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Hollywood Confidential [THE CAT’S MEOW]

From the Chicago Reader (April 26, 2002). — J.R.

The Cat’s Meow

*** (A must-see)

Directed by Peter Bogdanovich

Written by Steven Peros

With Kirsten Dunst, Cary Elwes, Edward Herrmann, Eddie Izzard, Joanna Lumley, Jennifer Tilly, Victor Slezak, James Laurenson, and Claudia Harrison.

ORSON WELLES: In the original script [of Citizen Kane] we had a scene based on a notorious thing Hearst had done, which I still cannot repeat for publication. And I cut it out because I thought it hurt the film and wasn’t in keeping with Kane’s character. If I’d kept it in, I would have had no trouble with Hearst. He wouldn’t have dared admit it was him.

PETER BOGDANOVICH: Did you shoot the scene?

ORSON WELLES: No, I didn’t. I decided against it. If I’d kept it in, I would have bought silence for myself forever. – This Is Orson Welles

I edited This Is Orson Welles, a series of interviews Peter Bogdanovich did with Welles, at the request not of Bogdanovich but of Oja Kodar, Welles’s companion and collaborator for the last 20-odd years of his life, to whom Welles had willed the rights. The incident Welles alluded to in this exchange is the subject of The Cat’s Meow, directed by Bogdanovich and adapted by Steven Peros from his own play.

Bogdanovich may see Welles as the inspiration for his film, but I have no idea where Peros got his facts. If you turn to the entry under Thomas Ince — a Hollywood director, screenwriter, and actor who was once famous as a pioneering producer — in the 1979 edition of Ephraim Katz’s Film Encyclopedia you read: “On the night of November 19, 1924, [Ince] was mysteriously and fatally injured aboard William Randolph Hearst’s yacht, on which he had gone for a weekend of fun and frolic with several other distinguished guests. He died before regaining consciousness. The death was officially attributed to heart failure as a result of acute indigestion. But scandalous rumors persisted in Hollywood that Ince was shot by Hearst, who suspected him of carrying on an affair with his protegee, Marion Davies.” A similar story is offered by The Cat’s Meow. Bogdanovich, assuming that most viewers won’t know anything about Ince, has asked reviewers of the film not to reveal what happens on the yacht. I can’t comply with his request because I see no other way of discussing the film in any detail, so you may want to see the film before finishing this review.

Ince’s name doesn’t appear in the index of either Robert Carringer’s The Making of “Citizen Kane” or Ronald Gottesman’s collection Perspectives on “Citizen Kane”, which contains Carringer’s near-definitive essay about the script’s authorship. But Ince’s name does appear in Pauline Kael’s less scholarly but more entertaining “Raising Kane“; her principal source was John Houseman, script supervisor for cowriter Herman Mankiewicz, and it seems safe to conclude, even without her prodding, that some version of the story must have cropped up in Mankiewicz’s first draft of the script, which Welles subsequently edited and added to. According to Kael, the only trace of the subplot left in the script is a speech made by Susan Alexander, who was loosely based on Davies, to the reporter Thompson about Kane: “Look, if you’re smart, you’ll get in touch with Raymond. He’s the butler. You’ll learn a lot from him. He knows where all the bodies are buried.” Kael writes, “It’s an odd, cryptic speech. In the first draft, Raymond literally knew where the bodies were buried: Mankiewicz had dished up a nasty version of the scandal sometimes referred to as the Strange Death of Thomas Ince.”

I don’t think we’re likely ever to know for sure what happened on Hearst’s yacht on November 19, 1924. The value of The Cat’s Meow – whose cryptic title may stem from a feature of the same name produced by Mack Sennett and directed by Roy Del Ruth that was released in 1924 — has more to do with its capacity to get us to reflect on its most famous characters: newspaper tycoon Hearst, his mistress Davies (the principal star of his film company, Cosmopolitan Pictures), producer Ince (the yacht party’s guest of honor, he was belatedly celebrating his 42nd birthday and trying to set up a merger of his film studio with Hearst’s), Ince’s mistress Margaret Livingston (a movie actress who three years later played the Woman From the City in F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise), Charlie Chaplin, gossip columnist Louella Parsons, and British novelist Elinor Glyn (who serves as the movie’s narrator).

The version of events offered by The Cat’s Meow is that Chaplin was having an affair with Davies and that Ince — who helped expose the infidelity to Hearst, hoping to gain his trust and encourage the merger — was shot from behind by Hearst, who’d seen him chatting with Davies and mistaken him for Chaplin. Some if not all of this hypothesis is supported by David Robinson’s authorized biography of Chaplin, which notes that a gossip item in the November 16 New York Daily News (which figures prominently in the film) implied that Chaplin and Davies may have been having an affair, confirms that Hearst kept a gun on the yacht for shooting seagulls (another detail used in the film), and adds that Ince was a small man whose head and hair color were similar to Chaplin’s and who might well have resembled him from behind. But Robinson also reports that “there is great doubt as to whether or not [Livingston] was aboard” and that “Chaplin consistently declared to his intimates that he was not aboard the yacht,” though photographs do show him at Ince’s cremation two days later. Robinson further notes that Glyn told Eleanor Boardman, King Vidor’s wife at the time, “that everyone aboard the yacht had been sworn to secrecy, which would hardly have seemed necessary if poor Ince had died of natural causes.”

