have ever seen an animated feature film in which there is less sense of piety or less burden about having undertaken animation altogether. In great films there is a visual momentum—often extreme, mannered, or expressionist—that still seems utterly necessary and demanding, so that it has burst out of the filmmaker like any other bodily fluid. Yet very often with animation there are intervening levels of self-explanation (often smug) that seem to say, “Well, I had this story, this idea, but then I thought I’d animate it. See how difficult it was? But see how I came through.”
But Sylvain Chomet’s exhilarating story about cycling and its mishaps has the speed and whir of a bicycle itself, spinning along so effortlessly that it’s hard to think there was ever any premeditation or determination on story plus line equaling movie. Quite simply, Chomet sees things that way. Indeed, one of the keynotes of this film is the general agitation it shows about whether it can remember to do—or organize—everything it wants to do. It is so caught up with its own motion and commotion.
After all, it’s an everyday story: Champion, a sad-faced orphan, wants to be a great cyclist. His grandmother Souza gets him a bike and trains him. He is in the Tour de France when wicked mafiosi kidnap him and two other cyclists. Why? Because they mean to employ their furious cycling energies in a form of popular theatre in Belleville (a mixture of New York and Montreal). Souza follows her boy to Belleville and there enlists the aid of an old vaudeville team—the Triplettes—in rescuing Champion.
The drawing is angular, often antique, except that Chomet is very versatile—in fact his is real drawing allied to the computer, and it is often a little like Toulouse Lautrec dating Betty Boop over an absinthe sorbet. There’s a steady period feel to it all—and you can tell that Chomet likes fussy décor and clothes. Yet the attitudes of the story are spiced by a very modern anti-Americanism that is so refreshing after the hangdog self-satisfaction of so much American animation. And although there’s a child, the energies and feelings are adult, smart, sarcastic, and superior. You have to hurry to keep up.
But it’s the music and the songs (by Benoît Charest) that seem to bring sinister acceleration to the geared wheels turning—it’s not too much to say that the film is like a giddy drug, a zest for turmoil, and an elegant resolve that seems to understand complex literary ideas. You could imagine Chomet doing an animated version of Proust—yet he has the old-fashioned trust in “wham!” that comes from an understanding of Tom and Jerry.
You can tell yourself that Pixar have captured a modern American attitude. But the sunniness behind those films seems to me essentially boring and complacent. It is as removed from Bush’s age as Disney was from the thirties. The Triplettes of Belleville is about a kind of animated film that assumes the medium is ready for smart, devious, and rather wicked grown-ups. Down with childhood!
Tristana (1970)
At the end of his life, Luis Buñuel made three films in France: The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, The Phantom of Liberty, and That Obscure Object of Desire. They are films about frustration, using that word in the largest sense. Just before them, yet unfortunately lost in terms of our attention, is Tristana, another masterwork, and an icy study in the same tantalizing opportunity and deprivation. This is the more intriguing becau
se it is a Spanish film, set in the Spain of Buñuel’s own youth. It has another claim to fame: It is the one meeting of those two classic Buñuelian presences, Fernando Rey and Catherine Deneuve.
Toledo, 1929—filmed there, with the there looking like 1729 or 1529. Tristana (Deneuve) is an orphan, with long hair, brown-auburn-red. She goes to live with her guardian, Don Lope, a poor but noble man (Rey). She is innocent; he is not. He comes to desire her and she accepts the coming. They live as a couple. But Tristana feels trapped. Then a young artist, Horacio (Franco Nero), comes by. He and Tristana are a natural couple.
Tristana goes with Horacio to Madrid. Two years later, they return. She has a tumor on her leg. Don Lope is rich now and he lets the invalid woman live in his house. Her leg is cut off. She gets better. Lope asks Horacio to visit. Horacio asks Tristana to marry him. She refuses. The young man does not love her as Lope does. He is unquestioning. So Tristana marries Lope, but refuses to give herself to him. Lope is dying. Tristana is to call the doctor. But she does nothing except open up the windows and let cold air into his room.
