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Good Clean Trash [SCANDAL]

From the Chicago Reader (May 5, 1989). — J.R.

SCANDAL

*** (A must-see)

Directed by Michael Caton-Jones

Written by Michael Thomas

With John Hurt, Joanne Whalley-Kilmer, Bridget Fonda, Ian McKellen, Leslie Phillips, Britt Ekland, Daniel Massey, Roland Gift, and Jeroen Krabbe.

After applauding some of the forthright aspects of High Hopes and other recent English movies in this space two weeks ago, I’m happy to find my generalizations confirmed by a new English docudrama on the John Profumo-Christine Keeler sex scandal of 30 years back. Scandal, the first movie made on this subject, is good, clean, licentious fun.

While the titillating aspects of the story automatically place the film under the general rubric of “trash,” Scandal gleefully embraces its category without being unduly dumb or irresponsible about it. Starting off with an evocative period montage of the late 50s and early 60s, accompanied by the strains of Frank Sinatra’s recording of “Witchcraft,” the movie proceeds to unravel its complex narrative with a kind of polish that excludes any pretense of telling the “whole” story. (The project started out as a five-hour miniseries, and got boiled down to a feature after the BBC decided not to participate, but it is questionable whether the entire story could have been told even at miniseries length.) As a result of the film’s deliberate incompleteness, we can’t entirely account for all the motivations of the two leading characters — Dr. Stephen Ward (John Hurt) and Christine Keeler (Joanne Whalley-Kilmer), neither of whom, one should note, was a national figure before the scandal broke — and this works to the film’s advantage by giving the spectator some interpretive leeway in understanding just what happened.

As far as the press was concerned, what happened in 1963 was that Christine Keeler sold a story to the Sunday Pictorial for 1,000 pounds stating that she had been sleeping with John Profumo, the British war secretary, as well as Eugene Ivanov, a Soviet naval attaché who was revealed as a possible spy. As revelation followed revelation, the popular British press had a field day; Profumo resigned from his post (he first denied the affair, then was proved guilty), and Stephen Ward — an osteopath and portrait artist of the rich and famous who had lived with Keeler, introduced her to both Profumo and Ivanov, and used her as an informant to help British intelligence — found himself being vilified as a pimp and abandoned by all his highly placed friends in the government, which ultimately drove him to suicide. Before the year was over, Harold Macmillan had stepped down as prime minister (ostensibly for reasons of health), and the Conservative government was defeated in the next year’s election, ushering in a 15-year period of Labor Party domination.

Although it’s tempting to try to link the Profumo affair to the recent trial by press of Gary Hart (among others), the effect of politicians’ sexual behavior on their political careers has had very different and nonsynchronous histories in England and the U.S. As English writer Graham Fuller points out in the current Film Comment, Grover Cleveland could admit to having fathered an illegitimate child in 1884 and still be elected president, but ever since Ted Kennedy’s debacle at Chappaquiddick, the American media and public have been less forgiving about tarnished public profiles. By contrast, Cecil Parkinson’s adulterous affair with a secretary who became pregnant, which ejected him from England’s Department of Trade and Industry in 1983, didn’t keep him from being named as Margaret Thatcher’s energy secretary last year.

One conclusion that might be drawn from the fickle attitudes of the public about such behavior in both countries is that public responses to the private lives of government officials are seldom consistent or logical but are rather reflexes to the political moods of individual historical moments. Presumably, the same public that voted in a Conservative government licked its chops when the yellow press helped to cause that government’s collapse. A similar sort of capriciousness can be seen in the American public’s indifference to Watergate before Richard Nixon’s re-election and its obsession with Watergate afterward — a return of the repressed that is no less apparent in this country’s shifting tastes in clothes, politics, movies, erotic and cultural fashions, and pleasure itself.

It’s to the credit of Scandal that it treats the Profumo affair as a manifestation of its own period rather than as a timeless parable or a story with a particular moral. Much of the movie is about the sheer elation of the energies that were set loose in the early 60s, and the grim aftermath of this elation for some of the individuals involved is treated refreshingly neither as poetic justice nor as divine retribution — the standard Hollywood forms of comeuppance — but simply as what happened.

The osteopath-artist Stephen Ward, a central character in the story as it’s told here, remains in some ways the most ambiguous and mysterious figure in the scandal. The son of a clergyman — one of the traits that he interestingly shares with John Hurt, the actor who plays him — he studied medicine in the U.S., then returned to England to set up practice in the seaside resort of Torquay. Stationed in India during World War II, he became a member of the local jet set, but was hospitalized toward the end of the war for some sort of nervous collapse. Back in England, he joined a London clinic and became known for his famous clients, the first of whom was Averell Harriman (who was then U.S. ambassador to Britain); before long, he established his own practice, where his patients included Winston Churchill, J. Paul Getty, Ava Gardner, and Elizabeth Taylor. He was also connected with the British royalty, and enjoyed the use of a weekend cottage on Lord and Lady Astor’s Cliveden estate.

Scandal’s story more or less begins when Ward meets Christine Keeler in 1959 at Murray’s Cabaret Club, where she is working as a show girl, and actively pursues her. Taking her under his guidance a la Pygmalion and comparing her to a racehorse (which, by implication, he would like to train), he convinces her to revert to her natural hair color (from bleached blond to brunette), removes her false eyelashes, takes her shopping, installs her in his flat, and begins to introduce her to some of his classy friends — without showing any interest in having sex with her. Apparently voyeuristic in his attraction to her, he delights in initiating her in some of the sexual games enjoyed by his set, such as planned orgies, and then chatting with her about them afterward. (Ward himself is a participant in these orgies, but we don’t get a very clear sense of how he behaves in them.) When Christy befriends another show girl named Mandy Rice-Davies (Bridget Fonda), the latter moves into Ward’s flat and social circle as well, and both women work as models as well as semicourtesans, accepting cash gifts from their wealthy dates.

Approached by British intelligence and asked to report on his Soviet friend Eugene Ivanov (played by Dutch actor Jeroen Krabbe), whom the intelligence agents suspect of espionage, Ward readily agrees, and he encourages Christy to get involved with Ivanov so that he can get more information that way. A lover of gossip and intrigue, Ward also is instrumental in getting Christy acquainted with war secretary John Profumo (Ian McKellen) at the same time, but after an affair between Keeler and Profumo develops, Ward’s reputation as a big talker makes their liaison too high a risk, and Profumo asks her to either move out of Ward’s flat or break off their affair. Although Keeler insists that Ward isn’t her boyfriend, she insists on remaining where she is.

All these intrigues eventually become public in late 1962, after two of Keeler’s less well-to-do lovers, both of them West Indian, get into a knife fight, and one of them turns up outside Ward’s flat with a gun. Ward, angry at this ugly exposure, asks Christy to move out, and she retaliates by selling both her story and a letter from Profumo to the Sunday Pictorial.

