The Milky Way (1969)

***^½
Country: France-West Germany-Italy
Director: Luis Buñuel

The General, It Happened One Night, Stagecoach, The Wizard of Oz, Sullivan's Travels, Detour, Easy Rider, Into the Wild—the road movie is one of the most enduring and versatile of film genres. Its literary roots stretch as far back as Homer's Odyssey and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. But surely one of the oddest, most unique, and most startling of all road movies is the great Luis Buñuel's surrealistic-religious version of that venerable genre, The Milky Way, from 1969.

In the film two hitchhiking tramps, Pierre and Jean (Peter and John, names clearly chosen for their Christian connotations), undertake one of the medieval pilgrimage routes from France to Santiago de Compostela in Spain, where the cathedral is said to contain the remains of St. James. As in most road movies, along the way they have colorful experiences and encounters with various people—but with some important differences that distinguish this from the typical road movie. For one thing, this is a Buñuel movie, so unpredictability and departure from strictly literal storytelling are to be expected. For another, because the individual episodes always involve religion in some way, they are linked thematically. And most curious of all, Pierre and Jean act sometimes as participants in the events of the film, sometimes more as observers who wander in and out of the episodes enacted around them, exactly the same as in dreams, where the dreamer's point of view can suddenly shift in just this way.

Each vignette in the movie serves as an anecdote of some kind about the Roman Catholic religion. Except for Pierre and Jean, everyone in the movie seems to be preoccupied with religion, endlessly pondering the polemics of Catholic dogma. But Pierre and Jean, who don't seem to be devout or even practicing Catholics, never discuss religion even though miracles constantly happen around them. Almost as soon as they set out they have an encounter with what appears to be Buñuel's bizarre personification of the trinity—an oracular man in a black cape accompanied by a dwarf and a white dove. Right after they comfort a child who bears the stigmata of Christ sitting alone by the side of the road, a chauffeured limousine pulls up and gives them a ride, almost, it seems, as a reward for their compassion. Later, when a passing Citroën speeds past them without stopping, Pierre mutters, "I hope he breaks his neck," and a moment later we hear screeching brakes and a crash. When they rush to the wrecked car, they find the angel of death sitting in the car waiting to show them that their prayer has been answered. Yet aside from causing understandable amazement, these miraculous incidents have little effect on them and never direct their thoughts or conversation towards any religious or spiritual topic.

As Pierre and Jean make their way to Santiago, scenes from their journey alternate with scenes from the past (including scenes of the Marquis de Sade and the Inquisition), their reveries about what they are experiencing, tangential scenes of the religious experiences of the people they encounter in which they play little or no part, and scenes from the life of Christ that offer some parallel to what is happening to them at the moment. Early in the film, for example, Pierre tells Jean that he wears a beard because his mother told him he looks better with it. This is immediately followed by a scene in which Christ prepares to shave his beard and the Virgin Mary tells him not to shave because he looks better with a beard. At the end of the film, just as the two vagabonds reach the outskirts of Santiago, they encounter a prostitute (Delphine Seyrig) who invites them into the woods for sex. The camera then pans away from the three, and we see Christ and his disciples walking through these same woods, where they encounter two blind men, whose sight Christ proceeds to restore in a weird parallel to the sexual encounter of our pilgrims.

Much of the film consists of people debating the theological enigmas of the Catholic church as though these were the most pressing of issues. Many of the most divisive historical controversies of Catholicism are included—free will versus predestination, the nature of the trinity, the nature of the Virgin Mary—quarrels which have spawned heresies, caused schisms, and resulted in excommunication, torture, and even death for those on the wrong side. Although the debates in the film generally end inconclusively, one—on the question of transubstantiation in the Eucharist, that is, how the body of Christ can be contained in the bread used in the communion service—is ingeniously resolved by an uneducated innkeeper. It's like this rabbit pâté I'm serving you, he tells his argumentative guests as Pierre and Jean observe from another table: the rabbit is in the pâté, yet it's still pâté. As in the other debates of this nature, the famously anticlerical Buñuel makes one of the most sacred doctrinal disputes of the Church seem utterly inane.

What I have described might sound rather like a narrative hodgepodge, with one episode following another haphazardly as the pilgrims proceed along their route, the progress of that journey about the only thing in the movie that could be called linear. But somehow it all manages to hold together, the film's coherence the result of its own crazy internal logic that fuses realism with mysticism, cogency with randomness. The images and the ideas don't fit together in any sort of conventionally logical way, but in the analogical way that dream images and events do. The film clearly shows Buñuel's thorough understanding of the psychological underpinnings of surrealism and absurdism and the exceptional skill with which he was able to translate those concepts into cinematic terms. I don't think any other filmmaker would have been able to take such an unlikely mélange and make it work so well—poking fun at what is basically a serious subject in such a bracingly comical way and with such bemused detachment—as Buñuel does in The Milky Way.

Knife in the Water (1962)

****
Country: Poland
Director: Roman Polanski

In 1961 Roman Polanski made the last of his nine short films, a 10-minute long silent called Mammals. In the film two men in a snowy wilderness compete to see who will ride on, and who will pull, the sled carrying their belongings. Mammals—a slyly ambiguous black comedy that can be interpreted alternatively as a Marxist satire on capitalist exploitation of workers or as an observation that the exploitative impulse is an innate human characteristic which can never be completely subdued—is reduced to its essential elements: two men, one sled, and vast expanses of snow. Knife in the Water, Polanksi's first full-length feature made the next year, is again reduced to essentials: two men and a woman, one sailboat, and vast expanses of water. Again the movie is about competitive conflict between its characters.

The film begins with a thirtyish man and woman driving down a country road bickering. So involved in their argument are the couple that they nearly run over a young hitchhiker who in desperation has resorted to standing in the middle of the road to get someone to stop. The driver's rage at the hitchhiker's brazenness soon turns to apparent friendliness when he invites the hitchhiker to accompany him and his wife on an overnight excursion on a nearby lake in their sailboat. No sooner are they on the boat than Andrzej, the older man, begins ordering the boy around, telling him, "If two men are on board, one's the skipper." "Or the drill sergeant," retorts the boy, who quickly catches on that Andrzej is playing mind games with him but decides to go along for the ride anyway. What follows is an hour and a half of sometimes civil, sometimes hostile antagonism between the two as each tries to outwit and dominate the other—an extended male pissing contest on a sailboat.

There are many areas of conflict between the two. Andrzej is a writer who has enjoyed some material success, as his ownership of a car and boat in 1962 communist Poland attests. The younger man is an impoverished student who criticizes the older man's preoccupation with success and acquisition. The writer's life is one of middle-aged regimentation; he has planned exactly one day and night on the lake before returning to town. The student's life is one of youthful spontaneity; he has simply taken off for the weekend on an unplanned adventure. Most contentious of all is the presence of the wife, Krystyna. Has her husband invited the student to come sailing with them in an exhibitionistic desire for an audience to their rather theatrical bickering, à la Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Has Krystyna gone along with his impulsive gesture because she sees the young man's obvious sexual interest in her as a possible weapon to use against her husband?

Polanski keeps the psychodrama pumping steadily throughout the entire movie, the compact plot constantly taking unexpected turns and frequently veering into dark humor. But equally fascinating is the film's visual virtuosity. From the moment it opens—with the couple photographed through the windshield of the car, the passing trees reflected in the windshield and superimposed on them as they argue—we are aware that this is going to be a film whose images alone will hold our attention. I can't say with certainty that this is the first time this kind of shot was ever used, although it is the earliest example I can think of, but I do know that I've seen it duplicated in countless later movies and even television programs. With much of the first half of the film taking place on the deck of the sailboat, and much of the second half in the even more confined setting below deck, Polanski continually devises imaginative ways to show the spatially limited action, often posing his actors in tableau-like compositions but keeping the film moving with rapid cutting between shots. The film is also filled with less functional compositions of breathtaking abstract beauty. In Knife in the Water Polanski achieves the kind of artful integration of narrative and image that only the most masterful filmmakers are capable of.

One of the film's most striking compositions—a secular icon?

Few film directors have begun their careers as auspiciously as the 29-year old Polanski with Knife in the Water, creating a masterpiece their first time out—Orson Welles, John Huston, Satyajit Ray, and François Truffaut immediately come to mind. Even given Polanski's impressive later career, Knife in the Water is still one of his best movies and one of the key European art films of the 1960s. (The movie received an Oscar nomination as best foreign language film of 1963 but lost to Fellini's 8½.) Visually fascinating and emotionally lacerating, it is the product of a brilliant young filmmaker on the verge of an illustrious career.

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I Vitelloni (1953)

****
Country: Italy
Director: Federico Fellini

What a joy it was to rediscover this early masterpiece of Fellini. When I first saw it years ago while in college, I was familiar only with the more flamboyant works of the 1960s, and I didn't quite know what to make of this one. Now I can see it as Fellini's first full-blown masterpiece, a film that bridges the gap between the postwar neorealism of Roberto Rossellini—with whom Fellini cowrote several movies including Open City and Paisan, working as assistant director on those films as well—and the later works made in Fellini's increasingly personal and fanciful style.