Love was an immense ideal for Buñuel once, overpowering all things. But now those things have grown so wiry and cunning. In a perverse way Tristana goes from being the utterly obedient girl to the murderous victim of liberation (she is free but she is on crutches). The inscrutable Deneuve (very well wigged for the film) is doubly alluring on crutches—and there is a moment when she discloses the sight of her ruined but perfect body to a young boy (but not to us). Don Lope is also the man steadfast in love, no matter that he has been humiliated by youth. It is just that he is her jailer. And though she has come to have deep fondness for him, finally she does take the slender chance to be his killer. Great calm can end in the peak of revenge.
There are those who will say that life is not like this at all—that the film is a throwback to an archaic Spain. But if you fall victim to the dreamlike logic with which Tristana progresses, then you know you are seeing the ritual of a fable. And if you can see the profound simplicity in Buñuel for what it is, then you are watching the great filmmaker of his time just where Toledo 1929 becomes everywhere and always.
Trouble in Paradise (1932)
What was the Lubitsch touch? Here’s one answer. Late in 1931 or early in 1932, the director King Vidor has a romance with the actress Miriam Hopkins. He takes her out to dinner and Ms. Hopkins comes with a script she’s just been offered—by Lubitsch! They read it aloud together over dinner, their pleasure with the food regularly interrupted by the joys of the script and its encouragement to enacted romance. And there at the end of the typed pages is this handwritten comment: “King—Any little changes you would like I will be happy to make them. Ernst.”
Happier, I daresay, to one-up a colleague than actually make changes. And who ever reckoned that Trouble in Paradise needed repairs? It came, supposedly, from a play, The Honest Finder, by Laszlo Aladar, but the screenwriter, Samson Raphaelson, declared the film was an entirely separate creation. It starts in Venice and moves to Paris, confident that in an age of depression the audience has a good-humored appetite for luxe and money, and the nerve that can win both. Make no mistake, Trouble in Paradise is disdainful of moral purpose and bromides about a better tomorrow. The political attitude is nihilist bar one thing—it is still stuck on sex and its great future. In the Lubitschian history of the 1930s, it was the Nazis’ greatest mistake to lose humor.
Two thieves meet—Lily (Miriam Hopkins) and Gaston (Herbert Marshall). He is such a fabulous thief that Marshall’s stiff leg seems like a hiding place for the loot. They are experts. Just sitting down to dinner they can pick each other’s pockets in places where no tailor designed pockets. Indeed, his coup is to show her the garter he has somehow taken from her warm body. They pick upon a victim, Mariette (Kay Francis). But Lily is afraid that Gaston may fall for her for real. Perhaps she should act independently?
It’s a film of talk, or innuendo, so theft is another idiom for sex. In which case, the moment when Francis simply takes off a heavy pearl necklace amounts to undressing. The drama of the film is a matter of which lady Gaston will settle with. And you could argue that this is a film that celebrates theft over loyalty. If in doubt, please play a double bill of Trouble in Paradise with Robert Bresson’s Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne. Trouble in Paradise was so effortless in 1932 it rather slipped by. But it is now regarded, with justice, as one of the markers in American comedy—after all, isn’t it crazy to prefer money to love? There is nothing better than the rising challenge to honesty between Gaston and Mariette:
GASTON: I know all your tricks.
MARIETTE: And you’re going to fall for them.
GASTON: So you think you can get me?
MARIETTE: Any minute I want.
GASTON: You’re conceited.
MARIETTE: But attractive.
GASTON: Now let me tell you.
MARIETTE: Shut up—kiss me! Wasting all this precious time with arguments.
True Confessions (1981)
It comes from a novel by John Gregory Dunne, with a screenplay written by Dunne and his wife, Joan Didion—so it’s no wonder that everyone seems fond of the sad story. It’s about the Spellacy brothers, Des and Tom, a priest and a cop, the one settled in the LAPD, the other rising steadily in the Catholic diocese of Los Angeles, the favored right-hand man of a cardinal played by Cyril Cusack at his most dreamy, fastidious, and vicious. And, straightaway, one realizes how seldom the screen takes being brothers seriously. These two know they’re chalk and cheese, and they both fear and resent, yet are humbled by, the difference, and there’s a kind of awful, gradual certainty whereby the cop is bound to ruin the priest’s career, which the priest accepts inasmuch as he was not strong or inventive enough to destroy himself. Destruction being what he needed and what his precious career merited.