Given all this trashy material (and more), the movie keeps itself bracingly free of easy moralism and glib conclusions; simply put, there are no villains in sight, and no pure heroes either. One of the principal virtues of Michael Thomas’s script and Michael Caton-Jones’s direction is that the overall view presented is balanced without ever seeming static. This is Caton-Jones’s first feature, but he already seems to function like a pro. He does indulge in some fancy uses of slow-motion and close-ups — which culminate in a gigantic image of Ward’s last unfinished cigarette crashing to the floor — but generally he seems to know that splashy effects of this kind don’t increase our knowledge of the characters or situations; they only help to dramatize the unanswered questions or heighten the erotic charge of certain moments.

Even Ward, who winds up as the major victim and scapegoat — and, thanks to the effectiveness of Hurt’s performance, is treated with a great deal of sympathy and depth — is spared a one-sided treatment; the casual racism that he reveals in a reference to “jungle bunnies” when he asks Keeler to move out of his flat is certainly not made to seem either exemplary or urbane. In keeping with the same principle, the unconventional love story between Ward and Keeler that serves as the movie’s central focus is neither romanticized nor deromanticized; it isn’t precisely defined or digested for us, so we have to make up our own minds about it — or, better yet, suspend judgment altogether.

On the other hand, it would be wrong to claim that Scandal presents its story without any pronounced moral biases. On the contrary, it is unambiguously positive and celebratory in its treatment of the characters’ carnality, hedonism, and tolerance of kinkiness (a nude guest serving as waiter at an orgiastic cocktail party bears a sign reading, “Please beat me if I fail to satisfy,” and Mandy obliges by slapping his offscreen penis with a rose). One would be hard put to find any recent American mainstream movie as guiltless and as accepting about such matters. Horror of horrors, this movie doesn’t even condemn the casual prostitution of Keeler and Rice-Davies, but makes it look like fun for all the parties involved.

(Apparently the orgiastic cocktail party was too much fun in its original English form to qualify for an R rating in this country, so some footage of straight screwing in this scene was cut from American prints. Presumably if this sequence had a higher moral tone in the American vein — say, a few knife slashings instead of guiltless intercourse — it wouldn’t have been threatened with an X.

(Another aside: Joe Boyd, one of Scandal’s executive producers, has pointed out that in 1961, the same year that Keeler was carrying on simultaneous affairs with Ivanov and Profumo, the queen’s counselor who was to prosecute Ward two years later for pimping — groundlessly, as it turned out — was prosecuting the publishers of [and successfully banning] Lady Chatterley’s Lover, asking the jury if they would want their servants to read such a book.)

Insofar as “yellow journalism” serves on occasion as an indirect political forum for the working class, the conflation of class revenge with sexual outrage undoubtedly fueled the Profumo scandal that followed, and the fact that Ward came from the middle class probably had as much to do with his abandonment by his wealthy friends as the sexual predilections that they surreptitiously shared with him. In effect, the closing of ranks in “gutter” journalism and the upper classes alike left a social climber like Ward out in the cold, without a toehold in either realm. But this is only one possible theory about the volatile cocktail of elements that Scandal deals with; one of the strengths of the movie as a whole is that it encourages us to reach our own conclusions.

Art Film by Numbers

From the Chicago Reader (April 13, 1990). — J.R.

THE COOK, THE THIEF, HIS WIFE & HER LOVER

* (Has redeeming facet)

Directed and written by Peter Greenaway

With Richard Bohringer, Michael Gambon, Helen Mirren, Alan Howard, and Tim Roth.

On the face of it, this movie seems to have a good many things going for it. Although he was born in 1942, Peter Greenaway is still probably the closest thing that the English art cinema currently has to an enfant terrible. A former painter and film editor who started making experimental films in the mid-60s, he achieved an international reputation with The Draughtsman’s Contract in 1982; he went on to become a star director and cult figure in Europe with several TV films and three more features that had considerable success in both England and France as well as on the international festival circuit — A Zed & Two Noughts (1986), The Belly of an Architect (1987), and Drowning by Numbers (1988) — although they have had only limited circulation in the U.S. A fair number of my film-buff friends swear by him, and he is commonly regarded as the most “advanced” art-house director currently working in England.

Greenaway’s latest feature makes sterling use of many of his longtime collaborators: Sacha Vierny, one of the best cinematographers alive (working here in ‘Scope), whose credits include Hiroshima, mon amour, Last Year at Marienbad, Muriel, Belle de jour, and Stavisky, as well as films by Raul Ruiz and Marguerite Duras; composer Michael Nyman, a sort of neoclassicist who has worked for everyone from the Royal Ballet to Steve Reich to Sting; and production designers Ben Van Os and Jan Roelfs, former interior designers who have worked in the Dutch film industry since 1983. His cast is unquestionably a distinguished one: Helen Mirren, for instance, has appeared in such films as Age of Consent, Savage Messiah, O Lucky Man!, Excalibur, and Pascali’s Island, while Richard Bohringer played a lead in Diva, and Michael Gambon played the starring role in the British miniseries The Singing Detective. The costumes were designed by French fashion designer Jean-Paul Gaultier, a Greenaway fan who agreed to work on the film for free.

None of these contributions, moreover, can be regarded as wasted: the film is beautifully lit, dressed, upholstered, mounted, acted, shot, scored, and color-coordinated. Why then do I find it so tedious, mechanical, and even conceptually ugly — downright irritating, in fact? Irritation, to be sure, can be an important tool to an avant-garde artist, but only if it serves as a lever, projecting the viewer into something else — a fresh perception or idea, a new definition of beauty or truth or, at the very least, content. But the irritation provoked by The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover leads me nowhere. It’s as if Greenaway had all this artistry, including his own, at his disposal and created nothing but a dead piece of meat, for no reason in particular — unless it’s to express his contempt for his audience.

The movie certainly tries to be shocking and provocative — originally assigned an X by our rating system, it now has no rating at all — yet it is so lacking in soul that despite its audacity it seems like it could have been programmed on a computer. In one of his interviews, Greenaway has suggested that the film is supposed to be an attack on Thatcher England and conspicuous consumption, yet his vision is so doggedly and exclusively upper-class, here and elsewhere in his work, that this strikes me as rather feeble, or at the very least a prime example of the pot calling the kettle black. If Thatcher England is the movie’s target, some alternative to Thatcher England — if not explicit, at least implied — is necessary for this attack to have any meaning; but there is not even a hint of such an alternative anywhere in sight. To all appearances, Greenaway thrives on his hatred too much to imagine anything that might exist outside of it.

The film’s slender plot has a point of its own to make that is worth examining. (Readers who plan to see the film and don’t want to know the story’s outcome are advised to stop here and come back later.) A brutal, loutish gangster with social aspirations named Albert (Gambon) dines nightly at his own huge, expensive French restaurant called Le Hollandais, accompanied by his battered wife Georgina (Mirren) and various henchmen, as well as a shifting set of associates and cronies. Over the course of ten evenings (each heralded by a separate menu), Georgina makes eye contact with a quiet, solitary diner and bookworm named Michael (Alan Howard), makes love with him in the ladies’ room, and then, with the assistance of the chef (Bohringer), has sexual encounters with him in various pantries between courses.

