Brazil (1985)

QFS No. 158 - The invitation for November 27, 2024
Brazil is directed by Terry Gilliam, the mad-genius behind (and part of) Monty Python’s Flying Circus, the still-quotable Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), Time Bandits (1981), Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998), The Fisher King (1991) in which Mercedes Ruehl* won an Oscar, the terrific 12 Monkeys (1995) and other films that are all a little ... askew. What a fascinating career Gilliam has had as a comedian, animator, actor and filmmaker. This is our first of his movies we’ve selected for Quarantine Film Society.

And this one is a favorite of mine – darkly funny, unpredictable and visually captivating, stunningly so at times. I first saw Brazil after someone recommended it to me while a student (…fellow…) at the American Film Institute and the movie stuck with me immediately. The story of how Brazil was made and released has become something of a dark tale itself. There are three versions of the movie that exist in the world – the original European release that’s 142-minutes long, the American version that’s 132-minutes long (probably the one you’ll find out there on streaming), and the so-called Sheinberg edit also known as the “Love Conquers All” version that’s only 90-minutes long. I’ve seen some aspects of each of these, and whatever you do, do not watch the Love Conquers All version because it’s an abomination.

Is now the right time to watch a film about trying to live under the gaze of a dystopic government with a crippling and heartless bureaucracy on the eve of what could be the downfall of representative democracy in this country? Sure why not. Good to know what’s in store for us! Eh.

Anyway, join watch and and discuss below!

*Not only was she later to be directed by yours truly in an episode of television, she also has the distinction of her first and last name sounding like a complete declarative sentence.

Brazil (1985) Directed by Terry Gilliam

Reactions and Analyses:
There’s a sequence in Brazil (1985) that captures so much of what the film attempts to say about society, progress, perception versus reality and also captures director Terry Gilliam’s unique vision, all in one 20-second (or less) moment and series of shots.

Sam driving in his miniscule car in his futuristic city.

Sam (Jonathan Pryce) is driving in his ludicrously tiny car, dwarfed by the wheels of a huge construction vehicle driving next to it. Then, the shot cuts from Sam’s face to what we presume is a POV shot of him driving through the city which we haven’t yet seen. This sort of cut is a conventional type of edit where we as the audience sees what he’s seeing.

Oh what a nice looking city they’ve got in Brazil.

It’s a driving point-of-view through a sleek, futuristic world with what appear to be cooling towers above uniform, efficient-looking buildings. But then, as the shot keeps moving (again, as though we are in the car looking out the domed windows as Sam is doing), suddenly a giant head of a disheveled-looking man holding a beer bottle appears above the buildings.

Wait, what’s going on?

The moment is long enough to give us a sense of what is going on? Is this some sort of giant? But then it cuts to a wide shot of the actual city – this was just a model in a glass case of what the city was proposed to look like, with this drunken fellow now peering into it and Sam’s car driving past the model in the background through what the city actually turned out to be.

It was just a model!

This sequence is illustrative of Gilliam’s work generally and themes of Brazil specifically in the following ways. First, it toys with filmic convention – we have an expectation of what we should be seeing (a POV) but the gag is a misdirect, played for laughs. But it’s also a commentary. People (government or businesses) promising one thing but the reality ends up being something totally different – both the shot and the subject in the shot (the cityscape). The wide shot shows the same towers as the model, but run down, graffiti covered. It’s no mistake that these buildings are named “Shangri-La Towers,” an elevated name for a dilapidated place.

Hidden in this is a third aspect: who is to blame for these promises not being kept? And are we simply powerless to hold anyone accountable?

We are victims of indifference to our circumstances in an uncaring world, Brazil tells us. Bureaucracy (paperwork!) is dehumanizing – no one takes responsibility because in a world where authority is both decentralized and opaque, there’s no one person to blame. Everyone is at fault therefore no one is. As perfectly described in this exchange:

Sam Lowry: I only know you got the wrong man.

Jack Lint: Information Transit got the wrong man. I got the right man. The wrong one was delivered to me as the right man, I accepted him on good faith as the right man. Was I wrong?

Mr. Buttle - whose fault is it that this is the wrong man? The paperwork said it was Buttle.

That wrong man was poor Archibald Buttle (Brian Miller) who later died after being taken away in a case of mistaken identity – in that, they have the wrong name entirely and are looking for Archibald “Harry” Tuttle (Robert DeNiro). Jill Leighton (Kim Greist) attempts to find out what happened to her neighbor Mr. Buttle but since he’s considered a criminal, she’s only met with institutional indifference, given the ol’ run-around.

Sam, however, is in the system. So surely he can fight it – that’s where we think the film is going. Someone who is of the system but doesn’t really care for it will use his knowledge of the system against it to take it down and make the world a better place.

Will Sam take down the system? If this was a simple film subject to studio tinkering, then yes. If it’s a complex film about our real contemporary world, then no.

Gilliam, however, isn’t one for the Hollywood convention of a happy ending (as is thoroughly documented in his fight with Universal Studios and Sid Sheinberg to get Brazil released back in 1985). Instead, Sam, who has apparent privilege as a worker drone in the Ministry of Information and as the son of a prominent member of the government, in the end can’t defeat the system nor can he prevent himself from being a victim of it either.

One of our QFS group members brought up this phrase that I’ll try to remember when talking about Brazil in the future – it’s Kafka meets Capra. Comparisons to George Orwell and his 1984 are of course impossible to miss, but it’s not entirely accurate. The seminal book paints a bleak and ultimately joyless world living under a totalitarian state. Brazil’s world isn’t quite as bleak – in fact, the rich among them are very happy. They can endure routine terrorist attacks as “poor sportsmanship” and can continue to eat brunch so long as a barrier blocks them off from the horrors unfolding behind them. Or they can completely change their appearance with the right cosmetic surgeon. And Sam’s inner mind is full of fantasy and light - he’s actually fighting the system in his dreams, as opposed to being swallowed by it in reality.

Winged hero Sam Lowry, in flight during a dream.

Although the less wealthy and poor are victims of an uncaring world – the Buttles, for instance – Gilliam plays all of this for absurdist laughs as opposed to bleak sadness. The film is satire, not a post-apocalyptic look back at a world lost as we inhabit a brave new world. Gilliam has said that Brazil does not take place in the future and even the title card says “somewhere in the 20th Century” (which now of course puts this film firmly in the past). So it’s about our present day where consumerism is most important, a world where a child asks Santa for a credit card, a procession marches by with people holding up “Consumers for Christ” banners, and the guard implores Sam to confess quickly otherwise his credit score will suffer. Twentieth century “satire” here comes dangerously close to full on 21st Century reality.

Consumers For Christ banner parades through the city.

And, I dare say, the film does find a way to have something resembling hope. Well maybe not as far as hope, but one can interpret that, in the end, Sam has found a place unreachable by the overbearing State – his innermost mind. The ending – the very ending, not what appears to be ending with Sam being rescued by the very terrorists he’s accused of being a part of – but the final moment of Sam in the chair humming the tune that’s the film’s namesake. He has gone off into the sunset with a woman he loves, free from paperwork and the dirty city.

Perhaps this is a happy ending? Sam smiling, lost in a fantasy for good.

Or, maybe they’ve already performed the lobotomy and it’s as bleak as saying – whatever you do, the State wins in the end (as does Big Brother in Orwell’s work). It’s unclear here in Brazil, but what’s clear is that the filmmaker shows a man in a chair surrounded by darkness, only to have that darkness dissolve into clouds and the world of his dreams. To me and to several of us in the discussion group, that is a glimmer of something brighter from the outside world.

Sam enters Information Retreival.

Much has been written about the groundbreaking production design and imagery in the film and what’s striking about seeing it now, in the 21st Century, is that this film was made at all. In our current movie landscape, only a two or maybe three directors are able to create an entire world something as big, bold and maniacal as this – perhaps only Christopher Nolan, Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese and maybe Denis Villeneuve – without relying upon pre-existing source material. “I.P.” to use the language or our times. And Brazil is a lot for a first-time viewer, we discovered – it’s full of visual gags and stimulation, extraordinary camera work, clever dialogue with that Monty Python-esque British humor inflected throughout. You could watch the film all the way through just for the propaganda signs throughout (“Suspicion breeds confidence.”) And it’s just a utter stroke of genius that this whole thing is set off by a bug falling into the printing machine. A system so confident in its infallibility but yet the tiniest of creatures can cause it to fail.

This set is both excellent in its design but also photographed nearly perfectly by Terry Gilliam and cinematographer Roger Pratt with one of the all time great camera dolly movies.

Brazil is full of big ideas packed into a madhouse of a film. If there’s one thing we’re missing, one sadness at revisiting a work as innovative and inventive as Brazil, is that there are so few of its kind since then. So few original films on that scale that are about ideas. Perhaps Nolan is the only one making inventive big world creation films about ideas. There’s a bleak homogenization in our movies, one big action or comic-book based film looking almost exactly like the next. It’s our version of being surrounded by gray walls.

Are we living in Gilliam’s Brazil or some version of that now? I don’t think it’s as bleak as all that. After all, we’ve all but gotten rid of paperwork.

Paperwork reigns down after Sam disrupts the tube system in Information Retrieval.

Princess Mononoke (1997)

QFS No. 157 - The invitation for November 20, 2024
We are all long overdue to be taken away to a different land. At least for a couple of hours.* And there’s perhaps no one better suited to take us elsewhere than the Japanese master of animation, Hayao Miyazaki. We have technically never selected a Miyazaki directed film, but his Studio Ghibli produced Grave of the Fireflies (1988, QFS No. 23), which was the first animated film we selected to watch for Quarantine Film Society.** Studio Ghibli films’ streaming distribution opened up more widely recently, which is an exciting development and will make it easier to see all of these great Miyazaki masterpieces.

Princess Mononoke is high on that list. In 1997, there was not yet an Academy Award for animated feature. Had there been, Princess Mononoke would’ve been the odds-on favorite to win that year. Disney, who dominates the category, had the above average Hercules (1997) and Anastasia (1997) – not classics, which is how Princess Mononoke is often described.

Fast forward a few years when the Oscar category was created, and Miyazaki takes home the statuette for Spirited Away (2001), a truly magnificent film that I’d rank among the greatest animated movies of all time. And just last year, at 80-years old, Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron (2023) won the top animated prize again. My Neighbor Totoro (1988) remains a favorite around the world. Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989), Howl’s Moving Castle (2004), Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind (1984) are among the titles that are celebrated by anime fans and others alike – and there are dozens more.

Miyazaki’s storytelling contains magic on par with Disney’s, but I’d argue even more so with stories that are layered and contain even deeper explorations of character and the soul. His stories take on complex emotions and never pander to the audience – which we definitely saw in the post-war tale of Grave of the Fireflies. Though animation as a medium is often aimed at children, his stories cater to adults as well, often with haunting imagery and disturbing sequences. Miyazaki has elevated the medium and the genre and has made an indelible mark on the film industry as a whole.

I’m very much looking forward to finally seeing Princess Mononoke. Disappear into Miyazaki’s world for a couple hours and join us to discuss here!

*Ideally, longer.

**Flee (2021, QFS No. 69) is the only other animated film we’ve selected due to a long-standing bias among some members of our QFS Council of Excellence (QFSCOE).

Princess Mononoke (1997) Directed by Hayao Miyazaki

Reactions and Analyses:
At the end of Princess Mononoke, the victor is nature. The enraged, decapitated Forest Spirit has just decimated Iron Town, the human-made walled outpost that’s been mining ore and decimating the forest in its path. Iron Town’s ruler Lady Eboshi (voiced by Minnie Driver in the English dubbed version) has had her arm bitten off by the wolf goddess Moro (Gillian Anderson).

But San (the titular Princess Mononoke, voiced by Claire Danes) and the story’s main protagonist Ashitaka (Billy Crudup) have retrieved the head and returned it to the Forest Spirit, healing it and the cataclysm has ended. In the spirit’s wake, the Iron Town is destroyed - but it’s not the end of the story. Instead, over all the destruction, sprouts being to spring and grass grows and nature reclaims the land. In the end, nature is victorious.

Nature has reclaimed Iron Town, now a grassy hill, near the conclusion of Princess Mononoke (1997).

If there’s a central idea of Princess Mononoke - and there are several, some that were a little harder to discern for us in the QFS discussion group - it is this: nature will endure and prevail, if we help it. If we, as humans, can live in harmony with it, symbiotically.

It’s no surprise that several movies including Avatar (2009) are influenced by Hayao Miyazaki’s epic story in Princess Mononoke - from both a story perspective and also visually. But what sets Princess Mononoke apart from Western fare including Avatar is that neither humans nor nature are all entirely good or entirely bad.

Take Iron Town. The town is clearly destroying the land and exploiting its resources. Lady Eboshi is an unrepentant capitalist hell bent on ruling the world. (In fact, she holds up a newly created rifle saying that it’s a weapon that you can rule the world with.) But even she has more layers than that - she is not the villain of the film, to the extent that there is a villain of the film.

Iron Town busy extracting resources from the forest.

And using fire-laden rifles to attack the wolf spirts and wipe out the countryside.

In fact, it’s quite the opposite - she is extremely benevolent. We learn she took women out from working in brothels and gave them dignity and power - but also putting them to work in the bellows of the iron works. She’s taken in lepers who were cast out from society - but also has given the task of making weapons for Lady Eboshi’s growing empire.

Lady Eboshi has empowered the women of Iron Town, rescuing them from brothels

But also employing them in the ironworks.

In this way, Miyazaki is pointing out something that we see every day in real life. Large corporations whose business is tearing up the Earth for resources to fuel modern economy and industry, claim that they are benevolent. Sure we’re extracting fossil fuels and poisoning the atmosphere, but we’re also providing jobs, education, and look how many renewable energy projects we’re funding!

Look how happy we all are living in Iron Town - how could a place this joyful also be causing grave harm to the world? Miyazaki’s juxtaposing these two realities in fantasy medieval Japan reflects our current reality today.

All of the characters are complex in this way. Even nature isn’t all good either. The wolves are particularly nasty, threating to bite off Ashitaka’s head at any given moment. The boars in particular are brutish, headstrong and unwilling to compromise. It’s their inability to let go of hatred that brings on the demon - or something like that.

I found the apes the most unsettling of the forest creatures.

The boars - just listen to reason, please!

Which is one aspect of the film we all found confusing - the rules and the mythology. Narratively speaking, the first half of the film or so is breathtaking in its scope and clear in its vision of a journey for Ashitaka to find a cure for his arm and “to see with eyes unclouded by hate.” But in the second half, Ashitaka encounters humans at war - samurai versus Iron Town, messy allegiances, even in the forest with the animals including the apes. And in the end, after all is said and done, Lady Eboshi and the conniving Jigo (with strangely aloof voicing by Billy Bob Thornton) receive no comeuppance. Eboshi does have an arm cut off, but even when nature is restored there is nothing to suggest, necessarily, that she’s going to change her tune and live in more harmony with nature. And Jigo - whose mission was to decapitate the Forest Spirit at the Emperor’s behest - survives and shrugs it all off.

The Forest Spirit, whose head is valuable - all of this is allegory that is up for analysis and discussion.

Perhaps this, too, is Miyazaki’s point several in our group contended - that these people continue to live among us. People who would live in discord with nature, with ill intentions who are only looking out for themselves. So this balance between nature and life will continue. And it’s also true that we, as American filmmakers and viewers, expect a narrative arc or change in a character. But in the East, perhaps that’s less necessary or expected - even in an animated film. After all, Ashitaka doesn’t really change at all, if you consider him the protagonist - he begins righteous and stays righteous. If anything, he’s trying to have everyone fight against resorting to anger and destruction and he loves the people of Iron Town but also Princess Mononoke and the denizens of the forest. San (Princess Mononoke) in fact still distrusts humans and her human self and doesn’t actually end up with Ashitaka.

San (Princess Mononoke) and Moro - not all good, not all evil.

Despite this lack of a narrative arc we’re hoping for as Western audience members, Miyazaki is painting a picture of there is no good and no evil. Nature itself destroys and brings to life. The Forest Spirit saves Ashitaka but also kills plants and destroys the countryside, just as life springs forth beneath its feet.

Miyazaki has mastered the animated film. But what he’s done to elevate it is that he manages to make the fantastical feel realistic. He manages to make the world three-dimensional, as if it’s there’s a camera on that hillside filming the wolves as they carry the masked San/Princess Mononoke, dodging real rifle shots. It’s a truly remarkable experience to disappear into a Miyazaki world.

But the world he’s creating, especially here in Princess Mononoke is a mirror to our world - a plea for what he hopes is ultimately balance in a world living in the absence of that balance, teetering on mutual destruction.

Near the end of the film, Princess Mononoke/San says, “Even if all the trees grow back, it won't be his forest anymore. The Forest Spirit is dead.”

Ashitaka replies, “Never. He is life itself. He isn't dead, San. He is here with us now, telling us, it's time for both of us to live.”

“It’s time for us both to live.”

Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974)

QFS No. 154 - The invitation for October 9, 2024
Not to be mistaken with Ali (2001), the Michael Mann biopic about Muhammad Ali. Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, as far as I know, has very little boxing and probably even less Muhammad Ali in it. But who knows!

Rainer Werner Fassbinder is one of those filmmakers whose work I, as film snob and student of film, should have seen. But instead, I pretend I know about Fassbinder – of course I do. I went to film school, you see.

Consequently, I know very little about Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, but more than one person has recommended it to me in recent years. One institution gives this film high marks as well – specifically the British Film Institute, where it came in at No. 52 on the Greatest Films of All Time List. You’re familiar, of course, with the oft-cited/derided BFI/Sight & Sound list that comes out every decade. Well, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul is tied in 52nd I’ll have you know. Tied with (checks notes) News From Home (1976) directed by Chantal Akerman – you all know her as the director of the No. 1 Greatest Film of All Time, Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975, QFS No. 98).

Anyway, I’m looking forward to seeing my first Fassbinder film, which will be our third German film after Aguirre: The Wrath of God (1972, QFS No. 40) and Downfall (2004, QFS No. 28) – so it’s been about 112 films since our last time with the Germans. See Ali: Fear Eats the Soul and add Fassbinder to your snobby film cred as well!

Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974) Directed by Ranier Werner Fassbinder

Reactions and Analyses:
There’s a scene more than halfway through Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974) that feels like a fulcrum of film. Moroccan-born Ali (El Hedi ben Salem) and the older German widow Emmi (Brigitte Mira) have fallen in love, but their uncommon pairing has drawn the ire of nearly everyone they encounter. Emmi is shunned by neighbors and co-workers. Her grown children stormed out in anger, with one son Bruno (Peter Gauhe) even kicking in the screen of her TV set.

All of this Emmi accepts with grace, and feels that people, though surprised at their relationship, are eventually going to come around. She knows she’s old and people are prejudiced against people from the Arab world. But in this scene, her fortitude has run out. They’re in an outdoor café, in a plaza, surrounded by yellow chairs. Not one sits next to them, they’re in the center of their own world. All the café staff stand back and away from them, simply staring.

Ali (El Hedi ben Salem) and Emmi (Brigitte Mira) hold hands in a sea of emptiness. The scene feels like the fulcrum of Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974) directed by Ranier Werner Fassbinder.

Emmi and Ali hold hands across the table and Emmi breaks down. She lashes out at them, at the world, for treating them this way when all they want is love. Ali tenderly strokes her hair to console her. The scene feels like a tipping point, the moment in which Emmi’s underlying belief in the ultimate goodness in people has cracked.

Emmi lashes out at the staff, but also the world, finally cracking. 

The staff looks on with apparent disdain at Ali and Emmi.

Ali consoles Emmi, displaying a tenderness that sometimes is elusive from the stoic husband.

Ali: Fear Eats the Soul feels as if it could’ve taken place today, that it could be a contemporary story. It is a contemporary story – you can imagine these characters swapped with someone who is African American or Latinx or, well, Arab. Prejudice and racial discrimination is not unique to any one country.

What makes this film so unique, however, is that this is Germany not quite 30 years after the end of the Second World War. The references to Hitler are surprisingly casual and off-handed and suggests to me that director Rainer Werner Fassbinder is making a comment about his own country’s lingering difficulty with race and prejudice. Instead of blaming Jewish people for their ills, characters throughout blame the immigrants from Arab-speaking countries.

Emmi’s son-in-law Eugen (played by Fassbinder himself), a vile misogynist, bristles at the notion that his superior at work is Turkish. He sulks at home “sick” but clearly just lazy and drunk, demanding beers from his wife Krista (Irm Hermann), The two couple are miserable with each other, constantly insulting and clearly hate each other. Fassbinder seems to be deliberate about the juxtaposition of this scene with the previous one, which is after Ali has left Emmi’s place and the two have made love in the night. People may look down on Arabs for being “swine” and lazy, cramming in homes instead of buying their own place (according to the ladies Emmi works with), but Fassbinder forces us to see that this is untrue – just look at how miserable Eugen is and his home life with Krista. If anything, native-born Germans are the ones who are taking their good fortunate and privilege for granted.

Emmi’s daughter is in what is clearly a toxic relationship. 

Which is directly juxtaposed with the preceding scene - a relationship that people don’t approve of but is clearly more loving than the other.

But everything is deliberate with Fassbinder, we found. The compositions are steady still, often using doorways or the staircase to provide a frame within a frame or obstacles to our viewing. He moves the camera only when needed and with great effect to bring our attention to something in particular.

The striking, mysterious wide shot - from Emmi’s point of view - of the bar she’s entered, lured in by the unique Arabic-language music.

But Emmi, as the older woman, is the oddity here.

Take the opening scene. There’s beautiful, hypnotic Arabic music playing and a woman steps in from the rain into a place, drawn by the music. She’s a stranger here – the frame is still. The reverse angle, her perspective, we see everyone straight upright staring back at her. Their posture speaks volumes, as if to say something’s not right here. Then the bartender Barbara (Barbara Valentin), comes around the bar and the camera pushes in, she passes buy which creates extra dynamism in the camera move and it pushes closer to Ali, who we are introduced to here, in a way.

This frame is the end result of a very deliberate push in by Fassbinder, drawing attention to Ali.

There are numerous instances when the camera’s movement is precise, purposeful, and helps tell the story in this way. Or lack of movement. Emmi and Ali go into an Italian restaurant (“Hitler used to go here!” is an unsettling plug for this place) after they’ve been married in court, and Fassbinder keeps his distance, playing much of the scene from another room through a doorway. It’s cold, like the reception they’re getting from the waiter as strangers in this place.

