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Cinematic Obsessions [THE GANG OF FOUR and SANTA SANGRE]

From the Chicago Reader (June 22, 1990). — J.R.

THE GANG OF FOUR

*** (A must-see)

Directed by Jacques Rivette

Written by Rivette, Pascal Bonitzer, and Christine Laurent

With Bulle Ogier, Benoit Regent, Laurence Cote, Fejria Deliba, Bernadette Giraud, Ines de Medeiros, and Nathalie Richard.

SANTA SANGRE

* (Has redeeming facet)

Directed by Alejandro Jodorowsky

Written by Jodorowsky, Roberto Leoni, and Claudio Argento

With Axel Jodorowsky, Blanca Guerra, Guy Stockwell, Thelma Tixou, Sabrina Dennison, Adan Jodorowsky, and Faviola Elenka Tapia.

In nearly half his films, 6 features out of 13, Jacques Rivette allows his characters only two possibilities. One is work in the theater, specifically rehearsals — an all-enveloping, all-consuming activity that essentially structures one’s life and assumes many of the characteristics of a religious order. The other, more treacherous possibility is involvement in a real or imagined conspiracy outside the theater — a plot or (the French term is more evocative) complot that is hard to detect yet seemingly omnipresent, sinister yet seductive for anyone who strays from the straight and narrow path offered by the rehearsals. Art versus life? Not exactly; a bit more like two kinds of art, or two kinds of life.

Both possibilities convey a sense of forging a fragile meaning over a gaping void. Any action is a form of play or fiction, whether it’s onstage or off, but it’s serious play with real consequences, whether one believes in the fiction or not. The rehearsals usually take place in an empty theater or studio devoid of sets or costumes, so even if they use a text, actors and directors seem to be creating meaning out of nothing. The conspiracy outside the theater, whether real or imagined, has a similar effect of granting meaning, direction, and purpose to a shapeless and ambiguous life. If the conspiracy has a “text,” it tends to be a kind of buried treasure or Holy Grail — a code to be broken, a jewel to be possessed. Or, in the case of The Gang of Four (La bande des quatre), a key.

With little variation, these are the basic conditions underlying Rivette’s 2-hour Paris Belongs to Us (1960), 4-hour L’amour fou (1968), 13-hour Out 1: Noli me tangere (1971), 4-hour Out 1: Spectre (1972), 3-hour Love on the Ground (released in a 2-hour version in 1984), and his latest feature, the 165-minute The Gang of Four (1988). In L’amour fou, the complot exists solely in the mind of an actress and involves her stage-director husband; in Love on the Ground, the rehearsals are for an original play to be performed in the director’s house — and the play is part of a complot, not an alternative to it.

Elements in the same pattern can be found in some of Rivette’s other films as well. Substitute the Catholic church for the theater (and the 18th century for the 20th) and you get The Nun (1966), Rivette’s adaptation of the Denis Diderot novel; substitute two female buddies sharing an apartment and identities and you get his riotous comedy Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974). Yet the most remarkable thing about Rivette’s filmography is its wide range despite these similarities.

The formal explorations carried out from The Nun, his second feature, through Noroit (1976), his eighth, represent one of the most thrilling sustained adventures in modern cinema. Each chapter in the adventure is a self- conscious heightening of one or more of the basic pleasures of movies, each set in relief by a different process: combining elements of fiction and documentary (L’amour fou); getting the actors to invent their own characters and improvise their own lines (both versions of Out 1) or collaborate on the script (Celine and Julie Go Boating) or share the screen with improvising musicians (Noroit).

I would argue that of all the Cahiers du Cinema critics who became filmmakers Rivette is, after Godard, the most important — more interesting and compelling than Francois Truffaut, Eric Rohmer, or Claude Chabrol, although his works are much less known than theirs. But I have to confess to a certain ambivalence about The Gang of Four. As a virtual anthology of Rivettean themes and patterns, it represents the first case of outright repetition in his career, and suggests that after three decades he has finally worked his way back to a more “classical” or conventional style of direction, like that of his first feature, Paris Belongs to Us. He’s obviously gained a great deal of mastery as a director in the meantime, but lost some spirit of adventure. The Gang of Four, one of his most accessible movies, can be an excellent introduction to his work as a whole; but it’s less impressive if you already know that work.

The theater group in The Gang of Four is an acting class in Paris run by a legendary, Svengali-like teacher named Constance Dumas (Bulle Ogier, who has appeared in seven of Rivette’s films). Her students, all young women, are played by real acting students, nearly all of them making their screen debuts here. Constance is directing her students (who play both the male and female roles) in a Marivaux play whose French title, La double inconstance (”Double Infidelity”), plays on her own name.

Four of the students — Cecile (Nathalie Richard), Anna (Fejria Deliba), Joyce (Bernadette Giraud), and Claude (Laurence Cote) — share a small house in the country and commute daily by train to the tiny theater where they rehearse with Constance. Near the beginning of the film, Cecile moves out to live with her lover, whom no one has ever seen, and Lucia (Ines de Medeiros) — another acting student, from Portugal–takes over her attic room. A bit later, Anna goes to a party and meets a mysterious man named Thomas (Benoit Regent), who drives her home. Gradually becoming involved in one way or another with all the students in the house, he embodies the ambiguous offscreen conspiracy that eventually affects them all — including Cecile and Constance — and is in fact the only male character of any importance in the film.

Like most of Rivette’s plots, this one is extremely complicated and mysterious, and, in the final analysis, rather gratuitous and artificial — a sort of diabolical mechanism reduced to its barest functionalism rather than a story that we can follow or believe in any ordinary sense. We’re never entirely sure whether Thomas is a crook or a cop; whatever he is, he represents an intrusion and a threat that the women all eventually have to come to terms with — violently, in fact.

To understand and appreciate the power of The Gang of Four, and Rivette’s work in general, one must consider a much broader and widely misunderstood branch of cinema — the cinema of personal obsession. When I say personal obsession, I’m not talking about a director’s offscreen behavior, I’m talking about style, form, and content. My Webster’s defines “obsession” as “a persistent preoccupation with an often unreasonable idea or feeling,” and that comes pretty close to what I mean if you include a hypnotic absorption with a way of seeing things. Most if not all of the obsessions I have in mind tend to be sexual and/or morbid in orientation, involving voyeurism and/or fetishism; they give the impression that a director could happily gaze at a specific person or object or activity forever.

According to the conventional wisdom, the progression of commercial movies over the last 75 years represents steady improvement, a series of gains: sound, color, wide-screen ratios, special effects, and so on. But this so- called progression is paralleled by an almost equally steady decline in the mass audience’s interest in the cinema of personal obsession.