The movie deals with the adventures and misadventures of five buddies in a postwar seaside town, unnamed but generally assumed to be Fellini's own hometown of Rimini. These men are referred to in contemporary Italian slang as vitelloni, translated as "the guys" or "the layabouts." In modern American slang they would probably be called slackers. Nearly thirty years old and obviously well-educated, they dress stylishly and talk of life in the big city while putting down the hidebound attitudes of their provincial town. Yet they are unmarried, live at home with their families, and don't work (although some have unachieved career aspirations)—clear examples of arrested development. Like the three main characters in Fellini's next film, La Strada (which was actually written before I Vitelloni but not considered commercial enough to be made right away), each of the five represents a character type: a beret-wearing, bespectacled intellectual who wants to be a playwright; a handsome Don Juan; a chubby, talented musician; a goofball (played in his inimitable hysterico-comic way by Alberto Sordi); and an introspective, observant young man named Moraldo who is clearly a stand-in for the young Fellini. At the end of the movie, only Moraldo has actually left to pursue his dreams in Rome, leaving the others behind to continue their avoidance of adulthood in the sticks.

I Vitelloni contains many images that would recur in later Fellini movies. A scene of the pals on the pier in mid-winter gazing wistfully out to sea presages the scene of Marcello on the beach near the end of La Dolce Vita; an episode at the theater, Cabiria's visit to the variety show in The Nights of Cabiria; a priest high up in a tree, the mad uncle in the tree in Amarcord; the Lent carnival, the wild parties of La Dolce Vita, Juliet of the Spirits, and Satyricon; Moraldo's friendship with a little boy who works at the train station (which makes him see how much he has to lose by staying in his hometown) presages Marcello's friendship with the girl on the beach in La Dolce Vita (which makes him see how much he has lost in his quest for success in the big city).

With I Vitelloni Fellini begins the process of taking events from his own life, transforming them, and incorporating them into the events in his movies, a subject he dealt with directly in 8½. Taken together, four of his movies form a sort of cinematic autobiography that pinpoints Fellini's state of mind at various stages of his life. I Vitelloni is Fellini's portrait of the artist as a young man, leaving behind the comfortable strictures of the past for an unknown future. La Dolce Vita (1960) shows its main character on the verge of fame but still torn between the simplistic morality of his provincial origins and the disturbing decadence he sees all around him. 8½ (1963) portrays a middle-aged film director now famous but still haunted by images of the past, fearful of commitment (except to his art), and plagued by an entirely new set of problems, both personal and professional. Finally, in Amarcord (1973) Fellini returns to his more innocent and hopeful boyhood in search of lost time. It's no wonder these films resonate powerfully with audiences, so authentically does Fellini encapsulate the universal in the personal.

But even outside the context of Fellini's oeuvre, I Vitelloni stands as a brilliant film in its own right. Fellini enlivens his realistically observed story with the kind of near-surreal images and episodes that came to be associated with his style: the Miss Mermaid 1953 beauty contest that opens the film, a group of priests walking single-file on the beach, the bizarre shop of religious notions that one of the group is forced by his father to work in, the gilded angel statue he steals from the shop, the simple-minded Giudizio who helps him try (unsuccessfully) to peddle the angel to a nunnery and a monastery then installs the statue on a mound at the beach and adores its otherworldly beauty.

Fellini is masterful at interweaving the stories of the five different main characters, deftly juggling and mingling individual plot lines. And although each of the five vitelloni is an identifiable type, Fellini invests each with a distinct personality. He already shows his brilliance at matching the actor to the part and gets superb performances from all five of his leading men, including his brother Riccardo, who plays the musician. The most famous member of the cast was Alberto Sordi, and in fact Fellini organized the long shooting schedule around Sordi, who was touring Italy with a vaudeville company at the time. Sordi turns in a broad but at times quite touching comic performance as Alberto, the joker of the group. When he attends the carnival costume ball in drag—wearing a short blonde wig and one of his mother's hats and flapper dresses from the 1920s, with overdone makeup including a beauty spot and a comically vampish, pouty, heavy-lidded expression, doing an exaggerated tango with a male partner—just try not to think of Jack Lemmon in Some Like It Hot.

Interestingly, the only one of the main actors who never worked more than once with Fellini is Franco Interlenghi, who plays Fellini's alter ego, Moraldo. Is the fact that Interlenghi is easily the best-looking of the vitelloni—just as Marcello Mastroianni and Bruno Zanin, who performed the same function in later films, were clearly more attractive than Fellini himself—an indication that Fellini was just a bit vain? At any rate, Interlenghi does a first-rate job of portraying a person who is more an observer of events than a participant. The character never openly discusses the subject with any of his pals, but Interlenghi subtly conveys Moraldo's growing discomfort with his buddies and the dawning realization that if he doesn't take the plunge and leave them behind, he will be trapped in the same kind of dead-end life they are destined for.

One of the last shots of the film leaves a lasting impression—a shot of Moraldo looking sadly from the early morning train that is taking him away, clearly fighting the urge to stay, waving tentatively at his friend the station boy, who is walking away from him, balancing on one rail as though walking on a tightrope. Moraldo almost seems to be saying goodbye to his past and to his youthful self. At the same time, images of each of the other vitelloni still asleep in their beds flash by in his mind and he knows that life in the little town will go on without him the same as always, while he is borne away to a new life somewhere else.

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L'Eclisse (1962)

****
Country: Italy
Director: Michelangelo Antonioni

The first time I watched Antonioni's L'Eclisse was years ago, and I remembered so little about it—two brief scenes and the amazing silent coda which lasts several minutes—that when I recently watched it again I was essentially seeing it for the first time. The greatest impression the film left with me was what a completely visual filmmaker Antonioni was. Paul Cézanne once said of Claude Monet, "He's nothing but an eye, but what an eye." I think this comment could equally be applied to Antonioni, for here incident is less important and has less impact than visual detail. Each shot in L'Eclisse is masterfully composed, at once abstract and fraught with significance. The choice of objects and people; their placement and movement in the frame; the geometry, perspective, and depth of the intricate yet crisply delineated compositions; the subtle tonal gradations of the black-and-white images; the purposeful transitions from one image to the next; the architecture of buildings, rooms, and streets—all visual aspects of each image in the movie are carefully and precisely planned by Antonioni.

In contrast to this complete control of the visual elements of the movie, the most important elements of conventional narrative—character and plot—seem startlingly casual. The main characters, Vittoria (Monica Vitti), a translator, and Piero (Alain Delon), a stock trader, are only sketchily defined. She is a detached observer of her own life living almost entirely in the sensations of the moment, while he is a shallow materialist driven by an ethos of competition and acquisition. The events of the movie seem almost self-propelled, unfolding in an episodic way that defies conventional narration in which one event leads to the next as the plot proceeds to its conclusion. Antonioni instead simply lays out a series of incidents whose impact is essentially cumulative.

The movie does have a clear beginning, as Vittoria breaks off her engagement and her relationship to Riccardo (Francisco Rabal) in a long, elaborately choreographed and edited sequence as self-contained and visually distinctive as the lengthy montage at the end. But from that point on events, although presented chronologically, seem to evolve spontaneously as the movie meanders from episode to episode. Events occur almost in isolation from one another, and the most memorable parts of the movie have little causal connection: The evening Vittoria spends with her girl friends, chatting, dressing up, and fooling around. The eerie episode when Piero's car, having been stolen by a drunk, is lifted from the river where it has crashed, with the drowned thief still in it. The frenzy of the stock exchange where Piero works, at one point interrupted by a minute's silence for a dead colleague before the trading bell rings and pandemonium instantly resumes. A quiet interlude in a small private airplane, where Vittoria seems to come unmoored from her ordinary existence and float free for a brief time, a sequence that more vividly than any other in the film gives a sense of the contrast between interior confinement, with four people crammed into a tiny airplane, and the openness of exterior space, with the plane floating through the sky and clouds.

Even the ending is wholly ambiguous. After their last tryst, Vittoria and Piero vow to meet again that evening and every day after that. Yet after they part, Piero replaces all the telephones he has taken off the hook for the duration of the tryst and resumes his normal commercial life, while Vittoria wanders down the staircase hesitatingly, her facial expressions hinting at indecision and conflict, actions that mirror those of the first sequence when she was working up the nerve to tell her fiancé she had decided to end their relationship. Yet there is method to this apparent narrative randomness: it corresponds exactly to what I take to be the point of the film, that in the modern world people's lives simply proceed from one stage to the next without clear meaning or purpose. Tellingly, Antonioni declines to do with his narrative what storytellers traditionally have always done—impose form where there is none inherent.

The one element of conventional narrative that Antonioni does not minimize is setting. In fact, he makes this the centerpiece and the unifying element of the movie. Always there is the emphasis on space—the lack or surfeit of it—and the contrast between overfilled interior spaces and empty exterior spaces—the vast, soulless ultra-modern postwar suburbs where Vittoria lives, places that are nearly silent except for the rustling of foliage, the spooky vibration of metal fence posts in the breeze, the clang of metal gates as they open and shut.