Eventually, a girlfriend of one of the henchmen spills the beans to Albert, who stabs the informant with a fork and goes on a rampage, threatening to kill Michael and eat him. The chef manages to spirit the lovers, both nude, away in a refrigerated truck full of decaying meat and seafood. They go to Michael’s book depository, where they hide out; the chef sends a boy over with a meal for them, and Michael invites the boy to borrow any books he’d like. When the boy returns to Le Hollandais with the dirty dishes, Albert tortures him to find out the couple’s whereabouts, which he eventually discovers by seeing a bookplate in a borrowed book.

When the couple learn that the boy has been hospitalized, Georgina leaves to pay him a visit; then Albert and his stooges arrive at the depository and, after stuffing Michael’s nose and mouth with pages from his books, they kill him. Georgina finds Michael’s body, and after spending the night with his corpse, she visits the chef and persuades him to cook Michael for Albert to eat. Albert arrives at the restaurant, where Michael’s entire body is served to him on a platter. Georgina forces him at gunpoint to consume a single mouthful, then she shoots him dead, saying “Cannibal!” over his body.

Given all the excess that precedes this climax — including an opening sequence that shows Albert stripping a debtor in the restaurant parking lot, smearing him with dog shit, then pissing on him, and Albert’s virtually nonstop physical and verbal abuse of everyone in sight — the viewer may feel a little cheated that the villain’s comeuppance consists of only a single forkful of human flesh. It would have been more consistent with the film’s overall tactics if the totally repulsive Albert had been forced to clean his plate, even though it might have further strained the audience’s goodwill and patience. But a more drawn-out ending would have removed some of the pithy irony of Georgina’s closing epithet. It is an epithet that is clearly meant to rebound on the audience — with a good deal less irony.

It’s true that Greenaway hasn’t held us at gunpoint for the preceding 125 minutes, but he’s used enough heavy high-art artillery to cow us into submission nevertheless. Here are his major weapons:

Theater. The film is framed by the opening and closing of theatrical curtains, and Greenaway has been at pains to explain that his principal model for the story was the Jacobean revenge tragedy, with particular reference to John Ford’s ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore.

Painting. The centerpiece of the dining room in Le Hollandais is an enormous painting by Frans Hals, Banquet of the Officers of the Saint George Civic Guard Company (1614), which functions as an ongoing cross-reference to Albert and his entourage.

Music. The cherubic boy who delivers the meal to Georgina and Michael in the book depository is a dishwasher who happens to be a soprano as well; Michael Nyman’s striking score features many choral passages, with the boy generally featured as live soloist whenever the camera glides past him in the kitchen.

History. Sean French, reviewing this film in the British magazine Sight and Sound, says, “The different rooms [in Le Hollandais] seem to represent different stages of history, an architectural mockery of human progress. The kitchen with its still lives and its fowl being dismembered is 18th century, the dining-room with its lush fabrics 19th century and the hi-tech bathroom late 20th.” Also, one of the pages stuffed into Michael’s mouth is the title page of a book called The French Revolution.

Color-coding. I quote now from the film’s press book, which is so explicit about the film’s intentions that it makes a critic’s interpretation superfluous: “The film features six rooms, each decorated and lit in a different color which symbolizes the kinds of actions which occur in that room: (1) the lavish restaurant dining room, where most of the verbal and physical abuse occurs, is blood-red, symbolizing danger; (2) the kitchen, where the lovers secretly meet, is jungle-green suggesting safety; (3) the parking lot, where the lovers flee, is a cold, ultramarine blue connoting the netherworld; (4) the lovers’ hideaway is gold to represent the golden age of learning and implying an Eden for the re-born innocents; (5) a children’s hospital ward which is the yellow of eggyolk and spring; and (6) the lavatories, where the lovers begin their affair, is the shadowless incandescent white of heaven.” Even Gaultier’s costumes sometimes change color to match the decor as the characters move from one room to another, followed by a laterally tracking camera.

Paradoxically yet characteristically, these heavy-duty art references are accompanied by dialogue that is relatively meandering and formless whenever it steps away from the film’s structural design. (Albert’s minor explosion of grief over his and Georgina’s childlessness, for instance, registers as an awkward attempt to cover up the absence of psychology elsewhere.) Greenaway’s obsessive reliance on structural systems — perspective (The Draughtsman’s Contract), the alphabet (A Zed & Two Noughts), numbers (Drowning by Numbers), and color-coding here — never functions as a means of exploration or discovery in the way that (for instance) the systems in Michael Snow’s experimental “structural films” like Wavelength, Back and Forth, and La Region Centrale do; they suggest the somewhat desperate tactics of a control freak who doesn’t really believe in or feel comfortable with narrative, but has to use it anyway to get his pictures financed and shown. They become, in effect, recipes for filming by numbers.

One can still enjoy Greenaway’s sarcasm and aesthetic eccentricity up to a point, if only because his intelligence, his art-history background, and his craft all provide a certain novelty in the art-film terrain that he has claimed since The Draughtsman’s Contract. That film had a pleasurable puzzlelike aspect and an intriguingly grim view of art patronage that fit in nicely with the handsome visuals and the cruel eroticism and wit, even if the laughter that greeted its showings often had an ugly and dehumanized sound to it. I got even more kicks out of A Zed & Two Noughts, my favorite Greenaway film, because of the sheer perversity, beauty, and complexity of its multifaceted conception. But I walked out of The Belly of an Architect, bored silly by the symmetrical center-framing and the turgidity of Greenaway’s preoccupation with midlife sexual crises, and even though I stayed to the end of Drowning by Numbers, I was just as bored by the mechanical jokes, conceits, and cruelties that made up the bulk of that film.

The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover is in no way inferior to these last two films, though it’s highly likely that one’s attitude toward it will be determined by how many times one has already ridden through Greenaway’s narrow and maliciously nuanced structural exercises. If you would enjoy a sadistic filmmaker calling you a cannibal for sitting through two hours of attractively framed nastiness and abuse, you might find this picture to be right up your alley.

Greenaway’s frozen and aristocratic sense of irony — a major part of his equipment, and my major bone of contention — puts quotation marks around virtually everything that we see and hear; but without a context for this irony, we wind up responding to it as if it were a wallpaper pattern rather than an existential position, a dandified form of decoration that is too willful to be very funny, much less witty. If Greenaway were producing only wallpaper, I’d have no reason for complaint; by the same token, if making movies were a matter of academic achievement — showing how well he’s learned his lessons — I’d give him an A plus. Sergei Eisenstein once quipped of Lewis Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front, “It’s a good PhD thesis” — quite unfairly, in my opinion, because that film has both an emotional directness and an academic clunkiness that his remark overlooked, the precise opposite of what Greenaway has to offer. I couldn’t call The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover a good PhD thesis because it has nothing serious to prove, but I wouldn’t hesitate to admit that it’s immaculately researched, conscientiously footnoted, and perfectly typed.

