JonathanRosenbaum.com

Reinventing the Present [10]

From the Chicago Reader (April 11, 2003). — J.R.

10

*** (A must-see)

Directed by Abbas Kiarostami

With Mania Akbari, Amin Maher, Roya Arabshahi, Katayoun Taleidzadeh, Mandana Sharbaf, Amene Moradi, and Kamran Adl.

In my mind, there isn’t as much of a distinction between documentary and fiction as there is between a good movie and a bad one. — Abbas Kiarostami in an interview

One way to identify the world’s greatest filmmakers is to determine which ones have found it necessary to reinvent the cinema from the ground up. The names that quickly come to my mind are Antonioni, Bresson, Chaplin, Dreyer, Eisenstein, Godard, Griffith, Kubrick, Mizoguchi, Renoir, Tati, and Welles — a far from exhaustive list of mercurial artists who rethought the nature of the medium not once but repeatedly, most often to their commercial disadvantage.

Not all of these figures qualify as “difficult,” though even such crowd pleasers as Chaplin, Griffith, and Kubrick were called that at some points during their careers. Whether people wound up seeing them as old-fashioned or unfashionable, these artists refused to turn themselves into commodities, alienating even their most passionate fans by confounding expectations and changing the rules of the game, and at times scaring off potential investors. By the time many partisans of Dreyer’s Day of Wrath and Welles’s Citizen Kane finally grasped the reconfigurations of Ordet and Touch of Evil, their directors had switched gears again, delivering the disconcerting Gertrud and Chimes at Midnight.

I’m not alone in placing Abbas Kiarostami in the company of such figures — though he’s been luckier than most of them so far, shooting with such tiny budgets and crews and commanding enough of an international audience that he’s been able to make precisely the films he chooses, even in Iran. (Getting them shown there is another matter.) But I have to confess that sometimes I’ve been slow to recognize and applaud his reinventions of himself and of cinema — just as I’ve sometimes been slow to accept the reinventions of the directors on the above list. We all exhaust certain works and aesthetic positions at different rates, and great artists often exhaust their own before their audiences and critics.

Kiarostami’s 10, opening this week at the Music Box, may well represent one of these disjunctions, for in it he seems to have abandoned much of what he’s done best in terms of visual composition, richness of detail in sound and image, diversity of characters and landscapes, and storytelling. Yet it has forced me to consider whether I’ve been misconstruing what he’s capable of — regarding only the traits I like most as the essential ones. I found 10 more immediately exciting as journalism in some respects than his other recent features. And I found it less immediately exciting as art, though repeated viewings have made it seem artistically fresher every time — even the drama becomes sharper with repetition. Kiarostami’s mastery of his material also remains evident throughout, even if it’s less obvious; the best example is his capacity to make the numerous jump cuts in the opening sequence virtually invisible. As J. Hoberman recently noted in the Village Voice, “Paradoxically, Kiarostami’s own absence serves to push his style to its limit. The more minimal the movie, the more it is recognizably his.” I wonder if this might also be said of his recent half-dozen experimental shorts about water, which are expected to surface at Cannes next month.

Since I regard Kiarostami as the most gifted director now working anywhere in the world, it stands to reason that my expectations when I first saw 10 were abnormally high. It hasn’t met all those expectations, but by changing the rules of the game it has given me more to ponder than recent, more satisfying works by other directors. Kiarostami takes risks that go well beyond the alleged risks taken by commercial wizards such as Steven Spielberg, who’s never come close to truly challenging his audience, not even in 1941.

All of Kiarostami’s fictional and nonfictional features since Where Is the Friend’s House? (1987) have been partly concerned with transactions between poor and rich people, and 10 – which combines fiction and nonfiction in a manner that seems relatively new to him — is no exception. Like his last six full-length films, it makes moving vehicles, especially cars, central — the camera virtually never strays from the front seat of a single car. But 10 is also the first movie since the very atypical early film Report (1977) that’s about the urban middle class, Kiarostami’s own milieu. Perhaps for this reason it’s less multicultural and more specifically Iranian than his others — its world is narrower because its boundaries are more firmly determined by class. (Kiarostami wasn’t born into the middle class — as a youth he worked as a traffic cop, among other things. But the domestic success of some of his movies — Where Is the Friend’s House?, Close-up, and Life and Nothing More – changed all that.) Local Iranian critic Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa points out that his use of the DV camera “has some of the intimacy of home video and some of the surreptitiousness of the surveillance camera” — which can be seen as two primary middle-class emblems.

There’s something indescribably poignant about the pseudonewsreel prologue to The Beginning or the End (1947), a docudrama I recently saw about the development of the atomic bomb, especially now that there’s been talk within our government about using nuclear weapons again. We see actors playing scientists from the U.S., Canada, and the UK burying a time capsule, to be opened in 2446, beside 3,000-year-old California redwoods. “Among the many items and records sealed in the time capsule,” intones the narrator, “were a movie projector, with instructions for its use engraved on copper, and a print of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer motion picture dramatization The Beginning or the End — a title expressing the fear of people today that a future atomic war may destroy all humanity.”

I don’t know which I find more moving — the faith in 1947 that people will still be around in the 25th century or the worry that they won’t. But the sincere expression of both sentiments makes this moment especially suitable for a time capsule — far more so than any in the movie that follows.

Movies, whether fictions or documentaries, have always captured and preserved moments and fragments of space; rather than being intended for the contemplation of people living in future centuries, they become part of an ongoing dialogue with people around the world about the future of humanity. At once simple and revolutionary, 10 is a modest gesture offered in that spirit — a film that says, “This is where we are now.” It gives us 89 minutes in a car moving through Tehran traffic on ten separate occasions, probably in late 2001 or early 2002. (The sequences are numbered backward like a countdown, from ten to one. Incidentally, the first rocket countdown in history was the invention of Fritz Lang and appeared in his 1928 Woman in the Moon.) With the exception of a single shot taken from just outside the car, everything we see comes from two small digital video cameras attached to the dashboard, framing either the driver or the passenger seated beside her — though sometimes we see the hands of the driver or the passenger in the shots of the other.

The driver, whom we don’t see until the end of the first and longest sequence, is a beautiful and stylish young woman (Mania Akbari) — a professional photographer who has recently divorced and remarried and is visibly a member of the upper middle class. She gives rides to three people she knows well: her ten-year-old son Amin, her sister, and a woman friend. And she gives rides to three strangers: an old woman and a young one, both en route to or from a shrine, and a prostitute, who gets into the car under the mistaken impression that the driver is a male customer. When the prostitute eventually gets out she finds a real customer; it’s the only time we see her, though it’s from behind, and it’s the only shot in the film that’s outside the car. As critic Gilberto Perez has noted, in a forthcoming piece for the Yale Review, “The film’s sole departure from its two fixed camera positions…implies that if [the prostitute’s] story were to be told a different point of view would be called for.” Amin appears four times — he’s in both the first and final sequences — and the young woman en route to the shrine is given two rides; the remaining four women appear only once each.

It’s worth noting that in recent years Kiarostami has been making films mainly for international audiences, not Iranian ones, which hasn’t been by choice. I heard that The Wind Will Carry Us never opened in Tehran because it was deemed uncommercial, and it seems that ABC Africa hasn’t been seen widely in Iran either. Kiarostami hoped 10 would get a broad Iranian release, but censors said he had to make cuts in two sequences, which would have forced him to remove the sequences entirely — a step that logically would have necessitated retitling the film 8. I haven’t heard which sequences these were, but the likeliest would probably be the one with the prostitute (seven), the one in which Amin discusses the porn his father watches on satellite TV (five), or the one in which the young woman, whose hopes for marriage have recently been dashed, removes her scarf to reveal that she’s shaved off most of her hair (two).