All this attention to visual detail is not just decorative, but profoundly thematic. The places where these people live and work, the landscapes through which they move tell us more about them than do their words and actions. The people in the foreground and what is happening to them are less important than the buildings, streets, objects, even other people in the background and on the periphery, for it is through location that Antonioni reveals his preoccupation with mood. The movie is ultimately more about the shifting moods of its characters than about their personalities, problems, or motivation. The people in the movie are almost vacuums. The places where they exist have greater substance and form than they themselves do, in a sense standing in for the vacancy of their inner lives.

Then there is that stunning final montage (Antonioni's version of Ozu's pillow shots?) when we revisit outdoor locations where scenes in the movie have taken place, but without any of the main characters present, ending as the streetlights come on and night falls. Containing no dialogue and with no obvious narrative connection to the rest of the film, this sequence is still perhaps the most meaningful in the entire movie. Antonioni seems to be saying that people and events are transient, that only places last. This is most strongly expressed in recurrent images of a barrel of water in which Vittoria earlier dropped a stick and which has now sprung a leak. As Antonioni repeatedly returns to the barrel we watch the water slowly emptying from it and flowing down the street and into the gutter. Life simply goes on, he seems to be saying, slowly flowing away, leaving behind only the empty vessel that once contained it. It is to Antonioni's credit that he has made a film about ennui that itself is never boring, a quality due largely to his astounding ability to use the camera to evoke mood and to transfer that mood almost subliminally to the viewer.

The strongest memory of a living person we take from the film is of Monica Vitti, whose Vittoria—in her aimless drift through life, unable to connect for long with anyone or anything—is the human focus of the movie. And the strongest human images that remain behind are the many lingering shots of her unreadable face, her expressions enigmatic yet hauntingly suggestive of a woman lost in a strange, bewildering, and apparently meaningless world.

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Brief Reviews

THE SON (2002) * * *
In my continuing efforts to update my knowledge of the foreign language films of the last twenty years, I recently watched my first work by the Dardenne brothers, Jean-Pierre and Luc, from Belgium. It's the thirteenth film of fifteen they've co-directed, most of them also written and produced by the Dardennes. It's also one of their most highly lauded, having received a special jury prize at Cannes and been nominated for the Palme d'Or.

The main character is Olivier (Olivier Gourmet, above, who is excellent and received the best actor award at Cannes), a carpentry instructor at a school for troubled teenagers, and the film opens with the director of the school proposing to enroll a new student, Francis (Morgan Marinne), in Olivier's program. But when Olivier sees the student's dossier, he has a strong reaction and tells the director his class is full. Olivier eventually relents but seems obsessed with the boy—stalking him, stealing his keys from his locker and sneaking into his apartment, and behaving bizarrely whenever around him.

Olivier seems to have no life outside his work, although we do get a glimpse of his austere apartment, where we witness an uncomfortable encounter with his ex-wife. He also seems to have no emotions aside from the extreme agitation he expresses when alone or around Francis. Francis, on the other hand, grows more attached to Olivier despite his cold treatment by the older man and at one point even asks Olivier to become his legal guardian.

For nearly the first half of the film, we are given no context for the relationship between the two or for Olivier's strange attitude toward the young man. So reticent is the film on this point that it almost seems Olivier might be a pedophile trying to resist his impulses toward Francis. He's not, but the exact nature of the relationship is only hinted at in a couple of places before being revealed midway through. For the first half of the film we are given little but Olivier's unrelenting anxiety around Francis and the mystery of its cause. This rather contrived approach strikes me as less ambiguity than coyness on the part of the directors, and I think it is a misstep that weakens the movie by forgoing any attempt at engaging the viewer's emotions in favor of piquing our curiosity and testing our patience by withholding information, a strategy I found more tedious than suspenseful.

The look of the film is certainly startling, though, and along with Gourmet's intense performance is one of the movie's great strengths. The directors shoot almost everything in tight close-up, following the actors with a hand-held camera. This might sound gimmicky but doesn't come off that way, instead lending the movie a sense of immediacy and authenticity and keeping the focus firmly on characters rather than on events or pictorial composition. It also emphasizes the emotional repression of Olivier.

I did observe that the movie was co-financed by Belgian television (which might partly account for the talking heads style) and also read that it was shot in 16mm and blown up to 35mm. The version I watched was in widescreen (with a 1 : 1.66 aspect ratio), and I couldn't help noticing that the tops of the characters' heads were often out of the frame. I'm wondering if the movie was originally filmed in an aspect ratio of 1 : 1.33 and later cropped for theatrical distribution. This would tend to emphasize even further the closeness of the camera to the actors and could account for the awkwardness in framing that was frequently noticeable.

The acting and direction of The Son are unquestionably impressive. The script, however, has weaknesses that are impossible to overlook. That the movie becomes so much more compelling in its second half makes the first half seem all the more obscure and padded. On the whole, I would say this is a good movie whose potential greatness is undermined by some of the artistic decisions of the Dardennes in their capacity as screenwriters.

YI YI (2000) * * *
If The Son gives us too little information, this movie, a multiple-prize winner from Taiwan, goes in the opposite direction and gives us too much. I knew I was having problems with this narrative overload when halfway through the nearly 3-hour long film I began fidgeting and checking to see how much longer it was going to run. The movie opens with a wedding that introduces us to the main characters, an upper middle class Taipei family, each of whom is confronting his or her own problems.

The father is coping with strains not uncommon to middle-aged professionals everywhere: a marriage that has grown stale, ethical problems at his work (an IT firm), doubts about the life decisions he has made, and the nagging feeling that his life is going nowhere. The wife, a lawyer, is dealing with both her seriously ill mother and severe depression. The teenaged daughter experiences a disappointing first love, while the young son is being bullied by schoolmates and family alike.

The problem is that with all this potent material to work with, the director, Edward Yang, simply doesn't know when to stop. For one thing, he tends to overindulge a fondness for slow, lingering shots. (Perhaps it's understandable that Antonioni was reportedly one of Yang's favorite directors.) These can be quite effective when used sparingly—for example, when a character who has just had a moving experience simply sits for a while and absorbs it—and as one who generally abhors aggressively kinetic music video-style editing, I feel guilty complaining about this.

But Yang uses the dilatory approach even when there is no good reason. For instance, someone opens the door to the apartment and walks in: First we have a shot of the empty hallway lasting several seconds. Then we hear a door off the hallway open and close, and a few seconds later someone walks into the hallway, turns, and walks toward the camera for several more seconds. Now we cut to the same person walking into the living room, who then walks away from the camera for several seconds before putting down his things, wandering around the room for a few seconds, and slowly sitting down on the sofa. None of this is in aid of any discernible thematic or even dramatic purpose: these people have problems, but ennui doesn't appear to be one of them. What should have taken a few seconds has lasted 30-60 seconds. Calling Jean-Luc Godard!

Even more distracting is the overdevelopment of subplots that eventually become full-blown digressions that divert attention from where it should be—on the father re-evaluating his life. In particular, far too much time is devoted to rambling subplots about the flaky brother-in-law and the young son (after all, the movie isn't The 400 Blows). Not content to show us the touching story of the daughter's unhappy first romance, in a startling shift of tone Yang embellishes it with a gratuitous and sensationalistic conclusion that involves sexual abuse of a student by a teacher and a triple murder. These and other divagations at times turn into soapish melodrama that undercuts the film's otherwise mature and thoughtful tone.

The strong parts of Yi Yi are very good indeed, and it is well worth watching just for these. But at points the film seems in danger of foundering under the weight of its accretion of superfluous detail. There is no denying that Yang, who died in 2007 at the age of 59, was a director of great talent. But Yi Yi, his eighth and last film, is kept from greatness by its overly ambitious desire to include everything and leave out nothing.
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The Best Movies of the 1980s

Another decade poll, this one on the 25 best movies of the 1980s, has concluded at Wonders in the Dark, and the results have been announced. This was for me the most difficult of the four decade polls I've taken part in. In previous decade polls—I didn't begin participating until the poll on the 1950s—my greatest problem was narrowing down a list of 40-50 possibilities—all taken from my list of **** movies, my highest personal rating—to 25 finalists. This time the problem was the opposite: I didn't have 25 to begin with, so I had to expand my preliminary list to come up with 25 finalists. This meant that for the first time a few of the titles on my final list, while very good films, didn't quite make my highest rating. One of the reasons for this was that for these lists I include only one movie per director. This practice originally began because I didn't want my lists dominated by a handful of individuals who are my own favorites at the expense of other directors. Even though this time such a limitation wasn't strictly necessary, I decided for the sake of consistency to continue observing it.