Consider the evidence: 1915 was the year of The Birth of a Nation and the first episodes of Louis Feuillade’s Les vampires — both extremely personal and obsessive works that were nonetheless totally in tune with the predilections of the mainstream — and 1918 brought Blind Husbands, the successful directorial debut of Erich von Stroheim, probably the most obsessive of all filmmakers. The 20s ushered in the first mature works of such gifted obsessives as Tod Browning, Carl Dreyer, Sergei Eisenstein, and Josef von Sternberg. But the 30s, after beginning with a few key works by these same figures (Freaks, Vampyr, the unfinished Que Viva Mexico, and The Blue Angel respectively), gradually gave way to calculation and compromise, e.g., Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky (though it was eventually followed by the genuine obsessiveness of Ivan the Terrible in the 40s), or simple inactivity. (Dreyer made one film per decade for the next 30 years; Stroheim made no more films at all.) Though Sternberg managed to be more prolific than the others, it was only because one aspect of his obsession, Marlene Dietrich, happened to coincide with mainstream taste; once his association with Dietrich ended, his career ran aground.

Nowadays, the obsessions of filmmakers are suppressed in favor of the calculations of bankers and the more scattered whims of stars, such as Eddie Murphy, Bill Murray, Sylvester Stallone, and Warren Beatty, who produce, and sometimes direct and/or write, their own pictures. These “auteurs” may fuss over their own close-ups and (in some cases) interfere with the creative work of the people they hire, but they lack the conviction and consistency of obsessive artists. The same goes for such directors as Woody Allen, Michael Cimino, and Brian De Palma, whose mulish reliance on their models is too unimaginative to qualify as artistry (although they might correctly be called obsessive copycats). I’m not trying to deny that some contemporary commercial American movies have certain obsessive qualities; but few of these obsessions are genuinely personal and artistic. Also, when certain obsessions are genuinely and widely shared — such as the racial and sexual hysteria of The Birth of a Nation, or current preoccupations with money — they’re less likely to be regarded as such.

Contemporary obsessive filmmakers tend to be marginal rather than mainstream figures — Chantal Akerman, Kenneth Anger, Robert Bresson, Leos Carax, John Cassavetes, Georges Franju, Mark Rappaport, Jacques Rivette, Andrej Tarkovsky — or else mainstream in a peculiarly closeted and secretive way, like Stanley Kubrick, Jerry Lewis, and Elaine May. Sad to say, Carax — whose career is currently at a standstill after only two features (Boy Meets Girl and Bad Blood) — is the only one in the above list under 40, and there are plenty of reasons to fear that this kind of filmmaking may be on the verge of extinction. (The main institutions in support of marginal cinema in this country, from the Village Voice to the NEA, are currently in the process of withdrawing or at least minimizing their support.)

Rivette’s The Gang of Four and Alejandro’s Jodorowsky’s Santa sangre, both in town this week in limited engagements — the former at the Film Center, the latter at the Music Box — represent, respectively, genuine and bogus examples of what the best obsessive cinema is all about. Santa sangre, which seems too calculated to qualify as obsessive or even compulsive but is sensationalist nonetheless, is getting more attention and exposure, and will probably attract more customers. After all, real obsessive filmmaking tends to be pretty scary stuff, and most spectators would rather be titillated than scared.

Among the most common traits of the best obsessive cinema are slowness (with notable exceptions, such as Griffith and early Eisenstein), lengthy running times, the kind of lingering, neurotic intensity that makes the films register most strongly a day or more after one sees them, and a sense of anxiety and dread that is related (but not necessarily identical) to suspense. The experience imparted by this kind of work is often both a dreamlike feeling of suspension and a sense of being caught inside a ferocious psychic energy that can’t be adequately accounted for by the plot or the characters. Rivette himself once expressed this disturbing sensation perfectly in an interview when he remarked, “The role of a work of art is to plunge people into horror. If the artist has a role, it is to confront people — and himself first of all — with this horror, this feeling that one has when one learns about the death of someone one has loved.”

Nothing could be further from this than a campy sub-Fellini circus like Jodorowsky’s Santa sangre, which, like his previous El topo (1971) and The Holy Mountain (1973), is very easy to watch and almost impossible to remember afterward. Chock-full of morbid surrealistic details (like a dying elephant’s trunk ejaculating blood to cap a sex scene) and other pretensions, it is largely devoted to the task of convincing one of its obsessiveness — it’s the work of a charlatan who habitually sells himself as a mystic visionary and piles on as many graphic shocks as possible. (The paradox, of course, is that the true obsessive, like Rivette, is usually too bound up in his or her obsessions to be concerned with “convincing” the viewer of anything.) The Mel Brooks of Mexican pop surrealism, Jodorowsky always follows the premise that if you hit the audience with 30 outrageous ideas in a row, 2 or 3 are bound to work (personally, I found the elephant’s funeral charming, until Jodorowsky spoiled it with overkill). But unlike Brooks — and closer to such programmatic postsurrealists and poseurs as Fernando Arrabal and Shuji Terayama — he has no sense of humor, much less an interesting sensibility (which prevents him from qualifying even as a bargain-basement Luis Bunuel, despite the fact that both filmmakers share a surrealist taste for obsessed characters without necessarily being truly obsessed themselves). There are plenty of laughs in Santa sangre, but few if any of them appear to be intentional.

The genre that Santa sangre belongs to might be described as the S and M circus story. (Other, better examples would include Browning’s The Unknown and Freaks, Victor Sjostrom’s He Who Gets Slapped, Edmund Goulding’s Nightmare Alley, Bergman’s Sawdust and Tinsel/The Naked Night, De Mille’s The Greatest Show on Earth, and Kurt Neumann’s Carnival Story.) Filmed in Mexico, in English (the title translates as “holy blood”), the story concerns a crazed magician named Fenix (played at separate ages by Jodorowsky’s sons Axel and Adan) who is traumatized as a child when his father mutilates his mother, then commits suicide. His religious fanatic mother Concha (Blanca Guerra), who worships an armless saint, catches her husband (Guy Stockwell), a circus owner, making love to the tattooed lady (Thelma Tixou) and pours acid on his penis. He retaliates by slicing off her arms, then kills himself. (In the comic-book world of Jodorowsky, such extravaganzas are everyday occurrences.) To make matters worse, young Fenix must now leave his beloved Alma (Sabrina Dennison), the tattooed lady’s deaf-mute harlequin daughter, who functions in the movie as a sort of all-purpose Fellini muse and Ideal Woman, better seen than heard.

After spending most of his life in an insane asylum, where he crouches naked on an uprooted tree and devours raw fish, Fenix escapes. He coincidentally passes the armless Concha on the street and joins her in a music-hall act where he stands behind her replacing her lost arms with his own. Meanwhile, he just happens to run into and murder the tattooed lady. He gradually becomes Concha’s psychic Siamese twin, unable to resist doing her bidding — which includes her knitting and piano playing, as well as murdering a flock of women and painting them all white in their coffins, until he runs into redemptive Alma again. You can probably figure out the rest, including the symbolism of all the characters’ names, although you’d never predict the closing biblical quote (the screen says from Psalms 143.6.8, if you want to look it up).

What are the obsessional aspects of Rivette’s movies, The Gang of Four in particular, apart from the overall structural patterns described above? Three traits in particular come to mind:

An infatuation with actresses that’s voyeuristic without ever being pornographic. This extends on occasion to a certain fascination with actresses assuming and mocking or otherwise challenging traditional male roles. Noroit, to cite one example, centers on a band of female pirates. In The Gang of Four, the actresses assume male roles not only in the Marivaux play they’re rehearsing, but also in a mock trial they improvise at their house, involving patriarchal figures such as Thomas, the judge, the prosecutor, and the jury foreman.