It’s also worth noting that the driver and her son are played by a real mother and son, but the prostitute isn’t played by a real prostitute; according to Kiarostami, he couldn’t find a real one willing to take the part. None of the actors is a professional — apparently the case in all his films, with the exception of Shohreh Agdashlu, who turned pro after playing the female lead in Report, and Mohammad-Ali Keshavarz, who was already a professional when he played the director in Through the Olive Trees (1994).

As in all of Kiarostami’s films at least since the 90s, none of the dialogue is scripted, though how the dialogue is generated has changed. In the earlier features Kiarostami, standing offscreen, would either provoke the actors’ responses or feed them their lines on the spot. For 10 he spent weeks rehearsing the actors, proposing basic situations and asking them to improvise, then left them on their own during the takes, remaining hidden in the back of the car but not directing them. All this careful preparation results in a blend of fiction and documentary so thorough that distinguishing one from the other is impossible while watching the film. Kiarostami has described his method this way: “I state, with a great deal of caution, that direction, in the usual sense of the word, can vanish in this kind of process. In this form of cinema, the director is more like a football coach.” In these terms, all seven actors are powerful team players, and the degree to which Kiarostami has absented himself from their performances is highlighted in the final credits, which consist of only a list of names.

It would be overstating the case to call 10 feminist, yet it broaches the issue of the condition and suffering of women in a world dominated by men in a way no other Kiarostami feature has done. He pointedly limited his male cast to one bratty ten-year-old and brief glimpses of the boy’s father, who’s some distance away in another car as he either drops off or picks up the child. Kiarostami has more to say here about the Iranian patriarchy than ever before, but at no point does the film become preachy. As in his other features, Kiarostami trusts in the intelligence and imagination of the viewer. (Even the two sequences in near-darkness — which recall the passages of darkness in his previous three features — require the viewer’s active participation.)

Amin repeatedly accuses his mother of being selfish, especially because of her work as a photographer and her demands for a divorce. All of Kiarostami’s features since 1988 include either him (Homework, Close-up, Taste of Cherry, and ABC Africa) or a partial or literal stand-in for him (the directors in Life and Nothing More and Through the Olive Trees, the driver in Taste of Cherry, Behzad in The Wind Will Carry Us). The nameless driver in 10 isn’t quite a stand-in, but traces of Kiarostami can be seen in her sunglasses, her photography, and her tendency to lead the conversations with her passengers. His own divorce in the 70s — he’s never remarried — was the major impetus behind Report.

After the local press screening of 10, a colleague and friend who disliked Taste of Cherry so much he hadn’t seen another Kiarostami film until this one, asked me, “If a movie showing the same things were filmed in Chicago, do you think people would find it anything special?” I told him honestly that I didn’t know. After all, there are infinite ways to show “the same things,” and simply agreeing just on what’s being shown in 10 would be no easy matter.

I would argue that 10 is every bit as relevant to Tehran as My Dinner With Andre and Mississippi Burning — two of his favorites — are to New York and Mississippi. And the relevance I have in mind isn’t just the condition of women. There is also, for instance, the blanching quality of the sunlight in Tehran that I recall from my one visit there: some of the sights we see through the car windows may not precisely match the bleached-out reality — even when the camera is facing the sun — but we certainly get a sense of the way the light feels. And we learn a lot about what life in Tehran, a city of more than 12 million, is like through seeing that it’s common to hitch rides and that many people spend as much of their time driving as they would in LA, though Tehran covers less than a fourth of the area.

Of course some people might think that learning what everyday life in Tehran is like is of minimal interest to American moviegoers. But I would suggest that it’s terribly important, especially given the appalling lack of exposure most Americans have to basic information about the people in the Middle East — whose lives our government hopes to alter. We ought to be able to distinguish between the various sects in the region, between the separate languages, between the basic governmental structures. And we ought to know something of who they are as human beings.

Long before September 11, Iranians who came to this country to visit were being subjected to suspicious and hostile treatment. All Iranians crossing U.S. borders, even to change planes, have been routinely fingerprinted and had mug shots taken over the past decade, during which Kiarostami made seven visits to the U.S. — a treatment I didn’t suffer when I visited Iran in 2001. He’d hoped to return last fall, when 10 was showing at the New York film festival, but couldn’t because he was required to wait three months for security clearance. The reason he was given was that the U.S. didn’t have a database for non-Israeli Middle Eastern visitors — which makes one wonder what all the fingerprinting and mug shots were for.

Fortunately it’s easier for Iranian films to get here than Iranians. One might reasonably suppose that the run-up to the war in Iraq has played some part in making 10 more commercially successful in this country than most of Kiarostami’s previous films; it seems a natural human impulse to want to learn something about people our government might choose to bomb in our names. Yet viewers of this movie might be surprised to encounter in the midst of all the Iranian details — saint’s shrines, Islamic divorce laws, chadors — so many Western touchstones: Amin’s T-shirts, his computer programming course, the Hercules video he asks his mother to bring, the flying car he says he saw on a foreign TV channel, his father’s satellite TV and porn, snippets of pop songs, English words (the prostitute laughs as she says, “Sex, love, sex”). I wouldn’t expect anyone to conclude that Iranians are “just like us” — how could they be, when both “us” and “Iranians” are each so culturally, economically, and ethnically diverse? — but one can’t help but notice how many points of reference we share.

My least favorite sequence in 10 is the last, because it adds nothing to what we already know about the driver and her son. My favorite — and that of practically everyone I know who’s seen the film — is the first, which is nothing but revelations. I suspect Kiarostami included the tenth segment mainly for musical reasons, because he wanted a diminuendo after the dramatic crescendo in the previous section — when the young woman reveals her shaved head, laughing as well as crying softly about her situation before falling into an eloquent silence — and thought that the simplest way to achieve it would be to repeat an earlier theme.

Still, in showing the unremarkable — the routine passing of Amin back to his mother from his father — this sequence suggests that routines and rituals have been the main focus of this movie all along. Its concern is errands, meals, memorized prayers, mechanized sex, picking people up and dropping them off, even little comic personal tics, like the way the driver’s sister repeatedly rubs her lip while sitting alone in the car. Nonsubjects, in other words — which have always been an important part of Kiarostami’s films, just as they’re central to our lives.

Improvisations and Interactions in Altmanville

From Sight and Sound (Spring 1975); I’ve mainly followed the editorial changes (mostly trims) used in the version that appears in my collection Essential Cinema. — J.R.

[. . .] Unless it is claimed that a pianist’s

hands move haphazardly up and down the

keyboard — and no one would be willing to

claim this seriously — it must be admitted

that there exists a guiding thought,

conscious or subconscious, behind the

succession of organized sound patterns . . .

Of course, it does happen, and not too

infrequently, that an instrumentalist’s fingers

‘recite’ a lesson they have learned; but in

such cases there is no reason to talk about

creation.

– André Hodeir, Jazz: Its Evolution and Essence

***

I can never think and play at the same time.

It’s emotionally impossible.

– Lennie Tristano, circa 1962

***

CHARLIE (Elliott Gould): This is the truth. You’re an animal lover, right?

SUSAN (Gwen Welles): Yeah.

CHARLIE: Okay, well: the great blue whale, right? You know about a great blue whale?

SUSAN (semi-audible): . . . got that wrestling guy, hunh?

CHARLIE: No, it’s a big fish, a big fish, there’s only two or three left in the world.

And the truth — the tongue: of the great blue whale : weighs more: than a full,

grown, African elephant…

SUSAN: No, that’s not true.

CHARLIE: You don’t believe it.

SUSAN: You’re just making it up to make me feel better –

CHARLIE: Aw –

SUSAN: –’cause you don’t like to see me cry.

CHARLIE: You feel a little better?

SUSAN (sniffing): Yeah, I do.