Because the WitD poll now permits television productions to be included in the poll, I could have filled out the list with the best TV mini-series of the decade. (See my list at the end.) For me the 1980s were the zenith of the TV mini-series, particularly in the UK. But as with the 1970s poll, I balked at including television productions because I don't really consider them the same thing as theatrical movies. I watch them differently, and I have different expectations of them. I expect theatrical movies to be more concentrated. I also expect to be able to watch them in one sitting, and for me that means a running time of at most around three hours, give or take a little.

One of the most interesting things I did in preparing for the poll was to watch the TV version of Ingmar Bergman's Fanny and Alexander. The theatrical film runs a little over three hours, and the TV version about five hours. I watched the TV version's four episodes over four nights, as it was intended, and then compared the two versions. The TV version contains several sequences, some brief and a couple fairly long, that do not appear in the theatrical version. Some of these add to the story, but some of them seem like digressions that aren't absolutely necessary and in some cases actually sidetrack the main narrative.

One short sequence that isn't in the theatrical version occurs when Alexander is locked in the attic for making up a story that his stepfather murdered his first wife and their two daughters. The two daughters appear to Alexander as ghosts and tell him what really happened—that they were victims of a tragic accident in the river that runs outside their house. This fairly brief sequence seems to hearken back to the dreaminess of Bergman's earlier films, a style he had largely abandoned by the time of Fanny and Alexander. Curiously, in a way it actually de-emphasizes Alexander's eidetic imagination, making the movie more a literalized ghost story than a portrait of the artist as a young man haunted by his own metaphorical ghosts rooted in his childhood experiences (the loss of this father and abuse by his stepfather).

A long sequence that also weakens the longer version occurs when their grandmother's friend Isak tells Fanny and Alexander a complicated and rather tedious story that is a parable of the human search for the locus of pure imagination and a lost state of grace. It elaborates on a point that is already obvious and doesn't tell us anything we don't already know about either Isak or Alexander. The whole extended sequence seems to exist only for a brief, although admittedly vivid, glimpse at Alexander's visualization of one event in the story. A similar sequence that appears only in the long version occurs after the Christmas feast when Alexander's father calms the restive children in the nursery by telling them a lengthy tale about a Chinese princess and her magic chair. The story is in itself not very interesting, a digression that slows the film down without contributing anything significant.

On the other hand, some things included in the longer version strengthen the movie. A couple of scenes that last only a few seconds are inexplicably missing in the short version. At the very beginning, Alexander imagines he sees a statue come to life. In the long version he also has a brief glimpse of Death as the Grim Reaper, and these few moments of counterpoint between beauty and death, with their echoes of The Seventh Seal, are so potent that I am surprised they were eliminated in the short version. Likewise, in the long version after the christening banquet, there is a brief shot of the guests all assembled, which then transmutes into a black-and-white photo, which becomes one of a pile of photos Alexander's grandmother is trying to sort out and paste into a scrapbook. This is one of the most haunting images in the movie, and again I am surprised that, lasting at most a few seconds and intensifying the movie's preoccupation with memory and time, it was eliminated in the shortened version.

A longer sequence with Alexander's uncles trying to get the two children away from their stepfather, who is holding them prisoner after their mother has left him, struck me as pertinent to the story despite its length, helping to flesh out the uncles and the way they differ in personality. This sequence was eliminated altogether from the theatrical version. And in the TV version the farewell of Alexander's mother to the actors when she announces she is closing the theater is, I feel, more poignant than the abbreviated sequence in the short version.

However, one example of trimming the movie improves the theatrical version considerably. This is the very first long sequence of the Christmas festivities at the theater and at the Ekdahls' house. The shorter version, which I described at length in a previous post, is wonderfully concentrated. I wrote that "Bergman seems to have rolled all of life into this one meal." But in the TV version, this sequence, running nearly twice as long, is bogged down in unnecessary exposition and digression, its power considerably diluted. After comparing the two versions, I decided that the ideal would probably have been something between the two, running about four hours.

Why am I writing in such detail about this one movie? One reason is that this decade poll and the previous one highlighted the proliferation of alternate versions of films under consideration—TV versions, restorations, reconstructions, director's cuts. Another reason is that I chose Fanny and Alexander as the #1 movie of the decade, as did the participants in the 1980s poll at WitD. This is the fourth decade in a row that I placed a film by Bergman at or near the top of the movies of the decade: Wild Strawberries at #2 for the 1950s, Persona at #1 for the 1960s, Cries and Whispers at #3 for the 1970s, and now Fanny and Alexander at #1 for the 1980s.

With the usual caveat, that this a personal list limited by my own viewing experiences and cinematic preferences—and acknowledging that on reflection it strikes me as a fairly conservative list, heavy on period movies and movies about children—here are my top films of the 1980s:


THE BEST MOVIES OF THE 1980s

1. Fanny and Alexander, Bergman (1983)
   
2. Blue Velvet, Lynch (1986)
3. The Night of the Shooting Stars, Taviani & Taviani (1982)
4. A Sunday in the Country, Tavernier (1984)
5. The Dead, Huston (1987)
6. Kagemusha, Kurosawa (1980)
7. Tootsie, Pollack (1982)
8. Hannah and Her Sisters, Allen (1986)
9. Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Almodóvar (1988)
10. The Last Emperor (Director's Cut), Bertolucci (1987)
11. Au Revoir, les Enfants, Malle (1987)
12. Hope and Glory, Boorman (1987)
13. Pixote, Babenco (1981)
14. Pelle the Conqueror, August (1988)
15. Babette's Feast, Axel (1987)
16. A Room with a View, Ivory (1986)
17. Dangerous Liaisons, Frears (1988)
18. Raging Bull, Scorsese (1980)
19. Brazil, Gilliam (1985)
20. E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, Spielberg (1982)
21. Terms of Endearment, Brooks (1983)
22. La Traviata, Zeffirelli (1982)
23. Jean de Florette, Berri (1986)
24. Paris, Texas, Wenders (1984)
25. The Home and the World, Ray (1984)

HONORABLE MENTION: The Elephant Man, Ran, The Big Red One: The Reconstruction, The Purple Rose of Cairo, Manon of the Springs, Radio Days, Crimes and Misdemeanors

BEST TV PRODUCTIONS: The Singing Detective, Brideshead Revisited, The Jewel in the Crown, Paradise Postponed

If I were to single out one film director for especially good work during the 1980s, it would be Woody Allen, for the films I mentioned plus Zelig (for the boldness of its concept and its meticulous execution).

This will likely be the last decade poll I'll be participating in. The 1980s lie at the outside edge of my knowledge of cinema, and my interest in movies produced after this decade begins to wane seriously. I find fewer and fewer movies of the last 20 years that appeal to me enough to go out of my way to seek them out, and when I do, I too often find they don't live up to my hopes. I'll continue to follow Allan Fish's concise and knowledgeable reviews at Wonders in the Dark, and the stimulating comments and discussions that his sometimes surprising choices evoke. And I'll be trawling the site for titles to add to my watch-list to help update my film knowledge. It's been a pleasure discovering and rediscovering the best movies of the 1950s-1980s, and I thank Allan and Sam Juliano of WitD for inspiring those of us who regularly visit the site to do this.

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Family Therapy: Two by Ingmar Bergman, Part 2

"A mother and a daughter. What a terrible combination of feelings and confusion and destruction," says Eva (Liv Ullmann) to her mother, Charlotte (Ingrid Bergman), at one point in Ingmar Bergman's Autumn Sonata (1978). That statement just about sums up the view of relations between parents and children that Bergman expresses in the third of his 1970s trilogy on family dynamics, following Cries and Whispers (1972), which examined sibling relations, and Scenes from a Marriage (1973), which examined the relations between husband and wife.

A brief synopsis of Autumn Sonata makes the film sound like a fairly straightforward mother-daughter psychodrama. The movie opens with Eva sitting at her desk writing a letter to her mother, Charlotte, a famous concert pianist who has just lost her lover of many years, another professional musician, after a long illness. Feeling that her mother may be in need of comfort, Eva, who has had no contact with her mother for several years (some sort of estrangement is implied), invites her to visit the isolated home in the Norwegian countryside where she lives with her husband, a minister.

When Charlotte arrives, things are understandably awkward between them at first, but as they catch up and get reacquainted with other, they seem to grow more comfortable in each other's presence. The only real problem is that Eva has not told her mother beforehand that she has removed her sister, Helena, from the institution where she had been living and is now caring for her at the house. Helena is in the advanced stages of a degenerative disease and is entirely dependent on Eva for care and can communicate only with Eva.

As Charlotte begins to accept this situation, mother and daughter appear to be relaxing and opening up to each other. This newfound intimacy, however, suddenly lurches out of control when the normally reserved Eva confronts her mother during a late night conversation, spilling out all her lifelong resentments toward Charlotte in an unexpectedly harsh and bitter diatribe. Charlotte is hurt by these accusations and defends herself as best she can. Eventually the two seem to reach a state of emotional equilibrium and at least to have aired their concerns even if they haven't completely resolved them. Charlotte soon leaves and is last seen on a train blithely discussing her upcoming concert tour with her manager, while Eva is shown sitting at a desk writing another letter to her mother expressing hopes for a better relationship in the future.