A recurring dialectic between collectivity and utter solitude. Something of a recluse (as well as a compulsive moviegoer), Rivette himself tends to be a solitary creature when he is not making films, and the relationship between collective endeavors and the loneliness that exists apart from them is a constant in his work. The absence of certain locations in The Gang of Four — principally the homes of Constance, Cecile, and Thomas — are every bit as important as the compulsive recurrence of certain settings: the theater, a nearby cafe, and the house in the suburbs. Constance is never seen outside the theater, and the principal image of (apparent) solitude in the film — shots taken from a moving commuter train that recur with sinister frequency, echoing the credits sequence of Paris Belongs to Us — chills us to the bone. (There’s no logical reason why the actresses are never seen commuting together, and it’s difficult to pinpoint why these point-of-view shots convey such a sense of desolation and loneliness, but they do.)

A virtual agnosticism about reality itself. It’s a paradox in many of Rivette’s films that rehearsals often seem more real than the world outside them; whatever uncertainties they may contain or reveal, these are uncertainties that can usually be dealt with. The uncertainties in the world outside, by contrast, are so vast that they become terrifying and immobilizing, whether these are matters of conspiracy or one’s own isolation. (And what is “conspiracy,” after all, but a collectivity from which one is excluded?) Indeed, the aforementioned shots from the train, which increasingly occur at night, have an almost supernatural feeling, as if the unseen traveler were crossing the river Styx.

Most of Rivette’s movies up through Out 1 (both versions) show an acute sensitivity to the precise period in which they were made. This is especially true of Out 1–no other films bear more eloquent witness to the exhilaration and subsequent disillusionment of Parisians in relation to May ‘68 — but check out Paris Belongs to Us, the only Rivette film available on video, for a highly evocative view of France in the late 50s. The loss of this contemporary/phenomenological dimension in his more recent films makes them a good deal more claustrophobic and metaphysical in their implications — an unfortunate development for a materialist filmmaker who remarked in 1962 that he believed in a spiritual domain only in terms of the concrete. By and large, the evocations of ghosts that crop up in Rivette’s work with increasing frequency since Celine and Julie Go Boating, and which figure in the suburban house in The Gang of Four, correspond fairly closely to an increasing avoidance of politics.

Nearly all of the obsessive traits cited above (and one could surely think of others) come together in the film’s beautiful opening sequence, which shows Anna alone in a cafe finishing and paying for her coffee, walking down an empty cobblestone street, passing through a door, going up some dark steps and through another door, taking off her jacket, and proceeding to rehearse a dialogue with another student without missing a beat, before we even realize where she is. This passage from “life” to “art” is so ambiguous that we can never be sure when the precise change takes place, but at least Rivette shows us the whole process without cheating — unlike those elliptical, bloodcurdling, and mystifying train shots between city and suburb, when we might as well be drifting through outer space.

Satire in Action [15 MINUTES]

From the Chicago Reader (March 23, 2001). — J.R.

15 Minutes ***

Directed and written by John Herzfeld

With Robert De Niro, Edward Burns, Kelsey Grammer, Avery Brooks, Melina Kanakaredes, Karel Roden, and Oleg Taktarov.

A first-rate Hollywood entertainment, 15 Minutes is more than a little schizophrenic, a shotgun wedding between two seemingly irreconcilable genres — the buddy/cop action thriller and the angry social satire. It can’t even be unambiguous about the reason for its title. Presumably to placate the action-thriller buffs — some of whom are bound to be pissed off because satire is what closes in New Haven — there’s a throwaway line toward the end of the movie in which a vengeful cop is told he’ll have custody of the killer of his slain colleague for 15 minutes. Far more important is the satirical reference the movie bothers to cite only in the press notes: Andy Warhol’s 1968 assertion that “In the future everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.”

I’m a satire buff, but I have to confess that I do like at least a couple of the straight-ahead and relatively mindless action sequences: several cops chasing a Czech killer through busy midtown Manhattan traffic, while the killer, Emil, and his simpleminded Russian sidekick, Oleg (who videotapes everything and whose hero is Frank Capra), flee toward Central Park; and a fire marshal and a murder witness trying to escape from her apartment after it explodes in flames. Still, if it weren’t for the satire, I doubt that I would have been interested in seeing this picture again.

For the record, I enjoyed it just as much the second time, though it held up better as entertainment than as satire. Part of the reason may be that satire, even more than action, demands clarity and purity of purpose. By the time this movie gets to the homestretch, its attempt to combine a vitriolic anger at the media and the rabble-rousing, vigilantelike efforts of the fire marshal to defeat the villain is more than schizophrenic; by this point, the left hand barely seems to know what the right hand is doing.

Two movie satires that didn’t close in New Haven are Network (1976) and Forrest Gump (1994), neither of which attempted to double as a crime thriller. I suspect that one major reason they didn’t flop is that the targets in both movies — pushy feminists and cynical TV executives, ranting, hypocritical Black Panthers and fake hippie pacifists — are goonish, neocon cartoons, broader than barn doors and hence unthreatening to many in the audience. These movies were probably irritating only to grumpy liberals like myself who refused to accept that these strident parodies were accurate or ideologically neutral. Especially egregious were the supposedly sympathetic figures who reflected how the screenwriters (and presumably spectators) saw themselves: William Holden in Network is a “principled” middle-aged philanderer who can see through all the lies of the lefties while possessing nothing less than the Truth himself (a transparent and somewhat comical stand-in for Paddy Chayefsky in his 50s), and Tom Hanks in Forrest Gump is a saintlike, sweet-tempered, salt-of-the-earth moron who comically epitomizes the innate goodness of innocents everywhere (presumably an idealized version of screenwriter Eric Roth, novelist Winston Groom, or director Robert Zemeckis, each hankering after his lost childhood).

One could argue that the simplifications in 15 Minutes about ruthless TV producers and unethical lawyers aren’t much different, but you don’t have to be a liberal to find these caricatures fairly believable or their real-life counterparts fairly sickening. And even though the Russian videographer might be viewed as a Gump with a foreign accent, he and the even creepier Czech killer, both recent immigrants, are embodiments of our own worst impulses and tendencies, monsters whose excesses stem directly from their observations of us. Theoretically we couldn’t laugh at Gump without recognizing something of him in ourselves, and we’d be inclined to be affectionately indulgent about his foibles. Any laughter provoked by the Russian stooge is bound to be more troubled, because Oleg is clearly a kind of Frankenstein monster our culture has created and his innocence is far more dangerous.

Roseanne Barr is one of the people thanked in this movie’s closing acknowledgments. It isn’t clear whether the segment of her touchy-feely daytime talk show — about a man who confesses to sleeping with his daughter-in-law, then, after she offers her own tearful confession, kneels on the floor and remorsefully hugs his son — is an actual clip or a simulation, though I don’t suppose it matters. More significant is that shots of Emil and Oleg watching this segment (which ends with a freeze frame and the title “Next up: forgiveness”) alternate with the footage Oleg has just taken with a stolen video camera of Emil stabbing to death his former partner and the partner’s wife.