– California Split

The first quote comes from a theorist, the second from a jazz pianist; together they

only begin to describe the difficulties and ambiguities attending any effort to

describe the aesthetic conditions of improvisation — for audience, improviser and

theorist alike. Taking the third quote as a test case, it is hard to know where to begin.

Is the dialogue written or improvised? Is the scene — Susan, a prostitute, arrives home

in tears after falling for yet another of her clients; Charlie, her flat mate, goes to her

room to cheer her up — an integral part of Joseph Walsh’s script, or something that

Robert Altman and/or Gould and Welles partially or completely concocted on the set?

A skeptic could remark with some justice that it makes no difference: whatever the

sources, combinations or relative degrees of calculation and spontaneity, the results

on the screen are all that count. But the fact that these results give an unmistakable

impression of improvisation — as evidenced by such factors as Gould’s loose,

evolving syntax and Welles’ semi-audible, equally vague reference to ‘that

wrestling guy’ – is a matter of some importance; without it, our responses

to the scene would simply not be the same. If Gould’s rap and delivery

were more polished, our attention would be focused on his whole

statement as a single gesture: Charlie spouts nonsense to make

Susan feel better. But in the scene as played, what we observe is

the emphatic (if somewhat ham-fisted) exposition of Charlie’s

nonsense and Susan’s reactions, motored on suspense and an

element of risk.

One hesitates to make too much of a scene that is small and,

for Altman, unexceptional; but the distinction is crucial. Well-

composed, cleanly delivered dialogue would perhaps convey

an implied moral judgment: Charlie cheers up Susan, therefore he’s

‘good’. Throwing this emphasis slightly off-center, Altman invites us

to judge Charlie/Gould, aesthetically as well as morally, on a

moment-to-moment basis. Like a matador coordinating his gestures

to the unpredictable but inescapable movements of a bull, or a jazz

improviser accommodating himself to fellow musicians and chord

changes, Charlie/Gould is wriggling his way into the imponderables

of a given emotional situation, and to respond directly to his

behavior we have to wriggle accordingly; so, for that matter,

does Susan/Welles.

The difference between conventional methods and Altman’s

is one between directness and indirectness, actions and interactions

– the actors’, the characters’, the director’s, the scriptwriter’s

and our own. It is decidedly a group endeavor, and as such, one

that lives and breathes in an intangible no-man’s-land between

‘thinking’ and ‘playing’ for the film-makers, ‘thinking’ and

spontaneous ‘reacting’ for the audience: the relative strengths

of both values are held in perpetual suspension, with new

stimuli that can potentially shift the balance coming along

at every juncture. From this point of view, anything can

affect everything, and no two spectators are responding

to precisely the same film –- the complete ‘text’ is common

to all, but each reading of it varies according to attentiveness,

temperament and perceptual capacity: an individual selection

of what is interesting or relevant and what is not.

This is not an approach that Altman can be said to have pursued

with any rigorous consistency, although it seems to figure at one

level or another in all his films since Brewster McCloud.

Minor details notwithstanding, it cannot be found to any

appreciable degree in the box-office hit that made Altman’s name

commercially negotiable and the subsequent works financially possible.

MASH is Mr. Roberts revised and updated, but not substantially improved. In

striking contrast to the movies that follow, it leaves essentially nothing to chance,

programming its effects with the ruthless efficiency that one would expect from a

skilled TV veteran. Oriental gongs are intermittently rung on the soundtrack to tell

the spectator when to laugh; black-comedy interludes of blood-spurting surgery are

periodically introduced to maintain a ’serious’ war-is-hell backdrop; and for all

the apparent verisimilitude of the celebrated overlapping dialogue — controlled by

an adept handling of timing and dynamics, where lack of inflection becomes a form

of emphasis — no one in the bleachers is permitted to miss a single significant line.

Too single-minded to include any serious risks in its strategies, it is unswervingly a

thesis film which militates for the heady (if headless) consensus of a mob’s euphoria

as part of its overall message: that fun-loving, honest, proficient surgeons are much

healthier and a lot easier to take than bureaucratic, militaristic hypocrites and

religious fanatics.

For roughly its first twenty minutes, MASH amply demonstrates this ‘audacious’

postulate; after that, it can only repeat its position ad infinitum over a series of

tacked-on skits. When Hawkeye (Donald Sutherland) and Trapper John (Elliott

Gould) leave for Japan, the structure is already buckling; by the time we reach

the football match, the film has clearly been stretched to run on like a TV series

(as, indeed it subsequently has), with the Korean War at this point safely out of

sight and out of mind. The sensible way of dealing with death and madness,

we are good-naturedly instructed, is to forget about them, while the only

way to deal with solitude is to ‘join the crowd’ like Sally Kellerman’s ‘Major

Hot Lips’ (after being subjected to a proper number of qualifying sexual

humiliations), or else go mad like Major Burns (Robert Duvall) — who is

sent packing early on, in a straitjacket, to make way for further horseplay.

After this sort of high-powered speciousness, Brewster McCloud

(1970) registers as an honorable failure: a species of crazed

doodling with all the awkward, endearing earmarks of a promising

‘first’ film, in which a director tries to do and say everything at once,

trusting to find his coherence in the cutting room. Wildly overlapping

allegory, satire, TV burlesque, social protest, demented bird lectures

and conventionally dull songs by John Phillips, the film nurtures a

dream of ‘escape by flight’ from convention that is as innocently

vague as its hero’s, and as predictably doomed. But along the way

are some glancing pleasures that suggest some of the achievements

to come: the intercut and overlapping use of René Auberjonois’ bird

lecture in relation to the already fragmented plot, at least until this

relationship becomes overly rigid and predictable; the debut of

Shelley Duvall, an Altman discovery, as a Texas-grown variant of

Breathless‘ Patricia; the bold delivery of certain oddball gags –

like the instant splattering of a newspaper headline (’AGNEW:

SOCIETY SHOULD DISCARD SOME U.S. PEOPLE’) by a bird dropping,

or the appearance of a tough hard-leather delinquent sporting a

Porky Pig T-shirt — along with some looser forms of humor, such

as John Schuck’s likeable enactment of a conscientious, semi-retarded

Houston cop.

It is only after the exorcism of Brewster, in McCabe and Mrs. Miller, that Altman

arrives at a fluent and developed style which can support his semi-improvised

approach. Henceforth, even his ‘mistakes’, like Images – an old Altman project

predating MASH that was filmed after McCabe – will carry a technical proficiency

and assurance that can support many calculated risks.

***

Writing, when properly managed (as you may be sure I think mine is) is but a

different name tor conversation: as no one, who knows what he is about in good

company, would venture to talk all; so no author, who understands the just

boundaries of decorum and good breeding, would presume to think all: The truest

respect which you can pay to the reader’s understanding, is to halve this matter

amicably, and leave him something to imagine, in his turn, as well as yourself.

-- Tristram Shandy, Vol. 2, Chapter 11

According to me it’s a collaborative art. I set a boundary line and framework,

but I don’t try to fill it all in. If I tried to put in the middle of it everything that

was in my imagination, it would be simply that. It would be a very sterile work.

So I try to fill it with things I’ve never seen before, things that come from other

people.

– Altman in a recent interview

The ‘open spaces’ that Altman offers to his fellow craftsmen or creates for

himself are obviously not identical to the ones that his films offer to audiences,

but they are related none the less: the openness and variability of a film’s

conception can help to encourage an open and variable response. Broadly

speaking, shooting, editing and sound-mixing appear to be regarded by

Altman as a process of elucidation, elaboration and discovery as much as

one of execution. (’The script will indicate character and situation,’ he has

remarked, ‘what I do comes on top of that.’) Actors are occasionally employed

without written parts, invited to ‘fall in with the material“ and create their own

roles, or encouraged to alter or expand their scripted parts during rehearsals.