Yet as one might expect from a film directed by the magisterial Bergman, there is a great deal more going on here than meets the eye. Like Scenes from a Marriage, Autumn Sonata is basically a two-character movie (the two characters are brilliantly inhabited by the great actresses Ingrid Bergman and Liv Ullmann), and it is the incredible complexity of those characters that is responsible for the depth, subtlety, and surprise wrung from such a seemingly simple premise.

With her wire-rimmed eyeglasses, hair braided and fastened tightly on top of her head, prominent teeth, and frumpy clothing, Liv Ullmann's Eva appears shy, plain-looking, and innocuous. But from the beginning, there are hints that all is not right with her. In the opening and closing scenes, in which she is writing to her mother, she is actually in the background as her husband directly addresses the viewer, talking about Eva and explaining what she is doing. But significantly, he refrains from commenting on why she is doing this, and something in his manner conveys unease about the decision to write her mother. We also learn later that Eva is not a happy woman, that she has lost a child and been institutionalized in a psychiatric hospital.

Eva's unexpected behavior during the late-night confrontation with her mother seems shockingly out of character. As the scene proceeds, it makes us question all the assumptions about Eva we have held until this climactic moment. We realize clearly for the first time that the timid and seemingly benign Eva is in fact deeply troubled, a passive-aggressive woman who may not even be fully aware of the true motivation behind her actions, and we understand the reason for her husband's air of unease during the opening scenes of the movie.

The percipient viewer might even have begun to wonder about Eva earlier in the movie, when she plays a piano piece for her mother, then shyly begs the reluctant Charlotte to critique her playing and perform the piece herself. This is like one of those moments in a horror movie when a character is about to open a mysterious door behind which some kind of threat is almost certainly lurking and the viewer wants to shout, "No! Don't open that door, you fool!" Yet Eva does open the door, compulsively pressing her mother into re-enacting with her a primal situation, with predictable results: humiliation for both.

After Eva's nearly hysterical confrontation with her mother, we begin to wonder about many of her actions that before seemed so forthright. Why did she contact her mother at such a vulnerable moment in Charlotte's life? Was it really, as she professed at the time, to offer comfort, or did she unconsciously sense an opportunity to attack while her opponent's defenses were weakened? Are her actions in regard to her sister Helena really as altruistic as they seem? Did she intend to use her as a pawn in a confrontation with Charlotte, an intention unacknowledged even to herself? She knew that Helena's presence in the house would unsettle Charlotte, yet she gave her no forewarning. A cynical viewer might wonder if this was to further throw Charlotte off her guard and make an unspoken accusation about Charlotte's neglect of her disabled child. After all, Eva's specific resentments about Charlotte's treatment of her as a child can be reduced to a combination of Charlotte's neglect of her family in favor of her career and her preoccupation with Eva's imperfections.

Then there is the question of why Eva decided to care for Helena in the first place. She made this decision soon after losing her own child, and Helena is as helpless as an infant. Could Eva be using her own sister as a substitute for the child she lost, not only to satisfy a psychological need to replace her dead child, but also to have another creature whose dependence on her will give her life meaning? At one point in the film, Eva says wistfully that she could be happy if only one person in the world loved her for herself. Yet this already seems true of Helena and of Eva's unbelievably patient and tolerant husband. Is she so unable to let go of the past, an adult still controlled by childhood grudges and perceived injustices centering on her mother, that she can't see what is so apparent to us, that she is already loved unconditionally by at least two people in her own household? So many things about Eva that seemed clear and simple earlier now seem opaque and ambiguous.

After that confrontation, we begin to see Charlotte in a different light too. If at first Eva was entirely sympathetic, appearing to be a victim, then Charlotte came off as comparatively unsympathetic. Under her soignée, poised exterior, she seemed a cool, aloof, and self-centered woman immersed in her career and avoiding true intimacy, a woman capable of superficial affection but not of any kind of deeper love, even for her own daughters. She treats Eva politely but is rather formal and distant with her. Something of a perfectionist, she is obviously repelled by Helena's disability.

As with Eva, after that midnight confrontation, a significant change occurs in our perceptions of Charlotte, a change that begins when we start to see Charlotte as the victim of Eva's hostile aggression. Charlotte does not react to this aggression with anger, but with mild and unresisting patience as she explains herself. She tells Eva how people of her generation are not by nature openly affectionate but that even if she did not express her love for her children, this did not mean they were unloved. She tells Eva of the personal difficulties in her marriage and of how the importance to her of her art often created conflict between the demands of her career and the needs of her family. She abashedly acknowledges that even though she tried to balance these things, in the end she invariably chose art over family. The viewer gets the impression that this is certainly the most intimate and self-revealing conversation Charlotte has ever had with her daughter, and possibly with anyone. We begin to see Charlotte as a more complex and sensitive woman than we did before—not simply a selfish person, but one defined by her own emotional limitations.

This dropping of masks and reversal of personalities hearkens back yet again to Bergman's Persona (1966). More and more, it seems to me that Persona is the seminal film in Bergman's later body of work, for so much in his later films seems to flow directly from that movie. For one thing, in Charlotte Autumn Sonata has as one of its main characters an artist. By the end of the movie, we see that Eva and Charlotte, far from being opposites in personality as they appeared at the beginning, are actually more alike than they believe. Both mother and daughter are self-absorbed almost to the point of narcissism. They are both overly sensitive to their own moods and feelings yet find it difficult to express their emotions.

The crucial difference between the two, though—the thing that allows Charlotte to move forward while Eva remains trapped nursing childhood grievances that have become a permanent part of her adult personality—is Charlotte's art. Artists may be no less selfish than the rest of us, but they have the expressive means of externalizing their inner lives. As Charlotte tells Eva, "Only through my music did I have the chance to show my feelings." It is significant that at the end of the movie Charlotte is seen traveling in a train to her next concert, while Eva is shown sitting at the same desk as at the beginning of the movie, doing the same thing—writing a letter to Charlotte as her husband looks on in resignation. In that letter she expresses sentiments of forgiveness and hope for a better relationship with her mother in the future that, in view of all that has happened in the film, simply do not seem realistic.

The other key element Autumn Sonata shares with Persona is the concept of the fundamental subjectivity of the individual human experience, what David Thomson calls Bergman's belief in "the harrowing separateness of people." In Bergman's later work, we see illustrated again and again the idea that we are each of us trapped inside ourselves, and that ordinary human attempts at communication are by their nature imperfect and fraught with emotional danger. This is the world view from which the later films grow.

Autumn Sonata, like its companion films on the family, shows that the emotional demands, both explicit and implicit, that we make on those we love temper love's sustaining qualities with an equally powerful ability to harm. In Autumn Sonata Bergman tells yet again a story of individuals that gives the viewer an intensive, microcosmic picture of all human relationships. That Eva and Charlotte can love each other only from a distance merely emphasizes the larger concept of the universal and unbridgeable distance between all human beings, even when they are related by blood, and when they share the emotional bond of love.
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Many of the themes about the artist and the family explored in later films were first introduced in Bergman's movie Through a Glass Darkly (1961). That brilliant film involves a writer—acting simultaneously as a participant in events, a detached observer of those events, and the transformer of his experiences into art—who is also a father with a schizophrenic daughter having an incestuous relationship with her brother. But it was in Persona that Bergman developed those ideas in such a focused form, presenting abstractions about art and life in the context of specific personal relationships, that they could serve as a template for much of his later work.

Family Therapy: Two by Ingmar Bergman, Part 1

A few weeks ago I wrote a post on Ingmar Bergman's Cries and Whispers (1972), in which I discussed Bergman's emphasis in that film on the family dynamics among the three sisters who are its main characters. Before the decade was over, Bergman would make two other films that, taken together with Cries and Whispers, form what could be considered a trilogy in which he examines how various members of the family relate to one other: Scenes from a Marriage (1973) and Autumn Sonata (1978).

Whereas Cries and Whispers concentrated on sibling relations, Scenes from a Marriage deals, as the title indicates, with relations between husband and wife. Originally made as a six-hour long mini-series for Swedish television, it was later edited by Bergman into a 167-minute movie, the version I watched, and released in the US in 1974. (Because it was first shown on television, it was ruled ineligible for the Academy Awards.) The film opens with a scene that is ambiguous: A man and woman—clearly identifiable as Erland Josephson and Liv Ullmann, two actors who had appeared in a number of Bergman's films—are sitting on a sofa in what appears to be an upper middle-class living room being interviewed. At first it is uncertain whether they are characters in the movie or the actors who play them discussing their characters, as in Bergman's The Passion of Anna (1969).


Within a few minutes, though, it is clear that these actors were from the beginning in character. The couple being interviewed for a magazine profile are Marianne (Ullmann) and Johan (Josephson). She is a lawyer in her thirties; he is a university professor of experimental psychology in his forties. They have been married for ten years and have two daughters. The interview is in part a clever way of succinctly presenting the background of these people and sketching their personality traits (or as we later find out, the self-images they present to each other and the world) and the way they relate to each other. Johan seems confident and more or less in control of the relationship, while she seems more reserved and behaves deferentially toward him. The image of their marriage they present to the interviewer is one of stability, of two complementary personalities who have achieved a relationship of contented equilibrium.