Tales of Ordinary Madness (on Yasuzo Masumura)

From the May 1, 1998 issue of the Chicago Reader. This marks the very beginning, the first baby steps, of my fascinating with and research into the films of Yasuzo Masumura — an extended project that eventually culminated in a lengthy essay and a dialogue with Japanese critic Shigehiko Hasumi that’s included in a book called Movie Mutations: The Changing Face of World Cinephilia (2003) that I coedited with Adrian Martin. Although several Masumura films have subsequently become available on DVD in the U.S., the U.K., and France, including many of the films I discuss or mention here (e.g., Red Angel, Giants and Toys, and Manji in the U.S., Kisses in the U.K., and Tattoo in the France, the latter called Tatouage), I regret that several favorites — most notably A Wife Confesses and A False Student – continue to be unavailable outside of Japan (where Masumura has subsequently become a popular cult director). The first three illustrations and the very last one used here, incidentally, come from Tattoo [Irezumi] (1966) and A Wife Confesses (1961), respectively. –J.R.

To appropriate one of the categories of Andrew Sarris’s The American Cinema, Yasuzo Masumura (1924-1986) is a “subject for further research.” I’ve yet to come across a complete filmography of his work, but he’s said to have made 57 films, a dozen of which are showing at Facets Multimedia Center this week. I’ve seen six of his features, five of which are in the series, and no two are alike — though they do have traits in common.

As I previewed these films I found that my professional duties and my predilections as a viewer pulled me in opposite directions. Over the next week I have at least half a dozen commercial releases to preview, but I’d much rather spend that time catching up with the seven Masumura features at Facets I haven’t seen — especially because I don’t expect to have many more chances to see them. (None of them is available on video.)

This doesn’t mean I think all of these films would be equally good or interesting. But what I’ve seen of what Masumura brought to Japanese cinema over 20-odd years reminds me of many of the best things I’ve found in American commercial releases of the same era. In fact, recalling some of the things I discovered about Samuel Fuller, Nicholas Ray, Douglas Sirk, and Frank Tashlin when I read Sarris’s book back in the 60s, I realized that what I find most appealing in Masumura is something I find little of in current commercial fare — a sense of personal engagement with what’s happening in contemporary society. Mike Nichols, Steven Spielberg, and Quentin Tarantino could all take lessons from Masumura — as well as from Fuller, Ray, Sirk, and Tashlin — about how to speak personally about the 1990s.

The most significant facts I know about Masumura were gleaned mainly from a 12-page spread about him in the October 1970 issue of Cahiers du Cinéma. He was born August 24, 1924, in Kofu on the island Honshu and started going to movies at a very early age, having become friends in kindergarten with the son of a movie-theater owner. In high school he discovered Jean Renoir and Akira Kurosawa; he saw Kurosawa’s first feature (Sanshiro Sugata, 1943, recently released here on video) three times. After the end of World War II he entered the University of Tokyo as a law student but dropped out two years later and found a job working as an assistant director at the Daiei studio in Tokyo, where he earned enough money to return to college as a philosophy major and graduate in 1949. The following year he won a scholarship to study filmmaking at the Centro Sperimentale Cinematografico in Rome, where, according to some reports, Michelangelo Antonioni, Federico Fellini, and Luchino Visconti were among his teachers.

After graduating, Masumura assisted on an Italian-Japanese production of Madame Butterfly, then returned to Japan in 1954, where he worked at the Daiei studio in Kyoto as an assistant to Kenji Mizoguchi, perhaps the greatest of all Japanese directors, on three of his last features — Chikamatsu Monogatari (The Crucified Lovers) (1954), Princess Yang Kwei Fei (1955), and Street of Shame (1956). After Mizoguchi’s death, Masumura became an assistant to Kon Ichikawa, another major filmmaker, on three other films before shooting his own first feature, Kisses, in 1957. For much of the remainder of his career — my sense of his post-1970 work is cloudy — he remained at Daiei, making about three features a year, sometimes as many as four.

In Japanese film history Masumura is a precursor of what’s generally known as the Japanese new wave, a movement that took root in the early 60s, around the same time as the French New Wave; it inherited its name from the French movement, though Nagisa Oshima, the figure most associated with the Japanese new wave, has said he always detested the label. Much as Jean Renoir, Robert Bresson, and Jacques Tati (as well as lesser-known figures like Roger Leenhardt and Alexandre Astruc, who functioned as critics as well as filmmakers) came to be seen as precursors of the French New Wave, Masumura was regarded as a major guru by Oshima before he embarked on his own career. Indeed, Masumura, director Nakahita Ko, and screenwriter Shirasaka Yoshio — who scripted at least ten of Masumura’s features, including Giants and Toys and A False Student — were all heralded by Oshima in a 1958 essay called “Is It a Breakthrough? (The Modernists of Japanese Film),” and Masumura was labeled the “possessor of the sharpest sociological perceptions of the three.”

In lauding this trio Oshima, whose own first film was still about a year away, was celebrating their taste for youthful irreverence, their conscious methodology, and their call for freedom and innovation. Masumura, for instance, wasn’t applying the principles of Italian neorealism — what one might have expected given his formal training — but doing something closer to the reverse. As Masumura himself put it in a 1958 essay quoted by Oshima, the problem with social realism was that it gave too much emphasis to societal pressures, making the defeat of the individual all but inevitable and promoting an overall sense of resignation.

“My goal,” Masumura wrote, “is to create an exaggerated depiction featuring only the ideas and passions of living human beings….In Japanese society, which is essentially regimented, freedom and the individual do not exist. The theme of the Japanese film is the emotions of the Japanese people, who have no choice but to live according to the norms of that society. The cinema has had no alternative but to continue to depict the attitudes and inner struggles of the people who are faced with and oppressed by complex social relationships and the defeat of human freedom….[But] after experiencing Europe for two years, I wanted to portray the type of beautifully vital, strong people I came to know there, even if, in Japan, this would be nothing more than an idea.”

Masumura’s desire for an “exaggerated depiction” arguably stems from the same sort of impulse that led Oshima to systematically exclude the color green from Cruel Story of Youth (1960), his first color film and second feature. For Oshima, green signified the typical Japanese home, including its enclosed garden and tea cabinet, and “I firmly believed that unless the dark sensibility that those things engendered was completely destroyed, nothing new could come into being in Japan.” For Masumura, social realism, with its suggestion that change was impossible, was as deadly as the color green was for Oshima. In its place Masumura wanted to erect a fictional universe where freedom and individuality could take flight.

How does this translate into a cinematic practice? To oversimplify a little (and again, I’m judging from only six features), it means creating a cinema of crazy people — films about fanatics — and never displaying a trace of sentimentality about them or anyone else. As Canadian critic Mark Peranson puts it, “[Masumura’s] movies are about the freedom to do whatever the fuck you want, and the ramifications of taking this attitude when society won’t accept it.” The same could be said of some of the best films of Fuller, Ray, Sirk, and Tashlin, many of which flirt with madness — individual as well as collective — and chart the ensuing social consequences.