The cold, distant, empty space utilized by Fassbinder in the Italian restaurant where the claim to fame - among other things - is that Hitler used to dine there.

Although it had been well documented, I was previously unaware of Fassbinder’s connection with Douglas Sirk and about how he was inspired by the German ex-pat’s work in the American film industry. Sirk, who we just recently selected two films ago (Imitation of Life, 1959, QFS No. 152) mastered melodrama, but also mastered the ability to take on socially provocative subject matter. In Imitation of Life, it’s race, just as it is in Ali: Fear East the Soul. Several people over the years have pointed out that All that Heaven Allows (1955) is a direct parallel to Ali: Fear Eats the Soul – an older woman and a younger man fall in love – but Fassbinder supercharges it with race. But he does it in a way that’s even more evolved than Sirk, in my opinion.

Rock Hudson and Jane Wyman play an older woman and younger man couple in Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows (1955) - an inspiration to Fassbinder

Where Sirk does an admirable job tackling social touchpoints, specifically race in Imitation of Life in during a time where racial discrimination was high in America – Jim Crow laws still very much in effect throughout the South – Fassbinder inflects his story with another angle. Both characters are lonely. We can see the stress it inflicts on Ali as an Arab in that it actually starts to kill him. But he strives for any sort of comfort from home – couscous, for example. (Which led to this trenchant over-simplification by one in our group: “Can you make me couscous? No? I’m leaving.”)

It’s this loneliness that bring these two together. Is that enough to sustain a relationship? No, and it frays. But they come back together and there’s a sense that they truly do love each other, even though Ali is stoic and speaks in broken sentences.

Ali confesses his wrongdoings and returns to Emmi’s accepting embrace.

If there’s a shortcoming of the film, is that Ali at times is objectified. This is possibly a comment as well by Fassbinder – he’s seen as one-dimensional if it fits someone’s needs. The woman feel his muscles, ask him for help, admire how young he is once people start to suddenly accept their relationship. Even the son comes and apologizes for breaking the television and sending a check. But even he is angling for something – he needs childcare from his mother to look after her grandkids when they need it.

Emmi’s friends marvel at Ali’s physical attributes - youth and muscles. 

So we don’t see Ali’s perspective enough, in my opinion. Had we been given a chance to see Ali speak in Arabic, for example, we wouldn’t see him as a brute as much, would see that he’s intelligent and thoughtful, perhaps, in ways that don’t come out as much when he’s struggling to speak in German. And see him comfortable in the other half of his dual identity as an Arab German.

One member in our QFS discussion group pointed out that we only see the racism and how people treat them after their married, and no other sense of their homelife. It becomes a bit too much, overly taxing, and gives us the feeling that the only thing they experience is racism. True, that’s the feeling conveyed, but if they love each other we could do with at least one or two scenes of domestic bliss. After all, we’re led to believe that they truly love each other and not that Ali is in this for some other gain or that she’s using him to stave off loneliness.

Fassbinder uses the set to block parts of his frame in deliberate ways, making our subjects harder to see. He’s a master of the use of distance to convey a feeling - in this case, loneliness and detachment.

All this aside, Fassbinder’s stripped down film is somehow captivating. It’s this bare-bones feeling, this lack of cinematic tropes – which is far different than Sirk, by the way – that gives the impression of realism. Not Realism in formal sense, but a feeling that this is a very believable, realistic story that’s happening right now as we watch it unfold. And probably that’s because it is a story happening right now, every day, in many places around the world.

Sicario (2015)

QFS No. 153 - The invitation for October 2, 2024
I’m sure many of you saw Sicario (2015) when it came out or in the ensuing nine years afterwards. I, however, am not one of them, hence this pick. It’s been on my list for a while, especially because of the filmmaker at the helm.

Denis Villeneuve is one of my favorite directors working right now. Arrival (2016) is a modern classic that got short shrift at the Academy Awards that year but I know will endure the test of time (really solid movie year with Inside Out, Mad Max: Fury Road, The Revenant, Ex Machina, Creed, The Martian, Spotlight, Brooklyn, The Big Short and the new Star Wars trilogy launched). For Villeneuve, I’ll go so far as to say his Blade Runner 2049 (2017) rivals or perhaps surpasses its legendary predecessor (come at me!). Dune (2021) is arguably his “worst” of those three it’s still a monumental and fantastic (half) a movie.*

All of these films above are likely vastly different than Sicario, which is what I’m most interested in seeing. He’s mastered atmospheric other worldly stories and landscapes, I’m very curious what he does with the Mexico-US border.

If you haven’t seen it or even if you have, please watch or rewatch join the Sicario discussion!

*I somehow haven’t seen Dune: Part Two (2024) yet which is why it’s left off this list but I’ve heard good things which is just as good as seeing it right?

Sicario (2015) Directed by Dennis Villeneuve

Reactions and Analyses:
Moments before the climactic sequence of Sicario (2015), there’s a shot in the film that evokes a specific genre of movie. It’s low light, the sun has set but there is striking reds and oranges and light in the distant horizon. The figures move in silhouette, in unison as the camera moves parallel to them, wide. The figures – some close in foreground and others in the back all wear military helmets and hold military weapons.

Classic soldiers-at-dusk shot in a war movie, which is how Sicario (2015) portrays border of Mexico and the US - as a war zone.

When I saw this shot, everything in the movie clicked for me – this is a war film. The shot is appropriately similar to imagery in Jarhead (2005), a film about the futility and Sisyphian nature of war – also photographed by the legendary Roger Deakins who is the cinematographer in Sicario as well. It’s a classic shot you’d see in a film about the conflict in Vietnam or in Middle East or Afghanistan. But here, in Sicario, the battleground is the US-Mexico border, not some far off world.

Not a shot from Sicario but from another Roger Deakins shot film, Jarhead (2005) - another film about war.

The composition here – as well as the narrative and themes that precede it – is no accident. The screenwriter Taylor Sheridan and director Denis Villeneuve have a thesis, and that thesis is that this conflict, this so-called “drug war” is indeed war. Full-blown war. Not a criminal enterprise of cartels and traffickers and something to be dealt with by the justice system. It is war. And thus, quaint rules of due process, legal procedure and the rule of law don’t apply. Because this is war, and your attempts to treat it differently are at best naïve and at worse a danger to the people of America. After all – look how brutal the faceless cartel is – they’re beheading people and hanging their bodies in major cities.

And in war, you must do what is necessary to defeat the enemy. To destroy these monsters, we need to become and embrace monsters. 

This thesis, if accurate, explains so much of the behavior of the characters in the film. Kate Mercer (Emily Blunt) is a proxy for the American people. An FBI agent, but she’s in the dark just as we are for most of the film, only given a little bit to know when it’s right. But the men around her – they know what’s best. Rest your pretty head, you don’t know what it really takes to get the job done, or so the message comes across in Sicario. It takes men willing to do ruthless things, bend the rules, break laws. That’s what it takes.

Kate Mercer (Emily Blunt) stands in as a proxy of the ordinary American - kept in the dark, just as she is as they cross the border here in Sicario.

Perhaps this is the cynical way to look at the film, but it feels very much in line with what Villeneuve and Sheridan are trying to say. In this way, it also feels deliberate that the character cast is a woman, unable to be taken seriously in a world where the only solution to our problems lies in bravado machismo and brazen law breaking in the service of “national security.” I hesitate to bring this up, but the only Black man in the film Reggie Wayne (Daniel Kaluuya) and the only woman are the only two who are portrayed as naïve wimps following “rules” like wimps do. Another way of looking at it (that one of our QFS discussion group members brought) up is that they are the only two following a moral compass. That is giving the filmmakers more credit than I’m willing to give them, but it’s valid. The other way to look at it, however, is that this Black man and White woman are diversity hires who don’t have the stomach to do what needs to be done to keep us safe. Yes, this is very much a cynical take but the evidence in the film itself suggests this interpretation.

Reggie Wayne (Daniel Kaluuya) and Kate are the only two people standing up for American ideals of justice. Is it a coincidence that they are also the only Black character and woman character in Sicario? There's a cynical way and a more gracious way to interpret this.

Sicario feels very much like a post 9/11 film. People entrusted with keeping America safe explicitly violated American moral values in order to do so. The film very much has that tone and I, for one, don’t love this aspect of the film. (I can disagree, of course, with what a film espouses while still thoroughly enjoying it – as I did with Sicario.) Matt Graver (Josh Brolin), after all, specifically does not want to select someone who went to law school, as Reggie has, because they know their at best skirting the law and at worst overtly breaking it.

Matt Barnes (Josh Brolin) has mastered the condescending look that "tough guys" give to people who want to follow quaint and outdated "rules" and "the law."

And throughout, the team condescends to Kate, keeping her in the dark and in the end it’s even clearer – they’re using her, including her loneliness as bait to lure in a corrupt cop (Jon Bernthal). Specifically, they’re using her status as an FBI agent to justify the CIA operating on American soil, which is otherwise against the law. But law doesn’t matter when you’re at war, as the filmmaker appear to contend.

Some in the group believed the filmmakers are just presenting the world as it is, showing what it’s really like. And here’s where I disagreed with them. It’s not just a simple expose, if you will; the filmmakers are expressing an opinion. For example, at the end Alejandro (Benecio del Toro), the shadowy international double agent of some type, has broken into Kate’s apartment to put a gun to her head and force her to sign a document saying that everything they did followed the law. But now, after Kate has seen Alejandro kidnap and kill in Mexico with impunity – in fact, he shoots her to disable her when she tries to stop him. Now in her apartment, she reluctantly signs the document, knowing that Alejandro will go through with it.

As he leaves, he says: “You should move to a small town where the rule of law still exists. You will not survive here. You are not a wolf. And this is the land of wolves now.”

Alejandro (Benecio del Toro) says here "You are not a wolf. And this is the land of wolves now." This is as close to a thesis statement as you can find in a film. 

If this is not a thesis statement, I don’t know what is. As well, the opening title card says The word Sicario comes from the zealots of Jerusalem, killers who hunted the Romans who invaded their homeland. In Mexico, Sicario means hitman.

“Invaded” and “homeland” here are deliberate, as is the framing. The Roman Empire was the ruling governmental authority, so if you swap America for Rome and the “zealots of Jerusalem” as Mexican drug dealers and drug lords – well, that’s a pretty stark interpretation. I’m not saying it’s completely inaccurate, but when you’re using those terms it definitely justifies violence for some folks out there.

Filmmakers should have an opinion, a thesis, An opinion makes a film better, gives it direction and that driving force is felt throughout the incredible craft of the film. Villeneuve is a master of showcasing scope, perhaps one of the best filmmakers using aerial photography working today. The sequence of black SUVs crossing the border from the US at Nogales into Mexico is hypnotic, ominous and incredibly effective at building tension. Similar work can be seen throughout Villeneuve’s recent work – Dune (2021), Blade Runner 2049 (2017), and Arrival (2016) are masterclasses in portraying scale and scope.

But Sicario, with all the stunning craft work helmed by Deakins and Villeneuve, it still comes down to something personal. Alejandro breaks into Kate’s home and forces her to sign the document, he leaves her apartment. She gathers herself, grabs her service weapon, and rushes out to the balcony in the cobalt dusk.

She points it at him in the near distance and he turns to her, opening himself up to be shot. Kate, shaking with a bloody eye from the firefight in the tunnel earlier, is unsure what to do. Alejandro opens himself up to her, giving her a clear shot. This moment is one of the most powerful in the film. It’s where performance, cinematography, directing, story, and theme all intersect. What will she do? Will she act as they would, act outside the judicial system and be judge, jury and executioner? In the battle’s aftermath, she told Matt she’s going to report all of it to the higher ups – but will she? Is this better?

She relents. She can’t go through with it, and he walks away. It’s a fascinating scene and we all had varying interpretations of it. Some felt that Kate realizes that Alejandro is right, that this is the way it works. She may not like it, but his way is the right way. Others felt that perhaps she knows killing Alejandro will not end anything and she, herself, will become like him – a fate she does not prefer.

The final sequence is open to a lot of fascinating interpretation.

Kate, small and insignificant at the end.

I took it to mean – Kate is bound by law, by the moral code of America. If you believe she’s a stand in for us, the general public, she has an obligation to follow that code. After all, she tells Matt this after the raid and battle in the tunnel. And Alejandro knows that. He knows she’s powerless in this world. She’s not a wolf.

And in the end, is Alejandro right? Are the filmmakers right, is the drug war only winnable if we commit to it as if it is a war? One member of our QFS group is a political scientist shared that he has a mentor from Mexico that works on issues of jurisprudence in that country. To paraphrase, though she is committed to the rule of law and governance in Mexico, she entertained the idea that perhaps maybe in this circumstance – you indeed need wolves.

Perhaps. But isn’t it true that wolves beget more wolves? In a land of wolves, what happens to the sheep? Are they all eliminated? The filmmakers pay some service to the sheep, with the somewhat innocent Mexican police officer (Maximiliano Hernandez as Silvio) who transports smuggled drugs in his police car. We see his son, his very modest homelife, and you get the sense that he’s not a violent criminal but just someone who is getting by, bending the law to survive. Until he’s callously killed by Alejandro and left to die on a dark highway. In the film’s coda, the officer’s son plays soccer near the border when gunshots are heard in the distance and everyone stops and turns towards it, before resuming play.

One of the few acknowledgements of the real victims in Sicario, somewhat tacked, here near the border wall. 

This is the only nod, really, the filmmakers pay to what is happening to the sheep in the land of wolves. It feels tacked on, an afterthought and thin compared to the complexity of the other characters and their storylines in Sicario. This has all the hallmarks of American arrogance – the story focuses on the American side of it, told through the American’s point of view. Matt, after all, accuses American drug users of being the ones who are causing all the harm. The true victims are the people of Mexico, however, where the sheep are being slaughtered by wolves. Perhaps the last thing they need are even more wolves.

Imitation of Life (1959)

QFS No. 152 - The invitation for September 25, 2024
Director Douglas Sirk’s name is synonymous with melodrama. As someone who studies film and works in entertainment, this is one of those givens you know about even if you don’t know his movies. I first learned about Sirk when Todd Haynes’ Far From Heaven (2002) hit the theaters. When it came out, Haynes made it clear it was an homage to Douglas Sirk films, in the story, the time period, and the style of the filmmaking.

Sirk, a Danish-German filmmaker was one of the many artists forced to flee persecution from the Nazis in the 1930s, just as Fritz Lang and Billy Wilder had to in the same era. Sirk made several German films before leaving the country and even directed short films into the late 1970s long after retiring from Hollywood filmmaking. I’ve been eager to see one of the classic Sirk melodramas – All that Heaven Allows (1955), Written on the Wind (1956), and this week’s film Imitation of Life – for some time. And this one stars Lana Turner who has a fun connection to our QFS No. 150 screening of L.A. Confidential (1997).

So envelop yourself in lush color tones, sweeping music, and likely overwrought emotion for our next film, the Douglas Sirk classic Imitation of Life (1959).

Imitation of Life (1959) Directed by Douglas Sirk

Reactions and Analyses:
A girl struggling with her racial identity, trying to find acceptance and ashamed of her mother. Her mother trying to convince her that she has nothing to be ashamed of, that she is enough. Another mother striving to achieve in her profession and follow her ambitions in a competitive, ruthless industry – the cost is time with her daughter, who feels a sense of neglect when she’s older despite all the comforts the mother has provided.

These all sound like story elements for a film in 2024, and yet Imitation of Life (1959) takes on all of this. The word our QFS discussion group kept returning to was “modern.” For a film that’s 65-years old set in a very specific time, this was surprising to all of us given Douglas Sirk’s approach to filmmaking.

While the narratives within the film are modern, Imitation of Life wouldn’t be mistaken for modern in its style. The film isn’t a gritty realistic portrayal of American life in the 1950s nor does it feature Method performances that were on the rise at this time (this film is only a few years after On the Waterfront, 1954) that mirrors today’s style of acting. Instead, in Imitation of Life we quickly find the popping color of the costumes, sweeping orchestral music, theatrical lighting with brightness punctuating the darkness, Lora (Lana Turner) emerging from shadows at the exact right moment.

Embrace the wonderous theatricality of the stage lighting in Imitation of Life. 

These are all hallmarks of melodrama, production elements intended to enhance the emotions of the scenes, to create something that’s just slightly more elevated than reality. Take just the opening sequence – it’s set on a beach in New York City. It’s clearly a stage, a clever rear projection or painted backdrop juxtaposed with the live foreground of a beach.

Lora (Lana Turner) and Annie (Juanita Moore) clearly on a stage, but it's all an "imitation" of life, you see.

But we forgive this detachment from realism quickly. One member of our discussion pointed out that it’s this lack of adhering to pure realism which allows us to accept the melodrama, to allow us to be swept along with it because we don’t question as much as we would something that’s more realistic. If you’re taken up by it, you can easily forgive the somewhat flimsy setup of a woman who meets a stranger at the beach and invites her and her young child to stay the night and eventually move in. For some reason, this didn’t bother me but perhaps in a film that commits to a broader cinematic realism, I would’ve been lost right away.

Breaking into song and dance on top of a moving train in Dil Se.. (1998).

This elevated reality is what serves musicals very well, and I thought immediately of Hindi cinema a.k.a. Bollywood. In Hindi films, we are keenly aware of the theatricality because, of course, people don’t break out into song in real life, strictly speaking. So the melodrama inherent in Bollywood is forgiven because the cinematic language sets up this deviation from reality.

All About My Mother (1999) is rife with melodramatic twists, but somehow is rooted in reality.

I was also reminded of another country’s master filmmaker, Spain’s Pedro Almodovar. At QFS we watched his All About My Mother (1999, QFS No. 109) and what struck me then is that the film felt like a telenovela with its plot twists and turns. Almodovar’s mastery of balancing melodrama and realism is one of a kind and is perhaps the only filmmaker I know who’s been able to pull off authentic emotion with twisting and turning plots that defy reality.

Somewhere in the spectrum between Bollywood and Almodovar lies Douglas Sirk. More than half a century ago, Sirk uses melodrama in Imitation of Life to probe the problematic racial dynamics in his adopted country, the United States. Originally from Germany, the filmmaker fled Nazi persecution and made a career in the American movie industry. I’ve noticed that often it takes a foreign-born director to keenly see some of the divisions of America and render them into art on the screen. In college, I had a terrific course that explored America through the lens of foreign-born directors. Though Sirk wasn’t in the course, he very well could have been where he would’ve joined the ranks of Milos Forman (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, 1975, QFS No. 75), fellow German émigré Fritz Lang (Fury, 1936, QFS No. 37), and Wim Wenders (Paris, Texas, 1984), among others.

One of the commonalities those directors displayed was a foreigner’s ability to both admire their new homeland and also criticize it, warts and all. Which is also a way of expressing love of their adopted country. In Imitation of Life, Sirk sees that a white person can flourish, reach their heights, seemingly on their own. But in the background, working in the kitchen unseen, is their black counterpart toiling away. Lora ascends to the top of her career while Annie (Juanita Moore) supports her faithfully.

Lora has a chance to flourish while Annie supports her in the background, out of focus.

But at what cost? Annie is unable to convince her daughter Sarah Jane (Susan Kohner) – a girl who can pass as white – that being black is nothing to be ashamed of. Perhaps the love and care she spent supporting Lora and her daughter Susie (Sandra Dee) is the cost for Annie. While Sarah Jane’s struggles are deep, existential, and wrenching, Susie’s amount to feeling as if her mother wasn’t around to spend time with her. Not to trivialize Susie’s angst, but Sirk feels like he’s making a sly commentary here. A black girl’s struggle in America is very deep and profound while a rich white girl can have the luxury of not worrying about her personal identity but instead can worry about the usual things children worry about.

Annie spends the entire film attempting to help Sarah Jane (Susan Kohner) that she shouldn't be ashamed of the reality of who she is.

Susie (Sandra Dee) feel neglected, which is valid but perhaps less existential than Sarah Jane's struggle.

What struck me throughout the film is that the characters don’t live in a time where they have language to address or understand race relations. Lora doesn’t offer meaningful support other than to suggest that things will get better. And Annie is unable to talk to her daughter about race in a nuanced or meaningful way. Of course, they are living in a time where divisions are very real between white and black families – the decision that struck down legal segregation, Brown v. The Board of Education, only happened five years before Imitation of Life was released – so it’s understandable that they don’t know how to talk about race in a constructive way. We’re still struggling with it now, but we have more language and tools. What I’m saying is: everyone in this movie would’ve benefitted from being in therapy.

For me, the entire film is worth it for this one particular payoff: the scene where Annie in essence says goodbye to Sarah Jane. Annie has discovered that Sarah Jane has moved across the country to Hollywood with a new name, working in a chorus line as an object of desire (or as lascivious a job as could be permitted to portray in 1959). Annie goes to her and is done fighting with her daughter, but instead only wants to hold her. As a final act of motherly love, she does what Sarah Jane asks – to leave her alone and pretend they aren’t related.

This extraordinary scene also is worth watching Imitation of Life. The performance, the writing, the staging - superior work by Douglas Sirk.

Annie, telling Sarah Jane that she will leave her alone but is there if she needs her.

Annie, relentlessly mothering, gives Sarah Jane her final act of love - the freedom Sarah Jane thinks she wants. 

The hold each other and both cry in each other’s arms. The roommate enters and as Annie leaves, she tells the roommate she used to raise “Miss Linda” – Sarah Jane’s new name, tacitly acknowledging her daughter is someone else now. After Sarah Jane closes the door, she cries sans says she was raised by a “mammie” “all my life.”

It’s devastating, and I did my best to keep from crying as much as they did. Throughout the film, Annie attempts to relentlessly be a mother. And in the end, what’s the most motherly thing she could do? Set her daughter free and assure her she could come back any time and her mother would be there to love her.

Sarah Jane collapses against the door in a way that I was prepared to do by the end of this scene. 

The melodrama builds and crescendos to this and somehow, even though the film doesn’t adhere to strict realism in anyway, I felt like I knew these people, these characters. As an American-raised child immigrants, I too have felt in many ways the way Sarah Jane felt in the film. I didn’t want to be seen as different than the other kids at school and at times not want my parents around where my classmates could see them. Sarah Jane is mortified when her mother comes to school to bring her an umbrella, revealing to the others that she’s actually black. I can’t say that I had experiences exactly like that, but I completely understood the character’s struggle in those scenes in a deep way.