Robert De Niro is the priest and Robert Duvall the cop, and you can feel them flexing their ideas over the possibility that they might have swapped parts. Indeed, there is even a hint or an osmotic smear whereby they might, very gently and fondly, be “doing” each other—it’s a great deal subtler and more beguiling than John Travolta and Nicolas Cage in Face/Off. But De Niro is very good indeed as the smooth careerist, doing the cardinal’s dirty work, and watching the naughty world of real men pass by, like a whore he’s giving a lift to.
I should have added that the drama is brought to a head by a barely disguised version of the Black Dahlia murders of 1947—when the parts of a pretty girl were found in a wasteland, cut up but organized artistically. This is the case that Duvall’s detective takes up, and it is what connects so many people in what still seems a small Los Angeles. The period stuff is very warmly done, and Ulu Grosbard shows himself a tactful director of a good script. Incidentally, Rose Gregorio (Mrs. Grosbard) does a very nice job as a tough but caring madam.
As you might guess, the supporting cast is expert—Burgess Meredith is unforgettable as a stubborn little priest who gets kicked off to the desert because he won’t play ball for Cusack; Kenneth McMillan is super as a fat, smart cop; Ed Flanders is as suave as silk, and Charles Durning—as the nastiest guy around—has a temper you can smell. There’s a scene where Duvall goads him in public where you want to lip-read in case Duvall sneaked in some really nasty insult to Durning.
I heard Didion once say that this was her best experience with filmmaking (and I think she was speaking for Dunne, too). It’s not a great film, but it’s very well done and enjoyable, and it leaves you wondering why two writers as good as Didion and Dunne and knowing as much about the picture business didn’t have a few more jobs as worthwhile. Yet most of their movies feel as if they were done for the health insurance.
The Truman Show (1998)
Nothing in the years since it appeared has taken away from the thought that The Truman Show was the mainstream phenomenon of the 1990s, the most original picture of a bland, if not stupefied, age, the movie in which the dread thing—the moment of real fear—occurred at high
noon in a sun-swiped picture community, one that starts and ends with retirement. No other American film was clearer that the greatest threat to our existence was ourselves, and above all our decision to be cheerful, amiable, and pleasant. Thus, the great moment when we begin to realize that Truman Burbank (Jim Carrey) has had life itself—its risks, its decisions—taken away from him. But not taken by Communists, alien body-snatchers, or drugs. No, the weapon in the crime against life is that American staple, the long-running, lifelike show.
The screenplay was by Andrew Niccol, the direction by Peter Weir, but in many respects the daring of the venture consisted in its being a Jim Carrey picture in which comedy gave way to authentic nightmare, all the more alarming in that the sinister pedal was forsaken for the uplift. It was as if someone at last had realized that the most disconcerting or frightening thing about America was not the menace, not the black look of the humble zombie, but the bonhomie, the salesman oil, the “warmth” of citizenship. The blight of the nation’s culture approaching the millennium was its betrayal of sincerity and sympathy. The archaic climate of film noir seemed ready to break up and be replaced by a film lumière, the kind of light that radiated commercials and which shone down upon the produce in our markets.
So the arc of The Truman Show is the gradual sense in our Lemuel Gulliver that he has been set up, that the busy ebb and flow of spontaneity in his cripplingly perfect community is nothing but mise-en-scène. Every soul is an extra; every incident is staged. Truman is a show that plays all the time on TV (banal but compulsive)—and please note that this film appeared a few years before the mocking glut of reality TV shows. After that, the haunting discovery is that a kind of godlike movie director (Ed Harris) is up there in his control room, hitting the switches, making the cuts, bringing the sidebars in and out with lethal tact. Thus, at a stroke, a film about filmmaking had asserted that it wasn’t just the eroding money, the fools’ glamour, or the celebrity of movie that was damaging, it was cinema’s imitation of and supplanting of life.
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