Writer-director John Herzfeld implicitly treats these two segments as practically interchangeable bits of shameless, pornographic spectacle. The Roseanne segment is already commodified; the snuff video hasn’t yet been, but as a subsequent development in the plot implies — a bit hysterically and implausibly, unless one allows Herzfeld some satiric leeway — this is only accidental. The media are equally willing to put either spectacle on display, complete with hypocritical justifications, to boost ratings. From this standpoint, the stupidity of a Russian Gump, the venality of a sensationalist TV newscaster and of a lawyer who’s ready to defend anybody, and the connivance of a killer trying to get off on an insanity plea and then make another kind of killing by selling the movie rights, are all morally equivalent — it’s no wonder that all four scummy characters wind up striking various deals. Herzfeld underscores his point by having the media happily allow a mugger with a knife in Central Park to portray himself as a hapless victim speaking earnestly about kids’ need for role models.

This sort of misanthropy may not add up to a complex analysis, but it makes for a much more satisfying notion of villainy than we usually get in cop thrillers. It also suggests that two sets of genre cliches can be a lot better than one, especially if alternating between them throws the viewer off balance by objectifying aspects of the suspense with the satire and undercutting aspects of the satire with the suspense. (Herzfeld’s previous feature, the 1996 2 Days in the Valley, negotiated its own numerous miniplots with somewhat less irony, apart from a penchant for including dog reaction shots — a veiled comment about the good-natured slavishness of his audience?)

For all the confusing signals it generates, Herzfeld’s contradictory approach encourages thought and reflection — something few cop thrillers do. The dialectic between the genres parallels the contrast between the lead buddies — a media-friendly, middle-aged gumshoe (Robert De Niro) and a younger fire marshal who shuns the media (Edward Burns), slightly tetchy rivals who find themselves paired in the investigation of Emil’s murders. Which one is the hero? First you think it’s the cop — not only because it’s De Niro, but also because he practices proposing to his girlfriend in front of a mirror, a hokey bit of business clearly intended to remind us of Taxi Driver. But the real hero turns out to be the fireman, who gradually becomes so pissed off by the media that he becomes another potential psycho/avenging angel like De Niro’s heroically demented vet — a nutcase we’re meant to cheer for. Whoever the hero is, he’s not what you might call consistently heroic, but we’re still supposed to be on his side whenever he’s ready to commit murder.

Herzfeld winds up getting his own hands just as dirty as those of his four villains — and he dirties us in the process, though he doesn’t make it easy for us to overlook his or our duplicity. That’s what I like about 15 Minutes. It expands Warhol’s witticism to say, more or less, “In the future, everyone will be a world-famous psycho killer for 15 minutes, and everyone will also be a world-famous psycho killer’s victim for roughly the same amount of time. In this future democracy of fame and attention, where equal employment opportunities rule, trying to distinguish between stars and fans, cynical media perpetrators and gullible spectators, predators and victims, will be pointless.” Which is precisely my idea of satire.

On Mohsen Makhmalbaf

From the Chicago Reader (April 11, 1997). I’ve suppressed the title/headline originally given to this piece, which I greatly regretted at the time, “Tortured Genius”. There are a few contributions of my own here that I also regret, but, for the record, I’ve decided to let this text stand. — J.R.

Films by Mohsen Makhmalbaf

It’s tempting but dangerous to approach artists from exotic cultures in terms of more familiar reference points — such as comparing Zhang Yimou’s Ju Dou to The Postman Always Rings Twice or reading Souleymane Cisse’s Brightness as if it were an African Star Wars, as some American and English critics have done. Yet to describe the styles and visions of the two major Iranian filmmakers of the 80s and 90s, Abbas Kiarostami and Mohsen Makhmalbaf, I’ve been exploring comparisons to Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky — a project obviously fraught with booby traps, but one that clarifies some of the important differences between these two major figures.

Last June the Film Center brought us seven features and nine short films by Kiarostami, and this month it’s showing ten features and one short documentary by Makhmalbaf, as well as three documentaries about him (one of them Kiarostami’s remarkable Close-up). This retrospective started last weekend with two of the most recent works, Makhmalbaf’s A Moment of Innocence and Houshang Golmakani’s Stardust-Stricken, Mohsen Makhmalbaf: A Portrait (both 1996). Half a dozen more films will show this week alone, and many of the best –The Peddler, Marriage of the Blessed, The Cyclist, and Close-up — will turn up the following week. It’s unfortunate that the films aren’t showing in chronological order — or in any logical order that I can discern — which makes the swerves in Makhmalbaf’s unpredictable career much harder to track. And regrettably absent are four features and a couple of recent short documentaries. (Two of the features, Nassoh’s Repentance [1982] and Two Sightless Eyes [1983], have never been subtitled; the third, The Nights of Zayandeh Roud [1991], is effectively a suppressed work; and the fourth, Gabbeh [1996], due to open commercially later this year, is missing because the U.S. distributor was unwilling to make it available for this retrospective.)

A key difference between these two writer-directors, which has only an oblique relevance to my Tolstoy-Dostoyevsky formula, is that Makhmalbaf is the most popular and respected filmmaker in Iran at the moment, despite his many run-ins with state censors, while Kiarostami is a hero principally elsewhere. Within Iranian society Kiarostami is widely regarded — and in some cases resented — as a self-serving pet of Western critics.

Though he came from a middle-class (albeit financially insecure) family, Dostoyevsky, whose first novel was entitled Poor Folk, called himself an “intellectual proletarian,” and an identification with society’s lower strata is clearly central to his work, as it is to Makhmalbaf’s. A central traumatic event that shaped Dostoyevsky’s future work was his arrest at age 27 for radical antigovernment activities (during the repressive reign of Czar Nicholas I) and his subsequent sentencing to death by a firing squad. This sentence was commuted at the last moment, and Dostoyevsky wound up with four years of hard labor in Siberia followed by four years of military service as an alternative sentence. But his belief that he was about to die left a permanent mark on his style and vision.

Something comparable happened to Makhmalbaf, a working-class fundamentalist and terrorist fighting the shah’s regime when he was arrested and tortured at the age of 17. Apparently it was only his youth that saved him from the firing squad; he wound up serving a five-year prison term that ended only with the 1979 revolution. Judging from a text by Makhmalbaf recently published in English that appears to be semiautobiographical, he fully expected to be killed during the early stages of his incarceration.

The incident that led to his arrest — Makhmalbaf stabbed a policeman with a knife — is the focus of A Moment of Innocence, his most recent feature. It’s one sign of his change over 22 years that the policeman he stabbed is invited to help re-create the event (as an unofficial, on-screen “codirector” who coaches the actor playing him) and show what he was going through at the time. A fictionalized version of Makhmalbaf’s arrest, torture, and stint in prison is the focus of Boycott (1985), and it’s no less telling that this film ends with its hero’s execution.