Douglas Sirk gives the heft of the narrative to this story of identity, of race, in a way that’s uniquely American, and puts the burden on Juanita Moore in a titanic performance as Annie. In a meta way, Annie, the black character, has the bigger character arc, the bigger struggle, than Lora, played by one of Hollywood’s biggest stars Lana Turner. But it’s Turner that gets top billing, gets the posters and the recognition and, of course, the money. This too is a commentary, though unintended, about America, about life, and about Hollywood. In that way, Imitation of Life penetrates on more layers than maybe it even intended.

How do you tell a child that she was born to be hurt? Juanita Moore shoulders the emotional load in Imitation of Life. 

Halfway through the film, Annie deeply knows Sarah Jane’s struggle and says to Lora, “How do you tell a child that she was born to be hurt?” To utter this in a mainstream film in 1959 is no small feat. The fact that it’s probably still relevant is the real tragedy of Imitation of Life. Yet another aspect of what a modern 21st Century film this 1959 melodrama truly is.

Godzilla Minus One (2023)

QFS No. 151 - The invitation for September 4, 2024
Godzilla Minus One (2023) is the first kaiju film selected by Quarantine Film Society. Kaiju, of course, is the film subgenre in which giant monsters destroy things. I think it’s amazing that what seems like a very limited type of film has a named subgenre, but this is where I’m wrong. There are tons of these movies and television shows varying in quality in the 70 years since Godzilla (1954) came out from Japan. I’m certainly no expert on these films, but I do enjoy a good giant animal picture now and again.

Godzilla Minus One created quite a buzz last year and I really wanted to see it. I’ve heard good things about it from a filmmaking and storytelling perspective, but also in the visual and special effects. If I’m not mistaken, they had a very slim VFX team compared to say big studio movies. And yet, they took home the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects, beating out a Marvel film, a Mission: Impossible film and Ridley Scott who is no stranger to Visual Effects. The first foreign language film to win the Visual Effects Oscar, which is cool.

Speaking of, this will be our fifth selection from Japan but our first Japanese film from this century. So curl with Godzilla Minus One and watch a giant lizard break things! (#spoiler) Join us next week for Godzilla Minus One.

Godzilla Minus One (2023) Directed by Takashi Yamazaki

Reactions and Analyses:
Is Godzilla’s destruction purposeful? Does he (it, she, they) know what he’s destroying? Is it intentional? Or is the destruction indiscriminate?

That was one of my main questions for the QFS discussion group and several were curious about this as well. And perhaps, for a mega-superfan of kaiju films, this is a question that’s very basic. But for someone like myself, it seemed an important question.

Perhaps the reason why I’m curious about this is that I’m not sure how to feel towards Godzilla. In some sense, if the destruction is unintentional, there’s a bit of sympathy one can feel towards the creature. It doesn’t know what it’s doing, it’s primal and a production of human tampering with nature – then it’s almost justified in its actions. A force of nature. After all, you can’t be angry with the actions of a hurricane or a volcano because it’s something unlocked by the Earth.

Is Godzilla an avenging god, a force of nature, or something of both in Godzilla Minus One (2023)?

But if Godzilla is an avenging god, wreaking havoc on a populace already suffering from the toll of devastating global war – then, it gets a little complicated. Godzilla, portrayed for seventy years on the big and small screens, appears in Godzilla Minus One as being fueled - or at least “embiggened” - by human’s insatiable need for bigger, larger and more destructive weapons. A scene, almost a cutaway scene, depicts the US dropping experimental nuclear bombs on the Bikini Atoll – with an insert shot of an underwater monstrous eye opening and powering up. The implication is this is what humans hath wrought. Nuclear war and self-annihilation.

Or as metaphor, a giant uncontrollable lizard getting larger and larger as it destroys more and more. A stand-in for the arms race writ large.

All Godzilla films are metaphoric and perhaps cautionary, from the original 1954 version to this one in 2023, borne of post-war Japan where nuclear annihilation was not theoretical but actual. It’s astonishing to realize that only nine short years after World War II and on the heels of the nuclear bombs wiping out Nagasaki and Hiroshima, that Toho Studios would make a film about a creature that was destroying Japanese cities. I even had this feeling while watching the 2023 iteration, that these poor people had suffered enough from fire bombings and nuclear weapons – isn’t it a bit too much to also subject them to a giant destructive lizard?

Haven't the Japanese people gone through enough in World War II? And now a giant lizard monster?!

Perhaps this is where cultural tastes and takes diverge between the US and Japan, which came up in our conversation. It’s easy to imagine that if the roles were reversed, that US filmmakers would very much make a film of giant monsters attacking Japan or Germany – their enemies in that war – as opposed to attaching its own populace on the shores of the Untied States . We found ourselves pondering what would’ve happened if Japanese filmmakers did indeed decide to make a 1954 film of Godzilla attacking the US, a revenge fantasy film in the way that would make the likes of a young Quentin Tarantino proud. Retribution through art is something we’ve seen before, but the Japanese have resisted that and instead turn inward with the Godzilla films.

And especially in Godzilla Minus One. Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki) was a naval flyer in the war but when we discover him, he’s abandoned his duty as a kamikaze pilot honor bound to die in a suicide attack against the Allies. Although this is shameful, culturally, in 2024 looking back the filmmakers turn this around and seem to say – yes, that was your duty then, but now we need to live and build our nation. And by ejecting just before he flies into Godzilla’s mouth with his bomb-laden plane, Shikishima saves the day, lives honorably, and lives on – even rewarded by discovering that Noriko (Minami Hamabe) is still alive. So living is worth living for, you see.

Don't do it!

Don't do it!!!

Ohhhhh....

The nationalistic pride in Godzilla Minus One evoked another recent film we’ve screened from another part of Asia - RRR (2022, QFS No. 86). In S.S. Rajamouli’s revisionist period piece, India is a place that had physical might and used violence and warfare to overthrow British rulers. Never mind the fact that this never happened and India is well known for its nonviolent moral and intellectual revolution that truly changed the world (as portrayed in Gandhi, 1982, QFS No. 100) – the India of 2022 is trying to assert a new world dominance. One that shows its military, technological and physical might as opposed to its intellectual and moral one from the past. RRR is a virulently nationalistic work of fiction that seeks to scrub that past and recast India as a mighty nation, ready to do battle. I, for one, found this appalling and will discuss further in the RRR QFS essay that remains TBW.

The violent conclusion of RRR (2022) reimagines Indian independence from the British through force and might. 

As seen here in blood splattered across an icon of the British crown.

And yet, there’s a parallel we found in our discussion with Godzilla Minus One. Japan was demilitarized after World War II and there was a sentiment that they might prefer to live that way, to build their society and give up their imperialistic past. In 2024, the world is a vastly different place. With a resurgent and belligerent China at their doorstep, is Godzilla Minus One recasting Japan’s past, to show that they have might in numbers and a national pride? And that this means their love of the Japanese country fuels their current military force for good and will keep the Chinese at bay? The former soldiers in Godzilla Minus One fight not because it’s their duty as soldiers, but it is their collective duty to build a nation of people, assembling a “civilian” navy to fight an enemy at their shores. One can interpret that this is all proxy for regional domination and moral superiority over a foe, even if it’s not overt. (Though, to me and others in the group who brought this up, it feels overt.)

The civilian feel comes together in Godzilla Minus One and can defeat monsters (which might include China?)

Saluting Godzilla's demise, having done their patriotic duty to save Japan. 

But while the film does have this national pride coursing through, there is ample criticism of the Japanese government. The former admiral Kenji Noda (Hidetaka Yoshioka) says:

Come to think of it this country has treated life far too cheaply. Poorly armored tanks. Poor supply chains resulting in half of all deaths from starvation and disease. Fighter planes built without ejection seats and finally, kamikaze and suicide attacks. That's why this time I'd take pride in a citizen led effort that sacrifices no lives at all! This next battle is not one waged to the death, but a battle to live for the future.

There you see this pride, but also damnation of nation’s leadership. It’s a fine line for the filmmakers to walk and they do so pretty well. Which got us to thinking – this is about as good as you can make this type of film, isn’t? The filmmakers balance politics, human drama, and action in a film about a giant lizard destroying everything in its path. There’s ample metaphor, there are emotional stakes – it all comes together in an science fiction film.

"Is that ... Godzilla?" is unintentionally hilarious. 

I does feel, however, of the scant Japanese Godzilla films I’ve seen, this one has taken some of the worst of American action film schlock and absorbed it, much the way Godzilla absorbs ammunition rounds. There’s the extremely cheesy lines, the overwrought emotions and overly convenient storytelling. Unfortunately, Noriko is saddled with several of these – Is your war finally over? As her first line to Shikishima when they reunite at the end feels straight out of the worst Jerry Bruckheimer/Michael Bay collaboration. Is that … Godzilla? Is one of the more useless expressions of dialogue you’ll find in a movie but it did make me laugh out loud (unintended comedy laughter is still laughter I guess). And of course, Noriko somehow survives Godzilla’s energy breath blast giving us the happy American-style (or Bollywood-style) ending we’ve come to expect with a massive film like this. Not to mention the somewhat predictable climax, where Shikishima ejects and survives as well.

Many of the action scenes are excellent, but the flying sequences featuring Shikishima zooming past Godzilla are exhilarating. 

Are these flaws or features? Any way you slice it, to make a film about an indiscriminate killing force that destroys on a large scale, is no small feat (pun intend… small feet… never mind). But to make it memorable, you have to make it about people, not about the lizard. And even if their emotions are not totally believable, they sure are more believable than a giant monster reigning terror across a nation. The bringing together of both make for what might just be the apex in kaiju – specifically Godzilla – movie making.  

Godzilla gonna Godzilla. 

L.A. Confidential (1997)

QFS No. 150 - The invitation for August 28, 2024
I’m fairly certain that everyone or nearly everyone reading this has seen L.A. Confidential, one of the great Los Angeles movies and truly a modern classic in so many ways. You’ve got a young Russell Crowe, not yet a household name, the steely-eyed Guy Pearce, Kim Basinger with probably her best performance, director Curtis Hanson’s exacting detail of the period and his fantastic adaptation of James Ellory’s period novel. And, well, okay, it does have Kevin Spacey but we don’t have to talk about that right now.

Aside from him, I’m partial to the overall excellence in the cast, which was put together by casting director Mali Finn. Mali cast L.A. Confidential and Titanic (1997), both of which came out the same year. Three years later, I moved to Los Angeles and was hired by Mali to be her assistant – my first job in the industry. To my additional great fortune, in the spring of 2001 we started work casting Curtis Hanson’s follow-up to L.A. Confidential, the Eminem-starred 8 Mile (2002). A cinephile who was closely involved with the UCLA Film & Television Archives, Curtis told us early on that he was approaching 8 Mile as a modern Rebel Without a Cause (1955) and hosted a screening of Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep (1978) for insight into the tone. What I’m saying is that Curtis would’ve enjoyed being a part of QFS or at least the idea of it.

Curtis, James Cameron, Joel Schumacher, Sharat Raju* and dozens of other directors loved having Mali as their casting director and she was known as a director’s casting director. She cast “real” seeming people and didn’t fall for beautiful faces, something I came to appreciate in my time working in her office alongside her. If you look at the films she worked on – and there were a lot of them – you would likely see a commonality in the actors who make up the fringes of the supporting cast. The ensemble for lack of a better term. I would argue (I mean, I have argued this point) that Titanic’s supporting cast are just as compelling as the main stars and possibly more so. That’s Mali’s fingerprints on Titanic, and you’ll be able to see that care in populating a cinematic world in this week’s selection as well.

L.A. Confidential is also part of what is truly an incredible film year, 1997. Check it out –  joining this week’s film and Titanic, at the Academy Awards alone you’ve got As Good as it Gets, Good Will Hunting, Life is Beautiful and The Fully Monty hitting the big categories. Then throw in Boogie Nights, Contact, Princess Mononoke, the first Austin Powers, Jackie Brown, Men in Black, Liar Liar, Wag the Dog, The Fifth Element, Tomorrow Never Dies (the best of the Piece Brosnan Bond films?), Con Air, The Game (underrated Fincher film), Face/Off, Gattaca, I Know What You Did Last Summer, Donnie Brasco, Gross Pointe Blanke, My Best Friend’s Wedding (solid Julia Roberts romantic comedy), Ang Lee’s The Ice Storm – I mean good lord we could have a screening series just on 1997!

I remember watching L.A. Confidential in the theater before I had ever even visited Los Angeles, and loved it. I’ve rewatched the film numerous times since moving to and living in LA and there’s an additional level of enjoyment you get from seeing sites that still exist – which can be an oddity in LA – as well as areas that feel very much a part of the city's past. Curtis Hanson, a native Angeleno who was probably a child when the events of this film take place, is meticulous in his recreation of that time. The DVD (which I still proudly have on my shelf) has terrific featurettes that are basically Curtis giving a tour of shooting locations in LA and they’re bite-sized and lovely.

Our 150th selection just felt like an appropriate time to revisit this film and its cool, stylish take on 1950s Los Angeles that has the slightest of connections to yours truly. I’m looking forward to revisiting it with you all and raising a glass for crossing a new QFS milestone. 

*Shameless, I know.

L.A. Confidential (1997) Directed by Curtis Hanson

Reactions and Analyses:
Closer to the end of L.A. Confidential (1997), Captain Dudley Smith (James Cromwell) holds a conference with his Los Angeles Police Department officers announcing the details of the death of one of their own, Detective Jack Vincennes (Kevin Spacey) and instructs everyone to find the killer at all costs. This is all misleading, of course, since it’s Dudley himself who killed Vincennes. But only we, the audience, know that.

The press conference about Jack Vincennes death from L.A. Confidential (1997).

Captain Smith (James Cromwell) asks about "Rollo Tomasi."

As the officers are filing out, he summons Detective Ed Exley (Guy Pearce) and mentions that Vincennes had a lead, and maybe it was in regards to his killer. The name, uttered in Vincennes final breath to Dudley, was “Rollo Tomasi.” The name is a fictional moniker Exley gave to the name of the man who killed his father and was never found – and only Vincennes knows about it.

It’s here that Exley now knows the truth – Dudley killed Vincennes. It’s the final piece of the puzzle that solves the Night Owl killings and answers a host of other questions for which Exley had been searching.

Ed Exley (Guy Pearce) knows. Director Curtis Hanson and cinematographer Dante Spinotti capture it in a simple, tight close up that holds long enough to register. A confluence of performance, writing, directing, and cinematography.

The shot has remained on the back of Exley’s head throughout this exchange. But once this name is mentioned, it cuts to his close up. And lingers on it – long enough for the audience to know, but we also want to know what is Exley going to do or say? It’s suspenseful, it’s tense and it’s simply a cut to a close up. Exley has to register it, decide, not betray any emotion, and come to a realization – all in a simple close up.

The next shot, it’s back to the back of his head, Dudley leaves, and Exley turns to camera, a close up again – and he’s shaken and something has changed.

It's an extraordinary moment in an extraordinary work of directing. It’s a bringing together of performance, cinematography, writing, and directing. It encapsulates what a great director does – bring together all the elements that make up a movie and synthesize them into something greater than their parts. Curtis Hanson does this masterfully throughout L.A. Confidential and re-watching the film for the seven hundredth time (give or take) gave us the opportunity to revel in the true excellence of his craft.

Perhaps it’s easy to forget that Guy Pearce and Russell Crowe (as Bud White) were total newcomers to American audiences in 1997. And take Crowe’s Bud White in Hanson’s hands as both director and writer. When I first saw the film in the theater 27 years ago, I remember loathing Bud White but also fearing him, which I think is the point. But this time, I picked up on something that might seem obvious but was new to me.

All the characters in the film are hiding something or angling for something. Dudley clearly is hiding his corruption. Exley is a climber – on the surface he’s a good cop, and truly he is. But he’s playing the angles, understanding how to get higher in the ranks. Lynn Bracken (Kim Basinger) is literally appearing to be Veronica Lake but is actually a girl from Bisbee, Arizona – and cheats on White with Exley to get Exley in trouble or killed. Pierce Patchett (David Strathairn) appears to be a businessman but he’s caught up in prostitution and drugs. The D.A. (Ron Rifkin) is a closeted homosexual. Vincennes appears slick but loathes what he does. And so on.

Bud White (Russell Crowe) is the only character not playing an angle in L.A. Confidential.

But the only one who is “pure,” who we can say is what you see is what you get – that’s Bud White. In a way, he’s the least corruptible. That’s not saying he’s a clean cop. On the contrary, he’s part of Dudley’s squad that beats up rival gangsters off the records. But he’s true to himself, the boy who watched his father beat his mother to death and has the physical and mental scars to prove it.

If there’s a thesis in L.A. Confidential it’s this – to have people protect us from the evils in the world, you can’t do it with just brawn and you can’t do it with just brains. You need both. So while Bud White is the brawn, he uses his brain to connect the dots and discover that his former partner Dick Stensland (Graham Beckel) lied to him and was part of a heroin racket.

And Exley, in what is probably the best glasses-wearing police officer portrayal in history, goes from what we believe is bookish, shrewd, and prestige-chasing to someone willing to plant evidence and shoot someone a fleeing suspect in the back. The very things he tells his superior, Dudley, he’s not going to do because that’s not the right way. And it’s Dudley who he shoots from behind after all is said and done.

Moments before does what Dudley asked Exley asked him he's capable of doing - shoot a suspect in the back to prevent him from causing more harm. 

This convergence of brain (Exley) and brawn (White), and how each transform into the other, culminates in the scene where the two nearly kill each other. Exley barges into Lynn’s home and they then have sex – but it’s all a setup with Sid Hutchins (Danny DeVito) taking blackmail photos “accidentally” given to White by Dudley so White then is driven to kill Exley. And he very nearly does until Exley reveals that he knows Dudley killed Vincennes. White, still enraged, ultimately burns off and does not go through with destroying Exley.

White doesn't kill Exley. This is the moment, the fulcrum of the film. It's this moment when he uses his mind and not his muscles that allows them both to team up and find the real villain. 

It's this turn, this moment where brawn gives way to brains, this moment that saves both of them and sets them on a path to ending Dudley’s secret reign of terror. Brain without brawn is feckless and powerless. Brawn without brains is primitive and intractable. Both are needed to balance each other, a yin and yang.

L.A. Confidential succeeds in being rooted in reality, and while it starts with the cast – every single one of them is a full three-dimensional human, fleshed out and realistic – the world created by Hanson makes the film feel as if it was something that actually happened in Los Angeles in 1953. Of course, though some storylines are based on a handful of real stories in James Ellory’s original novel, Hanson’s visually recreates 1950s Los Angeles with exacting detail. But he doesn’t do it for show or make a big deal of it – it’s all in the background. The pushing back of the details gives the film a verisimilitude that brings it to life.

There’s one example in particular that is detailed in a terrific museum piece at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles. Production designer Jeannine Oppewall and set decorator Jay Hart talk about Lynn Brackett’s home – it’s filled with flowing, silky, “lounge-y” fabrics in a home with archways and layers. But in the back of the home sits Lynn’s bedroom, hidden away and small. It’s simple and the camera pans over to a little pillow that’s clearly homemade of Arizona, with the town of Bisbee highlighted.

The Arizona pillow, a symbol of the real Lynn Bracken, deep in the recesses of her home.

That’s the real Lynn Bracken – a girl from Bisbee with layers of glamour on the surface, hiding the true person inside. It’s a symbol of the film, the story, and frankly of Los Angeles. And it provides an example of the attention to details that are in the background and though you might not notice them, they do their work on you, the viewer, to root it in a reality. And with that in the background, the performers have a chance to in the foreground of the film.

The details in Lynn Bracken's home and throughout L.A. Confidential are in the background and service to the story.

This is also another example of what it means to be a director, to pull in those elements and create a world what is this richly layered and detailed.

This use of foreground and background, enhanced by the strong horizontals and angles of the Pierce Patchett's (David Strathairn) Neutra home, is the masterwork of filmmaking - the combination of production design, cinematography and directing. And one of the many great character introductions Curtis Hanson pulls off throughout.

One of those elements that routinely shines is Dante Spinotti’s immaculate cinematography. In particular, how he and Hanson use close ups in the film. As described above, closeups are used as punctuation – of Ed Exley realizing that Dudley is Vincennes’ killer. But one close up in particular stands out and it’s the moment that White discovers Lynn at the liquor store. At first he can’t see her face – she’s in a black clock with white trim. But then, she turns to him – to us, the camera – into a stunning close up, Kim Basinger/Veronica Lake/Lynn Bracken in all her glamorous beauty.

Dante Spinotti and Curtis Hanson's stunning close up of Lynn Bracken as she snaps her head towards camera and Bud White - their fates eventually will intertwine. A classic frame evocative of early Hollywood glamour headshots.

It’s evocative of the glamour headshots of the era, of the stunning shallow focus, frame-filling shots of the time. And it’s a powerful character introduction. This is a person of consequence to the story. Throughout the film, Spinotti and Hanson push the limits of the close up, cutting off top of heads in the 2.35 aspect ratio, to bring us very close to the subject. For a film with so many main characters, it’s never confusing whose perspective we’re in at any given time. We always know whose eyes we’re seeing a scene through. Whether it’s looking up to see a Santa Claus decoration on a roof that’s about to come down or looking at two suspects in an interrogation room, we always know whose story we’re following and when – that’s the work of a director, a cinematographer, and an editor telling the story visually.

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L.A. Confidential is one of those rare films in which every single person involved in it is at the top of their game. Everyone is hitting home runs. It’s a powerhouse of collaboration which means it’s a powerhouse of directing. A textbook film to watch if you’re interested in production design, period costumes and props, locations, history, cinematography, editing, music, performance, writing – therefore a textbook of filmmaking. Let’s hope we’re still studying now and for years to come.

Scarface (1932)

QFS No. 149 - The invitation for August 21, 2024
In 1931 and 1932, there were a few gangster pictures that helped established the genre – Little Cesar* (1931), The Public Enemy (1931) and this week’s selection Scarface. Any of those would’ve been fun to watch, especially with stars like Edward G Robinson and James Cagney (who you may remember as being wonderfully bonkers in White Heat, 1949, QFS No. 74). So perhaps we’ll visit one of these other Pre-Code gangster films in the future.