Rather than scout every location in advance, Altman sometimes chooses to

encounter them only when he arrives with his camera crew.

Equally significant are the ‘open spaces’ that Altman allows for during shooting and

then fills at the editing or sound-mixing stage. The various announcements over the

public address system in MASH, René Auberjonois’ bird lecture in Brewster and

Leonard Cohen’s songs in McCabe were all arrived at and introduced long after

shooting began; and one might deduce that the use of Susannah York’s children’s

book (In Search of Unicorns) in Images, the title tune in The Long Goodbye, the

radio shows in Thieves Like Us and Phyllis Shotwell’s songs in California Split

were all partially determined after shooting was over. (Only partially, one assumes,

because all four of these ‘independent’ elements figure briefly within the actions

of their respective films.)

Most often, these interventions pass from the role of a foreground commentary

(mainly explicit in Brewster and Thieves; more frequently loose, approximate and

dreamy in McCabe, Images, The Long Goodbye and California Split) to that of a

background murmur whenever the scene’s dialogue begins, generally regaining

volume over subsequent lulls in the on-screen talk. Bridging scenes or taking up

narrative slack while subtly shifting or dispersing an audience’s focus, this

procedure distances us somewhat from the visuals and discourages sustained

identification with the characters — the reverse of the way music is used in MASH.

But the same technique creates an impression of overloading in much of Thieves

Like Us, where the use of Depression radio shows as historical artifacts and

ironic commentaries on the characters tends to duplicate points that are already

being established by other means (such as the three bank robbers’ mythical

sense of their own exploits). Sometimes these editorial nudges are even

extended beyond simple redundancy: in the central love scene between Bowie

(Keith Carradine) and Keechie (Shelley Duvall), which the actors are clearly

capable of sustaining by themselves, the unnaturalistic use of the same

radio phrase three times — ‘Thus did Romeo and Juliet consummate their

first interview by falling madly in love with each other’ — which is apparently

intended to punctuate the successive bouts of lovemaking and convey a

mood of time suspended, merely comes across as a self-conscious tic.

In California Split, on the other hand, the supplementary sound material has art

inventive, dynamic function in relation to the action, serving more as a lively

contrapuntal counterline than as a static one-to-one gloss. In the second scene

at the local poker parlor, one of Shotwell’s songs begins loudly over a long shot

of the card players’ becomes faint and is overtaken by these players’ dialogue

in medium shot, and then resumes loudness over a close-up of Bill –

delineating a dodgy kind of fan-dance in relation to a spectator’s diverse

routes into the scene. And when Charlie and Bill arrive in Reno, Shotwell’s

jazzy recitative-with-piano and Charlie’s independent free-form rap

suddenly (and gratuitously) converge on the phrase ‘nobody there’

–- a striking demonstration of the blind vicissitudes of chance

(such as the curious proliferation of elephants end Barbaras), which

operate throughout the film on multiple levels. [2012 postscript:

Lamentably, due to rights issues involving the songs, this moment

has been deleted from the version of California Split released on DVD.]

In all Altman’s best films, the emotional center gravitates around a pronounced

feeling of Absence — a sense of opportunities lost, connections missed, kindred

spirits divided and scattered — and in many respects, the independent sound

material serves to embody some form of this failed utopia: a ‘commentary’ of lyrical

idealism abstractly bridging discontinuous characters.

***

The contrast with MASH is again striking; there, the solitary characters are the

villains, and even Trapper John is made to appear suspicious and unwholesome

until he pulls out his jar of olives and joins the snob elite. In Brewster, McCabe

and The Long Goodbye, membership in a group is generally depicted as a sign

of naiveté. The fantasies spun by minor characters about Brewster and McCabe

– like the remarks of Philip Marlowe’s candle-dipping neighbors and Marty

Augustine’s entourage of faithful hoods — usually come across as the utterances

of gullible, fanciful children; in Images, the ‘healthy’, ‘public’ response of Hugh

(René Auberjonois) to the solitary madness of Cathryn (Susannah York) is

shown to be comparably myopic.

In Thieves Like Us and California Split, these relationships are less fixed and more

complex: Bowie, Keechie, Chicamaw and T-Dub in the former and Charlie and Bill

in the latter oscillate restlessly between different kinds of solitude and communal

living, and strained or frustrated domesticity — broken homes and temporary

arrangements — is a keynote in both films. But even here, the minor characters

share a visible kinship with the assorted array of cranks who populate McCabe

and The Long Goodbye, each riding on an autonomous wavelength that runs

at an oblique angle to everyone else’s. Consider, for instance, Harvey in

California Split, an old friend whom Bill looks up in a paint store:

HARVEY: Wait a minute! Don’t tell anybody

you came, I’m getting a flash. You see, I

have a good amount of ESP. I’m blessed

with it — my wife kids me about it — but you

should catch it when I get these flashes. Let

me see how close I can get to what’s goin’

on here. I get — I get that you’re probably

back with your old lady . . . an-n-n that

you probably want to paint your garage

door — perhaps even the whole front of your

house — I’m gettin’ the colour . . it’s a

greenish color. Right, how close did I get ?

BILL: I need a loan, Harvey.

HARVEY: A loan?

BILL: Yeah.

And that’s all we ever see of Harvey. Like some of the Flemish peasants in

Brueghel’s landscapes and certain topics and individual chapters in Tristram

Shandy, he emerges briefly in apparent non-relation to his immediate

surroundings, but retrospectively blends into an overall pattern of awkward

everyday cussedness that comprises an appropriate setting for absurdist-

humanist drama. A distant cousin of the eccentrics in Preston Sturges’

gallery of grandiloquent bit players, he is spiritually closer to Dee Mobley

(Tom Skerritt) in Thieves Like Us, dislocating the screen door on his

shack while counting the money in his hand and not quite aware of it,

or Ken Samson’s gate attendant in The Long Goodbye impersonating

Walter Brennan to a bewildered gangster.

The pathos of these characters – and countless other examples could be picked

from Altman’s menagerie — is directly related to the way that they momentarily take

the plot away from the films’ equally displaced heroes; their fumblings are only

condensed versions of the clumsy, uncertain relationships of McCabe, Marlowe, the

bank robbers of Thieves and the gamblers of California Split to their respective

worlds. John McCabe (Warren Beatty) cracks a raw egg into a double-whisky and

gulps it down to impress Constance Miller (Julie Christie), but all she cares to take

note of is his ‘cheap jockey-club cologne’; more worldly-wise but similarly lost, she

inhabits an opium pipe-dream that is equally inaccessible and unknown to McCabe.

Legends and ‘professionals’ to the residents of First Presbyterian Church, they are

helpless amateurs when faced with the potential challenges of each another, and

in many respect the film they inhabit registers as a wistful ode to that lost potential.

Within this context, the banality of Leonard Cohen’s semi-abstract songs becomes

workable through its teasing relationships and non-relationships with the action,

postulating mythical archetypes that might alternately ‘fit’ or collide with the

characters on the screen. Because these relationships are so fluctuating and

ambiguous (e.g., is Constance a ‘travelling lady’?), we are forced to construct

our own myths and anti-myths out of them, situating ourselves somewhere

– Altman doesn’t specify a precise position — in relation to Cohen’s

discourse, the story’s and the characters’.

What might legitimately be regarded as a style whose accents and cadences –

expressed through zooms, pans and qualities of light and focus, along with

shifting stresses on the soundtrack — convey a dreamy vagueness, is equally a

broad invitation to find one’s way in it, to merge with a narrative rather than

simply be carried along by it. Thus we are free to notice or not notice Constance’s

heart-shaped. money-box (and draw or not draw ’significant’ conclusions); and

when we hear intermittent strains of ‘Beautiful Dreamer’, they are not accompanying

her opium sessions but figuring in less obvious places: screeched out on a fiddle

in Sheehan’s Saloon while McCabe watches her bolt down a tableful of food, and

sung by her newly arrived prostitutes as they splash about in the misty bathhouse.