Comparing Kiarostami to Tolstoy involves a much looser set of analogies. For starters, Kiarostami hails from the upper middle class, not the cultured gentry, and his cautious distance from Islamic fundamentalism throughout his career has nothing in common with Tolstoy’s belated, fervent Christianity. Indeed, the physicality and serenity and cosmic overviews of both artists — in contrast to what might be termed the tormented psychological and spiritual underviews of Dostoyevsky and Makhmalbaf — may constitute the sum of their shared traits. They’re both masters of framing landscapes and vistas in contemplative long shots, while Makhmalbaf and Dostoyevsky are expressionist sketch artists exposing the cramped and conflicted interiors of their own brains in staccato flashes of lightning. Otherwise Tolstoy and Kiarostami seem to share common ground mainly in contrast with the nervous, twitchy, and hysterical styles of Dostoyevsky and Makhmalbaf and the comparable behavior of many of their characters.

When I took a course devoted to the two Russian authors in college the class was split between partisans of each; I can’t recall anyone apart from the teacher who expressed equal fidelity to both. I belonged to the Tolstoy camp, and if I reread both writers today I’d probably feel the same. I also feel closer to Kiarostami than to Makhmalbaf, maybe because my background is closer to his. But much as I suspect that Dostoyevsky has more to say about Russian culture than a universalist like Tolstoy — which can help when it comes to understanding a filmmaker like Andrei Tarkovsky, for instance — I’m fairly certain that it’s Makhmalbaf, not Kiarostami, who has the most to teach me about Iranian culture, particularly over the past quarter of a century.

Apart from growing up poor, Makhmalbaf was an unwanted child, as we learn from Stardust-Stricken; he was essentially raised by his grandmother, whom he later had to support and care for. (This experience inspired the middle episode of his three-part feature The Peddler, about a scatterbrained, spastic, and persecuted Jerry Lewis type whose life is devoted to caring for his aged and senile mother.) After he emerged from prison he returned to some form of political activism for a short spell, then helped establish a group of artists known as the Islamic Propagation Organization and became a prolific writer of plays, essays, short stories, and eventually screenplays. One early monograph — a good indication of how far he’s traveled ideologically — propounded a fundamentalist argument against women appearing onstage. His first screenplay to be realized (by someone else) was The Explanation (1981), and he directed his first feature the following year. Reportedly neither of his first two features — both marked by didactic Islamic propaganda — had much of a public impact.

I’m told that Makhmalbaf now dislikes Fleeing From Evil to God (1984) and Boycott, his third and fourth features (showing on April 27), and agreed to include them in this touring retrospective only after recutting them. The first [see poster above] is by all counts the worst of his films I’ve seen, bad on just about every level — acting, mise en scene, script, and overall conception. But its evident sincerity combined with its naivete is undeniably fascinating, because I’ve never seen anything else like it; its rough American equivalent would be a painting of Jesus in the wilderness executed by an illiterate farmer. The only Makhmalbaf movie I’ve seen in ‘Scope, it follows five nameless religious men, all dressed like monks, to a desert island as they flee from the devil’s temptations. The opening music calls to mind a spaghetti western, but very little happens in the film; the “action” consists mainly of metaphysical speculation spelled out in allegorical terms, not any sort of struggle with evil or Satan in the real world.

No two Makhmalbaf films are alike. Moving from film to film, you see a mercurial, troubled intelligence constantly seizing upon new stylistic influences, often seeming at odds with itself within individual features. But it’s still a shock to pass from a strained, amateur exercise like Fleeing From Evil to God to the skillful and frenetic Boycott, which abounds in Hollywood-style action sequences (including a shoot-out, a prison escape, and an adroit car chase), goofy and upsetting subjective moments (such as the hero’s nightmare of ants devouring the flesh on his face and animated ants in a later sequence), and apparently unmotivated freeze-frames tossed into the middle of a prison riot. The film clearly charts Makhmalbaf’s disillusionment with politics: “I used to fight because I existed,” the protagonist says in an early scene, after his arrest. “Now I no longer exist.” (Much later, he dryly notes that “imperialism and socialism are the same to a corpse” to a communist fellow prisoner bent on turning him into a Marxist martyr.) It also shows a growing commitment to popular filmmaking; as a fundamentalist youth, Makhmalbaf says in an interview in Stardust-Stricken, he was so opposed to cinema that he once refused to speak to his grandmother for several days after she went to the movies. (Apparently he now dislikes Boycott for its commercialism and has the same objection to The Actor, made eight years later, a box-office hit in Iran.)

In the April issue of Sight and Sound, Hadani Ditmars reports Makhmalbaf saying that “the best Iranian films came from the 1985-90 period, when censorship was at a low ebb.” Considering the output of both Makhmalbaf and Kiarostami during these six years, it’s a thesis well worth considering. During this stretch Kiarostami made The First Graders, Where Is My Friend’s Home?, Homework, and Close-up (he made his masterpiece Life and Nothing More… in 1992); Makhmalbaf made Boycott, The Peddler (1986), The Cyclist (1987), Marriage of the Blessed (1988), Time of Love (1990), and The Nights of Zayandeh Roud. The last two pictures were promptly banned, and Time of Love — a three-part theme-and-variations about adultery shot in Turkey with Turkish actors — seems a relatively minor work (albeit a thoughtful and provocative one). But the preceding three pictures may well represent Makhmalbaf’s most important achievements to date.

All three are tortured, lyrical arias about human suffering in contemporary Iran that attack social problems — urban squalor, social cruelty, and crime in the three sketches of The Peddler; commercial exploitation in The Cyclist; the nervous condition of a traumatized veteran of the Iran-Iraq war in Marriage of the Blessed – with an unrelenting hallucinatory fury. All three pictures, along with Boycott, are somewhat out of control, but as with Dostoyevsky in novels like The Idiot, it’s when Makhmalbaf is most out of control that he seems to cover the widest emotional and poetic range of material in the everyday world that surrounds him. Rather like Martin Scorsese wrestling with the demons and contradictions of his childhood Catholicism, Makhmalbaf seems to be fighting new versions of the same battle between his Islamic background and his skeptical, evolving intelligence in every project, but in these three films the scope of his ambition and engagement appears to be the widest.

In a recent interview Makhmalbaf notes that “a major difference between Iranian and Western cinema is that in the West, the evolution of cinema began with paintings, then photography…it was a progression through image….But in the East, our tradition of the Persian miniature did not really affect our cinema. At the beginning of the Islamic era, paintings and drawings were discouraged. So our tradition of image is not as old as our tradition of poetry… [and] we went straight from narrative to cinema….Our story-telling tradition is very poetic.”