“Pre-Code” of course refers to a film that predates the Production Code Administration censorship era that befell Hollywood starting in 1934. In 1932, the year Scarface was released, the film industry’s distribution oversight commission – called the Hays Code – had no real authority to mandate the removal of controversial elements from a film. Their notes were suggestions which were adhered to or not adhered to depending on the filmmaker’s or the studio executive’s muscle. This self-policing model gave rise to conservative vanguards of moral decency who threatened widespread boycotts of films with content they deemed immoral. The PCA was established and its stamp of approval began in 1934 and aimed to quell the discontent from these voices. That system continued for the next 36 years, finally replaced by a rating system that’s a precursor to our letter-based one we use today.

So there was a window of time from about 1922-1934 where many films pushed the boundaries of content, tone, style, and story. Scarface fell in that realm and faced real opposition with heavy censorship efforts from the studio. The PCA code intended to make sure that films didn’t glorify gangsters and other evil-doers, and instead they should receive comeuppance. Crime doesn’t pay, is the acceptable moral takeaway. To be somewhat fair to these censors, the 1930s was still rife with mafia-driven crime in major cities. Al Capone – upon whom Scarface is apparently based – was still very much alive and influential in Chicago in the ’30s.

Speaking of Capone – though loosely based on a novel, the Scarface script is co-credited to the legendary Ben Hecht who is almost certainly the most prolific writer in movie history (though he was one of five writers on this script – five!). Hecht apparently had once met Capone and based the main character on him, so much so that Capone had two men “visit” Hecht in Hollywood to make sure it wasn’t … too much based on Capone. (We’ve watched a Hecht penned film before, Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpiece Notorious (1946, QFS No. 117)

All of this is compelling enough to want to see Scarface, and that’s before mentioning that it was produced by the most famous wealthy future recluse of all time, Howard Hughes. With Hawks at the helm, you’ve got a double Howard film. The Full Howard, as it’s known by no one.

Watch the 1932 Scarface (not the 1983 one!) and let’s discuss!

*Not to be confused with the pizza, though both are made out of celluloid (ZING!).

Scarface (1932) Directed by Howard Hawks

Reactions and Analyses:
“The World Is Yours.” This is the advertisement Tony Camonte (Paul Muni) – the titular “Scarface” – sees when he looks out the window of his gaudy new apartment, financed from moving up in the ranks as the strongman to Johnny Lovo (Osgood Perkins). There it is, a literal big, bright, shining sign, illuminating his vision forward.

If there’s a thesis statement for Scarface (1932, and by extension the 1983 version), it would be that exact statement. The ambition of a man low on the totem pole, seeking more power, more money, more women, more of whatever it is he desires. You can take it – after all, it’s yours. “Do it first, do it fast, and keep doing it,” Tony says early on in the film.  

The World Is Yours according to this advertisement outside of Tony Camonte's window in Scarface (1932).

And throughout, Tony appears to be angling, smiling, grifting, posturing. His charm and charisma are obvious and as officially the muscle of Lovo’s operation, it’s clear that this is a problematic staff hire Lovo has made. Tony’s proving that he’s not really someone who follows orders and we see the two different dynamics of gangsters – a dynamic that plays out in gangster films for decades to come. The shrewd, calculating and often cautious puppet-master/chess player on the one hand and the violent, unpredictable, hot-headed reactionary who’s not afraid to dive headlong into battle. This is the Michael Corleone/Sonny Corleone dichotomy that’s at center of The Godfather more than 40 years later, for example.

Tony Camonte (Paul Muni) is charismatic, but it's clear that Johnny Lovo's hiring of a maniac like Tony is short-sighted at best.

Scarface, along with the other Pre-Code gangster classics Public Enemy (1931) and Little Cesar (1931), all released within a few years of each other, form an origin triumvirate of the gangster genre that continues all the way through today. Throughout the film there are familiar faces, ideas and themes – but in 1930s, they were likely novel. You’ve got the second-in-command Rinaldo (George Raft) with his coin-flip as a signature tic, the woman who is attracted to criminals and bad boys, the clownish sidekick Angelo (Vince Barnett), the attempt to go out in a blaze of glory, the relentless gunfire, the psychopathic and heartless killer, and so on. It’s actually sort of thrilling to watch this genre in its infancy.

About the psychopathic and heartless killers, Hawks and screenwriter Ben Hecht likely had portray antihero Tony as someone who would inevitably have no chance of ending up on top. This is a contrast of course to Michael in The Godfather who does succeed by vanquishing his foes, killing his sister’s traitorous husband, consolidating his power and earning the respect of his underlings. The Pre-Code censors in 1932, however, would not permit a positive portrayal of a ruthless gangster. He has to have his comeuppance, and Hawks concedes to the censors and places a plea for help in the opening title card:

This picture is an indictment of gang rule in America and of the callous indifference of the government to this constantly increasing menace to our safety and our liberty. Every incident in this picture is the reproduction of an actual occurrence, and the purpose of this picture is to demand of the government: 'What are you going to do about it?' The government is your government. What are YOU going to do about it?

There’s also this aspect of Tony that he isn’t just cruel, but that he must also have a psychosis in the way that James Cagney has in White Heat (1949, QFS No. 74). At the time, Hawks likely couldn’t portray Tony as simply an ambitious Shakespearean tragic figure, about one man’s pursuit of power because that would in a way be an indictment about the American dream. Fifty years later, Brian DePalma and Oliver Stone have nothing in their way to prevent them from reimagining this tale as a saga of an immigrant coming up from nothing and earning his place in a twisted version of the American dream. The World Is Yours, after all. Both go down in a blaze of glory, but Tony Montana in 1983 goes down, guns blazing, crashing into a pool. Tony Camonte in 1932 goes down sniveling, afraid of being alone and distraught at what will happen to him. A “hero’s” end in 1983 but a coward’s end in 1932. This is perhaps the biggest distinction between the films and between the eras. We sort of admire Tony Montana, ruthless as he is; it’s hard to say that same about Tony Comonte.

In 1932, Tony Comante dies sniveling and begging. 

In 1983, Tony Montana (Al Pacino) goes out in a more "heroic" or honorable blaze of glory in Brian De Palma's Scarface.

In the 1932’s Scarface, Tony gets his hands on a new weapon of mass destruction – the Tommy Gun, ubiquitous in gangster films from here on out. And he’s filled with murderous glee, looking to turn the North Side into Swiss cheese. He lashes out furiously at his sister Cesca (Karen Morley) for dancing with men at a club and strikes her. Later, he kills his best friend Rinaldo in a rage later on when he finds Rinaldo and Cesca together not knowing that they secretly were married while Tony was away. Perhaps a way to show that this is not a man to admire is to show that all of this behavior is aberrant. In a way, it ends up being an anti-gangster film. A member of our group pointed out that for about two-thirds of the way into most gangster films, the lifestyle seems pretty great. It’s the downfall that’s brutal.

Look how similar these two images are! And the joy in Tony Comante's face.

Both the 1932 and 1983 version feature weapons capable of doing maximum harm and serve no appropriate civilian purpose - more explicitly addressed in Howard Hawks' film than in De Palma's. And here, in this photo, Tony Montana (Al Pacino) has a little friend. You must say hello to it.

Members in the discussion group pointed out one particularly unfortunate and dispiriting aspect of Scarface, but not in a story sense. Mid-way through the film, a publisher and a politician who appear in essentially only this one scene, lament that these automatic weapons gangsters are now using have no purpose except for mass murder – and that they’re powerless against them unless the government does something about it. We’re still having this problem now, in 2024! It was actually a very depressing scene – and overtly racist unfortunately, arguing that half of these Italians aren’t even American citizens and thus should be rounded up and deported. We’re still having people argue this now, in 2024! The scene goes on to have one of the characters enumerate other ills of society in a list that almost exactly mirrors the text in the Hays Code of 1932 and the Production Code in 1934 – a scene clearly meant to appease the censors. The scene also features the publisher of the Chicago paper defending their work, saying that they have to report on the news while the government takes the position that the newspapers are simply glorifies gangsters and violence. We’re still having this discussion now, in 2024!

If you're a gangster, just don't down sit near windows during a gang war. 

Gun control debates, racist tirades and media complicity aside, Scarface is surprisingly advanced for 1932 and artistic in the seasoned hands of Hawks. The car stunts are exciting and clearly dangerous. The gunfire is realistic because, well, we learned they had to use real bullets firing around the actors to create bullet hits since this film predates the use of squibs. Nearly every single picture window gets utterly demolished, which leads one to question why any gangster would openly sit near a window at all during a drug war. They are liberally spraying bullets all over the place in the film and it’s quite thrilling, I have say. Hawks is an underrated artist in the grand arc of American cinema history, but this film showcases his artistry as a director – the use of the letter “X” somewhere in the frame whenever someone is about to die might be the first ever Easter Egg in a movie? But his use of action is very effective and it’s clear that he’s mastered the use of early special effects to simulate cinematic reality – all only a handful of years after the end of the Silent Era, which is amazing.

In so many ways, gangster films have come a long way. But in a lot of aspects, the fundamentals of the genre can be traced to this film and others from this time before American censors really crack down on portrayals of criminals as heroes. One commonality is the idea that if you are ruthlessly committed to the pursuit of power, then glory awaits. The world, after all, is yours.  

End credits of the 1983 version pay homage to filmmakers of the 1932 original.

A Woman Under the Influence (1974)

QFS No. 145 - The invitation for June 19, 2024
We haven’t yet selected a John Cassavetes film here at Quarantine Film Society and this shortcoming has sent shockwaves throughout the organization.* What’s just as shocking is that I, your humble narrator, have never seen a Cassavetes film. In 2013, The New Yorker, wrote that Cassavetes “may be the most influential American director of the last half century.” The last half century, mind you, included the likes of Steven Spielberg, Stanley Kubrick, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese and a lot more! So this is a pretty bold claim. And even more shameful I haven’t seen a Cassavetes film yet.

Oh sure, I’ve seen Mr. Cassavetes as an actor in such films as Rosemary’s Baby (1968). And his auteurist spirit lives on in John Sayles, Jim Jarmusch and especially Scorsese. So I feel as if I have witnessed his influence, if not having seen any of his actual work as a director itself.

I write all this just to make myself feel better because I know, I know, I should’ve been familiar with Cassavetes’ work from the second I stepped foot onto the American Film Institute campus lo those many years ago. His Faces (1968) and The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976) have been on my list for a while, just as this week’s selection has.

A Woman Under the Influence is considered Cassavetes’ most beloved work and stars his wife Gena Rowlands and Peter Falk (as not Columbo). I’m eager to finally watch one of the true fathers of modern cinema, especially modern cinematic performance and independent filmmaking, to fill in a gaping hole in my film knowledge. 

Join us to discuss A Woman Under the Influence! Feel free to be under the influence of something as well – it’s summer, after all!

* The QFS staffer responsible for this oversight has relinquished their proper name and has been remanded to a farm upstate.

A Woman Under the Influence (1974) Directed by John Cassavetes

Reactions and Analyses:
A Woman Under the Influence (1974) offers no answers. Is it about addition? Is it about toxic relationships? Is it about mental illness? Is it about double standards between how men are treated versus how women are treated? Is it none of these or all of these?

Director John Cassavetes does not seem to be raising awareness about addiction or mental illness or any of the other aspects listed above. If anything, A Woman Under the Influence is a portrait of a relationship between two dysfunctional people. Neither change, neither seem to learn or grow. One doesn’t know how to communicate with the other and one may not be capable of behaving in the world as a functional adult. From a storytelling perspective, the movie fights against all filmmaking convention, where scenes seem to continue on past their natural end, creating a feeling of uneasiness, that we’re watching something we shouldn’t watch but we are not released from having to watch.

This scene halfway through A Woman Under the Influence (1974) continues on for a longer time than it seems like it ought. John Cassavetes gives you no way out, just as the characters are trapped in their circumstances.

In a word, the film is relentless. There’s no escape from these two and their manias. Everyone in the QFS group felt that way – the exhaustion, the cringe-inducing awkwardness, the uneasy witnessing of a dysfunctional marriage. Cassavetes traps you in this film in the way that the characters are trapped. In that way, it’s truly a remarkable achievement of filmmaking.

One of the members of the group brought up the ending, which I agree is pretty perfect and apt for the story. In fact, the entire final sequence contains the rest of the film in a nutshell. Nick (Peter Falk) has slapped Mabel (Gena Rowlands) for standing and singing on the couch, and the children are trying to protect her and refuse to stay in their rooms after he physically carries them upstairs (twice!). He has just shouted at them all, saying he’s going to murder her and their kids. It’s terribly upsetting and wrenching, especially since Mabel may just attempted suicide but instead cut her hand and now lies there bleeding slowly from the wound. Everyone, then, calms and Mabel gathers herself and tenderly puts the kids to bed.

Nick washes Mabel’s hand with equal tenderness – a man who had just hit her moments earlier and threatened mass homicide – and they’re both silent as the water cleans her hand. The Mabel talks in low tones and asks if he loves her. Nick can’t answer. He looks up at her a couple of times and back down at the bandage and the wound. And he seems like he wants to say something, but he can’t - or won’t. This is someone who has professed or at least demonstrated that he does care for her deeply. But he’s also someone who has hit her several times in the film. This moment contains so much without saying anything – which is what he does. He says nothing. It offers no answers.

Nick (Peter Falk) is unable to answer Mabel at the end when she asks him if he loves her.

But perhaps the most brilliant part of this sequence is the next and final one of A Woman Under the Influence. As the music plays, both clean up the living room and put everything back the way it was. Not fixing anything, just rearranging as if it’s all back to normal. This also speaks volumes – nothing has changed. They’re going to continue on in the same manner as when they began the film and presumably the cycle will continue.

The story unspools. We’re dropped into this family and watch what they’re experiencing as if we’re a part of it but we gather information as it goes along that changes our perspective. At first, Nick seems to tell co-workers that his wife is loving and takes care of all the household needs. He tries to get his fellow workers the night off but instead they end up having to fix a water main and he can’t spend the night with Mabel. She, for her part, has given the kids to her mother so Mabel and Nick can have a night together.

So for the first 10 minutes or so of the film, it feels like a happy, healthy family with support and a couple who are hoping to spend more time together. But then Mabel drinks heavily, goes to the bar on her own, picks up a man, brings him home, and (we think) they sleep together. So at first it appears that Mabel has a drinking problem brought on by loneliness because her husband works so much.

A typical setup and familiar story. But then, when Mabel wakes up and the man (Garson Cross played by George Dunn) tries to slink away in the early morning, Mabel calls him by her husband’s name and is confused where the children are. We had seen her just the afternoon before as she put the kids in her mother’s car. Her behavior is jarring, and we start to realize that Mabel’s problems aren’t only substance-related – she has some form of mental illness.

For Nick’s part, at first he seems like a garrulous but likeable middle-class working man, doing his best to live with a woman who suffers from mental illness and doesn’t know what to do. He expresses regret on the phone that he has to stay out late working, and we’re led to believe this is a reasonable caring man – until we seem him shouting at Mabel in front of his co-workers at dinner the next day. (Setting aside for a moment how unusual it is for Nick to have invited a dozen guys from work over to dinner after being gone for probably 40 hours straight and missing a night with his wife...) Throughout that dinner scene, Mabel is so hard to watch – smiling and enjoying, but clearly not all there. So then when she insists on someone dancing with her and Nick shouts in front of everyone, we feel as if we’re in that dinner and can feel that awkwardness the others feel.

Nick seems caring at the beginning, and he mostly is. But also prone to unreasonable overreactions and violence. Or has he been driven to that?

Mable (Gena Rowlands) in the Top 10 most awkward dinner scenes of all time.

Because she starts caressing this pretty face and insists on dancing, leading to Nick;s first outburst.

At this point, it seems as though Mabel has a clear mental problem. But with Nick, we start to get close. Is he abusing her and that’s what’s driven her to this point? Or is it Nick driven to this rage because he’s lived with a person with mental illness and has no tools to address it in a time where these conditions were even more stigmatized than they are now 50 years later? Soon, we do see Nick strike Mabel so we know he’s capable violence as well. This unspooling continues as we learn more and more – the introduction of the doctor who knows her condition, Nick’s mother, Mabel’s mother and later her father. It’s clear this has been going on for some time and we’re just catching up.

One question that came up in the discussion is – does Nick have a mental illness as well? He seems prone to outbursts and violence, mood swings of his own. He wants to control everything, show everyone that everything is normal. Take the scene at the beach with the kids. He insists they go to the beach but then Nick chases down his daughter even though all she was trying to do was going to work on the sand castle. He preferred her be over by him on a beach towel, I guess?

Nick is also prone to extreme overreacting. He comes home when Mabel has been “babysitting” her three kids and two friends. Nick arrives and the kids are all trying on clothes in a costume party and their daughter is running around naked, as kids sometimes do. He flies off the handle, threatens to kill the other kids and their father, Harold (Mario Gallo) in what can only be described as an unnecessary escalation. 

To me, it seems clear that Nick also has a mental condition of some kind. Others weren’t so sure, they felt he was perhaps behaving in a way that someone might behave living with a loved one who has manic mood swings the way Mabel does (not that they condoned the violence of course). Whatever it is – perhaps some combination of both mental illness and driven to the edge (again, Cassavetes provides no answers) – it’s clear that the combination of Mabel and Nick is combustible. They go up in flames.

It says volumes that Nick can get off by behaving the way he does without so much as a mention of him having a problem that needs to be addressed, but it’s Mabel who gets carted off to an institution for six months. She’s subjected to shock therapy and separation from her children, but no one tells Nick that he’s got to seek counseling for rage or domestic abuse as well. He definitely definitely needs it. But it’s 1974, he’s a working class male in America, there is likely no way it’s even on his radar – or on anyone else’s in the family – that he has problems that need to be addressed.

Everything’s fine. We’re all fine here. So she’s got a couple of screws lose and is in the nuthouse, so what? (Paraphrasing Nick

Instead, he’s free to take his young kids out of school, ride in the back of a pickup truck with them, give them Hamm’s beer until they’re drunk enough to sleep as soon as they get home. It’s both a product of the 1970s and also the double standard of how the “hysterical” woman is treated versus how a man is, as reckless as his behavior may be.

Nick tries to get convince everyone, and maybe himself, that you can just force yourself to act normal and things will be normal. He plans a large, ill-conceived party for Mabel’s return from the institution. He invites all of the guys over for dinner after the work shift. He shouts at Mabel to just flip the switch and act normal. But that’s not how it works, and nobody in the film knows how to deal with Mabel’s problems – least of all the family doctor (Eddie Shaw). Dr Zepp communicates with Mabel in a way that we would, in 2024, recognize as profoundly unhelpful. Telling a manic mental health patient to simply “calm down” or the like is definitely not at all useful in any way.

Great sequence that is pure 1970s - a smoking Peter Falk riding in the back of a pickup with children who’ve been taking big swigs of Hamm’s beer.

A Woman Under the Influence is not easy – not to watch and also not easy to discern what meaning to derive from it, if any. And yet, it does feel like essential viewing. There are scenes where the filmmaking is top tier. When Nick’s drinking with the children (that’s so strange to write…), it’s a very tight closeup on Nick as the frame bounces violently, but solidly holding the closeup on Nick. The world speeds past him, out of focus and in a blur behind his head and the red railing of the truck. And he speaks very earnestly with the kids, apologizing for having to send their mother into the institution. The contrast between the dynamic background and what he’s saying is incredibly effective and affecting, giving the feel of that’s what his life feels like.

Mabel returns home after her time at the institution and goes to see their children.

When she sees them, it’s played in tight disorienting closeups, evoking how Mabel feels.

Also, when Mabel comes back home, she finally gets to see the children. She steps into the adjacent room and it cuts to a close up on her face. All of the shots are tight – there is no wide shot that holds the room and the family. It’s tight on her, then tight on the kids, it’s a little disorienting and you can’t quite get your bearings. This is how Mabel feels, and it’s done with the camera, without any gimmicks or special effects. Just simple shot selection, cinematography, choice of camera, and performance. Basically – directing. Cassavetes pushed his performers to the brink to expose their raw insides, photographed that rawness, and made a wrenching, relentless film.

In A Woman Under the Influence, he pushes his audience the same way, giving them no way out. Just as the characters in the film are trapped by their circumstances and each other. Is the moving saying anything about that? Is it saying nothing about that? I still don’t know for sure. So if if for nothing else, the movie is worth enduring exactly because it offers no easy answers in the way that life often does not. 

Black Girl (1966)

QFS No. 141 - The invitation for May 22, 2024
A lot of "firsts" in these next few sentences. Black Girl will be our first ever selection from Senegal, and our first selection of a film by Ousmane Sembene. Sembene is considered the “dean” or father of African cinema. Did I know this before? No. Am I ashamed of that? Yes.

Sembene’s first film, Black Girl, has been on my radar for the last few years. I first discovered it when it arrived at No. 95 on the esteemed* BFI/Sight and Sound 100 Greatest Films of All Time list. (Tied with QFS No. 9 A Man Escaped, 1956). As you remember, just a few weeks ago we watched No. 48 Wanda (1970, QFS No. 138). Recently, some of the imagery from Black Girl has piqued my interest, including clips I’ve seen in the great montage on the second floor of the Academy Museum that introduces you to the main Stories of Cinema exhibition. And from what I’ve gathered, Ousmane is finally getting some newfound recognition and his due outside of Africa and France.

For those of you keeping score at home, this is our eleventh selection from the BFI top 100 list. We previously selected No. 1 Jeanne Dielman, No. 5 In the Mood for Love (2000, QFS No. 105), No. 11 Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927, QFS No. 104), No. 30 Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019, QFS No. 114), No. 43 Stalker (1979, QFS No. 25), No. 48 Wanda, No. 60 Daughters of the Dust (1991, QFS No. 18), No. 67 The Red Shoes (1948, QFS No. 52), No. 72 L’Avventura (1960, QFS No. 116), and No. 95 A Man Escaped.

Also, at 66 minutes long, this will be the shortest Quarantine Film Society selection since our first Christmas in 2020 when we watched A Christmas Carol (1938) which clocked in at 69 minutes. So watch this week’s film because it’s only barely longer than an episode of Succession. Oh, and for all those other reasons too I guess.

*We’ve discussed at length how I both enjoy and also loathe the BFI list, so “esteemed” is of course sort of facetious. Yet, the list remains an important guidepost if for nothing else but to encounter great works of foreign cinema that I have overlooked.

Black Girl (1966) Directed by Ousmane Semebene

Reactions and Analyses:
Film as symbolism, film as metaphor. These were useful tools for me to finally get my grasp of Black Girl (1966). Recent crtitical revisiting of this early work from the Father of African Cinema Ousmane Semebene has placed this film firmly on the radar of people like us in the QFS viewing group.