***

MCCABE (muttering to himself): . . . I tell

ya, sometime — sometimes when I take a

look at ya I jus, I jus keep lookin’ and-a

lookin’ . . . Long to feel yuh little body up

against me so bad I think I’m gonna bust . . .

I keep tryin’ to tell ya, in a lotta different

ways — just one time you could be sweet

without no money around . . . I think I

could — well I tell ya somethin’, I got

poetry in me. I do. I got poetry in me! . . .

but — I ain’t gonna put it down on paper,

I ain’t no educated man, I got sense enough

not to try.

– McCabe and Mrs. Miller

MARTY AUGUSTINE (Mark Rydell) (to

Marlowe): You remember the night that Jo Ann

became ill and we hadda take her to the

hospital. Well, as you can see, she’s had

extensive treatment — the finest surgeons,

had nurses around the clock, best attention

– because, as you know, she’s very near and

dear to me. And the prognosis is excellent.

Excellent. She’s gonna be fine. Now I left

the hospital that night, and I was — I was

really upset I was — what was I ?

JO ANN (Jo Ann Brody): Haunted.

MARTY: What, what?

JO ANN (louder, more distinctly): Haunted.

MARTY: That’s it. Haunted! I was haunted –

absolutely haunted by the idea that somehow

I’d been unfair to her.

– The Long Goodbye

As can be partially discerned from the above, inarticulateness and clarity can often

register as moral positions in Altman’s films– at least until California Split, where

the whole question of a moral context becomes largely suspended. In the absurdist

terrain traversed by McCabe and Marlowe, a hired gun (Hugh Millais) describing

how to make profits out of dead Chinamen can be a lot more articulate than

the leading citizen of First Presbyterian Church, talking to himself; and a

psychotic gangster (Augustine) can enunciate sentences a lot more distinctly

and lucidly than Roger Wade (Sterling Hayden), a published novelist –

even if the former is describing his guilt feelings after gratuitously smashing

a Coke bottle across his girlfriend’s face, and the latter is merely trying to

communicate affection to his wife through a series of helpless stammers.

Altman’s apparent preference here for his tongue-tied characters over

their smooth-talking counterparts (the pompous lawyer in McCabe,

the sinister Dr. Verringer in Goodbye) seems to rest on the notion that

emotions speak louder than words. And the most serious reproaches

that have been leveled against the director — whether for ‘laziness’,

lack of intellectual rigor or incoherent rambling — can mainly be traced

back to this bias. But on Altman’s behalf, it is worth noting that rigor and

clean articulation is not really what he is after: the vagaries of behavior,

the indulging of certain moods and the staging of chance encounters,

can be enormously expressive even without the dividends of what critics

like to call ‘an organic whole’. It is rather like censuring a jazz musician

because his improvisations lack the polished form and execution of a

classical musician performing a written piece. While it is certainly true

that the former is less likely to achieve a finished form, there is a

different kind of excitement in the way that he tries to achieve it — a way

of regarding ‘form’ as a verb rather than a noun, a process father than a

postulate. And the base lines established by Altman for isolating and

relating different kinds and degrees of coherence are anything but loose.

In Michael Tarantino’s article “Movement as Metaphor” [which originally

appeared in the same issue of Sight and Sound], a persuasive case is

made through concrete evidence that the nearly constant movement

of the camera in The Long Goodbye affects both our relationship

to the film and Marlowe’s relationship to the world around him. In

what I hope might serve as complementary evidence of that film’s

formal interest (which surpasses, I believe, that of Altman’s other

works to date), I would like to show how roughly comparable

parameters are at work on the soundtrack, above and beyond

the overlapping dialogue — particularly in the extraordinary use

of the title tune, a facet of the film that many commentators have

taken to be nothing more than a trivial joke.

***

‘The Long Goodbye’ is a 32-bar standard by John T. Williams and Johnny

Mercer that is performed throughout the film in countless versions, none

of which is ever heard in its entirety; out of the dozen or so times that

parts of it are sung on the soundtrack — mainly by Marlowe, Marty

Augustine and Jack Riley (a pianist in a bar) on-screen or by Jack Sheldon

and Clydie King off-screen — most of the lyrics can be pieced together,

and some of them are worth quoting:

There’s a long goodbye, and it happens every day –

Where some passerby invites your eye

To come her way –

Even as she smiles a quick hello, you’ve let her go,

You’ve let the moment fly –

Too late, you turn your head . . .

[. . .] There’s a long goodbye: can you recognize the theme?

On some other street, two people meet as in a dream –

[. . .] It’s too late to try, when a missed hello

Becomes a long goodbye.

(Copyright by U.A. Music Ltd.)

In simplest thematic terms, this is a commentary on the broken encounters

that punctuate the film (and it should be noted that the personal pronouns

become masculine whenever Clydie King sings the lyrics, thereby expanding

their inclusiveness), beginning with Marlowe and his cat and continuing through

virtually every subsequent relationship charted in the plot. As with Cohen’s songs in

McCabe, the relevance to the action is fluctuating but dynamic in relation to our

responses, and the same words can suggest different things at different times. In

more directly operative terms, the song functions as follows:

1. As a piano improvisation (by the Dave Grusin Trio) in the opening scene, before

the actual theme is stated; as Marlowe is woken by his cat and tries to persuade the

latter to eat something, he can be heard humming, singing (’Can you recognize the

theme?’) and whistling various fragments, completely out of synch with the piano

and in a different key.

2. Sung by Jack Sheldon as the credits come on, while Terry Lennox (Jim Bouton)

drives away from the Malibu Colony (and is momentarily entertained by the gate

attendant’s Barbara Stanwyck imitation), in a medium-tempo, somewhat Sinatra-

like version.

3. Sung by Clydie King (beginning a fresh chorus) in a slower, more moody and

lyrical version as Marlowe pulls up at a supermarket to buy cat food, her chorus

continued by

4. A soupy muzak version of soaring violins, parodying conventional Hollywood

mood music, as Marlowe enters the supermarket (where he’s told that he has left

the car headlights on), which is continued by

5. Sheldon’s version, while Terry drives towards Marlowe’s house, proceeding

through the next-to-last bar of a chorus, which is completed (and a new chorus

begun) by

6. The muzak version in the supermarket (Marlowe to clerk: ‘You don’t happen to

have a cat by any chance –’ Clerk: ‘Whadda I need a cat for? I got a girl’), continued

by

7. Sheldon’s version over Terry driving, which is in turn continued by

8. Grusin’s piano improvisation as Marlowe returns home, again humming and

singing parts of the tune-out of synch, in a different key — along with phrases

of his own (’I love the cat’).

Subsequent uses include (among many others) a statement of the theme by guitar

and castanets over Marlowe and Terry’s drive to Mexico; the first four notes

sounded whenever Eileen and Roger Wade’s gate bell is rung; a version by Morgan

Ames’ Aluminum Band continuing Clydie King’s rendition during the first scene

with Marty Augustine, when the music first comes over a car radio, then is made to

sound as though it is coming from the house of Marlowe’s hippy neighbors; back

in Mexico, as a funeral dirge played by the Tapoztlan Municipal Band while Marlowe

speaks to the local coroner; a loud, chaotic and sloppy jazz version played and sung

by guests at the Wades’ party in Malibu (a scene of social chaos gravitating around

Roger Wade, who is emotionally going to pieces); and sung with a slight Jewish lilt

by Marty Augustine in his office as he waits for Marlowe to arrive.