In Masumura’s work this craziness ranges from the hysterical, as three competing candy companies run promotional campaigns in the Tashlin-esque Giants and Toys (also known as The Build-up, 1958), to the calmly reasoned, as an army nurse during the Sino-Japanese war dispenses sexual favors to an amputee in Red Angel (1966). There is also the slow-witted young man in A False Student who poses as a college student, joins a Maoist study group, and eventually goes nuts after being mistaken for a police informer. And the tea master in the relatively lackluster Thousand Cranes (1969) who methodically sets about sleeping with his late father’s girlfriends. In the first Masumura film I ever saw — a 1967 feature known in France as La chatte japonaise (”The Japanese Cat”) and elsewhere as Love for an Idiot — there’s the madness of a middle-aged businessman who trains, marries, and then loses a much younger wife; crazed by his fond memories of crawling around on all fours while she rode him piggyback, he tries to simulate the same activity alone in his apartment.

In some of these films — Giants and Toys, A False Student, Red Angel — madness, or the “madness” that seems sane in an insane climate, is a consequence of a monstrous conformity found respectively in the worlds of advertising, politics, and war; in others — Love for an Idiot and Thousand Cranes — it points to private demons that other things in society have unleashed. Either way, Masumura tends to be lucid about what this madness consists of and what it has to contend with: the outcome of the struggle of various characters with their own manias or with the manias that surround them is invariably determined by their ability to sustain their integrity as individuals.

Oddly enough, this craziness seems least apparent in Masumura’s first feature — known as Kisses, The Kiss, and A Kiss – an excitingly photographed teenage love story that recalls Nicholas Ray and is well worth seeing. There’s a big difference between what constituted provocation in 1957 Japan and what might seem daring elsewhere; it’s worth noting, for instance, that on-screen kissing wasn’t permitted in Japanese cinema until after World War II, so even the title is likely to carry a slightly different charge on its home turf. (Similarly, the Maoist demonstrations at the university in the 1960 A False Student are intriguingly out of sync with the comparable demonstrations in the West that would erupt several years later.)

The hero and heroine of Kisses — a bakery delivery boy and an artist’s model — meet while visiting their respective fathers in prison; his father is serving a term for an “election day violation,” hers for stealing money to pay her mother’s hospital bills. Not wanting her mother to know that her husband’s in jail, the model is seriously considering prostitution to raise the money for her father’s bail so he can go visit his wife in the hospital. (Twisted yet subtle moral decisions of this kind are characteristic of the dilemmas faced by Masumura’s heroines. Generally identified as a “woman’s” director, much as his mentor Mizoguchi was, he tends to accord more moral consciousness to his female characters. In the extraordinary Red Angel a war nurse who’s raped subsequently exchanges her sexual services for a pint of blood that might save the life of her rapist; ostensibly she doesn’t want him to die because he might think she’s taking revenge. The heroine in A False Student has comparable scruples when it comes to dealing with the sanity then madness of the title imposter.) After a few false starts the relationship between the delivery boy and the model blossoms when he takes her to the beach, then to dinner at a dance hall; he even accompanies her on the piano while she sings what appears to be the title song, but winds up deserting her at the end of the evening when she asks him to declare his love.

According to Japanese critic Tadao Sato, the film was ignored by critics when it came out because of its presumed similarity to other youth films of the period: only later did it become apparent that Masumura was rejecting many of the trappings of the genre. “His hero was neither mild-mannered, romantic, nor especially good-looking, but rather audacious and perpetually angry,” Sato writes. “He was not the first Japanese version of the angry young man — rich, profligate youths had to some extent raised hell before him — but he was the most significant because he was a poor boy from the masses. In contrast to previous youthful heroes, he gives vent to his frustrations through exaggerated actions rather than through languishing melancholically, for sympathy is the last thing he wants. Thus, there are no atmospheric props or sentimental effects in Kisses, and the young hero is going to fulfill his thwarted needs through action alone.”

Thanks to its fluid, airy black-and-white cinematography, Kisses is beautiful to look at — as are the less fluid but very artfully composed A False Student, and the more expressionistic Red Angel, both of which are also in black and white. By contrast, the color cinematography in Giants and Toys is uniformly garish and ugly — I’m sure deliberately, as all the film’s characters are uniformly unpleasant — whereas the color in Thousand Cranes and Love for an Idiot is functionally attractive, though not necessarily in the same ways. All of which is to say that a persistent, recognizable visual style is not part of Masumura’s ongoing strategy as a filmmaker. “I don’t subscribe to the cult of the image,” he declared in 1969. “I think that a film should have a construction, a plot, an evolution — in short, its own structure.” But in the same interview he maintained, “I never use close-ups. I detest them. Why do a close-up of an actor or actress’s face? I’ll agree to do a close-up if it’s the real face of a peasant, for example…[but] the performance of actors has no interest because it’s finally a lie and doesn’t wind up with anything beyond a certain ‘resemblance.’”

Lest this sound like an overall denigration of actors, it’s worth noting that Masumura developed what amounted to a repertory company of favorite actors, including Hiroshi Kawaguchi (the male lead in both Kisses and Giants and Toys) and Ayako Wakao (the female lead in A False Student, Manji, Seisaku’s Wife, Red Angel, and The Wife of Seishu Hanaoka; she also played in Mizoguchi’s Street of Shame). He also directed one of Mizoguchi’s main actresses, Machiko Kyo, in what might have been her last performance, in Thousand Cranes; and director Juzo Itami plays a featured role in A False Student.

What is persistent in Masumura’s work, apart from a few actors, is a certain ethical engagement with the world — and a set of strategies for pursuing and sustaining that engagement, such as the privileging and exaggeration of obsessive forms of behavior. Partly for this reason, judging from what I’ve seen, nearly all his films are deeply erotic on some level. Because women’s sexuality often serves as coin of the realm in Japanese society — at least as Masumura and many of his compatriots view that society — the way that these women’s “fortunes” get saved, spent, or squandered within that economy remains a profound ethical issue, and I can think of few directors apart from Masumura and Oshima who’ve made sexier movies that are also frank about their political concerns. In a society where individuality can often be expressed only in a sexual realm, eroticism becomes an exploration of political freedom. If one wants to understand why Oshima’s In the Realm of the Senses is a profoundly political (and antiwar) film, Masumura’s oeuvre and all it implies points one in the proper direction.

The Constant Compromise (GOOD NIGHT, AND GOOD LUCK & CAPOTE)

From the October 21, 2005 Chicago Reader. — J.R.