But the film is challenging, despite its recent reclamation of glory. Before getting into all the production challenges – of which there were the usual kinds and the uniquely African kinds – we’ll delve into the narrative and the filmmaking craft.

From a purely story standpoint, almost all of us in the group felt the story contained numerous holes and an ending that was shocking, sudden and abrupt. And unearned. Diouana (Mbissine Therese Diop) appears in France, a new maid for a white French couple who also live in Dakar, Senegal – where they encountered and hired Diouana.

But it’s clear there was something missing in the arrangement. Diouana believes she’s arriving in the South of France to take care of children. Madam (Anne-Marie Jelinek) treats her, however, like a maid and not a nanny. Diouana develops a sense that she was duped, is trapped, and has no way out.

Diouana (Mbissine Therese Diop) didn’t sign up to be treated as a maid. But then… what did she expect? Perhaps a well delineated contracted could’ve gotten them all out of trouble in Black Girl (1966).

All of this is a perfectly fine set up. Diouana believed she was going to see France but instead sees darkness out the windows at night and has no encounter with the famous nightlife of the area near Cannes where she lives. France lacks the human vitality of Dakar. In France, it seems, people are stuck in their homes instead of out in the world together.

The strange thing, however, is that Diouana feels shocked that she has to do work at all. And here is where a variety of narrative questions being. Why is she surprised? Was she misled? Is she just young and naïve? Also, when she is actually paid, she says “I didn’t come here for the apron or the money?” But … didn’t she? Surely she didn’t think she was on vacation – she knew she was there for work?

This is not in any way meant to excuse the behavior of her employees. Madam is definitely demanding and it’s not clear why the children are suddenly gone. And for how long? Timelines are unclear in the film throughout – has she been there for a week, a few weeks, months? It matters only because of this – we need to feel as an audience that she is truly trapped, truly abused with no way out. That’s the only way the end is earned and worthwhile.

That’s the face of an irate employer prone to violence.

The end was a major topic of discussion. No one was quite sure what to make of the suddenness of Diouana’s suicide. To me, it’s was, of course, very bleak, but why was this her only answer? The film did not present that she was so trapped and desperate that death was her only way out. She packed up her things and was, seemingly, going to leave. But in the end, she does not and finds that suicide in the tub is her only means of escape.

The narrative is imperfect. But it’s not meant to be airtight as a direct story. It’s film as metaphor, as symbol. When I thought of it that way, and excused the narrative imperfections and some of the inexperienced filmmaker craftwork, the film takes on an importance that is clear in its recent rival.

All of it is symbolism, and what it symbolizes is clear from the start. The power dynamics between the white employers, extracting labor from Africa to do their chores with no cost to themselves. The tantalizing wealth and fun of France, luring poor Senegalese to toil and not experience the joy of the French Riviera in the way the white French are able. The liberal African-loving dinner guests, exoticizing the black girl who serves them food and openly talking about her when she’s mere feet away. Not to mention the extremely creepy guy who wants to kiss a black girl for the first time, treating her as a literal sexual object for his unwanted affection. And the dehumanizing slave market-style scene when Diouana first meets Madam on the street as the group of women are attempting to find work as maids or servants. The refusal of money – a symbolic gesture standing up to the West’s money and holding on to pride, even if it didn’t make sense in the narrative or in reality. 

Dehumanizing dinner featuring a creepiest of the creepy guys who just wants to kiss a black girl.

Dehumanize human marketplace for a maid/nanny.

Even the death – she dies alone, in a tub that, when we next see it, is wiped clean as if she never existed. She’s invisible to the world, and in death forgotten. For a film rooted in a kind of realism or neorealism to some extent, it’s entirely reliant upon symbolism for one to see its value and importance.

Take, for example, the mask. Which many of us felt was the most effective metaphor employed by the filmmaker. Form my perspective, when I first saw the mask on the wall of the French home, I applied meaning to it. I immediately judged the French couple as the type who “love Africa” and culturally appropriate their art in the way that I’m familiar with people who are enchanted by the exoticism of India, but have little care about the actual people and their experience there.

The mask’s origin.

The mask on the wall in France. a gift from Diouana.

The mask “chasing” Monsiur (Robert Fontaine) away in Dakar.

But I was too hasty; the mask evolves in the story, and we discover that it was actually Diouana who gave the mask to them as a gift. It’s genuine and authentic, whether the couple see it as anything other than a fascinating artifact. Then Diouana takes it down when she’s preparing to leave, causing a stir as Madam starts to get very upset with her but Monsieur (Robert Fontaine) says it’s hers after all, she can take it. This, too, is symbolic – is it a hope that Senegal and Africa will reclaim their indigeneity? Perhaps.

Then, the mask returns to Senegal after Monsieur brings it to the mother. A boy takes it and wears it, following Monsieur as he leaves but it has the feeling of dread – almost as if the boy in the mask is chasing the white man out. Out of the village, out of Senegal, out of Africa. This is where the symbolism in Black Girl is most effective – it’s thematic, it has a narrative push, and it’s active. 

It’s amazing this movie was made at all. In Africa, specifically in Senegal but also likely true elsewhere, Africans were banned from making movies due to a Nazi Vichy government law. Illegal! Such work was left to ethnographers, treating Africans as subjects of study instead of creating narrative work about their lived experience. The ban wasn’t lifted until 1960! Only six years before Black Girl is released. One can excuse any inexperience or amateurish filmmaking – by this point the West and Asia had been making films for sixty years. Without any production infrastructure in place, Sembene had to learn on the fly and scrape together the resources to make a movie.

Diouna arriving in France, wide eyed, but it will all go awry.

When you look at it from the production standpoint and look at the film as symbolism and metaphor, Black Girl is a stunning achievement. Sembene practically had to invent African film – hence his well-deserved title of Father of African cinema. Truly an incredible accomplishment, and Black Girl should be seen with all of this context to fully understand it’s value as a film.

Hard Eight (1996)

QFS No. 140 - The invitation for May 15, 2024
This is our first QFS selection of a Paul Thomas Anderson film. You know him from all of his great work over the last 25 years but Hard Eight was his first feature. I’ve seen so many of his films but I’ve never seen the first one so this week’s selection addresses that to remedy that shortcoming.

PT Anderson made Hard Eight when he was about 26 years old. What’s almost as infuriating as that is the next year, in 1997, he makes Boogie Nights and then two years later makes Magnolia (1999). By my count, that’s three major motion pictures before he was 30 – including two of those films, Magnolia and Boogie Nights I’d put up there as downright modern auteurist classics. The amount of stars he directed before 30 years old rivals any of the great filmmakers of all time.

Now, whether you enjoy his films or not is a matter of opinion of course. Although he has been Oscar-nominated eleven (11!) times for screenplay (5), directing (3) and best picture (3), he has never won one. This is probably bad luck and circumstance, but it also could be an indication of how people have mixed opinions on PT Anderson’s work.

For example, if you’re a fan of “The Rewatchables” podcast like I am, you probably know that they consider Boogie Nights one of the greatest films ever made. Personally, I enjoyed Magnolia more than Boogie Nights as a film, but even Magnolia is ripe for criticism – frogs and Aimee Mann and whatnot – and is not universally loved. PT Anderson has the young pre-fame filmmaking pedigree of Steven Spielberg in a way, but Anderson’s films are not mainstream nor are they small artistic and abstract explorations of the soul. He’s Martin Scorsese with less benefit of the doubt from critics. Both of them make movies lauded for artistry even though the narrative may not be so clean, but it feels like Scorsese’s long life as a dedicated artist gives him leeway with the public in ways that Anderson may not.

Of course, there is no perfect film devoid of criticism. For me his greatest achievement is There Will Be Blood (2012) one of three of his films nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture along with Phantom Thread (2018) and Licorice Pizza (2022). There Will Be Blood is a singular accomplishment of filmmaking in terms of its scope and its exploration of power, ambition, religion and will. Not to mention the sheer production feat of making a period film with an oil well explosion.

Apparently, PT Anderson’s next film will be released in 2025. All I know is that it’s his first film with Leonardo DiCaprio, which feels like a good fit when making the comparison with Scorsese. Scorsese is undoubtedly one of the greatest filmmakers of the second-half of the 20th Century, and continued on into this one. When we look back in a couple of decades about the greatest filmmakers at the start of the 21st Century, it’s hard to debate PT Anderson including at or near the top of the list. I’m looking forward to finally seeing his first one.

 Join me in seeing Hard Eight (1996) and discuss with us!

Hard Eight (1996) Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson

Reactions and Analyses:
When is it too late to reveal a major story point? The end of Planet of the Apes (1968) or Citizen Kane (1941) suggest that it’s never too late. Citizen Kane of course makes sense because that’s the conclusion of the hunt, whereas the why the world exists the way it does isn’t revealed until the last image, but it’s not the central driving why of the film. In Hard Eight (1996), our QFS discussion centered around the revelation of Sydney (Philip Baker Hall) and the central why motivation – why he’s behaving like the guardian angel or savior of man-child John (John C. Reilly).

The movie begins with Sydney taking in what appears to be a perfect stranger and offering him coffee and a smoke. It feels like Sydney knows something about John but it’s very cryptic. And for some reason, John goes on a road trip with Sydney and becomes his Players Card-scheme protégé. John does not ask why Sydney is being so kind to him.

Sydney picks up a “stranger” kicking off the question why in Hard Eight (1996).

And Sydney seems like he knows about John.

This sets off a really strange road trip.

Sydney teaches John how to get a room through Players Card scheme.

And as the film continues – even bridging two years over a first-act title card that advances time – we still don’t know why Sydney keeps being John’s angel. We get some hints about Sydney not having a connection with his own children, so the story evolves to suggest that John and Clementine (Gwyneth Paltrow) are becoming surrogate children for him.

About halfway through the film, the question of why is still not resolved. It’s at this point that nearly all of the QFS members (myself included) started to sense that the film is meandering without a real sense of purpose or direction. To me and several of us, Hard Eight suffers from hiding the ball too long. We know so little about the characters except that John’s mother had died and he lost his money trying to win enough to pay for her funeral. The opening Players Card scam is so inspired and memorable, but then the film relies upon more mood and style rather than versus substance.

Even the revelation, finally when it happens, is not done visually or through some action by our main character. A supporting character, Jimmy (Samuel L Jackson), knows the truth – Sydney was a gangster who shot and killed John’s father – and he blackmails Sydney. Now that Syndey has taken John in as a son, there are personal stakes that we as an audience understand now.

Ohhhhh… that’s why. Samuel L Jackson (as “Jimmy”) tell us. But is it too late in the story to reveal that? Several us felt that yes, it’s too late.

This late revelation backloads the action and drama. Suddenly, there is plot and stakes. But since this happens late in the narrative arc, everything is crammed together as the film builds to a somewhat obvious conclusion: when you threaten a former gangster with blackmail, you’re probably going to get yourself killed.

And that’s exactly what happens. Sydney breaks into Jimmy’s home and shoots him as he’s coming home from a date. We get a simple glimpse of what a young Sydney must’ve been once like – cold, professional, efficient, and compassionate (he lets the date go home). There’s something fun about watching an aged gangster, living with regret, coming to terms with his past and trying to make up for something he’s done. But if we don’t know why he’s doing it, does that take away from our feelings about it? Everything does click a little bit better, but there are a lot of aspects of the story unsaid.

You threatened a former gangster with blackmail - what did you expect would happen?

Sydney comes to help out Clementine and John at a hotel room where a semi-conscious man lies handcuffed and beaten up. We are given bits of information as to what happened, but John and Clementine are so unreliable and distraught that it’s still unclear what happened in what is, up to this point, the only dramatic scene more than an hour into the movie. We learn that Clementine and John were married that day … and yet Clementine is still continuing work as a prostitute? Or is John (and maybe Jimmy?) acting as a pimp in an ill-conceived scheme for money?

The first really dramatic thing in Hard Eight happens about an hour into the movie and introduces a lot of questions.

Questions include - how doomed is this marriage?

Also – had Sydney been keeping tabs on John throughout his life, like Obi-wan Kenobi and Luke Skywalker? Was John’s father a gangster too, because why else would Sydney feel so distraught? And why is Sydney in Reno or does he live there because he finds John somehow who doesn’t live there but then…

I’m not bringing up these holes specifically to attack the plot or premise. It’s more a reflection of the filmmaking here. The filmmaker is relying on style and not substance for so long, so then when we get some substance but not enough of it, we start reaching for more substance, as opposed to being brought along with the narrative. There is no obligation for a movie to explain everything; obfuscation can be a useful narrative tool especially in a movie. But Hard Eight keeps the audience in the dark in a way that seems to do a disservice to the storytelling.

Speaking of the filmmaker – of course, we selected this film as it’s Paul Thomas Anderson’s first movie. The next two he makes, Boogie Nights (1997) and Magnolia (1999) cement him as the next great director of a generation. Our conversation, however, helped illustrate how that’s a contentious claim on greatness. I pointed out in the QFS discussion that Hard Eight has a tonal issue. Are some of these scenes and situations supposed to be played for laughs? Are Jon and Clementine fun doofuses in the Coen Brothers mold? It’s hard to tell, but that balance comes through a little more in Boogie Nights and Magnolia. Others in the group feel that PT Anderson never ever quite gets tone right in any of his movies, as if the director enjoys turning a “tone dial”from one end to the other without any balance. I can see that – Magnolia swings from poignant moments between Frank Mackey (Tom Cruise) and his catatonic dying father to an infamous breaking-the-fourth-wall singing sequence to Aimee Mann’s “Save Me.” It’s bold, but for me personally, PT Anderson can pull off the tonal shifts with a few missteps here and there (the end of There Will Be Blood, 2009, is an example for me where the ending has a really whimsical tune followed by a goofy final line by Daniel Day-Lewis’ Daniel Planview into the end credits).

In the end, we were interested in discerning what from this movie convinces producers, studios, and star cast to be in his next films? One benefit PT Anderson gets in the 1990s is that Hard Eight was made during the golden age of independent cinema. What probably didn’t hurt is that this is also the golden age of ample funding of music videos – a medium in which PT Anderson truly excelled. As far as films, there are a lot of 1990s studios willing to take risks on a fledgling filmmaker with a voice. For me, just seeing Hard Eight that voice isn’t totally clear – or rather, it isn’t totally clear to me what signaled to producers that this filmmaker has something unique that cannot be suppressed and has the instinct if not skill to tell a story expertly. It’s likely that the very real documented problems PT Anderson had in making Hard Eight – in which the studio attempted to recut it – prevented him from making a film fully of his desire.

Yet, his directing is confident, the command of the camera is elegant but at times more sizzle than steak. Comparing this to, say, Quentin Tarantino four years earlier in Reservoir Dogs (1992) or Wes Anderson three years earlier with Bottle Rocket (1993) with their first films, PT Anderson is harder to get a grasp of in terms of what convinced producers and studios of his greatness. One can easily see Reservoir Dogs showcases a writer-director of the highest order and Bottle Rocket suggests the quirkiness that will characterize all of Wes Anderson’s future work. But Hard Eight is harder to pin down. In three short years after Hard Eight releases, PT Anderson directs Mark Wahlberg, Julianne Moore, Burt Reynolds, Luis Guzman, Don Cheadle, William H Macy, Heather Graham, Jason Robards, and of course Tom Cruise in a role that very nearly won him what would have been his only Oscar, across two landmark films.

Opening image of Hard Eight mirrors one of the final images.

What I’m trying to get at here is – how. Very much in line with the why we tried to address in Hard Eight. Not that it wasn’t ultimately correct to support this filmmaker at this stage of his fledgling career. However it ended up happening, the American film landscape is lucky someone saw whatever greatness lay in store for PT Anderson and gave him a chance to flourish. Without it, we wouldn’t have some of the more iconic films of the last 25 years.

High and Low (1963)

QFS No. 139 - The invitation for May 8, 2024
It’s been entirely too long since we’ve selected an Akira Kurosawa film here at Quarantine Film Society. It was way back in July 2020 when we were young and terrified, but watched the masterpiece Yojimo (1961, QFS No. 13). The offending parties to this nearly four-year gap have been reassigned to new minor roles within The Society.

High and Low has been on my list for a long time and I’m a little upset I haven’t seen it yet. Several months ago, I finally saw Ikiru (1952) in the theater at the New Beverly and though it instantly became one of my favorite films, I was simultaneously upset that it had taken so long before watching such a gem.

And so, lo and behold, the New Beverly just screened High and Low to come to my rescue. I was about to select it anyway (seriously – I have notes to prove it!) and so once again the stars align. I have not seen many of Kurosawa’s non-samurai period films, so it’ll be excellent to finally get a chance to see this one.

But also, excellent to watch at home! Then join the discussion of High and Low below if you can!

High and Low (1963) Directed by Akira Kurosawa.

Reactions and Analyses:
High and Low (1960) has two halves, almost two separate movies. This has long been discussed over the years and by our QFS discussion tackled this as well. But one of our members, a cinematographer, picked up on something I hadn’t noticed – a slight but deliberate change in camera use between the halves.

The first half deals with the kidnapping of Shinichi (Masahiko Shimazu), mistaken for the wealthy child of Kingo Gondo (Toshiro Mifune), and Gondo’s decision whether or not to pay a huge sum to this mysterious kidnapper. Shinichi is Aoki’s son, played with excruciating grief and torment by Yutaka Sada. This half of the film takes place all in Gondo’s home, with everyone awaiting the kidnapper’s next call and us as the audience, trying to determine what Gondo will decide.

The first half of High and Low (1963) showcases director Akira Kurosawa’s mastery of staging - wide frames and compositions with deliberate camera moves when necessary, and takes place entirely in the Gondos’ home. Body language becomes an important aspect of the storytelling when using wide frames.

The camerawork in the first half is composed as if on a stage, with actors blocked in ways where sometimes someone’s back is to us, but their body language speaks volumes. The camera moves, when they happen, are also steady, composed, operated on a gear head for smooth and precise movements. 

The second half – the camera is freed. We’re out in the world, on the case, trying to find the kidnapper and also Gondo’s money. It’s likely Kurosawa had seen many of the films of the burgeoning French New Wave movement where the camera is liberated from the tripod and thrust into the dirty, complex world. Kurosawa’s version is still precise and deliberate, but there’s a greater urgency and rapid movement that evokes a handheld style, if not deliberately handheld.

Kurosawa throws the camera into the world as the hunt for the kidnappers unfolds. The camera, too, is free - some handheld, moving camera that hand off from one detective to another in pursuit.

High and Low becomes an elevated police procedural.

Detectives stuck watching from the car as the suspect encounters Mr. Gondo in person.

Following the suspect through the seedy underbelly of Yokohama. The heroin den sequence evokes the imagery now found in modern post-apocalyptic movies and dramas.

These two styles mimic the change in style, change in movie, change in tone and the change in focus. The drama in the first half of the film is almost entirely internal, just as it is internal in this house. It’s Gondo’s furrowed self-exploration of what to do, whether to give in to the demands and destroy the career and life he’s built for one his personal staff members. It’s the visible anguish on Aoki’s face, at first pleading and then prepared to sacrifice his son in order to save his boss’s livelihood (and, also, his own). There’s his wife Reiko (Kyoko Kagawa) who acts as the moral compass, pleading with Gondo to save the child, that she doesn’t need this home and this wealth.

Reiko pleads with Gondo, and she’s ultimately proved right - even though it costs them both in the end.

But is that true? Gondo reminds her that she was born into wealth and has never had to live as he had to growing up so she doesn’t know what she’s talking about. Which then in turn a revelation – that Gondo got a boost early in his career from a dowry from Reiko’s wealthy family.

All of these internal struggles mirror the setting and pace and blocking of the first half perfectly. Kurosawa exhibits his mastery of composition, placing some people in the frame looking towards us and others looking away to enhance their position. Or to have a small sliver of light come through the curtains to bring our focus to a certain place. Kurosawa places Gondo in foreground on the phone, for example, when in the background Aoki anguishes alone and small in the frame. Another moment, when Aoki pleads with Gondo, the two are on opposite sides of the frame – Gondo barely able to look at him.

Gondo, tormented, only his face is in darkness in this shot - a way to use light to tell the story of an internal struggle.

This deliberate staging allows Kurosawa to play with power dynamics – who is big in the frame, who is small? Who is forced at the edge and who is covered in darkness. It’s brilliant and textbook and requires care to execute. (Of course it doesn’t hurt to have the extraordinary Mifune as one of your chess pieces to play on the board.)

Gondo deciding not to pay the ransom. Body language, choice of staging, attention still brought to the center. Mastery in blocking for the camera.

High and Low goes from a story about executive-level business intrigue, to a hostage thriller, to a story exploring social dynamics and issues of wealth, power and poverty before becoming a detective and police procedural with stunning set pieces including the seedy underbelly of 1960s Yokohama.

Kurosawa somehow pulls all of this off without any sense of whiplash or asymmetry. The master clearly at the top of his game is able to balance all of these elements in just about the most seamless way a bifurcated story could be crafted. And he doesn’t abandon elements from first half into the second half – we are reminded of Gondo’s sacrifice when later we see him mowing the lawn. Or when Aoki takes Shinichi back on the path to find the kidnappers’ lair – the detectives catch up with him and Aoki reveals that Gondo told him they won’t need to drive to Gondo’s shoe factory any more, having been forced out as they all knew he would be. We are given glimpses into Gondo’s life changing, even though he barely appears in the second half and we’re more interested in hunt and pursuit of the wrongdoers.

Kurosawa uses this efficiency in his story telling throughout. For example, the bald, sweaty detective Bos’n Taguchi (Kenjiro Ishiyama) – he’s the detective who is rough around the edges but a joking, committed bloodhound. But he’s on the screen so little, how do we know that? Just in a few words, we learn he disdains the wealthy so when Gondo sacrifices we see Bos’n’s admiration. And in behavior – he’s always sweaty and rubbing his head – Kurosawa is a master of tagging a character with a physical tic (see Mifune as “Sanjuro” with the shoulder twitch in Yojimbo, 1961 QFS No. 13). So when this hardened detective breaks down when Aoki and Shinichi reunite, we understand this man and he, in some ways, is a stand in for us as the audience. It’s incredibly moving.

That scene in particular contains another example of Kurosawa’s brilliance. The detectives are in the foreground, their backs to the camera as Aoki runs full speed away from us, towards Shinichi in the distance who runs as well. But the camera stays with the detectives – we see Bos’n holding back tears as he turns towards profile, and Chief Detective Tokura (Tatsuya Nakadai) gives the command that kicks off the second half: “For Mr. Gondo’s sake, be bloodhounds!”