The continuities and discontinuities that are established or implied in Nos. 1-8

-– between Marlowe and Terry, home and supermarket, one car’s trajectory and

another, or one ad lib version over another-are not merely reflections but active

instruments of the divisions being set up between these discrete entities, at the

same time that a common tune is binding them all together. And the spectator’s

relationship to the action is being further played with by the multiple shifts

in the music’s volume throughout most of the above examples, as melody

and/or words fade in and out of the soundtrack in relation to the dialogue,

passing from ‘foreground’ to ‘background’ in a manner somewhat analogous

to the camera movements in so far as they repeatedly redefine our focus on

and distance from the events taking place — thus continually altering and

varying our grasp of them. We are required, in other words, to improvise our

own ‘Long Goodbye’, both figuratively and literally, in order to establish our

proximity to all the others.

The shifting volumes of other sound elements — the miaow of Marlowe’s cat, the

voices of his spaced-out neighbors – are simultaneously altering our impressions

of spatial depth and physical separations in these scenes, as is the sound editing of

Marlowe’s police interrogation, which cuts back and forth between the tinny

reverberations in the room he is being ’secretly’ observed from to the more full-

bodied sound in the room that he occupies.

But the spatial and spiritual distances suggested in the above are modest indeed

compared to those which accumulate in the movie’s later scenes, beginning with the

Wades’ disastrous party. In the scenes that follow — Roger’s suicide, Marty

Augustine’s threat to castrate Marlowe, Marlowe’s frantic pursuit of a glassy-eyed

Eileen Wade until he is run over, his regaining consciousness in the hospital — the

sharp divisions between characters reach an intensity that suggests a rapid

escalation of neurosis to schizophrenia, a state of total dissociation. This is

expressed not only through a shallow sense of space in certain shots (Marlowe

and Eileen rushing into the waves after Roger, Marlowe’s subsequent chase after

Eileen), where characters appear to be traversing enormous distances without

advancing anywhere, but even further in the loud, bouncy, cheerful and utterly

autonomous jazz piano version of the theme which accompanies Marlowe’s

frenzied pursuit of Eileen. When he is hit by another car, the sound suddenly

dovetails into a few raucous bars near the conclusion of Sheldon’s vocal

version, with a trumpet blaring over the voice; this in turn is quickly overtaken

by a cacophony of overlapping sirens that fade into a dead silence broken

only by maniacal, distant screams from other rooms in the hospital where

Marlowe wakes up.

For all its jokey overtones, the scene which ensues is decidedly the most

nightmarish in the entire film. On the bed opposite Marlowe’s lies a figure wrapped

mummy-like, from head to toe, in bandages. After coming to his senses, Marlowe

cracks to his room mate, ‘You’re gonna be okay — I seen all your pictures too’ and

starts to leave the room, until the figure grunts at him incoherently but insistently,

beckoning him over. ‘Hey listen, you tell that guy that it don’t hurt to die’ Marlowe

remarks to the virtual corpse that might as well be him – indeed, is him if we

consider how Marlowe stalks senselessly through the remainder of the film.

‘Hey, that’s the smallest one I’ve seen,’ he goes on, picking up the mummy’s

miniature harmonica. ‘No, listen, I can’t,’ he explains, ‘I gotta tin ear.’ He blows

a plaintive whine on the harmonica, adds, ‘I’ll practice — see you later,’ and

beats his retreat from the room and his dormant doppelgänger, evading a

nurse with the declaration, ‘I’m not Mr. Marlowe, this is Mr. Marlowe here’

with another distant scream of pain from another room heard over his

parting words.

***

In this crucial scene, we have Altman’s ‘universe’, themes and formal procedures

reduced to their barest expressions. And if the harmonica and Marlowe’s cryptic

adoption of it — he is blowing on it again in the movie’s closing shot –

immediately recalls the harmonica wails of Jean-Pierre Léaud in Jacques

Rivette’s Out 1 and Out 1: Spectre for its reduction of communication itself

and the production of ‘meaning’ to stark essentials, the relationship may not

be entirely fortuitous. Rivette has recently expressed an interest in Altman’s

work which began with The Long Goodbye; and the behavioral comparisons

of Juliet Berto and Dominique Labourier (or Bulle Ogier and Marie-France Pisier)

in Rivette’s Céline et Julie vont en bateau are not wholly irrelevant to those of

Elliott Gould and George Segal (or Ann Prentiss and Gwen Welles) in California

Split, however much more simplified and ‘protected’ the Altman-conducted

improvisations may be.

Central to the concept of modernism in all the arts is the idea of collaboration — the

notion that artist and audience conspire to create the work in its living form, that the

experience of making it is in some way coterminous (if far from identical) to the

experience of hearing, seeing or reading it. Even at his most venturesome and

‘experimental’, Altman cannot be described as a director who pursues this notion

unequivocally and consistently, in the sense that Tati does in Playtime (through

visual options) and Rivette does in Spectre (through interpretative options);

considering the fairly constant way he has remained active in the commercial

cinema since MASH in 1970 — and all the conditions that this fact implies –

he cannot really be considered in the same league at all. But virtually alone

among his peers, he has opened up the American illusionist cinema to a few

of the possibilities inherent in this sort of game — played for limited stakes

in controlled situations, but played none the less.

All You Need Is Cash [SMALL TIME CROOKS]

From the Chicago Reader (May 19, 2000). — J.R.

Small Time Crooks

Rating ** Worth seeing

Directed and written by Woody Allen

With Allen, Tracey Ullman, Elaine May, Tony Darrow, Hugh Grant, Jon Lovitz, Michael Rapaport, George Grizzard, and Elaine Stritch.

Small Time Crooks is Woody Allen’s 29th feature in 31 years. I don’t think it would be much of an exaggeration to say that all the major developments in his work to date took place during the period around Love and Death (1975) and Annie Hall (1977), when he transformed himself from a gagman with a clunky mise en scene into a fairly graceful filmmaker, and the period around Husbands and Wives (1992), when he bravely discarded grace and went on a brief adventure. It led to the relaxed candor of Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993) and the sour gallows humor of Bullets Over Broadway (1994), before collapsing into the banality and facility of Mighty Aphrodite (1995), with its Whore With a Heart of Gold.

September (1987) was an embarrassment, and other low points, the moments when Allen’s energy and invention flagged the most, include A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy (1982), Shadows and Fog (1992), and Celebrity (1998). Small Time Crooks never attains the diffidence of the last three, but at times it comes awfully close. The way exposition is handled says a lot about a storyteller, and the dialogue signaling that a cynical and snooty art dealer (Hugh Grant) intends to exploit the nouveau riche heroine (Tracey Ullman) is just about as perfunctory as movie storytelling gets. It’s not only lazy, it reduces human possibility and complexity to the task of carrying us from point A to point B in a script; Flash Gordon’s Ming the Merciless is more nuanced. Allen’s confidence that viewers will swallow this reveals a frightening contempt — an attitude that was already evident, albeit more explicitly, in Stardust Memories (1980).

The only way to excuse this kind of characterization is to conclude that Allen is trying less to deal with life than to follow movie conventions. This preference is the most significant limitation of Allen’s work as a whole, though it’s also one of the deepest sources of his popularity. It even helps explain why he seldom changes as an artist and why the public that supports him doesn’t want him to change. Whether this inflexibility is the consequence of a profound conservatism or of arrested development, it betrays the attitude that the world is incapable of undergoing improvement or any other significant alteration.

It’s almost unthinkable these days that Allen could make a movie that wasn’t modeled directly or indirectly on a European art-house feature of his youth. This usually means a feature by Ingmar Bergman or Federico Fellini, but he’s nearly exhausted the oeuvres of both filmmakers. (In his more fertile periods, he was capable of expanding his list of models, basing the use of “witnesses” in his 1983 Zelig on Warren Beatty’s 1981 Reds and making the starting point for his 1987 Radio Days a relatively late Fellini, the 1974 Amarcord.) The initial inspiration for Small Time Crooks was Mario Monicelli’s hilarious Big Deal on Madonna Street (1958), itself a parody of popular heist movies of the 50s such as The Asphalt Jungle (1950) and Rififi (1955): in it a bunch of small-time incompetents try to pull off a robbery by digging a tunnel and encounter one messy problem after another, including hitting a water main. It’s true that in his first feature as a director, Take the Money and Run, Allen played an incompetent bank robber, but most of the details in Small Time Crooks point to Monicelli.