How does Makhmalbaf’s visual style reflect this alternative tradition? Largely, it seems, through its eclectic editing and framing, including frequent recourse to what Western viewers regard as eccentric camera angles — shots where the camera is lower or higher than we’d expect or where it frames the action obliquely, sometimes through windows or doors or with various obstructions cluttering the foreground (such as prison bars in Boycott). These angles are especially apparent in Boycott, The Peddler, The Cyclist, Marriage of the Blessed, and The Actor, and what seems most disorienting about them is their seeming lack of motivation. In contrast to the Western visual tradition, which has the legacy of painting and still photography lurking behind every shot we perceive as “normal,” Makhmalbaf’s choices of camera placement seem wider and more arbitrary — especially when he’s filming the same action from a succession of vantage points, as he does throughout The Cyclist — because the meanings of these angles are less coded, even when they carry the clear influence of Western cinema. This gives his scattershot technique a freshness combined with an overall sense of chaos: like a restlessly shifting insomniac, a typical montage leaps around a given subject with desperate abandon, as if looking for and never finding a proper resting place. This might be termed the Makhmalbaf twitch effect, and it’s central to the nervous energy of his movies.

Turning to the cinema as a subject in his next three features, Makhmalbaf goes through a significant series of gear changes. Once Upon a Time, Cinema (1992), a comic fantasy about the birth of Iranian cinema, most of it in black and white, seems designed as a peace offering to the Iranian government, which banned his two previous features. It isn’t devoid of provocation, particularly when it comes to handling the shah’s harem — Makhmalbaf is invariably something of a troublemaker even when he’s mending bridges — but it’s mainly a work of bits and pieces, never more so than when it’s summing up the history of Iranian cinema in the sentimental closing montage (which ends with an emblematic landscape from Kiarostami’s Where Is My Friend’s Home?). Missing from this montage is any scrap of what I regard as the greatest of all Iranian films, Forugh Farrokhzad’s 1962 short documentary about a leper colony, The House Is Black – a film Makhmalbaf caught up with only in 1995 at the Locarno film festival. Farrokhzad’s radical poetic humanism makes mincemeat of the first episode of The Peddler, a horrified look at the government’s treatment of retarded children — an episode with a chamber-of-horrors approach that, for all its power, seems cheap and voyeuristic in comparison.

Images From the Qajar Dynasty (1992) is a short documentary about the shah’s palace that figures in Once Upon a Time, Cinema (both films are showing together at the Film Center this Sunday). Dedicated to French filmmaker Albert Lamorisse — the Oscar-winning director of The Red Balloon (1956) who died while shooting a documentary about Iran–it begins with a helicopter shot in homage to his work, before moving on to glancing echoes of Alain Resnais and, in the use of sound effects to accompany paintings, Sergei Paradjanov (a major inspiration in Makhmalbaf’s subsequent Gabbeh).

The Actor (1993), a semitragic satire about contemporary Iran and its media, makes several references to Once Upon a Time, Cinema (using some of the same actors, making allusions to Charlie Chaplin). It was made around the time that Makhmalbaf’s first wife burned to death in a domestic accident, and there may be some bitter echoes of his marriage in the grotesque, strident quarrels in this film between a movie actor and his infertile wife–which might account in part for Makhmalbaf’s recent antipathy toward the film. (He subsequently married his late wife’s sister and has children from both marriages; as one indication of the degree to which he’s still affected by his impoverished roots, I’ve heard that he refuses to allow any of his children to own more than one set of shoes at a time — a rule he also adheres to.) As a modernist work that’s also an attack on modernity, The Actor seems divided against itself in a manner that’s characteristically Makhmalbafian — and bad tempered in a way that periodically makes it seem like a rebuttal to the good-natured comedy of his previous film.

As an indication of Makhmalbaf’s popularity in Iran by the early 90s, his casting call for Salaam Cinema (1994) yielded about 3,000 applicants — a virtual riot that we see at the beginning of the film, a documentary chronicling some of the auditions. Here Makhmalbaf’s role as provocateur is only incidentally aimed at the audience; it’s mainly directed at the hapless applicants, whom he mercilessly bullies, taunts, and plays with — all but parodying some of the psychological tortures he underwent as a youth and depicted in Boycott. (As if to drive home this disturbing parallel, he shows at one point his manipulations of a former political prisoner who’s auditioning along with his two sons.) It’s clear that Makhmalbaf’s sadistic and authoritarian mind games — such as pitting friends and relatives against one another (”The one that cries the fastest knows the most about love”) — carry a didactic message about the social power of cinema. But whether on this occasion it’s a useful lesson or a callous excuse for exploitation is a question he seems willing to leave open — refusing to respond when one brutalized teenage girl throws one of his testy questions back at him (”Would you rather be an artist or a humane person?”) or claiming a bit later, without much conviction, that “it’s the camera that’s so cruel.”

In more ways than one, these sequences call to mind the tears of a young schoolboy frightened by the documentary camera crew filming him in Kiarostami’s Homework, raising the whole thorny issue of how much intimidation by cinema and the exposure of that intimidation can justify each other. Determining to what extent Kiarostami’s kindness or Makhmalbaf’s cruelty is real has a lot to do with how one approaches the work of either filmmaker — though this doesn’t mean the answer to one question should determine the answer to the other. That both filmmakers are swimming in the same treacherous waters — trying to discover what truth and honesty mean within a repressive society that also may contain kinds of wisdom, beauty, and humanity missing from our own, and trying to express those meanings in universal as well as local terms–suggests that we should attend to both of them, not choose between them.

Even if one concludes that Kiarostami is merely more adept in cloaking his sadistic use of power than Makhmalbaf — the interpretation of some Iranian viewers — the problem posed by both filmmakers about their authoritarian roles as filmmakers in an authoritarian society remains the same. In films as diverse as Homework, Close-up, and Life and Nothing More…, Salaam Cinema, The Actor, and A Moment of Innocence, both artists are either literally or figuratively inserting themselves as characters in their own fictions and documentaries and charting their interactions with working-class Iranian society — an ongoing project of self-interrogation that has few counterparts in Western cinema (with the partial exception of Godard’s experiments with French television in the 70s).

If Makhmalbaf remains the more troubling figure, especially for Western viewers, there’s little doubt that he’s also the more exposed — that’s what the Makhmalbaf twitch effect conveys to us, for better and for worse. Each of his films proposes a different kind of laboratory to test the pertinence and persistence of Islam in the modern world, overheated experiments in which he uses his own tormented soul.

Lie Lady Lie [HOUSESITTER]

From the Chicago Reader (June 12, 1992). — J.R.

HOUSESITTER

** (Worth seeing)

Directed by Frank Oz

Written by Mark Stein and Brian Grazer

With Steve Martin, Goldie Hawn, Dana Delany, Julie Harris, Donald Moffat, Peter MacNicol, Richard B. Shull, Laurel Cronin, Roy Cooper, and Christopher Durang.

I’ve seen previews of two summer comedies so far — Sister Act and Housesitter – that have elicited gales of hysterical laughter from their mainly young audiences. In both cases the hysteria and volume of the laughter seemed a bit out of proportion. The one-joke premise of Sister Act – that there’s something indescribably hilarious about nuns behaving slightly irreverently — smacks more of quiet desperation growing out of repression than of something to feel happy about. I suspect that if I were a Catholic I’d feel more offended than charmed by the complacency of this running gag, whatever Emile Ardolino’s efficiency as a director. There’s a certain darkness behind many of the laughs in Housesitter, too, but at least they relate to a zeitgeist I can feel part of.