Father and son reunited and moments before Detective Tokura says “For Mr. Gondo’s sake, be bloodhounds!”

And so the second half they’re off, trying to get the kidnapper and recover Gondo’s money.

There are so many points of entry into this film that it’s almost overwhelming to analyze. The bullet train sequence is a masterpiece in suspense. Gondo’s secretary Kwanishi (Tatsuya Mihashi) and his double cross that backfires give us a sense that Gondo is right that his stature is perilous – and Reiko is right ultimately that Gondo’s sacrifice is the correct action ultimately. We also see Kurosawa’s version of a zombie apocalypse film as we explore a heroin den – dreary, seemingly dangerous, the shuffling feet of the addicted clinking on unseen glass vials and bottles. And the plot itself, the suspense and the central question of who is the kidnapper?

He must be the kidnapper! Who else would wear mirrored glasses indoors?!

Several of the QFS discussion members, myself included, were certain that the other board members of the National Shoe Company arranged for this attempted kidnapping of Gondo’s son. The beginning of the film sets up that premise, which is a great narrative device to send us down that path. But ultimately, it’s a psychopath (but is he a psychopath?), a poor medical intern who looks up at Gondos’ castle above his poor slum. The explanation is that it drove him crazy to see that every day, looking down on them, and that he wanted to teach the man a lesson.

This final scene in the prison between Gondo and Takeuchi (Tsutomu Yamazaki in the only scene where he speaks) gives the kidnapper a chance to explain to Gondo and to us the why. I asked our group the question is this scene necessary. Without it, the scene ends with Mr. and Mrs. Gondo in their emptying house, the auctioneers measuring the furniture for their upcoming auction. For me, that felt like the appropriate conclusion to Gondo’s story and several felt similarly.

However, we would be left wondering why and missing out on any sort of explanation. And though Taekuchi’s motives felt thin – how could he be driven so far when there are probably a couple thousand people in the same situation who saw that same house and lived all around him – who didn’t think kidnap and murder were the solutions. So we’re left with psychosis, something that’s born out by the final images of the film as he’s dragged away, the security gate comes down, and Gondo’s image reflected in the mirror of both lives forever torn.

Gondo meets the kidnapper face-to-face a second time.

The final image in the movie in a scene that arguably did not have to be in the film. Up for debate!

While I personally would have preferred a stronger rationale for the film’s antagonist, this is a minor story objection to what is one of the greatest films by one of the greatest filmmakers of all time. Much of Kurosawa’s work should be essential viewing for filmmakers, but High and Low contains it all – blocking, camerawork, pacing, framing, character development, performance, to name a few. It’s clear to me now that the master’s masterclass for all of us is High and Low.

Wanda (1971)

QFS No. 138 - The invitation for May 1, 2024
I’m sure you all have seen this movie because it’s the 48th Greatest Film of All Time™.

Wanda – according to the oft derided/lauded* British Film Institute Sight and Sound Greatest Movies of All Time List released every ten years – is the 48th Greatest Film of All Time. Forty-eighth! Following a two-way tie between North by Northwest (1959) and Barry Lyndon (1975) at No. 45 and tied at 48 with Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Ordet (1955).   

Woah, what’s that you say? You’ve never heard of Wanda? That’s outrageous, well I oughta…

Okay fine. Neither had I.

Wanda falls firmly into the Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975, QFS No. 98) territory here – a film from the 1970s that’s highly acclaimed by critics and filmmakers and one I have never heard of. (Not stylistically, just in terms of obscurity… for me at least.) I do feel some measure of shame for not knowing about both Wanda and of course Jeanne Dielman from before. So here we go again, firming up our film nerd cred by watching and discussing Wanda as a film and of course whether there are only 47 greater films ever made than it. I know very little about this movie but what I do know is that it is significantly shorter than Jeanne Dielman.

For those of you keeping score at home, this happens to be our tenth selection from the BFI top 100 list. We’ve previously selected No. 1 Jeanne Dielman, No. 5 In the Mood for Love (2000, QFS No. 105), No. 11 Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927, QFS No. 104), No. 30 Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019, QFS No. 114), No. 43 Stalker (1979, QFS No. 25), No. 60 Daughters of the Dust (1991, QFS No. 18), No. 67 The Red Shoes (1948, QFS No. 52), No. 72 L’Avventura (1960, QFS No. 116), and No. 95 A Man Escaped (1956, QFS No. 9).

I have seen 60 films in the Top 100 and yes, I just them up counted now. Am I proud of this or a little concerned? I’d say both. Looking forward to knocking No. 48 off the list! Watch Wanda and return here to discuss!

*I both laud and deride the list routinely.

Wanda (1971) Directed by Barbara Loden.

Reactions and Analyses:
It’s hard to watch Wanda and separate the narrative from the craft. The story, though thin on a driving narrative, is still compelling. And the reason to keep watching is Wanda (Barbara Loden), seeing what happens to her as she drifts through her life. The movie is also about how Loden made it and what that evokes in us as a viewer. This is true for many films to some extent – the how did they do that idea ­– but there’s something different about the “how” with Wanda and it in some ways fleshes out the “why.”

Barbara Loden in Wanda (1970) directed by Barbara Loden.

Shot mostly on 16mm reversal stock – which is cheaper but less forgiving than negative film and more in line with budget-strapped documentarians of the day – Wanda, though restored, retains the grainy immediacy of the shooting format. Which makes it feel like a time piece. Stores that no longer exist populate the world (Woolworths and Korvette), the clothes, the rampant smoking, the cars that are easy to break into and hotwire. Although it’s not a documentary and it’s not New Wave, it has a feeling of being a loose and free portrait of a time, place and character where we’re experiencing the world with Wanda because we experience almost the entire film through her perspective.

Our group had a very mixed set of reactions to the film. Wanda gives so little information that the viewer pieces backstory and character motivation together with the clues that are in there throughout. Motivation is a tricky word because … is there motivation? Is Wanda motivated at all? She’s the biggest enigma of the film. Her expression and her emotions are minimal. She’s in court and does the opposite what we’d expect – she doesn’t fight for custody of her children at all. She can’t care for them but also doesn’t seem to even acknowledge them. The children, shockingly, don’t acknowledge her at all.

Wanda in court, not interested in her children and they feel the same - at least in this scene.

This speaks volumes and breaks with audience expectations of how a woman, a mother, would behave when around her children. The children perhaps no longer know Wanda as their mother at all.

When I saw this scene, I felt I knew Wanda or at least understood her backstory. She felt like people I know who I grew up with in the Midwest and so I extrapolated what I felt I knew about her. She is from a place and time where women aren’t getting a great education and are likely expected to marry at a young age. She’s attractive, so I imagined she got by on her looks, married young, had children young, and suffers from depression – or at least this sense that she never had direction in her life.

And true enough, the film starts to bear this out. Wanda does in fact get by on her looks – she’s robbed, has no money, but sleeps with a man who’s paid for her drink and then abandons her at an ice cream stand (who also takes pity on her and gives her an ice cream cone, unbidden). She’s directionless and just pulled along by whatever happens to her, getting swept up with a two-bit crook Mr. Dennis (Michael Higgins) and ends up being his accomplice (but it’s not clear she really wants to?). No one shows her any kindness without it being transactional - for sex, usually - except the guy with the ice cream cone and a brief moment when Mr. Higgins tells her she did good in their taking of hostages. The smallest of smiles crosses Wanda’s face and you get the sense that nobody has given her an earnest compliment in a long time, or maybe ever.

The one earnest compliment and the one actual smile from Wanda in Wanda.

Wanda does push back at one point, vomiting from nerves before the ill-conceived heist and saying she doesn’t want to go through with it. It’s one of two times she takes real action and shows agency. (Of course, she gives in and goes through with the bank robbery anyway.) The second time is near the end of the film when the airborne officer attempts to rape her in his car and she actually fights back and escapes.

The passivity and the narrative ambiguity proved to be too much for several of the QFS members. For me, I was taken along with the filmmaking and the storytelling but I definitely can understand how frustrating Wanda could be as a character. What is motivating her? What is she living for or striving for? Nothing? It must be nothing.

The filmmaking, however, is pretty remarkable. As mentioned earlier, this is one of the cases where I find it’s hard to separate the film from the filmmaking, or the feat of how they made the film. It has that lean, free-camera feeling of an expert filmmaker, not a first-timer with a crew of … four!

For example – the early shot in the film, when Wanda leaves what has to be one of the bleakest houses ever portrayed in cinema as it’s immediately adjacent to a coal strip mine. Wearing light colors, she walks through a black landscape, coal all around, the camera feels like it’s a mile away and she’s very tiny in the frame. The shot continues for a long time. Too long, contemporary audiences complained. To which she explained in an interview (as retold in Current), “I wanted to show that it took a long time to get from there to there.”

One of the early shots of Wanda - very long take of Wanda, in mostly white, against a start black landscape with piles of coal and the bleak world around her.

That’s very telling, and also illustrative of Loden as an artist. She made choices in a film that seems “real” and that we’re watching a real person drift through life. It’s a real tragedy that Loden never made a movie and died a decade later. Her follow up to Wanda would’ve been something very special. The filmmaking of Wanda should be taught to directors just starting out who use their own moxie to pull off something meaningful.

The driving sequences should be necessary film references for any filmmakers shooting from or with a car. Loden has shots looking through the front windshield onto the drivers – which means, given her limited budget, that they had the camera operator strapped to the hood of a moving car. The shots are so lovely for what is probably one of the most awkward road trips ever filmed. During that trip, the camera is in the passenger seat (sometimes the driver’s seat!) looking right at Mr. Higgins or Wanda, and it feels like we’re on the trip with them. But the driving sequence that’s most riveting is the attempted hostage taking and bank heist. The interplay between the two cars, the movement, the camera moves inside the car from Mr. Higgins’ watch to his face for example – these are extraordinary. There is so much dynamism in the sequence, so much tension – especially when Wanda is pulled over for making an illegal U-turn – that it suggests a much more experienced director at the helm than someone making their first film.

Variety of shots while driving, expertly done by Loden and her cinematographer/entire camera crew Nicholas T Proferes.

Wanda evokes Terrence Malick’s Badlands (1973) – a film that comes out only three years later. (I made a joke in our discussion that this was a much sadder film given the petty and incompetent thief and should be called Sadlands. It got very few laughs but it’s hard to tell on Zoom sometimes, right? Right?) Similarly in the two films there’s the crime, the listless, emotionally detached lead female protagonists who are carried through the story by awful men, taking place in a part of the country that rarely is portrayed authentically on the screen. I have no way of proving the connection, but I discovered that Loden gave a Harold Lloyd Master Seminar at the American Film Institute in 1971 – a time when Malick would’ve been in the audience. I have a theory that Malick was inspired by Loden and what she was able to accomplish on virtually no money and no crew. (Though Malick had young stars, more money and more crew than Loden - but not a lot more.)

Wanda (1970) on the left and Badlands (1973) on the right. I’m sure Loden’s talk at AFI in 1971 helped inspire Terrence Malick to make his first movie, too. (More like “sadlands,” am I right?) I’m compelled to say that I’m a proud alum of the AFI Conservatory and am trying to will this connection into being if it isn’t totally true.

For a film with an inscrutable lead character – or at least one whose motivation can be debated – the most confounding part is the ending. The film concludes on a grainy freeze frame of Wanda, seeking refuge in a bar after nearly being raped (again). Everyone around her is having a good time and laughing it up while she sits and others buy her drinks and food.

But what will happen to her? Will she continue on as she has been? She’s gone through no personal epiphanies, no great character arc. We have no reason to believe that Wanda is going to change. And perhaps this is the lasting idea that Loden wants to leave us with in this image. The world is all having a good time around her, swirling, living life. But she is stuck – literally, since it’s a still image – in her place, dependent upon the goodwill of others and unable to (incapable of?) change. Perhaps it’s a stretch, but the film does begin the way it started – there is no explanation, there is only interpretation.

The final shot, a still frame, in Wanda.

The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)

QFS No. 137 - The invitation for April 24, 2024
Happy Fourth Anniversary!

For our four-year anniversary of the Quarantine Film Society, we decided to select an epic by the great David Lean. Yes, it took us four years to get to a David Lean film, and for the most part it’s because I’ve seen most of the epic classic ones. Lawrence of Arabia (1962) remains one of my favorite films of all time and we could easily have selected it to commemorate our four years of watching and talking about movies. 

But instead, I picked what is my second favorite Lean film, The Bridge on the River Kwai. I’ve seen it in the theater once and probably half a dozen times in total. (I have somehow managed to watch Lawrence of Arabia about six times in the theater over the last 20 years in LA, a personal achievement of which I'm quite proud.) 

One of the things I love about David Lean and why I love his filmmaking is that he makes the epic personal. He crafts giant films on huge tapestries during times of war or conflict – but they are, at their core, character dramas. Lawrence of Arabia is, among other things, an exploration of a man’s identity, of living in between two realities, all set against the World War I proxy conflicts between Turkey and the Arabian kingdoms. A Passage to India (1984) examines race, imperialistic hierarchy, and tolerance during the British Raj rule of India. Doctor Zhivago (1965) is set during the Russian Civil War and beyond but concerns itself mainly with the love story between the two protagonists.

Set during World War II in Burma, The Bridge on the River Kwai is a fascinating tale of duty, of an almost sacred commitment to a task. The film questions whether that task is moral or not. We will discuss this further when we chat about the film, but I’ve always be interested in what is known in Hindu philosophy as dharma – one’s sacred duty – and The Bridge on the River Kwai manages the best portrayal of the concept I’ve come across in Western cinema through Alec Guiness’ character. Again, here the film is not about the war. But war surrounds the story. The epic is backdrop for the personal.

Speaking of epic, just a brief reflection on pulling off a four-year run of Quarantine Film Society. Sure, “pulling off” wasn’t really all that much doing. Simply (a) repeated unemployment of yours truly, (b) stubbornness, (c) an eagerness to write mini-film essays nearly weekly and (d) have at hand a bunch of maniacs willing to watch a film and get on an online video phone to talk about it.

These four years I’ve watched more movies than perhaps any other four year stretch of my life except perhaps for college. I’ve greatly expanded my working knowledge of the craft of cinema, American film history of the 20th Century, and have gained a greater appreciation of film as an art form – in that it can be interpreted less like a sentence in a book and more like a painting in a gallery.

For all of this, I thank you. I hope to keep this up for as long as I can. Join me to discuss The Bridge on the River Kwai as kick off our next four years of world cinema domination.

The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) Directed by David Lean

Reactions and Analyses:
Who is the antagonist in The Bridge on the River Kwai? For a film that has a lot of traditional action elements, it is not an action film in the classic sense. Or a war film in the classic sense, for that matter.

This question, though, of who is the antagonist or “the bad guy” is an interesting one and was quickly brought up by one member of the group. He argues that it’s actually Colonel Nicholson (Alec Guinness). He’s a maniacal man hellbent on living up to his own moral code, to the point of collaborating with who is his enemy.

Is Colonel Nicholson (Alex Guinness) the antagonist of The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)?

This is a fascinating take on the film and several QFS members felt similarly. Nicholson, is governed by a code and cannot waver from it. If anything, his counterpart Colonel Saito (Sessue Hayakawa), who runs a prison work camp, is downright reasonable by comparison. Nicholson nearly sacrifices not only himself but his officers on principle. He nearly completely and totally collaborates with the enemy, very nearly (inadvertently) foiling the covert mission by his own government. 

Consequently, several QFS members felt that this makes him a merciless sociopath. Sure, I can see that. But also, I’ve always seen him as totally and completely tied to his duty. As I wrote in the invitation to The Bridge on the River Kwai, for me Nicholson evokes the philosophical concept of dharma – which can be translated to spiritual duty, a duty that’s beyond mere obligation but something that’s deep inside of you that you have no choice but to fulfill. There are characters who appear in Hindu mythology who embody the concept, and at times they are unable to do anything other than their duty. They are, as I’ve heard referenced “bound to their dharma.” Rama from the epic The Ramayana has to obey his elders, his father, even when doing so triggers off a curse that leads to his father’s death. (There’s more to it than that but for simplicity’s sake, I’m boiling it down.)

Also, in the other Hindu epic The Mahabharata, the warrior prince Arjuna is on the eve of battle against his family and is paralyzed by inaction. Krishna, who is Lord Vishnu incarnate on earth, guides Arjuna through this crisis by reminding him that his duty is as a warrior for his people, and a warrior fights. Even when it’s going to be against cousins and uncles who he knows and loves – because he is on the side of righteousness. (Again, this is massively oversimplifying the Bhagavad Gita but go with me here.)

Sacred duty, or dharma, is best understood through Krishna’s explanation of the concept to Prince Arjuna on the eve of battle against his relatives in the Bhagavad Gita - depicted here in this artist’s rendition.

Now, I’ve always felt that Nicholson embodies this concept better than almost any character I’ve seen in a Western film that isn’t inspired by Eastern philosophy directly. And I still feel that way, but I noticed something different this time that should’ve been obvious to me before – this is an antiwar film. Nearly every war film is at its core an antiwar film. But The Bridge on the River Kwai is perhaps even darker. It’s not only addressing the cruelty of war, it criticizes the very necessity of war – and of the British Empire. The bridge is more than a bridge - it’s a symbol of colonialization and empire.

If you’re going to have a metaphor, might as well be a big one.

QFS members pointed out the arrogance of Nicholson, claiming their British engineers are superior intellectually to the Japanese ones, their workmanship and organization the model of the world. Some in our group couldn’t really tolerate that, which is totally valid. But this arrogance is entirely David Lean’s point. It’s this arrogance, this expressed superiority – that it’s all nonsense. And, in the end, futile and destructive. Like the British Empire, they’ve gone in with what they believe to be good intentions, but leave behind destruction, ruin, and death in their wake.

Or “Madness,” as the medic Major Clipton (James Donald) says in the last line of the film. And after the destruction, Lean leaves us with a final shot, an aerial pullback, wide, from the sky, with a jaunty British military tune. This is not accidental, and it’s an acerbic, biting final blow against the British. He could’ve chosen somber or desolate music. But the final tune has the flavor of cynical sarcasm to it.

“Madness!”

And yet, it’s Nicholson, bound by dharma, who must build the bridge and can only do so the best he can. He can’t even comprehend what others are telling him when they say to not build it so well. There are many telling exchanges in the film, but this one to me stands out as emblematic of what I mean:

Major Clipton: The fact is, what we're doing could be construed as - forgive me, sir - collaboration with the enemy. Perhaps even as treasonable activity.

Colonel Nicholson: Are you alright, Clipton? We're prisoners of war, we haven't the right to refuse work.

Major Clipton: I understand that, sir. But... must we work so well? Must we build them a better bridge than they could have built for themselves?

Colonel Nicholson: If you had to operate on Saito, would you do your job or would you let him die? Would you prefer to see this battalion disintegrate in idleness? Would you have it said that our chaps can't do a proper job? Don't you realize how important it is to show these people that they can't break us, in body or in spirit? Take a good look, Clipton. One day the war will be over, and I hope that the people who use this bridge in years to come will remember how it was built, and who built it. Not a gang of slaves, but soldiers! British soldiers, Clipton, even in captivity.

 The incredible build up is all worth it – the long film, the (perhaps) extraneous William Holden (as “Shears”) sequences, the near suicide of Hayakawa – it is all worth it for that moment when Nicholson discovers that it’s his fellow British soldiers who are trying to blow up the bridge. As if awaked from a trans, Nicholson says What have I done? Truly one of the greatest epiphanies ever filmed, both in terms of performance and payoff. Nicholson remembers that the bridge was his duty, but there was a greater one and it was for the British Army.

Colonel Nicholson sees Sears (William Holden), the moment before his realization. “What have I done?”

 A final note – I thought I had this film figured out. It has remained in my memory as one of my formative movies. But rewatching it and discussing with the QFS group has introduced even more complexity into the story and the themes. Once again, the mark of a truly great work of art and craft by one of the masters of the medium.

Ace in the Hole (1951)

QFS No. 136 - The invitation for March 27, 2024
This is our second Quarantine Film Society selection by the great Billy Wilder, after having seen one of his earlier films The Lost Weekend (1947, QFS No. 84) a couple years ago. Ace in the Hole (1951) has been on my to-see list for some time, so I’m very much looking forward to it.

I was tempted to select a Wilder film I’ve already seen because they are so rewatchable. And I’ve managed to see a great deal of Wilder’s films - Some Like it Hot (1959), Sunset Boulevard (1950), The Apartment (1960), Double Indemnity (1944) are such terrific classics - but he made so many that there are a lot left for me to watch. He’s another one, like John Ford, with a very high batting percentage of great hits. I went with Ace in the Hole because, well, don’t we all want to bask in the glow of Kirk Douglas’ chin for nearly two hours?

Ace in the Hole (1951) Directed by Billy Wilder

Reactions and Analyses:
One of the most surprising aspects of Ace in the Hole (1951) is that it’s from 1951 and not 1971. There’s an expectation for many of the post-World War II American films, that they have a Capra-esque quality. A happy ending or at least one that’s, at best, ambiguous or a qualified victory for the protagonist.

A happy ending Ace in the Hole certainly does not have. One of our group members highlighted a shot at the end of the movie, where the crowds have recently left and all that remains is Leo’s father near a sign that reads “Proceeds go to Leo Minosa Rescue Fund.”

The crowds have vanished near the conclusion of Ace in the Hole (1951). Of note - the “re-elect Sheriff Kretzer” sign written directly on the cliffside.

It’s a shot that speaks to the fickle nature of the crowd, the spectacle over, and all that remains is the detritus of the carnival and a family in ruin. Leo (Richard Benedict) has died. His wife Lorraine (Jan Sterling) has departed with the masses, just as she intended to early on before Tatum (Kirk Douglas) convinces her that her fortunes will change soon. And Tatum, having used Leo and keeping him trapped longer than necessary in order for him to reap the benefits of the sensational story going viral before “going viral” was a term, also dies. But not before a final act of almost valor.

The 1970s – coming on the heels of New Wave moments throughout Europe which in turn came on the heels of Post WWII neorealism – featured a generation of filmmakers who were raised by people who had witnessed the horrors of humanity and understood that real life had no clean happy endings. Obviously, this is an overgeneralization but the trends are clear to see from the films that came to life in this era in the second half of the 20th Century.