Big Deal on Madonna Street carries us through the first part of Small Time Crooks, during which ex-con Ray Winkler (Allen) joins three other New York incompetents (Tony Darrow, Michael Rapaport, and Jon Lovitz) who want to knock off a neighborhood bank. The plan is to rent the former pizzeria next door and drill the tunnel from there. Ray’s manicurist wife, Frenchy (Ullman), becomes part of the plan when she’s enlisted to sell her cookies as a front, and her dim-witted cousin May (Elaine May) is brought in to help sell the cookies.

After the heist flops and the cookie store becomes a smash success, Big Deal on Madonna Street is discarded. The action moves forward a year, and Allen starts working without a European model (if the Village Voice’s J. Hoberman is right, Allen’s now using an American model, Born Yesterday). The remainder of the movie concentrates on how Ray and Frenchy cope with their newfound wealth. She goes lusting after culture (and Hugh Grant); he becomes bored. After they split up, she finds herself bankrupted by crooked accountants, and he decides to steal a necklace at a party with the help of May.

Apart from the comic gifts of Elaine May — which Allen should be credited for exploiting, even if he gives her a less fully rounded character than she deserves — the second part of Small Time Crooks isn’t nearly as funny as the first. Allen can’t seem to find enough sense of play in his material, perhaps because he’s too close to the class-bound sources of his humor. Someone with an edgier comic imagination and a willingness to take risks might have taken advantage of this situation, but Allen is unable or reluctant to exploit such opportunities — which is part of what makes him incapable of growing.

Perhaps the strongest emotions expressed in Allen’s work as a whole are responses to his working-class background: fear, hatred, and disgust. Ultimately they can be seen in his preference for movies over life, expressed more in terms of other movies than in allusions to life experiences — The Purple Rose of Cairo is a classic illustration. So the view of poverty we get in Small Time Crooks has little to do with the Brooklyn of Allen Stewart Konigsberg (aka Woody) and much to do with Warner Brothers movies about gangsters — underlined by a clip from White Heat seen on TV–as well as Big Deal on Madonna Street.

This mind-set sees the role of art and culture in general and of movies in particular not as providing an understanding of life but as providing an escape from it. In interviews Allen is generally quite up-front about his bias, making it clear that his idea of art corresponds precisely to the idea of what mindless entertainment in American culture is supposed to be. It’s a self-annihilating dream, but it’s often held up as the model for what everyone allegedly wants at the movies.

This suggests that Star Wars would provide Allen with a better model than Wild Strawberries, and here’s where the issue of arrested development comes up. Allen considers himself a philistine and an artist, but because he’s a conformist, he doesn’t have the slightest interest in contesting the equation of culture with money or art with gentility that’s so quintessentially American. To overstate the case, what Allen really seems to like about Wild Strawberries isn’t so much what Bergman does with sound and image or what he has to say about life but the fact that they served espresso in the lobby of the theater where he first saw it. More precisely, what he likes about Bergman’s views of life and filmmaking are inseparable from notions about class — which are what really interest him.

Allen’s movies specialize in contemplating the notion that money can somehow remove vulgarity or produce gentility. Frenchy is a typical protagonist — and arguably a closer soul mate for Allen than Ray, the character he plays. She aspires to the “finer” things in life but can’t attain them because she remains “unspeakably vulgar.” When Ray first met her, we’re told, she was known as “Frenchy Fox, the topless wonder.” When she and Ray get rich she decides to serve snails at a dinner party. “A snail leaves a trail of scum when it walks,” Ray complains. She replies, “Not in France.” Excluded from this overall debate is any developed sense that French truck drivers as well as corporate executives enjoy snails (because they’re culturally conditioned to do so) and that feelings of unworthiness or estrangement tied to class are culturally produced and can therefore be overcome or at least superseded by other emotions.

Allen’s movies aren’t interested in such possibilities, and the comforts they do dispense derive in part from this exclusion. Small Time Crooks may conclude quite conventionally that money can’t buy you everything, but most of it flirts even more conventionally with the opposite premise.

An Actor’s Revenge

Kon Ichikawa’s 1963 masterpiece, one of the most dazzling and stylistically audacious Japanese films ever made, has to be seen to be believed — though in Japan, interestingly enough, it’s never been regarded as anything but a potboiler. The film was putatively made to celebrate the 300th film appearance of box-office idol Kazuo Hasegawa, and is in fact a remake of a 1938 film by Teinosuke Kinugasa that featured Hasegawa in the same parts. Ichikawa uses it as an unprecedented opportunity for unbridled stylistic play (the film’s use of ‘Scope and color is breathtaking), Shakespearean complication (Hasegawa plays two parts, one of them in drag), and a fascinating investigation into the relationship between theater and cinema. The hero is a Kabuki female impersonator out to avenge the death of his parents, and the plot proceeds somewhat like a film noir (with revelatory flashbacks), while adroitly mixing onstage and offstage action. To make the campy mixture even weirder, Ichikawa periodically uses contemporary jazz on the sound track. One can easily see here why Disney is one of Ichikawa’s favorite filmmakers, but perhaps the most remarkable aspect of this singular experiment is its demonstration that theater and film are more kissing cousins than distant relations — the more stage bound the film gets, the more cinematic it becomes. If you’ve never seen this, prepare to be stunned. In Japanese with subtitles. 114 min. (JR)

Teenage Wasteland [BATMAN RETURNS]

From the Chicago Reader (June 26, 1992). — J.R.

BATMAN RETURNS

* (Has redeeming facet)

Directed by Tim Burton

Written by Daniel Waters and Sam Hamm

With Michael Keaton, Danny DeVito, Michelle Pfeiffer, Christopher Walken, Michael Gough, Pat Hingle, Michael Murphy, Cristi Conaway, and Andrew Bryniarski.

Even the title of Batman Returns is something of a lie, referring not to the fictional world of the story — where Batman can’t be said to return because he’s never been away — but to the dent this sequel is supposed to make in our lives. But how much of a dent can it make when it has virtually no characters, no plot, no fictional world, no mise en scene, no ideas, no developed feelings, no inspiration, no adventure, no sense of inner necessity beyond its status as an investment and marketing tool? It’s arrested development on every possible level.

Like everyone else who squeezed into Webster Place’s after-midnight shows on opening night, I was primed for some sort of revelation, however minor. It didn’t have to be elation; a good dose of mean-spirited negativity might have sufficed. I was ready for anything that could qualify as a mood changer — or barring that, a simple harking back to the original Batman, which had plenty of flaws but at least could boast the demonic vigor of Jack Nicholson’s Joker and his nihilistic media crimes, and a certain obsessional uniformity of mood and decor. For quite some time I told myself that there was something charming about this movie’s klutzy sense of uncertainty about itself, which I was interpreting as proof of its sincerity. Giving it the benefit of every doubt, I conceded that arrested development might be a viable theme as well as a condition for a movie addressed largely to teenagers. But by the end I felt I’d been sold a souvenir booklet, not a finished movie, and many of the teenagers seated around me looked as if they felt similarly shortchanged, if not exactly outraged.