This scene is followed by a strangely contrasting one. Marianne and Johan are entertaining their friends Katarina (Bibi Andersson) and Peter (Jan Malmsjö), and all are seated at the table in the dining room. The profile of the couple has been published, and Johan reads it aloud, sarcastically ridiculing the idealized picture of the couple it presents, as Marianne smiles and nods in agreement. Yet what he reads accurately reflects the image they presented to the interviewer, and it is clear from their expressions that the couple are secretly pleased with the result.

This kind of irony—possible only with the most masterful actors, those capable of suggesting simultaneous contradictory emotions—hearkens back to Bergman's Persona (1966), with its theme that we all wear masks that conceal our inner selves and that in a sense we are all actors giving a performance for the world at large and for each other. In the dinner scene, taken in conjunction with the opening scene of the interview, Bergman implies that this is also true of married couples, as they present a united front to the world. And, as we will discover in the course of the movie, he further implies that this is true within the marriage itself, in the way the two people in a marriage tend to hold something of themselves back from each other.

The irony of the scene does not end here, though. Later in the meal it becomes apparent that the marriage of Katarina and Peter is in serious trouble, and as Marianne and Johan look on in obvious discomfort, their friends begin tearing into each other with an escalating viciousness reminiscent of George and Martha in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? The subjects of contention are those typical of bourgeois marriages everywhere: fidelity, money, careers, goals that have begun to diverge, waning sexual interest in each other. The irony of the situation is that even though we won't learn it for a while, these are exactly the areas of dispute that will arise later when cracks begin to develop in Marianne and Johan's seemingly ideal marriage.

When Johan announces out of the blue that he has been having an affair with a graduate student he is advising (how many times have you heard of that situation?) and is leaving Marianne to take up a new teaching post in the US, their calcified marriage begins to crumble. The rest of the movie traces the evolution of relations between Marianne and Johan over the course of the next several years—from a bitter separation, trenchant post mortems about the reasons for the end of the marriage, divorce, the collapse of Johan's career plans, disputes over maintenance and child support, to the eventual remarriage of both. So chaotic is the trajectory of their relations that at one point while all this is happening, Johan asks aloud, "Are we living in utter confusion?"

The movie ends ten years after it began, in a sense coming full circle. Marianne and Johan, involved in unhappy marriages to others, are now secret lovers sneaking away for a tryst at the country vacation home where Johan first confessed his affair to Marianne and told her that their marriage was over. Earlier in the movie, Johan told Marianne that they were like children trying to make sense of the adult world. The intervening ten years since we were introduced to them in that gripping first scene have been difficult for both, but at the end of the movie they seem at last to have grown up.

Because it was originally made for television, Scenes from a Marriage uses the conventional TV aspect ratio of 1:33 : 1. Structured around six episodic "chapters," the movie consists largely of dialogue rather than action and is shot mostly in the talking-heads close-up style typical of the small screen. The strictures of this format had major effects on the movie. For one thing, they required Bergman to write a screenplay in which dialogue does practically everything—conveys information, illuminates character traits, and explains the progression of his main characters through the phases of the transformative changes they undergo. The dialogue must be clear, focused, naturalistic and literal. It must be an exact fit for both the characters and the actors who portray them. Bergman accomplishes this with absolute mastery.

The limitations imposed by this format also required Bergman to simplify his style. If the chief means of showing the nature of Marianne and Johan's relationship is through their conversations, then the visual novelty and stylistic flourishes we associate with Bergman's previous work would only be distractions. Bergman reduces his visual style to essentials, resulting in one of the most stylistically minimalist films he ever made. Yet the film is never boring, so strong are the writing and acting, and so unfailingly apposite are the choices Bergman makes from his relatively basic visual palette.

Because of the heavy reliance on dialogue and the extensive use of close-ups, the movie could only succeed if the actors playing Marianne and Johan convincingly merge with their characters. I am specifically referring to Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson, who appear in every scene, occasionally alone but almost always together. (Other actors in the cast appear in no more than one sequence.) These actors must carry a movie that even in its edited version runs nearly three hours, and they do so brilliantly, right from that opening interview sequence, which portends one of the greatest strengths of the movie: In the first couple of minutes we see the actors settle into their roles and become the characters, and they never let up for the remainder of the film.

This must have been especially challenging for Ullmann, who had played lead roles in five Bergman films in the previous seven years and was therefore quite recognizable to those familiar with the director's work. The role of Marianne was the most conventional character she had at the time played for Bergman—a contemporary professional, a complacent middle-class wife and mother untroubled by personal demons—yet she disappears into the role, carrying the viewer along with her on her unanticipated journey. As Marianne, she sees the world she blithely took for granted disintegrate and experiences the most intense and disturbing emotions of her life when she leaves behind the sheltered existence she led with Johan. After she learns to let go of her bitterness toward Johan and forgive him, she is able to become more confident, mature, and independent, and more open about her sexuality. She finds a real identity outside her marriage and emerges a stronger and more resilient woman.

Like Ullmann, Josephson had also appeared in several of Bergman's films, but in smaller and less prominent roles. Bergman had the rare knack of creating highly individualized female characters and placing them in stories in which they dominate the narrative and are the most memorable people in the movie, particularly in his later career, say from Persona (1966) on. Scenes from a Marriage, however, is essentially a two-character movie in which the main male and female characters are given equal weight. With so much responsibility for the success of the movie resting on his performance, Josephson clearly proves himself up to the challenge of sharing the screen with such a strong and distinctly defined presence as Ullmann's Marianne. Like her, Josephson's Johan is an utterly ordinary man, not the writer, musician, or painter who is so often the chief male character in Bergman's movies. And unlike the spiritual and artistic torments of those characters, Johan's problems and insecurities are the ordinary ones common to middle-class, middle-aged men everywhere.

A few years older than his wife, he has reached the point in his life at which he begins to question the worth of his accomplishments and to aspire to something more ambitious, something he believes will be more significant and satisfying. He sees the means of this personal and psychological fulfillment in career advancement and a renewed sex life with a younger wife. (Since the birth of their second daughter, his sex life with Marianne has been minimal.) That he is later unsuccessful in achieving these things eventually makes him question his decision to divorce Marianne and move on. Yet like Marianne, in spite of his confusion and suffering—or is it really because of it?—he seems by the end of the movie to have grown. Johan has lost much of his self-centered arrogance and discontent with the course of his life, becoming more humble and more accepting of the way his life has turned out.

Perhaps the most important change among all those they have undergone, though, is that both Marianne and Johan have adjusted their expectations about love to a more realistic level. "We love each other in an earthly, imperfect way," Johan tells Marianne at the end of the film, and it is hard to find fault with that painfully acquired insight.
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In 2003 Bergman, who died in 2007, made a movie for Swedish television (his last work) titled Saraband that involves Marianne visiting Johan at his country home some 30 years later. As in Scenes from a Marriage, Marianne and Johan are played by Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson.

Brief Reviews

THE MIRACLE WOMAN (1931) * * * ½
This is a most impressive early sound picture, more compelling and well-crafted than most of the movies of its time I've seen. Barbara Stanwyck plays Florence Fallon, a young woman who with the help of a sleazy showman, Bob Hornsby (Sam Hardy), becomes a celebrity evangelist/miracle healer in the style of Aimee Semple McPherson. The daughter of a minister who dies after the congregation he had served for many years replaces him with a younger man, she is motivated by bitterness and revenge, and by disillusionment with what she sees as the hypocrisy of those who profess to be true believers. When Hornsby sees her deliver a fiery denunciation of her father's parishioners from the pulpit, he realizes what a potential goldmine she is with her histrionic evangelism and her ability to make religious platitudes seem sincere. "George M. Cohan said, 'Leave 'em laughing,'" he tells her. "I want [you] to leave 'em crying."

Her revival meetings are theatrical, stage-managed affairs—almost religious spectacles—complete with shills planted in the audience to fake miracle healings and help Florence fleece the gullible for contributions. Problems begin when Florence meets and falls in love with a blind war hero, John Carson (David Manners), whom she saves from suicide, and begins to question her ruthless exploitation of her followers' trust. The possessive Hornsby, a sort of malevolent Pygmalion, senses he is losing control of Florence and coerces her into continuing their scam by threatening to implicate her in crimes he himself has committed, including bribery, fraud, embezzlement, and even murder.

Stanwyck is sensational in the title role, relentlessly intense as she maneuvers through a whole gamut of emotions. She is by turns a hardened cynic out to manipulate the credulous with her showmanship and phony piety, a frustrated victim being controlled by the menacing Hornsby, and a disillusioned and vulnerable woman susceptible to redemption by the goodness of her blind lover. But whatever emotions she expresses, she always remains believable and basically sympathetic.