 With its social commentary on human nature and their attraction to spectacle, the media’s role in fanning the flames of that human nature, and a non-Hollywood ending Ace in the Hole feels like an independent film from the 1970s and not a studio release from twenty years earlier. You can easily see a throughline between this and Network (1976), a film whose very essence is an analysis of media, entertainment and sensationalism. The cynicism in Ace in the Hole feels uncommon for the 1950s, with the Cold War in its infancy and the Allies victory in World War II fresh in people’s minds. The fact that it’s Billy Wilder and that the film is twenty years before its time, in some respect, is perhaps why I’m so drawn to it now and why it has been rediscovered as an overlooked classic of the time.

Tatum says early in the film, “You pick up the paper, you read about 84 men or 284, or a million men, like in a Chinese famine. You read it, but it doesn't say with you. One man's different, you want to know all about him. That's human interest.” Tatum, as an anti-hero, displays a deep understanding of that human nature throughout Ace in the Hole. Sheriff Kretzer (Ray Teal) hates him but Tatum turns him around and knows what the sheriff most wants – to be seen as powerful and important. Tatum tells Sherrif Kretzer how he will promote the sheriff as the man most determined to save Leo and in exchange Tatum gets exclusive access to the mine and the metaphoric gold inside. He convinces Lorraine to stay in town and play the grieving wife because it will make her a star and make all of them money. Tatum is a devious genius and he almost pulls it off.

“Almost” is the operative word. His gamble has proven too costly and Leo dies. And here’s one of our primary debates happened in our QFS discussion group. In the end, does Tatum feel guilty? Is that what drives him at the end? He’s clearly devastated by Leo’s death – but is it because it ruins his own chance at stardom and the heights of journalistic fame? Or is it because he’s come to terms with the fact that he’s Leo’s “murderer,” that he directly caused Leo’s death and consequently has a moment of clarity?

Leo, trying to hang on and trusting Tatum.

Several in the group believed that Tatum has no real remorse. Sure, he didn’t want Leo to die but he also knew that it meant the end of his own life. Others believed that he did in fact feel remorse and you can see it by his solitary act of bringing in the priest to comfort Leo for his final moments. Then, Tatum literally shouts from the mountaintop to tell everyone that Leo is dead and the carnival should go home. If he was truly in for all of this glory himself, he would’ve let Leo die quietly and had the “scoop” on Leo’s final minutes. (“Scoop” in quotes because Leo is the one creating this scoop.)

(Above sequence:) Tatum shouts from hilltop that Leo is dead. Is this the guilt-ridden face of a man full of remorse?

For me, personally, I think he did feel a measure of remorse and guilt but too little too late. And perhaps that’s why he doesn’t seek medical attention after Lorraine stabs him – he knows it’s his penance. He has to now suffer as he’s caused Leo’s suffering for his own gain. Perhaps explains why he accepts this pain without seeking amelioration or offering complaint, but it’s left (deliberately?) ambiguous.

People in our group brought up the cynicism but for me – and I said this early in our discussion – the film didn’t strike me that it was overtly cynical. And that probably says more about me or the time in which I live in now. For the 1950s, sure, the film is more cynical about human nature than popular culture portrayed. But we’ve now lived 75 years or so since then and seen the world revolve around capitalism, social media, hype, and the classically American propensity of squeezing money from every corner of human life. GoFundMe campaigns and “tribute” songs to raise money are the a logical extension of the funds to save Leo in the cave, the altruistic flipside of tragic spectacle. 

And Leo – even the most “sympathetic” character in the film – is a grave robber of Native American artifacts! The person we’re cheering for to survive has, himself, stated that he’s probably cursed by the old spirits for robbing one too many times the burial sites of the indigenous of New Mexico. (Not to mention the studio so disliked the film that after its initial release they pulled it and remaned it “The Big Carnival” because people, you see, like carnivals so they might think it’s a fun movie! Talk about cynicism.) So it’s fair to say Ace in the Hole does have loads of cynicism – on screen and off – even though that’s not what first struck me.

The story is rife with plot holes as pointed out by the group, including the biggest one – why couldn’t Lorraine go down there to talk to Leo? It’s true – once Tatum goes down there frequently and it’s seemingly now safe to talk to Leo, then why can’t people who love him do that, like his parents? Also, is it believable that Tatum would suffer a stomach wound like that for so long? Only if he believes it’s a moral punishment.

And there’s this question – did Tatum ultimately win? He, too, is stuck in a hole – both he and Leo are in a hole together, one actual and one metaphoric. Both are counting on the other to extract them from their personal holes, but both die together. Tatum’s goal was to get back on top, become famous and return to New York. And while he doesn’t make it to New York and out of Albuquerque physically, he has become famous – people are cheering for him, the radio broadcast wants his exclusive thoughts. He is, for a moment, atop the world.

The final confession, near the end for Tatum.

But it’s all fleeting, like the masses who come overnight and leave the next day as the tragedy ends. Ultimately, Tatum will become infamous and perhaps that’s victory enough – especially if you’re a cynic.

Past Lives (2023)

QFS No. 134 - The invitation for February 28, 2024
What I know about this film approaches zero. I do know it’s (partly) from South Korea and that it’s Celine Song’s first film after being a staff writer on a major Amazon series. So, you know – pretty amazing, that!

But I’ve deliberately kept myself away from knowledge of the plot and was looking forward to seeing the film. This is our second selection from South Korea, the other being Bong-Joon Ho’s Memories of Murder (2003, QFS No. 112), and many more remain on my to-watch list. The South Korean film industry just keeps blasting home runs all over the place.

Join us this week if you can!

Past Lives (2023) Directed by Celine Song

Reactions and Analyses:
There’s a shot in Past Lives (2023) that essentially tells the premise of the film in one frame. It’s early on, Na Young says goodbye to Hae Sung because her family is immigrating from South Korea. The goodbye is curt and without over-wrought emotion because, well, they’re adolescents.

Then they each walk towards their own homes – Na Young upwards on the right of the frame and Hae Sung on the left, more or less straight, away from us. This image defines, in some ways, their trajectories. It’s simple and straightforward but clear. And it definitely sets a course for the split in their lives.

When I first selected Past Lives, knowing very little about the film besides its accolades and that it’s Oscar nominated for Best Picture, I assumed this was a South Korean film. And after having seen it, I can say that it’s very much an American film, an immigrant’s tale. This splitting or fracturing of a life in divergent storylines. It could’ve been told from my parents’ perspective leaving India in the 1970s.

The point from which their lives split in Past Lives (2023).

I brought this up in our QFS discussion and the others pointed out that this is not just an immigrant’s tale – this is the story of anyone who is forced to split from their home at a young age and has that fondness, that nostalgic remembrance, and that powerlessness to stop that fracturing the familiar. The fact that this is also true and valid illustrates how universal and accessible the story is.

Past Lives makes an argument for the simple film told with tenderness but with just the right amount of layering. The Korean concept of “in-yun” – the layers of interaction between throughout past lives – feels deliberate beyond how it’s used to describe the relationship between Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) and Na Young/Nora (Greta Lee). Perhaps in-yun is also meant to convey that the film is not as simple as it seems, that it’s layered in unseen ways (which, I’m sure, is me misinterpreting the definition of in-yun but bear with me). That there’s depth between these two childhood friends (sweethearts?) and when they reconnect later in their lives, that connection has meaning beyond how it’s been set up in the film.

The QFS group was split on the strength of this connection. For some, the childhood connection between Na Young/Nora and Hae Sung didn’t suggest a deeper connection later in life. For example, Nora claims to not exactly remember the boys name while talking on the phone with her mother, but then discovers he’s been asking about her whereabouts for a little while now.

After going on their “date.”

For others in our group, their connection in childhood was enough and felt familiar – this idea of two lives, connected through family, culture, and yes, love – two people diverging but when they reconnect, it’s fated they are to be together. Or, more specifically, in-yun. Case in point: your enjoyment of this film is directly related to whether or not you believe that their relationship at the beginning is strong enough that they could reconnect so quickly over such a long span of time.

Past Lives has the ease of a simple film well told but some of the trappings of a first-time filmmaker, several of us felt (including me). For example, there’s a scene where Nora’s (non-Korean) husband Arthur (John Magaro) talks about how they met and became a couple and moved in together and got married so she could get a green card, etc. What’s missing in his description is “love.” The kind of standard American relationship story devoid of cinematic spark or romance, but realistic and familiar. He continues to then say that in this version of the story, Hae Sun – the childhood lover – returns to her life and she realizes that this is who she should’ve been with her whole life. That he, Arthur, is the villain in this story. Hae Sun is more closely suited to her culturally but also very satisfying narratively. Both Nora and Arthur are writers so this aligns with their story-telling impulses.

Now, that’s all true but … we know that already as an audience. The filmmaker seemingly hasn’t trusted us to put that all together and she has a character explain it to us. This, to me, is a significant misstep in a story otherwise hewing close to cinematic realism. The scene, also, continues and Arthur says he started to learn Korean because Nora was talking in her sleep but in Korean. He says “You dream in a language I can’t understand. It’s like there’s this whole place inside you I can’t go.”

That is beautiful. It’s poetic, it speaks to the character himself, to their relationship, to the thrust and import of that scene. The scene could have very easily started here and it would have spoken volumes. But instead we get the needless explainer. And the ending as well – there’s a version of the film that ends as soon as Hae Sung leaves, wondering if this life is actually a past life and “we are already something else to each other in our next life? Who do you think we are then?”

Again – this is beautiful poetry. One member of the group suggested that ending of the film would be stronger if it ended right here, or right after this and he gets in his airport ride and goes. Instead of the long walk with Nora back to her husband where she cries. (And this is where I offered the additional criticism of staying in a wide shot instead of seeing her face here, for that felt like a payoff to me.) Even the opening shot - there’s an unseen bar patron watching the three in the bar. We push in slowly but instead of trusting the images of these three, with only their expressions and body language to inspire our curiosity, we’re hearing a bar patron who we will never see give us a setup that our eyes would have given us without the help.

Perhaps. These are all counterfactuals and there’s an argument in conducting film criticism that one needs to focus on the film in front of them and not the alternate version in our heads. Yes, valid – but still, the fact that these questions arise are less about how we would’ve done it differently and more about a few small weaknesses in an otherwise solid, simple film. 

Despite some first-time filmmaker criticisms, there are a lot of beautiful uses of visual storytelling throughout - including the use of symmetry across eras between Na Young and Hae Sung.

And in defense of the simple film – I mean “simple” not that it lacks depth or intelligence. Quite the opposite. When the filmmaker has trusted us, we’ve filled in the blanks and walked in the shoes of two people different than ourselves and went on a journey with them. As one person in our group remarked – it’s refreshing to have a film that’s only about 90-minutes, has a simple but tender story, well-acted and executed, that brings up emotions in a natural way. Not overwrought or excessive or gratuitous. (Counterexamples from this award season include Oppenheimer, 2023 and Killer of the Flower Moon, 2023). I believed I added “inoffensive” as a way of describing Past Lives and, once again, I meant it as a compliment. There are no subplots, no side character, no stretching for meaning. It’s all there. Simple.

Whether that simplicity was effective or not, we all were in agreement, however, on this one thing – we are grateful that a movie like this is still being made, is receiving accolades, and that a lot of people have watched and enjoyed it. So consider this an endorsement of the simple film.

Hae Sung and Nora on their non-date date in New York City.

The Holdovers (2023)

QFS No. 133 - The invitation for February 21, 2024
This is our first selection of an Alexander Payne film, one of my favorite contemporary filmmakers. I’ve seen nearly all of his movies, hence its exclusion from the QFS Priority Selection List since I’ve seen nearly all of them. Truly one of the great living screenwriters, a modern auteur.

The first Payne film I saw was Election (1999) at an advance screening in Ann Arbor* while I was in my first screenwriting class. Our professor took us to see it at the State Theater and the film didn’t even have the final credit scroll yet. I saw it a second time at the Michigan Theater during its regular release later that year and it remains one of my favorite viewing experiences – the film brought the house down, especially after one line in particular. Exemplary satire, Election is an underrated modern classic and should have earned Reese Witherspoon at least an Oscar nomination, one of a litany of Oscar Crimes™ over the years (see 2023: Gerwig, Greta).

Payne’s Sideways (2004) not only won him his first Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay but also single-handedly made Santa Barbara Wine Country overcrowded, drove up the demand for pinot noir production and consumption and destroyed the reputation of the perfectly fine merlot grape. His Nebraska (2015) is a beautiful, melancholic road trip film. Throw in About Schmidt (2002), and The Descendants (2011) for which he won another writing Oscar, and you could call that a pretty terrific career.

I’m sure I’m not the first one to suggest this, but from the way I see it Payne is the Preston Sturges of our times. Sturges, as you recall from QFS No. 2 The Miracle at Morgan Creek (1944), wrote and directed films about ordinary misfits caught in a lie or a deception – as a fake husband in The Miracle at Morgan Creek, Hail the Conquering Hero (1944) as a fake war hero or Sullivan’s Travels (1941) as a filmmaker posing as a fake hobo – as a way into the exploration of humanity, relationships and society. Both have a similar way of capturing a character’s story through humor, often bittersweet, but with the slightest of social commentary. With Sturges that commentary was a little more overt and daring, and Payne’s mission is not cultural or social criticism necessarily. But you can find it in his authentic portrayal of an ordinary person, his or her sense of normalcy upended.

Sturges might’ve used more sweet than bitter in his cinematic concoctions, and Payne can be acerbic and creates some truly uncomfortable and squirm-inducing scenes. So it’s not a perfect comparison but I stand by the assertion. Regardless, both carved out a particular niche in their eras – auteurs whose works relied upon well-told stories with grounded characters in exquisitely crafted scripts as opposed to artistic or visual innovation. With health doses of humor.

I’m very much looking forward to finally seeing another Alexander Payne film, his first in six years, and having a chance to discuss it with you. Please watch The Holdovers at home or in the theater – still playing somewhere near you I believe – and we’ll discuss!

*Home of the current National Champions of College Football.

The Holdovers (2023) Directed by Alexander Payne

Reactions and Analyses:
There’s a moment in The Holdovers (2023) that feels like its heading towards familiar territory. A misunderstood curmudgeon teacher and his misfit students all have to somehow survive the winter together at their private boarding school as they’re stuck with each other until school resumes after the break. With this setup, it’s easy to be prepared for a story in which the students come to understand this man more and the teacher softens and becomes a better person and therefore a better teacher by knowing his students more personally – and everyone learns something about themselves or life that prepares them for the world more than their conventional education ever could.

I’m not trying to sound glib; many an excellent film has done this well and movingly – Dead Poets Society (1989) or The Breakfast Club (1985) come to mind. So that’s the direction Alexander Payne is appearing to veer us towards in The Holdovers.

But then, something happens. All the kids, except for one literally fly away in a helicopter to a mountain top.

Paul (Paul Giamatti) and Angus (Dominic Sessa) are stuck with each other from this point forward in The Holdovers (2023).

What Payne really setting up for is this – don’t expect anything because this movie is not going where you think it is going.

As one of our group members put it, you think it’s going to be a movie about class, but it’s not just that; you think it’s going to be a movie a hardened grump falling in love and being transformed by that, but it’s not; you think it’s about the start of a friendship between a teacher and his student – it’s not that exactly either.

All of those themes are in The Holdovers, to be sure, but just when the narrative goes in the direction you think it’s going to go, it goes somewhere else. That this happened in a film that Alexander Payne directed but did not write – to me, that’s incredibly impressive. He took another script and made it a film that feels very much like his voice.

What Payne has always been good at is making characters feel real, even when they’re a little askew. His characters have believable inner lives, are imperfect, and struggle inwardly but not usually outwardly. What I’ve loved and appreciated about Payne’s movies is that they have a very distinct comedic edge but they’re truly dramas. I empathize with the characters in his movies because they seem so much like humans with familiar struggles. 

The Holdovers caused me to experience something new for me in a Payne film – it made me well up with tears several times. Angus (Dominic Sessa) meets his father (Stephen Thorne) in a mental institution, they hug and Angus tells him he misses him. His father, seemingly moved, can actually only reply that he believes the institution’s staff is poisoning his food. And then you realize that Angus is truly alone and in deep need of love and encouragement. When Mary (Da’Vine Joy Randolph) breaks down at the party about the loss of her son, you feel it deeply, as if she’s been holding it at bay for so long and finally lets her grief go.

Topping off all them, however, is the end. The handshake between Angus and Paul (Paul Giamatti). There is perhaps more power, more earned emotion in that handshake than in any number of romance films or romantic comedies’ climactic kisses. And importantly, it’s not a hug – it would’ve been ruined if it was a hug. It would’ve felt fake, like a movie. Because that’s not their relationship. They’re still teacher and student. They went through a journey together, learned each other’s deepest held secrets, have changed and grown to see each other as lonely, suffering, resilient human beings. And that handshake holds it all, with Paul’s cracking voice and Angus hearing from his teacher – a sort of surrogate father role – that the kid is going to be all right. That’s all Angus needed in his journey, was someone to tell him that. And it was earned, narratively, and paid off in the right way.

Perhaps the most meaningful handshake in recent movie history. And then Angus is gone.

In the invitation to this week’s selection, I mentioned Payne as our era’s Preston Struges. And I think this film helps bolster that case. Let’s set aside how both auteurs deftly use comedy to tell a dramatic story in ways both narratively interesting but grounded in truth. There’s also the social criticisms embedded in their films.

Payne addresses class in The Holdovers in several ways but most importantly it’s woven into the DNA of the main character Paul. When we learn about his backstory, Paul reveals he was kicked out of Harvard because of allegations of plagiarism by the son of a famous person at Harvard – when it was actually the opposite, the son copied Paul’s work. But the administration wouldn’t have sided with a kid who left his abusive father and extricated himself from poverty and ended up at Harvard through his own means. The fact that he’s cut down by the wall of privilege is devastating in the retelling and is evident in the unresolved grief that Paul contains within.

Similarly, we hear about Mary’s late son who couldn’t get a scholarship to pay enough for college, went off to the army with the hopes of eventually going to college, only to have him die fighting in Vietnam. Mary’s story touches on race too – it’s never said but you know that he was the only Black kid in his class, whose mother worked there just so he could go to school and have a chance.

Mary (Da’Vine Joy Randolph) in her sister’s simple room. She gives her son’s baby shoes and other baby clothes in a exquisitely moving scene. Even the set dressing and set here is a depiction of class - a Black middle class home set against the wealth privilege of Dalton from the rest of the film.

In all these ways, Payne is making an oblique criticism of the system that rewards the wealthy and well connected, but not through didactic speechifying, but through the story, through the setting, and through the characters. Simply pointing out it exists in the way it exists and portraying it in a way that shows it’s real and not a narrative contrivance is perhaps one of the best ways a filmmaker can illustrate how inequitable things truly are.

Sturges’ social criticisms of a different era centered around poverty and concepts of masculinity/military might. In Sullivan’s Travels (1945), Sullivan (Joel McCrea) a Hollywood director wants to make a movie about hobos. To do so, he goes and lives as one. But it’s skin deep – he can escape this any time so there’s no real lesson learned and he’s only doing this as a temporary means to an end. Through a series of circumstances, he ends up homeless and without memory and actually has to live as a vagrant. In both The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (1944, QFS No. 2) and Hail the Conquering Hero (1944), the main character has to pose as a military man or a masculine husband figure despite being just an ordinary guy who gets caught up in a… well not quite lies, but untruths let’s say.

(Above) Preston Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels on the left (1944) and Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers on the right. Completely different storylines in these specific films, but both filmmakers auteurs wield comedy to tell dramatic stories with an embedded criticism of class. Auteurs of their times.

Sturges uses more narrative contrivances than Payne does but both point out some of the unfairness or absurdity of life through a lived experience of a character, through the use of humor and poignancy – with near perfect writing and performances. Again, it’s not a perfect comparison but both Payne and Sturges were auteurs who had something to say about our current world and about humanity that is revealing while simultaneously being entertaining.

Another member of the group put it this way – I thank the film gods that a movie like The Holdovers is still being made. Writing, directing, acting, an adult storyline and grown-up themes. This is the film that has become an endangered species in the era of limited series and the mid-budget character driven dramas ending up on screening services instead of movie screens. Thank the film gods indeed for giving us Dominic Sessa and Da’Vine Joy Randolph in these roles, and for seeing Paul Giamatti corner the market on the curmudgeon with the soft center. And thank the film gods for Alexander Payne continuing to use his formidable might to bring these stories to life.

Black Narcissus (1947)

QFS No. 131 - The invitation for December 13, 2023
Emeric Pressburger and Michael Powell are the powerhouse directing duo from England whose legendary work includes The Red Shoes (1948, QFS No. 52), The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), 49th Parallel (1941) with Laurence Olivier, The Tales of Hoffmann (1951), and of course this week’s selection The Black Narcissus. I’ve only scratched the surface myself with their career work but everything I’ve seen has been incredibly impressive. It’s no wonder they are so influential to the following generation of filmmakers – Martin Scorsese and Spike Lee to name two – and I feel they need to be studied further by us and future filmmakers.

One of the hallmarks of Pressburger and Powell is their masterly grasp of film craft. The cinematography in their films is legendary and was duly awarded throughout their careers. Their art direction, costumes and set design are unforgettable. I point you to The Red Shoes for a textbook in the complementary usof all those elements as a case in point. Their numerous Oscar nominations for screenwriting and several for editing illustrate their excellence in storytelling for the visual medium.

Black Narcissus is one of those films I should have seen already. I know about its enduring cinematography and some of the story elements, but I’ve never seen it. It’s a big oversight in my viewing history that I’m happy to remedy now. I’m excited to finally see it and continue with my exploration of Pressburger and Powell.

Black Narcisscus (1947) Directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger

Reactions and Analyses:
The wind. Besides the sweeping vistas, the first thing you really become aware of in Black Narcissus is the wind. Before we even physically arrive at the monastery, the characters make mention of how the wind is unavoidable up there, on the cliffside in the Himalayas above the village in the valley below.

And throughout the film, the wind is a nearly constant. It blows the fringes of the habits of the nuns, shakes the flowering tree branches and the tassels on the drapes. No matter what anyone does, the wind can never be dominated. There is an uncontrollable force that can never be mastered out there all around you and it’s folly for anyone who tries to master it. Worse – the attempt to control an unseen force like that can lead to suffering and madness.

To me, this is one of the overarching metaphors of the film. A group of white nuns come to a palace no longer used in order to turn it into a missionary, to bring their teachings, medicine and religion to a place and people who believe in other ways of being. The group is small and recent; the people already there are ancient and vast.