The main comic staple of Housesitter, apart from the enjoyable physical clowning of Steve Martin and Goldie Hawn, is a theme I associate especially with the comedies of Billy Wilder: the baroque complications that grow out of elaborate lies. The first Wilder examples that spring to mind are The Major and the Minor; Some Like It Hot; One, Two, Three; Kiss Me, Stupid; The Fortune Cookie; and Avanti!. The lies in these movies are about age, gender, politics, prostitution, physical injury, and adultery.

In Housesitter nearly all the lies relate explicitly to marriage and implicitly to class. But before we get to the lies, we’re treated to a prologue. Newton Davis (Steve Martin), an unfulfilled Boston architect, presents a literally gift-wrapped house he designed and built in their New England hometown of Dobbs Mill to Becky (Dana Delany), the woman he loves, as a marriage proposal, and she promptly turns him down. Three months later, still in love with Becky, he meets Gwen (Goldie Hawn), a waitress at a Hungarian restaurant in Boston, and spends the night with her in her apartment. That evening he shows her a sketch on a cocktail napkin of the house he built for Becky, noting that he hasn’t yet sold it and that it’s still standing there empty. End of prologue.

On her own initiative and without telling Newton, Gwen takes a bus to Dobbs Mill. Posing as Newton’s newlywed wife, she proceeds to fill the house with furniture and groceries that she charges to him, and meets Newton’s parents (Donald Moffat and Julie Harris) as well as Becky in the process. Newton eventually arrives with the intention of selling the house and is shocked by what Gwen has done; but he also discovers that Becky finds him more appealing as a newlywed and decides to keep up the masquerade as a means of wooing her.

Most of Gwen’s lies are outlandish improvisations that lead to other inventions. She tells Becky that she and Newton met in a hospital, that her face was all bandaged up because of a hit-and-run auto accident, and that they made love and even went through the wedding ceremony before the doctor removed the gauze. She also mentions that Newton paid her medical bills. When Becky, knowing that he had to borrow money to build their prospective dream house, asks her how Newton could afford it, Gwen invents another lie about Newton getting a promotion at his architectural firm.

Newton’s efforts to keep abreast of her inventions and add a few of his own have a lot to do with what keeps this movie cooking. The creative flights of fancy seem to work up a momentum of their own, and eventually even become a form of real wooing between the ersatz couple. The lie about the job promotion, for instance, gives birth to a whole series of lies that Gwen tells Newton’s boss (Roy Cooper) to try to get him that promotion; one of these is that her father from Ohio and the boss were in the same Army unit together. To back up this lie, she eventually has to recruit a couple of Boston street people (Richard B. Shull and Laurel Cronin) to play her parents when a wedding reception is held at the new house in Dobbs Mill.

Much of what makes this overall premise not merely funny but recognizable and even familiar is the fact that this country has been going through an extended period in which everything from the economy to the wars we wage is based on elaborate pyramids of deception, including ungainly amounts of self-deception — the way we’re encouraged to build our lives on credit and ignore portions of our own history represent only the tip of the iceberg. (The dream house Newton designs and builds on spec seems emblematic.) By proposing that our compulsive lie spinning is not only harmful, which we already know, but also sexy, creative, helpful, and therapeutic, Housesitter may simply be doing what most Hollywood comedies do: contriving to make us feel redeemed. But it also touches a portion of our psyches that we’re already pretty hysterical about; simultaneously guilt-ridden and defensive, we’re more than usually prone to responding with giddy laughter.

It’s gradually made clear that part of Gwen’s motive for her deceptions is a sense that she’s been excluded from things because of her class (”I just wanted to see what it would be like to live in that picture,” she says at one point to Newton, alluding to his sketch). But the film goes to great lengths not to spell this out in concrete detail. Hawn’s part is slender, though she’s a bit more adept than usual in finagling her way through it entertainingly. But at least her character isn’t cut short the way her false parents and Becky are by being defined exclusively according to a cliched notion of their respective classes.

As a mainly unsympathetic portrait of an upper-crust young woman, Delany’s Becky is certainly adequate as a foil for the two leads; but try to think about her character on her own terms and you can’t get very far. And Shull and Cronin’s characters are downright offensive because the movie seems to equate their homelessness with their alcoholism. That this movie seems happy to exploit this unexamined assumption is nauseating; but it’s also a crafty ploy that makes Gwen’s humble origins seem more respectable.

Steve Martin can’t do much with his character either, but only because he, like Robin Williams, seems to have forsaken some of the wilder aspects of his original comic persona for the blander, cornier characters that tend to figure in more commercially successful movies. (Similarly, Peter MacNicol makes Newton’s friend at work look and sound as much as possible like Billy Crystal, on the apparent assumption that familiarity breeds box-office receipts.) Fortunately, Martin has more success than usual drawing on his physical resources to give his uninteresting character some zany punctuations. Shortly after he enters his fully furnished house for the first time, he slips on the floor, falls over a sofa, and lands squarely on his feet with the kind of beautiful aplomb that, if memory serves, he last showed doing somersaults on a baseball field in Parenthood.

I suspect most of what makes Housesitter more watchable than anticipated is Frank Oz’s gradually developing grace as a comic director, also visible in What About Bob? and his hyperventilated use of Martin in Little Shop of Horrors. He can’t turn the dross in the script into gold, but he certainly gets the best out of his actors. (Too bad the script doesn’t allow more stretching room for Julie Harris, but wasting consummate pros tends to be standard operating procedure these days.) Oz also milks the most out of the comic situations, so as long as we aren’t reminded too insistently of the characters’ thinness, this is pretty funny and enjoyable stuff.

The Good, the Bad, and the English [DEAD AGAIN]

From the Chicago Reader (August 30, 1991). — J.R.

DEAD AGAIN ** (Worth seeing) Directed by Kenneth Branagh Written by Scott Frank With Kenneth Branagh, Emma Thompson, Derek Jacobi, Andy Garcia, Hanna Schygulla, Robin Williams, Campbell Scott, and Wayne Knight.