Good Night, and Good Luck

** (Worth seeing)

Directed by George Clooney

Written by Clooney and Grant Heslov

With David Straithairn, Clooney, Robert Downey Jr., Patricia Clarkson, Frank Langella, Ray Wise, Heslov, Jeff Daniels, and Dianne Reeves

Capote

*** (A must see)

Directed by Bennett Miller

Written by Dan Futterman

With Philip Seymour Hoffman, Catherine Keener, Clifton Collins Jr., Chris Cooper, Bruce Greenwood, Bob Balaban, Mark Pellegrino, and Amy Ryan

Good Night, and Good Luck and Capote view journalism as an intricate mix of principles, bravado, and negotiation. Working in a minefield, their star journalists are victims of their vocations. Good Night, and Good Luck, set in the early 50s, celebrates Edward R. Murrow’s bravery, eloquence, and sense of justice in challenging Joseph McCarthy at the height of his power — a kind of heroism that evokes John Wayne’s in a western like Rio Bravo (a movie I cherish, though its view of good and evil is similarly unshaded). Good Night, and Good Luck – named for Murrow’s sign-off line — also explores how internal politics at CBS were shaped by the network’s relations with its sponsors. The victimization of Murrow can be seen in his early death from lung cancer — his chain smoking, like James Agee’s and Albert Camus’, was somehow connected in the public mind with his moral seriousness — and in the way his weekly show, See It Now, was bumped to a Sunday-afternoon slot after he challenged McCarthy. The whole story’s seen from the vantage point of a 1958 tribute to Murrow, at which he spoke almost as warily about the future of television as Dwight Eisenhower did about the future of the military-industrial complex during his farewell speech as president three years later.

George Clooney’s second feature as a director is effectively shot in black and white, evoking the television screens of the time, and it’s confined to tellingly cramped interiors — the CBS studios in Manhattan, an adjacent bar, a nearby hotel room. The film adopts, somewhat insidiously, the myth that life was simpler back in 1953 and ‘54, and it offers Murrow as a lesson for today, as if to ask, “Why can’t our newscasters show the integrity and nobility he did?” It cagily combines archival footage of McCarthy with actors playing the CBS staffers — a very convincing David Strathairn as Murrow, Clooney as producer Fred Friendly, Frank Langella as top honcho William Paley, Jeff Daniels as second-in-command Sig Mickelson, and Ray Wise, Robert Downey Jr., and Patricia Clarkson as members of Murrow’s production team. Downey and Clarkson’s characters were married secretly in violation of CBS policy; they’re the only characters ever shown intimately, and their fears are depicted as emblematic of the cold-war atmosphere. It’s an interesting way to represent the past, though the use of space, actors, and archival footage seems more theatrical than cinematic.

Among the things I learned from the film is the story of Milo Radulovich, who was booted out of the air force without a trial in 1953 because he refused to denounce his father, a Serbian immigrant, and sister for their alleged communist activities. Murrow picked up the story from the Detroit News, and five weeks later the air force cleared Radulovich of all charges. Emboldened, Murrow attacked McCarthy more directly on his show a few months later.

I was reminded of a recent story in which the editors at Arcade Publishing of New York contracted to print a collection of contemporary Iranian literature in English translation, only to discover that because Iran was on America’s enemies list, they’d have to get a permit from the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control or face $1 million fines and ten-year prison sentences. Arcade saw this as a violation of the First Amendment and filed a lawsuit in federal court. Ten weeks later the Treasury Department, without responding directly to the lawsuit, issued a general license that allowed Arcade to “freely engage in most ordinary publishing activities” involving countries on the enemies list. The collection, Strange Times, My Dear: The PEN Anthology of Contemporary Iranian Literature, came out a few months ago.

Capote – an account of Truman Capote writing In Cold Blood, about the seemingly motiveless slaying of an entire family in rural Kansas in 1959 and the execution of the two killers five and a half years later — sees the book as a supreme literary achievement, a judgment I don’t share. More provocatively and persuasively, it demonstrates that Capote had to destroy himself to write this best seller and explores moral dilemmas that are considerably more nuanced and interesting than any of those faced by Clooney’s Murrow. Capote has been skillfully and economically put together by two friends, writer and actor Dan Futterman and director Bennett Miller (whose only previous feature was the 1998 documentary The Cruise), and it stars a third friend, Philip Seymour Hoffman, who does a remarkable impersonation of Capote. The credited source is Gerald Clarke’s relatively uncritical 1988 biography of the same title, but the film’s canvas is much smaller than the book’s, and its message is strictly its own.

Capote kept himself out of his book completely, novelistically recounting events and conversations from memory: he claimed to have 94 percent recall, though subsequent evidence suggested otherwise. In Cold Blood is a page-turner that still carries some weight because of Capote’s feeling for Perry Smith, one of the killers, and his affinity with him — both had been abused and neglected as children. Capote borrows some of that weight by making one of Smith’s climactic lines in the book, a reference to the father of the slain family, one of the film’s climactic lines: “I didn’t want to harm the man. I thought he was a very nice gentleman. Soft-spoken. I thought so right up to the moment I cut his throat.”

The title of Capote’s book can be read as a reference not just to the murders but to capital punishment, though he never makes an explicit connection. And he never broaches the ethical dilemma he faced: he befriended both killers and assisted them legally, but when their appeals delayed their execution and the book’s completion he withdrew much of his support and didn’t tell them. After the two killers were hung, Kenneth Tynan applied the book’s title to its author, attacking him for not having done more to save their lives. That drew a hysterical response from Capote; this and other exchanges appear at the end of the 1967 collection Tynan Right & Left.

Despite its strengths, Capote’s book never rises above the true-crime genre. Part of its dubious appeal derives from the suspenseful cinematic crosscutting that allows readers to anticipate the gory slaughter of the family. (In the reductive 1967 film adaptation by Richard Brooks, the ghoulishness is made even worse by the Freudian flashbacks to Smith’s childhood that attempt to explain the murders while they’re occurring.) Capote called his book a “nonfiction novel” and declared himself an innovator; ironically the book has neither the originality he claimed for it nor the novelistic density and intelligence of Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song – a book Capote loathed because of its obvious indebtedness to In Cold Blood but one that has a far more interesting and self-critical story to tell, in part because it deals directly with the media’s implication in the appeal of true-crime stories.

Both Capote and Good Night, and Good Luck equate journalistic integrity with accuracy and see compromise as a necessary part of working in the mass media. Murrow attacks McCarthy, then interviews Liberace (also shown in archival footage) to boost his ratings — helping perpetuate the era’s myth that Liberace was heterosexual and looking for a wife. In Capote, distinguished partly for the offhand yet honest way it deals with the author’s homosexuality, Capote seems more morally confused and self-deceiving than hypocritical — as when he lies to Smith (Clifton Collins Jr.) about how much of the book he’s written and whether he’s come up with a title.

The films themselves also frequently engage in compromise, lying shamelessly and sometimes unnecessarily about some matters yet trying to be scrupulously accurate about others. I suppose this inconsistency could be rationalized as poetic license, but the desire of both movies to combine poetic generalizations with prosaic specifics creates more confusion than clarity.