One way of looking at Black Narcissus is that it’s an interpretation of British colonialism, specifically in South Asia. A small group of people, atop a hill looking down on and away from the locals, are trying to remake a world they’re not normally part of. And they cannot. They can’t control the primal, human nature of the place. (The nuns, are temporary – the winds live forever. India achieves independence from England in 1947, which is the year Black Narcissus is released so this is a very plausible interpretation as it would’ve been on the mind of writer-director Brits Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger.)

From Black Narcissus (1947) where you can see branches pushed back and the nun’s habit fluttering.

The wind took up a good amount of our discussion about the film. To one QFSer, the wind felt as if it represented the spirit of one’s past, haunting you. Another said he felt the wind revealed yourself to yourself, like a mirror in which you are forced to look at your own image and reflect. It reveals yourself to you. Several of the nuns have joined the order because they have a past they were trying to leave, especially Sister Clodaugh (Deborah Kerr). The solitude of the place, the natural elements, the long vista horizon – Sister Phillipa (Flora Robson) mentions she’s staring to lose faith upon seeing the infinite up there – forces each to confront something about themselves.

For Sister Clodaugh, she hadn’t even thought about her old lover since joining the order – not until she was up on the mountain at the monastery. Then the place, the wind, brought those memories back to her. The primal forces bringing to life primal emotions and urges.

It’s impossible to watch this film and not be utterly swept away by the filmmaking craft. If ever there was a film in which you could feel the hand of a master filmmaker carrying you along, it’s this. (Or master filmmakers to be more accurate.) Everything is tightly constructed and deliberate. The camera pushes in slowly in mid-conversation, but only when needed. Sister Coldaugh puts out her hand to shake Mr. Dean (David Farrar)’s hand, but he instead grasps it gently and squeezes ever so slightly – an intimate moment played entirely in a medium 2-shot with a wide enough lens that the action in the background of the nuns leaving can still be seen. I couldn’t help but say that producers on shows I’ve directed would’ve been horrified if I didn’t shoot a close ups on each person and then an insert on the hand to really hammer it home. But here, the directors choose to play it in a medium 2-shot – so simple, so perfect, and conveys intimacy, sensuality and their connection.

Pressburger and Powell also use canted/Dutch angles selectively but that are so well composed that one QFSer mentioned that they convey motion and movement without actually moving the camera. The close ups fill the frame, with extreme close ups on the eyes or on lipstick being applied to the lips. Contrast that with the wide vistas throughout the picture. The control and firm tightness of the film definitely evoked their The Red Shoes (1948) that the duo makes the year after this movie.

Speaking of those vistas, those matte paintings – for me, this is one of the greatest films ever shot on stage that looks like it wasn’t shot on stage. (One in the group disagreed with me so there’s a difference of opinion on that.) Another QFSer brought up that by using the images of the Himalayas in that particular style (black-and-white photographs painted with chalk), the filmmakers set up the painterly aspect of the film from the start. It’s not “reality” but it’s a painted reality – something that’s heightened and even more beautiful than reality. This painterly set up allows you to accept those vistas and the disappear into the story.

Epic matte paintings throughout Black Narcicuss of the vast vistas and grandeur around them, giving the film a painterly quality.

But it’s not just that they are beautiful, it’s what they represent. The vastness, the superiority of creation all around them, to me, makes the nuns not only smaller, but their mission almost meaningless and futile in the face of the abyss, the infinite around them. In particular, the part of the set with the huge church bell. The staging of this is astonishing. Not only is it on the edge and gives us a feeling that these nuns are all teetering on the precipice of stability, but the sheer (pun intended) technical feat of this – the directors had to have multiple matte painting backgrounds to simulate reality. There are the wide shots from behind the bell looking out towards the mountains. Then there are angles that show the bell, the nuns on the left of the frame, and the valley stretching out into the distance. And then, to top it off, there’s a high angle matte painting – a shot from above the bell looking down into the distant canyon floor below. All of these had to be conceived, planned out, then rendered in advance. The filmmakers couldn’t just walk on set and choose where to put the camera because they had to create that reality beforehand according to their vision in advance. It’s all so astonishing and inspiring.

This is perhaps my favorite shot of the Black Narcissus, just from the sheer (pun intended) complex planning this required to ensure there was a matte painting created for this perspective. It also enhances the distance of the characters from the village, introduces an element of danger, and symbolically shows the nuns living on the egde - literally and metaphorically.

It's been documented that Pressburger and Powell took inspiration from the Dutch painter Vermeer and his landscapes. A member of the group pointed out that it has a lot of single source lighting as well, evocative of the painting of Caravaggio. Which is no small feat for Technicolor stock that required far more light to properly expose than the human eye requires. Painterly is definitely an apt word for this film.

Vermeer has been cited by cinematographer Jack Cardiff as a reference for the vast lanscapes of Black Narcisuss, but we could see also detect similarities to Caravaggio, as depected here in The Calling of St. Matthew (1600).

What genre is this movie? That is a question someone in the group asked. Of course, it’s drama – but could it also be a thriller, with a horror-like climactic resolution? There’s a warning early on by Mr. Dean that they won’t make it until the rains come. And, ultimately, that happens. But Black Narcissus in one way of looking at it is akin to a closed-room thriller where they all start to go crazy and then one attempts to kill one of them.

In an admittedly strange comparison, I brought up Danny Boyle’s overlooked Sunshine (2007) that features a mission to the sun to launch nuclear weapons into it in order to kickstart the failing sun’s heat. In Sunshine, everyone is on a mission, they start going crazy, and there’s somehow an entity on board who tries to kill them as the film goes on. It’s not a perfect parallel, but after seeing the slow burn of Black Narcissus there’s an argument to be made that this can be considered a thriller in many ways. (Another in the group brought up Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca, 1940, for its feel in the same filmmaking era.)

A QFSer brought up this exchange and its potential importance, which reflects the film’s title:

Young Prince: Do you like it, Sister Ruth? It's called Black Narcissus. Comes from the Army-Navy Stores in London.

Sister Ruth: Black Narcissus. I don't like scent at all.

Young Prince: Oh, Sister, don't you think it's rather common to smell of ourselves?

The group member’s assessment is that this is the thematic statement of the film. Here is something that’s being done to cover ourselves, to mask our natural scent. We humans all create a natural smell but we tend to hide it with something. For the nuns, it’s their faith masks their natural self (literally and figuratively), obscures their personal pasts. But you can only cover it – there’s the inner animalistic nature that we all have that either remains suppressed or emerges with time. And it can emerge in scary, deadly ways as it does with Sister Ruth (Kathleen Byron).

In the scene where Sister Ruth puts on her make up – something that covers up something natural – Sister Clodaugh picks up the bible. Is this her cover? Is that what the directors are saying, that religion is a cover for the natural animal of ourselves? Perhaps, which sounds like a pretty subversive criticism of organized religion if that’s their intention.

There’s also something to the sadhu, the holy man who sits in reverent silence on the mountain top. Different religions orders come and go, but he remains there, unfazed. The image of an ascetic praying at the mountain, selfless, having achieved enlightenment and a oneness with everything around them is a common one in Hindu literary and religious traditions. Lord Shiva is often portrayed this way, long locks of matted hair, seated atop the Himalayas. This feels like the filmmakers are tying this into theme of colonialism trying to corral an ancient people and its faith, but it could also be an endorsement of a more mystical an ancient spirituality that worships out in the world and not confined within stone walls.

Left to right - Shiva statue atop Shiva Mandir in Bangalore (credit Darshan Karia), the holy man (uncredited or least I can’t find it) from Black Narcissus, Illustration of Shiva (artist credit unknown). Note Jean Simmons (Kanchi), the Indian bowing before him who is, notably, not actually Indian.

Which leads me to brown face. Do I Iike all the brown face, all the white actors playing South Asians in this film? I do not. I understand this is a “product of the time” and that argument is used as way to blow past criticism of using Jean Simmons (Kanchi), Esmond Knight (The Old General) and May Hallatt (Angu Ayah) as South Asians. But … come on. At the time they’re making Black Narcissus, India has a robust and growing film industry with many terrific actors who all are fluent in English. And though the film is being produced when the British are being finally kicked out of India, they are still intertwined in the Subcontinent. Pressburger and Powell could have easily gotten an Indian actor up to the standards of an international production and gotten them a ticket to London. I would almost buy the dearth-of-local-talent argument if Black Narcissus had been shot in 1946 Los Angeles where South Asians would’ve numbered at best in the dozens, as opposed to 1946 England where there are literally hundreds of South Asians at this time. As (soon-to-be-former) members of the British Empire who could study in London, just as Mohandas Gandhi and others had, there was a South Asian diaspora already living there. The production could easily have had a casting search for these actors but the fact is (and by that, I mean my educated guess) they simply didn’t want to because “at the time” people didn’t really care if they cast white Europeans and painted their face brown to make them ethnic. So it’s not lack of South Asian talent at fault here, but a lack of production effort. (Okay, end of rant. As a South Asian American, this rant has been my special privilege to contribute here.)

Aside from this (and from the utterly preposterous series of costume choices for Mr. Dean) Black Narcissus is an essential work. The conclusion is masterful. I was clutching my seat, not knowing who would die in the final scene. The deranged look of Sister Ruth – a look that one of our group pointed out must’ve influenced Stanley Kubrick a generation later – as she emerges, skeletal and red-eyed, as she emerges from the doorway is pure horror film perfection. And then that shot, looking up at Sister Clodaugh with the bell swinging behind her head as she gazes in horror down into the abyss has left an indelible imprint in my mind.

The final harrowing confrontation between Sister Ruth and Sister Clodaugh with its gripping imagery.

The rains eventually come and indeed, Mr. Dean is right – they made it until the rains but no more. You know it’s not a Hollywood film of the era. Here, someone at the beginning predicts the protagonists will fail and then they eventually do just that. There are scores of other films that would’ve seen these nuns triumph and overcome adversity. But the mission is doomed from the start. And in one of the final shots, the fog covers up the monastery high above as they are all leaving. This, like all of the shots in Pressburger and Powell’s masterpiece, is deliberate and not just a beautiful and poignant image. There are forces in the world that are too powerful for humans to control – from the external world to our inner nature – let alone comprehend, and an attempt to do so will certainly lead to doom.

Klute (1971)

QFS No. 127 - The invitation for November 15, 2023
Alan Pakula is one of the great workman filmmakers who seemingly gets overlooked in conversations about the best directors of an era. His films speak for themselves. All the President’s Men (1976) is just an utterly stellar film that really showcases an incredibly adept filmmaker at the top of his game. Throw in The Parallax View (1974), Sophie’s Choice (1982), Presumed Innocent (1990), The Pelican Brief (1993) along with Klute and that alone would be enough to call it a career. Add the fact that he produced To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) – really an amazing body of work. 

Klute along with The Parallax View and All the President’s Men is considered part of an unofficial “paranoia trilogy” – thrillers with that extra paranoid* edge that came to define a mood of the 1970s. I think it’s an excellent time to dip into this, don’t you? I haven’t yet seen Klute but I have heard good things and excited to watch.  

Pakula died in a tragic car accident when he was still a viable director, having directed Harrison Ford in The Devil’s Own (1997) a year earlier. Although he was 70, I’m sure we were robbed of a few more excellent films from a very skilled hand at the helm. Nevertheless, his mark on the American film landscape is indelible.

Klute features a great cast, including Jane Fonda who won an Oscar for this and with Donald Sutherland in the title role, a legendary cinematographer in Gordon Willis, and some probably terrifically outdated 1970s social mores. I’m looking forward to finally seeing this and discussing with you next week!

Klute (1971) Directed by Alan J. Pakula

Reactions and Analyses:
A scene early in Klute (1971) is perhaps its most subersive. A wide shot, flat, with women sitting beneath modern artwork. We soon hear the model talent scout, who is entirely off camera, face never clearly seen, talk about each woman as if they’re commodoties. It’s incredibly dehumanizing and, likely, accurate. This is the improbable introduction into Jane Fonda’s character “Bree” who is one of the women and, it turns out, has bad hands. She, and the other women, are treated in such a callous and disposable fashion we immediately sympathize with her even before we know much about her. She’s soon ushered out and the next group of models are brought in (and clearly the agency asked for “ethnic” choices because the next group are mostly Black - which is a really subtle but fine touch by the filmmaker).

Bree (Jane Fonda) treated as a commodity in Klute (1971) Directed by Alan J. Pakula.

Aside from the character introduction, this is a scene that gives us a glimpse into Alan Pakula’s filmmaking. The dialogue, though only spoken by characters we don’t see or have their backs to us, has the feeling of natural conversation - overlapping, easy flowing, conversational and matter-of-fact. Bree, when revealed, is on the side of the frame, partially blocked by the talent scouts in the frame. The choice of shots are both cinematic and photojournalistic - the feeling we’re spying on something real.

This is Pakula’s particular genius, and one that comes out even more clearly in his masterpiece All the President’s Men (1976) - this style I would characterize as “cinematic realism.” It’s not pure realism or documentary style, though his style does make you feel like you’re witnessing something real, like you’re hiding in the room and watching. This is enhanced by the great Gordon Willis, who makes the lighting feel natural and real but uses shadows for creative and thematic effect. Hence the “cinematic” part of "cinematic realism.” There’s still very much the hand of the filmmakers present, with deliberate feeling choices throughout.

This is a style, for me, that I strive whenever I have a chance to make something original. Or, I should say, this is the style that most naturally comes to me. It is, I’d argue, one of the more difficult styles of filmmaking to pull off - to feel both invisible and visible as a filmmaker. To maniuplate the audience but also make it seem like you are not doing so overtly. Pakula shows his mastery of it throughout his work.

In Klute, most of us in the QFS group felt that the thriller aspects of the film to be vastly inferior to mood and themes of the film. The plot is not terribly straightforward, slightly convoluted, with a handful of gaping holes. But the plot is secondary to what the filmmakers are trying to explore about human relationships, about being a woman in a world where a woman has little to no power, about addiction and the human mind.

Bree can’t stop turning tricks, and in the narrative device of the confessional with the therapist, she shares why. She’s in control, she has power and agency. And we see it in the first scene where she has a john and convinces him to pay more. She treats him like he’s the only thing in the world but we, as the audience spying on this scene, see her check the time on her watch.

Donald Sutherland’s “John Klute” on the other hand is such a thinly constructed character of whom we know so little about. When Bree finally seduces him, several of us in the group felt that this was going to go in a familiar way - oh, he’s going to be obsessed about Bree and driven to madness. But the script does something unexpected - she actually falls in love with him. You see it in the fruit buying scene. It’s so subtle, but she wants to reach out and feel for him and it’s clear that she’s found stability or something like love and is unprepared for it. So much so she tries to go back to her old pimp (Roy Scheider’s “Frank”) and … gets high? Or just drunk? Something that requires Klute to help her recover.

Fonda won the Oscar for her role but said afterwards, “I'm not very happy about what the picture is saying to women, which is, if you get a good shrink and a good guy, everything will turn out all right, and I don't think that's true." And that is definitely a problematic takeaway from the film.

But the film’s lasting value is in its style. One OFSer pointed out that when Bree gets a call for a job, she steps into a shadow, literally stepping into the dark and away from the light. There are other really memorable uses of light and dar - when Klute watches Bree undress for the older fabric salesman he’s in the shadow; the silhouettes in the very first wide shot at dinner where the foreground diners are in shadow but the background ones against the window are lit; when Bree is talking to Peter Cable (played by Charles Cioffi), her face is lit but everything behind her is in shadow; in the basement when Klute is searching for an intruder and all we see is what the flashlight sees.

Basement chase scene, illuminated by only a flashlight (more or less) by the great Gordon Willis in Klute (1971).

The overall sense of watching from afar as a voyeur pervades the film in the shots through a window from across a street or from atop a building looking down at Bree and Klute entering through a doorway down blow - enhanced by the unsettling score by Michael Small. The performances and filmmaking are extraordinary throughout, despite the flaws in the plot and thematic elements.

Long shots from afar enhance the sense of being spied on or surveilled in Klute (1971).

Finally, it struck many of us that this is a film that could not be even pitched now. A medium-budgeted thriller with a terrible title (why is this film called “Klute” and not “Bree” when clearly it’s her story?) - seems more in line for a limited series on a middling streamer. Which is a shame. Klute reminds me once again that the 1970s is arguably the greatest decade of American filmmaking where directors were given the chance to explore, innovate and create.

The Seventh Seal (1957)

QFS No. 127 - The invitation from November 8, 2023
Sweden’s legendary director Ingmar Bergman is one of those essential filmmakers whose work you’re required to familiarize yourself with if you go to film school and intend to be a director. And with good reason. His films are deeply empathetic and explore what it means to be human in a style that I would characterize as part of the Neorealist movement that swept through post-war Europe. But Bergman’s films have something even deeper and more meditative, a true journey into the soul that grapples with questions of morality and spirituality at their core. 

Incredibly influential to filmmakers after him, Bergman wrote most of his own work and was a true auteur in film and television. Just look at some of his accolades – it’s pretty impressive to be Oscar-nominated five times for Best Original Screenplay when you’re not writing in the English language. To me, that’s astonishing. It’s a high bar for Academy members to look past the language barrier and to nominate a film for its written work - and Bergman did it five times over several decades! 

For me, I’m still making my way through Bergman’s work – especially Persona (1966), Cries and Whispers (1972) and Fanny and Alexander (1983) which are high on my list of movies to see. His Wild Strawberries (1957), however, is a film I’ve seen in the theater and is a true masterpiece in its structure, style, pacing and exploration of a complex life lived. And, amazingly, he made it in the same year as he made this week’s selection The Seventh Seal. Two classics released in the same year has to be up there as one of the greatest single-year outputs by a filmmaker, rivaling Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 (The Godfather Part II and The Conversation) and Steven Spielberg’s 1993 (Schindler’s List and Jurassic Park).  

As for The Seventh Seal – I’ve seen it once before but never in a theater so I’m looking forward to catching it at The New Beverly. I don’t want to ruin it for you if you haven’t yet seen it, but it’s probably the best Swedish movie to be spoofed in one of the films in the Bill and Ted’s Adventure Trilogy.  

The Seventh Seal is an iconic, classic film and I’m excited to watch it again and discuss with you.

The Seventh Seal (1957) Directed by Ingmar Bergman

Reactions and Analyses:
Volumes have been written about The Seventh Seal and it has inspired a generation of filmmakers after it. The film comes out in 1957 and is perhaps one of the first instances in the West where the main thrust of the film is a philosophical one - is there a God and if there is, why is He/She/It silent? Not that a philosophical question hadn’t been posed in a film before, but here the film openly debates in both dialogue and in metaphoric action the philosophical question of whtehter or not there is a higher purpose. The knight Antonius Block (Max von Sydow) spends the entire time literally dealing with Death - an embodied death (Bengt Ekerot) in the form of a grim reaper with whom he plays chess. So the existential question of what comes after death is more than just an undercurrent - it is the current. Philosophizing about the existence of a higher power is not just theme it’s also plot in The Seventh Seal.

As someone who was not raised in the Christian tradition but grew up in a mostly Catholic neighborhood, some of the symbolism was familiar to me but there is a lot that I missed. So I turned to members of our group who had that religious background to fill in some details. One idea that came up was - is the knight dead the entire time? The film opens on the shoreline and the squire Jons (Gunnar Bjornstrand) lies facedown - dead? Sleeping? Even the knight is lying on his side when he sees Death approaching. Is it possible that he, like Christ, is close to death and dying himself and actually on a metaphoric cross contemplating the existence of God, begging for an answer? It might not be as straightforward as that, but there are definitely nods to this aspect of Christ’s divinity and story throughout.

The knight played by Max von Sydow in The Seventh Seal (1957), showing reverence towards Death.

Examples abound. There’s Jof (or “Joseph” played by Nils Poppe) and Mia (which is a Swedish abbreviation of “Maria,” played by Bibi Andersson) - Jof literally sees visions of the Virgin Mary with baby Jesus, of ghosts, of Death at the end, and Mia has an infant son Mikael (reference to the Archangel Michael?) with whom they travel around as itinerant performers. They gather a band of misfits and travel a ravaged, doomed countryside, rife with sinners and stricken by the plague at the end of the Crusades. The parallels to the life of Christ are easy to find if you just scratch the surface.

Aside from the symbolism, the central question Ingmar Bergman asks: with all this evil and destruction in the world, how is it possible there’s a benevolent God out there? From interviews, we know that Bergman was raised in a religious family and was terrified by death, seeing Albuertus Pictor’s church paintings depicting death playing chess against a knight. He says he wrote the film “to conjure up on his fear of death.” In the film we see a woman burned alive, a parade of people self-flagellating, people who died and just rotted away in place, others consumed by the plague. An entire village is empty. The group felt clear that Bergman answered the question, that the silence from heaven is what he fears - we are alone in a cruel world.

Parade of the flagellants from The Seventh Seal (1957) Directed by Ingmar Bergman.

And yet, there’s the one scene where he is picnicking with Jof and their family. In the idyllic setting, with a slow pullback as he talks to reveal more of the setting, the knight says he’s truly happy. He’s saying that life is worth living here and now, and not for the afterlife because who knows whether there is one or not. For me, this scene is the one that gives me hope for the film. That there is beauty in the world, and that it lies in friendship and moments of sublimity. QFSers in the discussion pointed out that Bergman provides an answer of what to do if there is indeed no higher being - do good acts. “One meaningful deed” as the knight strives to do.

A film is not the same thing as an essay, and except for the most experimental films, generally speaking a film needs a plot. So aside from a parallel Christ story, Bergan borrows from other familiar literary traditions of the knight returning home, his squire at his side. There are echoes of Don Quixote and Sanch Panza, but without the fool’s errand aspect. Here in The Seventh Seal, the knight is the serious, questioning soul and the squire is the cynic, who says, for example, “Our crusade was so stupid that only a true idealist could have thought it up.” This is quite an indictment of someone who was part of waging a literal holy war. Although lightly plotted, the knight has a mission to ensure the life of that family - his one meaningful deed - all while keeping Death at bay. It’s this adventure tale, interwoven with the mystical, that keeps the film moving through the more philosophical aspects. And, for me at least, herein lies Bergman’s genius - you’re pulled in by the intriguing plot device and narrative, and you’re led to contemplate the meaning of something bigger as the story unfolds. Bergman asks: Are we alone? Bergman also answers: If we are, let’s do something righteous and live for the here and the now.