The most instructive evening I’ve spent in the English theater was the first time I went, in the mid-60s, to a series of three one-act plays written by and starring Noel Coward called Suite in Three Keys, which may well have been Coward’s last stage appearance. In retrospect, what seemed so peculiarly English about the whole experience was the communion that existed between Coward and his audience. The plots of all three plays were negligible and the repartee more standard-issue than brilliant. All that really mattered, it seemed, was the mysterious intimacy, the almost conspiratorial rapport between Coward and his public, which had more to do with personality than with narrative, character, or even performance in the usual sense. The overall effect seemed to have a lot more to do with entertainment than with art; the feeling was much closer to that of patrons crowded around a piano in a pub than to theatergoers pondering lofty questions like the meaning of life. This rapport came to mind on viewing Kenneth Branagh’s second movie, Dead Again. At first glance, the nationality of Dead Again is an open question. It’s an American studio release scripted and produced by Americans and set in Los Angeles. Directed by an Englishman, it features three English actors — Branagh, Emma Thompson, and Derek Jacobi — in the principal roles; Branagh and Thompson play two roles apiece, and only one of these four roles is English. Why bother about whether Dead Again is English or not? I think it matters, finally, because the line that’s drawn between art and entertainment in this country is different from the one drawn in England. In this country any distinction — specious or otherwise — that may have existed between art and trash up through the 50s was torn asunder in the 60s by the combined forces of movie auteurism, artistically self-conscious rock, and camp taste (among other influences), followed by the Mixmaster blends and confusions of postmodernism in the 70s and 80s. The result is that now practically everything from Barton Fink to MTV is treated like “high art” and “entertainment” is used strictly for things like TV game shows and sitcoms. But in England simple entertainment is given a somewhat wider berth. Diversion doesn’t require the trappings of “serious” art in order to be treated with deference. Graham Greene may have divided his novels between his more “serious” ones and his “entertainments,” but both have tended to be valued by English readers for their entertainment value, and the thrillers aren’t disparaged because they don’t aspire more to “art.” I doubt that many of the people in Noel Coward’s audience were bothered about whether or not what they were watching was “art,” either. By contrast, as J. Hoberman has implied, the recent reprinting and repackaging here of noir novels (by Jim Thompson, David Goodis, and others) as if they were high-toned masterworks seems to suggest that trashy entertainment can now be taken “seriously” in our culture only if it’s tarted up to resemble a night at the opera. In any case, Dead Again can be regarded as either failed art or successful entertainment, as heavy straining or light sendup — even as “pretentiously unpretentious” or “unpretentiously pretentious” — all depending on which national lens it’s seen through. The first time I saw the movie, I took it as a trashy American-style entertainment that ultimately strangled on its own excesses as it lusted after “artistic” credentials — rather in the manner of a Brian De Palma film, albeit with less evidence of sincerity or personal conviction. The second time I saw it, I took it more as a kind of coded sport between Branagh and his English viewers, which made it seem no less disheveled but somewhat more comprehensible. Clearly Branagh has arrived on our shores weighted with the baggage of his associations with English theater and Shakespeare. For people who consider his Henry V an art movie simply because it’s Shakespeare, there’s something rather disconcerting about his turning next to material that’s closer to Daphne Du Maurier (in atmosphere) and Agatha Christie (in trickiness). This uneasiness is related to our peculiar 20th-century notion that Shakespeare belongs to rarefied “high” culture rather than to popular “low” culture (a bias that, as we’re reminded by Lawrence W. Levine’s fascinating Highbrow Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America, is very different from the way Shakespeare was experienced here during the first half of the 19th century). The fact that the English are more able than we are to relish the pop side of Shakespeare — the low comedy and the hammy grandiloquence that was enjoyed more readily by our American ancestors — suggests that Branagh may be more of an entertainer and less of a highfalutin artist than our built-in cultural biases automatically assume him to be. From this point of view, apart from Henry V’s infinitely better script material, Branagh’s two movies are reasonably compatible.

On the other hand, it’s also possible to regard Dead Again as a rather disingenuous form of slumming: setting out to beat the Yanks at their own game, Branagh hurls thunderbolts of flashy effects at his audience and cares only tuppence for the content. (His witty first appearance in the movie as an American detective smacks of in-joke and subterfuge: he’s parked in a convertible and speaking on a cellular phone when a passing truck driver calls out that he’s parked on the wrong side of the street.) His movie is lots of fun, the narrative gripping if convoluted, but when the postponed revelations and messages finally come crashing to the fore, it’s every bit as silly and only about half as convincing as Field of Dreams or Ghost — two movies, by the way, that were significantly developed by a coproducer of this movie, Lindsay Doran. A pivotal moment toward the end points up the nonseriousness of the proceedings: When some of the characters enter an artist’s studio, practically the first thing we see is a duplication of Salvador Dali’s famous melted-watch painting, here with a pair of gold scissors — a major visual and narrative motif throughout the movie — kitschily added to the familiar elements. Shortly we see all sorts of other artworks involving scissors in the same room. The gag collapses and ridicules the minimal coherence of the fictional world that the film has established up to this point, and the fact that Branagh is so eager to use it suggests how lightly he takes that coherence.

Most of the pleasure of Dead Again depends on the unraveling of its mysteries, so I’ll just say briefly, for the record, that it involves an amnesiac American woman (Emma Thompson) with recurring nightmares, an American detective named Mike Church (Branagh) who more or less adopts her, a newspaper photographer (Wayne Knight) who helps them out, a former psychiatrist working in a supermarket (Robin Williams) who serves as the detective’s occasional guru, and an English antique dealer (Derek Jacobi) with a talent for hypnosis. When the antique dealer hypnotizes the woman, we see her flashbacks in black and white; recapitulating her nightmares, they involve another set of characters in Los Angeles: an English woman (Thompson) who falls in love with and marries a German composer (Branagh) who apparently murders her, a German housekeeper (Hanna Schygulla) and her son who live with the composer, and a reporter of obscure nationality named Baker (Andy Garcia). (There are some indications that the reporter is supposed to be English, but Garcia’s clotted accent sounds vaguely Eastern European.)

What ensues involves reincarnation, the eventual reduction of at least three of the more interesting characters to simple narrative props, surprises involving the identities of three other characters, a cornball love story, and a lot of stylistic fancy footwork — particularly intercutting between the two plots — that alternately serves to obfuscate and elucidate what’s going on. Some of this climactic intercutting is impressive in terms of narrative economy but ultimately rather superfluous in terms of both exposition and drama; it registers as virtuosity taking place in a void. By the end, we’re more likely to be exhausted by the formal gymnastics than moved or persuaded by what the story is saying. This is because Branagh has basically been treating the story as one would a libretto — a disposable vehicle designed simply to inspire and showcase melodies (i.e., the performances and the mise en scene). The fact that Emma Thompson is married to Branagh in real life adds a strain of subtextual meaning to the stories of both of the movie’s romantic couples that ultimately counts for more than the stories themselves, and there are other in-jokes that function even more esoterically. Dead Again doesn’t add up to much as a mystery story either. It reminds me of something Edmund Wilson once said after reading one of Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe novels, in one lengthy magisterial sentence of complaint: “I finally got to feel that I had to unpack large crates by swallowing the excelsior in order to find at the bottom a few bent and rusty nails, and I began to nurse a rankling conviction that detective stories in general are able to profit by an unfair advantage in the code which forbids the reviewer to give away the secret to the public–a custom which results in the concealment of the pointlessness of a good deal of this fiction and affords a protection to the authors which no other department of writing enjoys.” Worst of all, the movie cheats so outrageously that the viewer can’t pick up clues and match wits with the detective in classic mystery fashion; one simply has to agree to go along for the ride and agree to be surprised. At least half of the revelations of the plot prove to be capricious and irrelevant, and perhaps another third are never adequately explained. But if sheer diversion is what you’re after rather than art that means something, there’s little doubt that Dead Again will keep you happy — even if you never do figure out what the title is supposed to mean. You certainly won’t be starved for personality.