The publicity material for Good Night, and Good Luck describes the lengths to which the filmmakers went in trying to ensure that period details were right. Yet the film is structured around a glaring anachronism: live performances by a hip black jazz singer (Dianne Reeves) with a quartet in the CBS studios. The implication that one could have seen anything remotely like this on CBS TV on a regular basis during this era is more than a little fanciful. Clooney might defend it as atmosphere and as emblematic of the spontaneity of live TV, but it’s so false it taints the more accurate details. The film also speeds past important facts without bothering to explain them. At one point we learn that Murrow has invited McCarthy to be on his show to respond to his criticism, and then we learn that McCarthy has proposed that William F. Buckley do the responding and that this proposal has been rejected by CBS — two bombshells that need more context.

Capote also dispenses with context in its portrayal of Harper Lee (Capote’s reclusive, enigmatic childhood friend and research assistant in Kansas, author of To Kill a Mockingbird and not much else) and William Shawn (editor of the New Yorker, which serialized In Cold Blood, implausibly seen flying to Kansas to take care of Capote at the time of the killers’ execution). Both are clearly meant to function as narrative props, simplified to the point of banality to keep the focus on Capote.

Yet his story too is overly simplified. A title flashes on the screen at the film’s end: “In Cold Blood made Truman Capote the most famous writer in America. He never finished another book.” The first sentence is debatable, the second simply wrong. In 1980 he published Music for Chameleons, a collection of nonfiction pieces clearly conceived and organized as a book.

The movie also oversimplifies Capote’s artistic decline, which it keeps confusing with his fading mastery of his commercial profile. Even Bob Balaban’s Shawn is given some twaddle to deliver about how Capote would eventually change the way people wrote — which was true only to the extent that he got others to confuse market value and aesthetic value. Whether he was trying to elevate true crime to the status of Greek tragedy or trying to reduce Marcel Proust’s great novel to mere gossip — part of the implicit aim of his unfinished Answered Prayers – the promotional sleight of hand was essentially the same. There’s a reason he’s remembered more for things like beating Humphrey Bogart at arm wrestling during the shooting of Beat the Devil than for most of the sentences he wrote.

I’d argue that Capote’s most substantial gifts were as a minor but talented fiction writer and that his decline had already started when he decided to abandon those gifts to become a mediocre, if flashy, journalist. His most ambitious early forays into nonfiction using fictional techniques were The Muses Are Heard (1956), about a production of Porgy and Bess touring the USSR, and “The Duke in His Domain” (1957), an interview with Marlon Brando in Kyoto. Both of these first-person narratives are bitchy exercises in the snobbish one-upmanship the New Yorker specialized in at the time. The Muses Are Heard, with its exotic subject and lively prose, is more amusing and nuanced; “The Duke in His Domain” is bereft of insight and distinction, its fashion-plate surface engulfing even Brando and Kyoto. (Capote’s complete lack of curiosity about Japan on his first visit there is documented in devastating detail in Donald Richie’s recently published Japan Journals.) Capote shows how he had to curb his bitchiness to befriend people in Kansas, but as Answered Prayers makes clear, he stopped restraining himself back in New York.

Perhaps Capote believed that to become a celebrity and celebrity chaser he had to suppress parts of his own identity. The degree to which he wound up strangling his finer impulses as a consequence is a sad story worth reflecting upon.

The Young and the Paralyzed

From the November 10, 1995 Chicago Reader. — J.R.

The Doom Generation

Rating ** Worth seeing

Directed and written by Gregg Araki

With James Duval, Rose McGowan, Johnathon Schaech, Cress Williams, and Dustin Nguyen.

Kicking and Screaming

Rating *** A must see

Directed by Noah Baumbach

Written by Baumbach and Oliver Berkman

With Josh Hamilton, Olivia d’Abo, Chris Eigeman, Jason Wiles, Carlos Jacott, Eric Stoltz, Elliott Gould, Cara Buono, and Parker Posey.

Chet: Here’s a joke. How do you make God laugh?

Grover: How?

Chet: Make a plan.

— Kicking and Screaming

As luck would have it, I had my second looks at The Doom Generation and Kicking and Screaming, two radically different youth movies about defeat and paralysis, back-to-back. Both seemed better the second time around, though for very different reasons. Noah Baumbach’s first feature, Kicking and Screaming, which I’d originally seen and liked at Cannes last May, seems to have been tightened up in the editing and given more focus. Perhaps because I disliked Gregg Araki’s fifth feature, The Doom Generation, when I first saw it last August, I found it harder to decide on a second viewing whether it had been changed in the interim; in any case I found myself disliking it less.

Expectations had something to do with my first impressions of both movies. Baumbach is the son of a friend of mine, Village Voice film critic Georgia Brown, which means that I have a nodding acquaintance with him and wanted to like his movie. I’ve never met Araki, although we’re both survivors of the film program at the University of California, Santa Barbara — he as a student, I as a teacher — and he once wrote me a friendly letter after I favorably reviewed his second feature, The Long Weekend (o’ Despair). I was disappointed, however, by the two subsequent Araki features I saw, Totally F***ed Up and The Living End, both of which seemed much more strident. I wasn’t looking forward to more of his in-your-face aggressiveness, which The Doom Generation delivers in spades. “A heterosexual movie,” announces the opening title ironically, but we discover before long that just about the only heterosexual activity in the movie is the kind that sublimates or redirects the men’s latent homosexuality.

The three characters at the center of Araki’s new movie are two young lovers, Jordan White (James Duval) and Amy Blue (Rose McGowan), and a lawless drifter they pick up named Xavier Red (Johnathon Schaech). The color-coded surnames make it clear from the outset that stylization is very much the name of Araki’s game, so don’t expect full-blown characters with coherent pasts or imaginable futures. Even if this weren’t clear, the very first scene establishes a world of comic-book exaggeration and formal abstraction; it’s set in a raucous club ablaze with syncopated strobe lights and the announcement “Welcome to Hell.” The film never strays very far after that from loud colors and minimalist decor.

For that matter, the first of many scenes of violence is so gratuitous and outlandish that we’re obviously meant to salivate in Pavlovian fashion, however satiric or “distanced” Araki’s intentions might be. When Amy lights a cigarette inside a Quicky-Mart decorated with huge signs announcing “Shoplifters Will Be Executed” and “America…Love It or Leave It,” the Asian-American clerk orders her to put it out; after she grinds it under her heel, he orders her at gunpoint to dispose of the butt. She complies, and she and Jordan announce that they don’t have the $6.60 they need for what they’re buying and have to go back to their car for the cash. The clerk makes threatening gestures, and Xavier — whom they’ve already encountered at the club — promptly blows the clerk’s head off with a gun; the head sails across the store, following a gushing spray of blood, and the mouth of the severed head continues to move and make gargling noises after it falls with a thud like a pumpkin. A little later, on a motel room TV, we discover from two parodic (and rather funny) anchorpeople that the clerk’s name is Win Cock Suck and that his crazed wife responded to the murder by slaughtering their children.