One wants to like Batman Returns with a sense of hopeful desperation, much as one wants to believe in Ross Perot or Bill Clinton; one even agrees in advance to feel depressed about the inevitable disillusionment in the hope that it will at least offer a new kind of depression, a fresh form of doom. Indeed, some reviewers have been praising Batman Returns for having the prescience to depict a three-way mayoral race in Gotham City, as if this were a shrewd anticipation of the current presidential race. It’s always tempting for journalists to treat the chameleon moods of the moment as if they had lasting significance, but I would hazard the guess that the current assumption that Bush won’t be our next president may be as myopic as the belief that Batman Returns will fare even better than Batman at the box office. And if a three-way presidential race is still viable four months from now, it will make the apolitical nihilism of Batman Returns, which strikes me as 80s to the core, appear ridiculously out-of-date rather than up-to-the-minute. Anyway, I seriously question the political savvy of any movie so fascistically tied to the star system that it makes any notion of a general populace appear both obligatory and irrelevant, like sofa stuffing. When the Penguin conspires at one point to destroy all the firstborn in Gotham City — an ambition worthy of a Biblical plague — one doesn’t feel the slightest bit disturbed or frightened, because there are no visible signs of humanity in this picture to be destroyed, only empty symbols and faceless extras.

Nevertheless, Batman Returns and its publicists and defenders have been promising a lot, so expectations were running high at Webster Place. The gradual and irreversible depletion of these hopes was palpable by the end; no booing or jeering greeted the final credits, but I certainly heard no applause.

I didn’t mind that Michael Keaton’s Bruce Wayne/Batman was just as inexpressive as in the original, because his two major opponents — Danny DeVito’s Oscar Cobblepot/the Penguin and Michelle Pfeiffer’s Selina Kyle/Catwoman — promised to add something extra to the brew. Only at the end did it become obvious that promises are all this movie can offer; development or realization is entirely beyond its grasp. Even if one accepts the only emotions on view, teenage isolation and petulance — and given that the screenplay is by Daniel Waters, who wrote Heathers and cowrote The Adventures of Ford Fairlane and Hudson Hawk, one shouldn’t be surprised by such a narrow range — it’s hard to accept them being expressed in the rawest possible state, without even a fictional world worthy of the name to fester in or the possibility of implied emotions that might give them some wider context.

Personality is at such a premium in this movie that it feels uninhabited. Any Hollywood cartoon character you can think of, no matter how minor, has more substance than any character here. Daffy Duck is like Hamlet next to Bruce Wayne/Batman, and Foghorn Leghorn is a veritable Lear beside the Penguin; for that matter, even the headless and nameless black maid in Tom and Jerry cartoons of the 50s seems a lot more human and interesting in her variable moods than Selina Kyle.

DeVito and Pfeiffer’s characters wind up disappointing because they never go an inch beyond their rudimentary concepts, are totally devoid of surprises, and don’t even pan out as coherent or meaningful Jekyll-and-Hyde constructions; they’re simply sketchier forms of Keaton’s Bruce and Batman, with mechanical variations in gender, physiognomy, and character. (If the warring animal and human natures of the three characters are what’s at issue, as the script pedantically reiterates at every opportunity, it’s too bad that real penguins and bats count for so little in the mise en scene — and I could have used some more real cats as well.) DeVito’s makeup job is so half-baked and sloppy that without the script’s assurances that his character is supposed to have some affinity with actual penguins, one wouldn’t consider him part of any bird family. He merely looks like an overstuffed doll or straw man inspired by a badly remembered John Tenniel illustration from one of Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, and his supposedly fancy-sounding dialogue is too poorly written to help unify his character.

Pfeiffer’s Selina Kyle, a frumpy and mousy secretary to the evil industrialist Max Shreck (Christopher Walken), is purest caricature. When we first encounter her, pouring coffee for Shreck and the Gotham City mayor (Michael Murphy), she meekly offers to make a suggestion about what they’re discussing, then amends this to a request to ask a question; we never discover what this suggestion or question is, and it seems significant that we don’t care in the slightest. Our sense of Selina’s failure is supposed to be clinched by the fact that she doesn’t have a husband or a loyal boyfriend (despite the fact that she’s Michelle Pfeiffer). And when Shreck throws her out of a skyscraper window for knowing too much about him, we’re all set for her resurrection as Catwoman — a “return of the repressed” a la Sam Raimi’s Darkman and other comic-book vengeance figures. (Her self-transformation owes a lot to Tim Burton’s previous feature, Edward Scissorhands, but there’s little sign of any new thinking; it’s basically just regurgitation.)

As a neo-feminist vigilante figure Catwoman clearly has a lot of potential, but the movie strangles itself attempting to avoid realizing any shred of that potential. (Whether this is out of demographically inspired commercial calculations — such as a fear that misogynist teenage boys might be unduly upset by a genuinely feminist Catwoman — or sheer ineptitude I cannot say.) Saving a woman from a potential rapist, Catwoman takes great pains to demonstrate that she feels absolutely no solidarity with her; alternately smitten with and enraged by Batman, and both conspiratorially drawn toward and physically disgusted by the Penguin, she generally behaves with less complexity and unpredictability than the Batmobile — which tends to be a more privileged character in the movie, commanding the only halfway decent action sequence. Like many of the special effects, she seems to exist exclusively in relation to certain scenes and shots, not as an autonomous entity. Her visual design seems derived mainly from figures in two 1955 Hollywood pictures I find much more enjoyable: Shirley MacLaine’s “Batlady” in Frank Tashlin’s Artists and Models and Vivian Blaine and the Goldwyn Girls in the “Pet Me Poppa” number of Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s Guys and Dolls. (Her acrobatic hand flips seem directly traceable to Daryl Hannah’s replicant in Blade Runner.)

In referring to the “arrested development” of the other characters, I mean only their imaginative inadequacy, not any lack of emotional maturity. As with the three lead characters, the script and direction rather than the actors seem mainly to blame for their thinness. As a suave, though hardly original, villain named after Max Schreck, who played Nosferatu in the 20s, Walken is more than adequate. But when he’s called upon to show some feeling for his son Chip (Andrew Bryniarski), we can’t quite believe it because the script hasn’t prepared us. There’s a bit more fatherly feeling in Alfred (Michael Gough), Bruce Wayne’s aristocratic butler, but the archetypal setup of this relationship — quite similar to the one in Arthur and its sequel — is hardly fresh either. And Pat Hingle’s Commissioner Gordon, Cristi Conaway’s Ice Princess, and Michael Murphy’s mayor are essentially standard types used like props.

What about the sets, you may ask? The late Anton Furst may have depended rather heavily in Batman on Blade Runner and Brazil for his inspirations, but at least the results had a look of their own — German expressionist in overall orientation but distinctive enough that one might call them Furstian. By contrast, many of the “inventions” of Bo Welch — a Burton regular who also worked on Mommie Dearest, Swing Shift, and The Color Purple — seem slavishly dependent either on Furst or on specific shots in classic films (e.g., Metropolis for Shreck’s office, Citizen Kane for the gate entrance to the Cobblepot estate and the fireplace in Bruce Wayne’s mansion). The gigantic toy duck the Penguin rides through the sewer probably represents his creativity at its best — a nice touch that unfortunately bears little aesthetic relation to the other details.

The adolescent loneliness and sense of abandonment that stood at the center of Edward Scissorhands may ultimately be the only subject and emotion Burton feels prepared to cope with as a director, but there’s certainly no crime in trying to treat that subject again in all three of the leading characters here. My only complaint is that repetition of an idea when it’s only stated rather than explored is hardly the same thing as obsession, as some reviewers have been suggesting. And considering the laborious set pieces and mechanical effects that keep interrupting this monotonous theme, one wonders if it’s even been properly imagined. It’s almost as if all the elements that gave Batman its immense popularity –its pseudo-Wagnerian sense of dark myth, troubled characters, and brooding sets–have only been sketched in for the sequel, under the assumption that the audience can fill in the blanks with its memory of the first movie. On balance, I’d rather go swimming.