Capra's direction is assured, and he keeps things moving briskly. The emotional intensity of the plot surges and relaxes, but Capra's sure-handed staging never for a moment lets the movie's interest level flag. Highlights include the lavishly detailed, circus-like revival meeting scenes, including one in which Stanwyck delivers a rousing sermon on the strength of faith while inside a cage of lions; a tender and humorous birthday party scene with Florence and John; a dramatic night scene on the beach between Florence, John, and Hornsby in which she defiantly confesses her charlatanism to John; and a spectacular fire that destroys Florence's Temple of Happiness in the movie's climax.

Florence and John in the lions' cage

Capra's expert staging of these sequences is aided tremendously by the inventive photographic effects of cinematographer Joseph Walker, including impressively mobile tracking shots, startling whip-pans, and imaginative camera placement—for example, looking into John's room from inside its fireplace, with roaring flames in the foreground between the viewer and John and Florence. Many shots of the revival scenes are composed showing Stanwyck from the rear with upraised arms, the silhouette of her body visible through the backlit diaphanous white gown she wears. This is one of the most watchable movies of its era I've seen—one of Capra's best early directorial efforts and one of Stanwyck's best and most sizzling early performances.

THE ENIGMA OF KASPAR HAUSER (1974) * * * *
Directed by Werner Herzog, this movie is a part-factual, part-speculative work based on a true story. In 1828 a young man is found early one morning standing in a deserted street in Nuremberg, Germany, holding in one hand a note saying his name is Kaspar Hauser and in the other hand a prayer book. Able to speak only one nonsensical sentence, he seems disoriented and confused. He appears to be neither violent nor mentally defective, only unacquainted with normal human life.

Kaspar appears on a street in Nuremberg

Exhibited as a freak in a circus, he is observed by a professor who adopts him and undertakes to teach him the ways of civilized humans and the German language. Kaspar quickly learns to communicate, and the story he tells is a bizarre one. He claims to have been kept chained in a dark cellar for nearly his entire life and never to have encountered another human being (food was left for him while he was sleeping) or to have seen anything outside the cellar where he was imprisoned. Under the professor's tutelage, Kaspar becomes something of a celebrity. There is much speculation—most of it absurdly fanciful, for example, that he is the castoff heir of the royal House of Baden—about his true origins before he is mysteriously murdered a few years later.

Filming largely in the Bavarian village of Dinkelsbühl, which looks essentially unchanged since the early 19th century, Herzog authentically recreates the life of the time. In the midst of this historical realism, he interpolates brief dreamlike scenes filmed in an anomalously distorted style. The overall effect of this historical authenticity punctuated with unexpected departures into surrealism is to suggest how utterly strange life in his new environment is for Kaspar. No matter how much he learns about the ways of human beings, his conception of life always keeps its edge of strangeness, threatening to slide at any moment into weirdness, if only briefly. Like a mystic, he is subject to occasional visions and imaginary events that seem to the viewer baffling and mysterious, but to Kaspar as genuine as his real experiences.

Kaspar is played by a 41-year old street singer named Bruno S., who didn't want his full name used in order to preserve his privacy. It's hard to imagine that anyone else, especially a professional actor, could have given such a naked, real performance, so spontaneous, instinctive, and entirely lacking in artifice does he seem. And it's hard to imagine that the movie would be half so effective with anyone else in the title role. One of the oddest supporting characters in the film is a scribe who is present almost from the beginning of the movie until its very end, obsessively documenting every experience Kaspar has, from his discovery in the town right up to the results of his autopsy. Yet these factual details provide no real insight into the man. The insight is provided by Herzog and Bruno S., whom it's clear played off each other and inspired each other like two complementary halves of a whole, Herzog providing the intellect and vision and Bruno the heart and emotions.

The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser is unlike any other movie I've seen: It incorporates dreamlike elements that in a strictly logical and narrative sense don't seem to belong in an otherwise realistic movie, yet that on some extra-logical level do enhance the narrative without compromising its coherence, suggesting through the story of Kaspar Hauser that the nature and meaning of human existence can be explained only so far before hitting the impenetrable wall of the inexplicable.

DAYS OF HEAVEN (1978) * * * *
Terrence Malick is one of the great contemporary American directors, a filmmaker with a style as distinctive as that of David Lynch, yet he has directed only four movies. When you see how meticulously conceived, written, photographed, and edited his movies are, this deliberately unhasty approach to filmmaking becomes entirely understandable. His first movie, Badlands (1973), seemed to follow a clear plan determined in advance, with little improvisation. But beginning with Malick's second movie, Days of Heaven, his work seems to be the result of a combination of advance planning and spontaneous inspiration taking place at the editing stage.

I have heard that Malick is an exceptionally well-read man, and in Days of Heaven I detect two clear literary influences. The plot of the movie resembles Henry James's novel The Wings of the Dove. In the early 1900s two lovers, Bill (Richard Gere) and Abby (Brooke Adams), pretend to be brother and sister. When Bill is fired from his job in a steel mill in Chicago after a dispute with the foreman, he and Abby, along with his young sister Linda (Linda Manz), travel south seeking work as itinerant farm workers. They end up in the Texas panhandle, where the wheat harvest is just beginning. The wealthy owner of the farm where they find work (Sam Shepard) quickly becomes obsessed with Abby, and when Bill overhears the farmer's doctor telling him he has only a few months to live, he persuades Abby to allow herself to be romanced by the farmer and to marry him, with the expectation that he will soon die and she will inherit the farm. Two forces thwart this scheme, though. The farm foreman (Robert Wilke) is immediately suspicious of Bill and Abby. And the farmer's love for Abby cures him of whatever disease the doctor thought he had.

The other literary influence I detect is apparent in the visual element of the movie and makes an even stronger impression than the narrative. This element resembles the vividly atmospheric rural locales of certain novels of Thomas Hardy and the themes in those novels of the conflict between man and nature as humans attempt to tame and dominate nature in an early Industrial Age agrarian setting. The people in the movie are dwarfed and made insignificant by the vast, flat landscapes of the plains and the golden fields of wheat, the imperatives of following the rhythms of the crops, and the challenges to human endeavor posed by the physical world. Some of the strongest images in the movie are of the wheat being grown, being harvested, being processed. Scenes of frenzied harvesting, a sudden invasion of locusts, and the nighttime burning of the fields are especially dramatic and hypnotic. Such images contrast strongly with those of artifacts of early 20th-century industrialism—steel mills, steam-driven trains, the first automobiles, primitive farm machinery, even the World War I-era airplanes of a flying circus.

The invasion of the locusts

Visual and thematic preoccupations present in all of Malick's movies appear here: scenes of the limitless sky overhead shot through overhanging trees, of ever-flowing rivers, of animal and insect life coexisting with human beings shown in almost documentary fashion, of people attempting to survive in immense landscapes that barely accommodate their presence. All this is imbued with a deterministic sense—not unlike that of Hardy—of the lack of control of individuals over their destinies, which seem governed instead by hostile human enemies, their own self-destructive impulses, and a benignly indifferent natural world.

The movie is filled with arrestingly beautiful images, and a great deal of credit for this must go to Nestor Almendros, the Spanish-born cinematographer best known for his work with François Truffaut and Eric Rohmer, who won an Oscar for his work here. (Additional photography was done by another Oscar winner, Haskell Wexler, who has said he tried to duplicate the work of Almendros rather than impose his own style on the parts he shot.) Almendros largely eschewed artificial lighting, particularly in the many outdoor scenes, in favor of natural sources of light. Those outdoor scenes were shot mostly late in the long summer days on location in Saskatchewan, and the result is nothing short of stunning, with one riveting image following another. The voice-over narration typical of Malick, the performances, and the plot are lean, while the visual element is of a contrasting richness seldom found on the screen. Days of Heaven is in all ways the expression of a fully developed and uniquely personal cinematic style associated only with the greatest film directors.
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A Study in Scarlet: Ingmar Bergman's Cries and Whispers

"Bergman insists on the truths of how people feel toward others they need to love."

—David Thomson, The New Biographical Dictionary of Film (2004)

From Wild Strawberries (1957) to his final feature film, Fanny and Alexander (1982), the great Swedish director Ingmar Bergman returned again and again to stories about the family, about the ways that members of a family relate to one another, the ways they grant and withhold intimacy, the ways they conceal or reveal their true feelings for one another. Along with Through a Glass Darkly (1961), his 1972 film Cries and Whispers is probably his most concentrated and focused examination of family dynamics.

At an upper middle-class country estate around 1900, two sisters, Karina (Ingrid Thulin) and Maria (Liv Ullmann), have come to be present as their eldest sister, Agnes (Harriet Andersson), dies after a long illness, probably cancer. Agnes is cared for by her long-time servant Anna (Kari Sylwan). These are the main characters in the movie, although other characters—Agnes's doctor (Erland Josephson), the sisters' mother (also played by Liv Ullmann), Maria's daughter (played by Linn Ullmann, the daughter of Liv Ullmann and Ingmar Bergman), Karina's and Maria's husbands, and a handful of others—appear briefly.