By this time, however, such harsh, over-the-top details register as routine, because the whole movie is pitched at this level. The talk among the trio on the run consists almost exclusively of lines like “You can relax your royal sphincter muscles, your highness” and epithets like “jism breath,” “ass crack,” and “scum fuck”; I suppose we could read such language as a cover-up for fear and vulnerability, but it also seems calculated to elicit callow audience approval. Many other details too seem not so much indirect revelations of character as pure exploitation jive. We see Xavier jerk off while Amy and Jordan have sex in the bathtub, then lick the semen off his hand; and when Xavier gets around to having sex with Amy as well, we learn right away that an image of Jesus Christ is tattooed on his prick (at which point I guess we’re meant to exclaim “Far fucking out” or its equivalent). Later the guys discuss formerly “having sex” with a golden retriever and a cantaloupe. So by the time they get around to rape, castration, murder, and homophobic /fascist rant performed on top of an American flag to the national anthem and accompanied by the same strobe effects as at the club, we’re likely to feel pretty ho-hum about it all; I know I did.

If this is independent cinema’s alternative to Natural Born Killers, I can’t see that it represents much of an improvement. It adopts the same specious pretext that we’re gazing deep into the dark American unconscious rather than catering to the audience’s worst instincts; and it advances the same duplicitous claim that parody of excess is somehow different from plain old excess — a claim that becomes just another pretext for heaping on more. The embrace of negativity and cynicism — as much a staple of contemporary commercial filmmaking as the standard happy Hollywood ending was of yore, and every bit as much an evasion of reality — is proffered dishonestly, as if it were simply arrived at by looking at the world rather than at the box-office grosses in Variety.

So much for what I still dislike about The Doom Generation. But it must be said that Araki occasionally pauses long enough to treat his threesome with a certain tenderness and pity, the same sort of feelings that gave The Long Weekend (o’ Despair) much of its distinction. (I only wish Amy received as much understanding as Jordan and Xavier do — though Araki does devote an interesting if highly ironic scene to her grief when they accidentally run over a dog, which elicits more compassion from her than any human being has. In another good scene she confesses her infidelity to Jordan, who professes not to mind at all.) Equally commendable is Araki’s consistent effort to fully create the movie’s space rather than merely fill it, as most movies do. One comes away from this movie, as one does from some of the films of Araki’s two obvious models, Jean-Luc Godard and Jon Jost, with sounds, images, and feelings more than characters and plot, and ultimately the overall expressionist effect may count for more than the lurid parade of individual shocks and sensations.

Before looking at Baumbach’s auteurist credentials, it’s worth giving some attention to the commercial context for Kicking and Screaming. The producer is Joel Castleberg, who served as executive producer on Bodies, Rest and Motion and Sleep With Me, both “Generation X” movies starring Eric Stoltz that bear more than a passing resemblance to this comedy. Indeed, I’m told that Kicking and Screaming was made on the condition that a part be added for Stoltz. (He plays a long-term philosophy major and bartender, a role apparently written shortly before the movie went into production.)

Structured around a single college semester — a format signaled by such titles as “Midterm” and “Only One Month Until Christmas Vacation!” — Kicking and Screaming begins with a college graduation party that introduces the four graduating heroes, all of whom are at a loss about what to do next: Grover (Josh Hamilton), Max (Chris Eigeman), Otis (Carlos Jacott), and Skippy (Jason Wiles). It’s hard to keep their names and faces straight, especially when all four remain on campus for the next half year; I can’t say I always had a clear sense of who was who. Surely this is part of the point, but that fact doesn’t help the struggling viewer. On two separate occasions a female character remarks, “You guys all talk alike” — but whether this was two female characters or the same one also eludes me now. At least it isn’t just the male dialogue that’s undifferentiated. But generally, as other reviewers have noted, the women characters tend to understand their own lives and futures better than the men do theirs, though virtually everyone is occasionally limited in his or her ability to function by endearing eccentricities.

The main mover in this world seems to be Jane (Olivia d’Abo), Grover’s former girlfriend (her eccentricity is a habit of removing her retainer while she’s talking). A onetime coffeehouse waitress, Jane decides to study in Prague rather than live with Grover in Brooklyn, thereby sending him into a funk that lasts most of the remainder of the movie, keeping him on campus along with his no more decisive friends. (Otis can’t even board a plane to attend graduate school, one time zone away.) When Grover’s father (Elliott Gould), who recently separated from his mother, turns up to visit him — my favorite scene, perhaps because it has so much to say about the uneasy interactions between fathers and sons — Grover can’t even commit to staying in his dad’s Greenwich Village apartment while he’s away. Meanwhile Jane calls periodically from Prague, leaving Grover various messages, but he never calls her back.

Baumbach has worked as an intern at the New Yorker – a job coyly alluded to as a possibility for Grover in one scene — and has written a New Yorker piece or two, so it’s no surprise that most of his bantering dialogue suggests that magazine’s worldview. If a prototypical line of dialogue in The Doom Generation is “Will you kindly pull your head out of your rectal region?” in Kicking and Screaming it’s “Somebody got up on the wrong side of the futon this morning.” (This isn’t to say that Baumbach doesn’t have a penchant of his own for baroque obscenity. His cameo in the film is devoted to asking another guy, “What would you rather do, fuck a cow or lose your mother?” When the guy says, “Fuck a cow,” Baumbach promptly calls him “cow-fucker.”)

At its worst, Baumbach’s dialogue suggests some of the smart-ass dandyism of writer-director Whit Stillman (an impression fostered by the presence of Chris Eigeman, who starred in both of Stillman’s features, Metropolitan and Barcelona). Baumbach salts his supposed urbanity with liberal rather than conservative trimmings, however. What ultimately saves the dialogue, in my view, are the lovely performances Baumbach coaxes out of his actors, all of whom tend to treat the witticisms as material to play against rather than simply deliver. Baumbach said that Jean Renoir is his favorite director, and there’s a genuine quirky curiosity about people in this movie that validates this taste — a desire to move beyond the characters’ cover stories. This sense of discovery is something Araki seems to find only in his arsenal of formal devices.

The main thing that Araki and Baumbach have in common is their dialogue — not its style, which is radically different in each case, but its function as emotional camouflage, a kind of compulsive delaying action designed to disguise not knowing what to say or do. But perhaps because Baumbach’s characters are more educated, they’re a good deal more self-conscious and self-critical than Araki’s. In one of many flashbacks to Grover’s first encounters with Jane, she notes in passing that she hates raisins, adds that her mother used to make her eat them, then gives Grover 50 cents as a self-imposed penalty for telling him a “bad story.” (Grover, declaring that he likes the story, insists on pocketing only a quarter.) Significantly, they first meet at a writing seminar presided over by Baumbach’s father, novelist Jonathan Baumbach, where Jane tears into Grover’s short story for its triviality.

The male leads in both movies recall the title of Saul Bellow’s first novel, Dangling Man; if Araki’s two heroes dangle over their unresolved sexuality, Baumbach’s dangle over their vocations and purpose in life. And contrary to what Chet tells Grover at the head of this review, God probably laughs more at the absence of plans, an absence all these dysfunctional guys are confronting. For as both movies show, not having plans generally turns out to be as exhausting, as time-consuming, and as draining a project as having them.