Bergman was a master at creating highly individualized and complex female characters, a rarity in male directors and one of the most remarkable things about him as a screenwriter and film director. In Cries and Whispers he has done this four times over. Agnes, the eldest sister, is a loving and warm woman. (The name Agnes is derived from the Latin for "lamb.") She is unmarried, and her relationship with the servant Anna suggests she might be a lesbian. Karina, the middle sister, is a cold, withdrawn, self-centered woman trapped in a loveless marriage with a domineering and equally cold older man. Maria, the youngest sister, is flirtatious, promiscuous (in the past she had an affair with Agnes's doctor, which caused her husband to attempt suicide when he discovered it), and also self-centered, but warmer and more sensual than Karina. The servant Anna, who is about the same age as the sisters, is a simple, selfless woman devoted to her mistress and of the four women in the household the only one who is openly religious. No mention is made of a husband, but she did once have a daughter, now dead.

We learn these things about the women not only from the way they treat each other, but from details about their pasts that are subtly interpolated into the plot as very short flashbacks. Childhood memories of a brief glance at a doll's house and of a Twelfth Night celebration with a magic lantern limn a contented childhood for Agnes and Maria. Karin's most vivid childhood memory, in contrast, is of her cold jealousy for the affection given by their mother to Maria. The childhood dynamics of these three sisters are stunningly observed: the confidence and maturity of the eldest sister, the feeling of being excluded and starved of attention of the middle sister, and the pampered special position of the youngest and prettiest sister. It is easy to see how these experiences as children prefigure the personalities and behavior of the three sisters as adults, especially in the pressured environment of the present situation.

The reactions of Karin and Maria to the coming death of their eldest sister clearly indicate how unnerved and frightened they are by the idea of death and the inevitability of their own deaths. After Agnes dies (about halfway through the movie), there is a stunning dream sequence that vividly shows this fear. It is not clear whose dream it is (at one point the dead Agnes says it is her dream); it is likely that the sequence is a cinematic conceit intended by Bergman to represent a collective dream. In the dream the dead Agnes, laid out on her bed in her funeral attire (which eerily resembles that of a baby), calls Anna to her in the night and asks her to bring each of her sisters to her. First Karin then Maria gingerly enters the room, is overcome with fright, and immediately turns and leaves. Only the religious Anna, who seems to accept death as a natural occurrence, consents to stay with her mistress and is seen in a final shot cradling Agnes, curled in the fetal position, in her arms, almost like a Pietà. Most of this sequence is shot in tight close-up and with few edits, making the expressions on the faces plain to read.

Anna cradles the dead Agnes in her arms

The second half of the movie deals with events that happen after the death of Agnes. Karin, Maria, and their husbands are quite businesslike and unsentimental about wrapping up the estate and dismissing the faithful Anna. Far from being a transformative event, the death of their eldest sister has only hardened the personalities of Karin and Maria. The one possibility for change occurs when the shaken Maria confronts Karin and pleads with her to accept her affection. Resisting Maria's overtures, Karin loses control of her tightly reined-in emotions and tells her younger sister how much she hates her. But Maria persists, and finally Karin (who can't bear to be touched) responds, the two embrace, and a new intimacy seems to have been created. Near the end of the movie, though, just before they part, the mercurial Maria disavows this new relationship as just a passing whim and leaves Karin alone and isolated once again. It is the final and most potent example in the movie of what David Thomson calls Bergman's "convictions of the harrowing separateness of people, the intractable privacy of men and women."

In a recent post on Bergman's Shame, I wrote of the precise balance in his best films between the thematic and the narrative, between ideas and people interacting in emotionally charged situations, and attributed this to his background in theater. (Bergman was involved in theater from his days as a student at Stockholm University, later managing several theater companies. For several years in the 1960s he was director of the Royal Dramatic Theater in Stockholm.) This theater-influenced approach to film, which is more apparent in his movies of the 1960s and 1970s than in his earlier work, is on full display in Cries and Whispers, with its plot reminiscent of the family dramas of Ibsen and Chekhov.

Added to this balancing of ideas and characters is the theatrical staging of the action and the overall look of the movie, with its strong emphasis on composition, on the placement of objects and people within the frame and their limited movement within a confined space. Cries and Whispers is in the literal sense of the term a chamber piece. Nearly all of the action takes place in Agnes's country house—in the sitting rooms, in the dining room, in Anna's room, and most vividly in Agnes's bedroom, which is, of course, also her sickroom and the scene of her death and laying out. I can't think of another film by Bergman with such a strong sense of being influenced by stage sets.

Perhaps the most obvious indication of this is the use of an identifiable color scheme in the movie, only Bergman's second film shot in color. The predominant color in this scheme is red, with white, black, and the occasional gray the other colors in the scheme. Every room in the house is painted an intense red color, like those red rooms in paintings by Matisse. The dresses the sisters wear are often red or rust colored. The nightclothes, the bed linens, the linen in the dining room, and the clothing Agnes is laid out in are pristine white. The furniture is of dark mahogany or black lacquer and, of course, the clothing worn after the death of Agnes is mourning black. There is no blue or yellow in the movie, and even the outdoor foliage is drained of color because the movie takes place in the fall. And whereas movies conventionally fade to black or occasionally white, the fade-outs in Cries and Whispers are always to red. This saturation of the images in the color red may perhaps be intended to remind the viewer of blood. After all, there are a lot of open emotional wounds on display in the movie. But blood is also essential to life. When something is referred to as bloodless, it is lacking in vitality, and the result of anemia is a dearth of the nutrients necessary for life.

Maria, Karin, and Anna in the red sitting room

Each of the three actresses who play the sisters had a long association with Bergman, and each had memorable roles in several of his films. All give beautifully accomplished performances. Thulin has perhaps the most difficult role as the unlikable, neurotic Karin, whose childhood alienation still governs her life and her reactions to her sisters. Ullmann must suppress her natural intelligence and sensitivity to play the frivolous and inconstant Maria, and she does this convincingly, with her red-gold hair and simpering mannerisms. But it is Harriet Andersson who dominates the movie, even though she dies halfway through, as the eldest sister who manages to retain her nobility and selflessness even as she ventures more than once to the brink of death, gasping in agony, only to be pulled back to life again by the devoted Anna, before finally dying suddenly and quietly. These near-death scenes are truly disturbing and the most demanding of any performer in the movie. This marvelous ensemble is completed by the plain, Rubenesque Sylwan—who appeared in only seven movies between 1956 and 1982 but easily holds her own with the veteran Bergman actresses—as the earthy, maternal Anna, the life force of the movie and the person who holds the household together.

The movie opens and closes with two brilliant sequences. It begins with a brief montage of morning scenes in the garden outside the house before moving indoors as clocks in the various rooms strike. We then see a close-up of Agnes's face as she wakes. For a few seconds, her face registers disorientation, then—and Andersson conveys this with absolute clarity—we see the dawning realization of where she is and the sudden memory that she is dying. It is a heart-rending moment. As Agnes is gripped by a spasm of pain, one small tear forms in each eye. She gets out of bed and walks to the window, where she gazes at an allée of leafless trees in late autumn. (In that opening montage, the garden appeared to be in summer. Was that Agnes's dream?) After winding the clock on the mantel, she goes to her writing desk, opens her journal, and writes a short entry: "It is morning, and I am in pain."

The movie ends in another brilliant sequence that tempers all the pain, unsettling memories, and uncertainty that have occurred in the hour and a half since that opening sequence. After the sisters and their husbands have left, Anna stays behind to clear the house. She has been offered a memento of Agnes and has declined the offer. ("She's playing her role well," comments Karin's lawyer husband condescendingly.) But she has kept one thing of Agnes's of which the sisters are unaware: her journal. The movie opened with Agnes getting out of bed and writing a brief entry in that journal. Now Anna picks up the journal and begins to read in voice-over as we are shown what she is describing.

Anna and the three sisters stroll in the autumnal garden

It is a day in early September, and Agnes's sisters have arrived for their visit. For the first time in the movie since the opening montage, the action takes place outdoors. Dressed completely in white summer outfits and carrying white parasols, the three sisters, accompanied by Anna, dressed in pale gray, are strolling through the autumnal grounds, the trees and earth covered with brown leaves. They come to their childhood swing and sit down, Karin and Maria facing away from the camera and Agnes opposite them facing the camera. Agnes no longer has the haggard look of a dying woman wracked with pain. She now resembles the healthy and beautiful Harriet Andersson of earlier Bergman films. And she looks peaceful and contented. As Anna pushes the swing, the camera moves in to a close-up of Agnes, who thinks to herself: "Come what may, this is happiness. I cannot wish for anything better. Now, for a few minutes I can experience perfection. [She closes her eyes.] And I feel profoundly grateful to my life which gives me so much."

Perhaps for Bergman this is what the art of cinema is all about: capturing in the midst of pain, the unstoppable passage of time, death, and the certainty that each of us is ultimately alone (the cries?) those fleeting, still moments of perfection (the whispers?) that briefly bring us peace and contentment.
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