The strongest achievement of The Cat’s Meow may be the performances, especially those of Kirsten Dunst (Davies), Edward Herrmann (Hearst), and even Eddie Izzard (Chaplin), who takes some getting used to because, as other reviewers have noted, he bears a closer resemblance to Welles in his mid-30s than to Chaplin at the same age (Welles was only nine in 1924). This resemblance is surely deliberate on Bogdanovich’s part; he knew Welles much better than Chaplin and probably saw parallels between them. (Given Bogdanovich’s apparent identification with both figures, particularly insofar as he’s a controversial Hollywood filmmaker with a bumpy career and a ladies’ man who’s been both envied and hated, one might even hypothesize that his depiction of Chaplin adds up to a covert yet scathing autocritique — though it would seem outrageously arrogant if he dared own up to it.) If we can overlook Izzard’s lack of physical resemblance to Chaplin, his capacity to suggest Chaplin’s essence in other ways — more as a man than an artist — steadily grows as the film develops. (Similarly, Bogdanovich is more attentive to Hearst as a man than he is to Hearst as a public figure — and I would think that his own marriage to a woman much younger than himself bolstered his identification with Hearst.)

In some ways, Dunst gives the film’s most impressive performance. She’s only a teenager, but she succeeds in embodying Hearst’s flighty if mainly loyal 27-year-old mistress to an uncanny degree. Herrmann’s portrayal of Hearst is equally sympathetic and multilayered, though quite unlike Welles’s Kane version, as there’s virtually no social or psychological critique of him. (The only time I noticed Bogdanovich alluding to Kane directly was when he showed Hearst on a rampage after receiving confirmation of Davies’s affair with Chaplin.) This may be because romantic relationships typically count for everything with Bogdanovich and social concerns for practically nothing — despite a self-conscious little speech by Glyn in the film that zeroes in on the “California curse” she associates with Hollywood, in which “your hold on morality…vanishes without a trace.” Hearst’s devotion to Davies winds up excusing not only his pleasure in shooting seagulls, but his corruptness as a press baron and yellow journalist, in which the film takes no interest. The only people singled out for any sustained critical or satirical abuse are Louella Parsons (Jennifer Tilly) and a straitlaced, middle-aged midwestern couple. By contrast, the treatment of Hearst, Davies, and Chaplin is so multifaceted I was eventually persuaded to overlook some of the more brazen improbabilities, including the notion that Davies would have been so open about her relationship to Chaplin in such close proximity to Hearst.

Cary Elwes, a dead ringer for Ince, may well deserve as much praise as Dunst, Herrmann, and Izzard. Perhaps I’ve been ignoring him because he plays a real-life celebrity I know less about and find less sympathetic than the other three central characters. His colleagues in the film, notably Hearst, perceive him as a has-been, and he winds up desperately tattling on Chaplin and Davies in his efforts to maneuver himself back into the limelight — which may make him more of a self-critical projection for Bogdanovich than either Chaplin or Hearst.

Though The Cat’s Meow is set eight years earlier than Robert Altman’s Gosford Park and in the U.S. rather than in England, and though it features a much racier crowd (pun intended when it comes to a late-night group grope with a black saxophone player), the two films do have a few loose parallels, especially in their parodic treatment of Parsons and their satiric critique of the way servants are exploited (the resemblances between Joanna Lumley and Maggie Smith are mainly superficial). Yet the differences between the films are as instructive as the resemblances. The convincing portrayal of Parsons as stridently and unconsciously gauche seems Altman-esque, but once she finds a way to bribe Hearst into giving her a lifetime contract, Bogdanovich drops the caricature and shows her to be much more clever than previously suggested. A Ping-Pong game that has a couple of maids scurrying after countless balls as they’re heedlessly batted off the table by two guests condenses most of the best gags in Gosford Park, but the sequence is offhand, the point forgotten almost as quickly as one of the balls.

What’s masterful about Bogdanovich’s direction is the cumulative detail, which adds complexity to incidental as well as central characters. He has a graceful way of switching viewpoints from one character to another and an uninsistent yet mainly persuasive sense of period. He even presents a plausible version of Hearst’s taste. I remember being surprised when I visited Hearst’s mansion, San Simeon, in the 80s at how tasteful rather than vulgar much of it was; that was one of the main details Citizen Kane changed, undoubtedly for good reasons.

Because Kane did such a good job of mythologizing both Hearst and Welles — albeit in very different ways, for very different reasons — and because the film has become an unassailable classic in many people’s minds rather than a marvelous aberration, it has created a lot of unhelpful and misleading impressions. Perhaps the cardinal failing of The Battle Over “Citizen Kane”, a 1996 Oscar-nominated documentary, is its nearly groundless argument that Hearst and Welles had a lot of things in common. The corruption of the former and the innocence of the latter only begin to describe the essential differences. Indeed, I would argue that it’s precisely because Kane is the only Welles film to view corruption from a corrupted viewpoint — the pivotal contribution of Mankiewicz, a gifted Hollywood hack — that Hollywood ultimately warmed to the film, even assigning the script an Oscar.

Charles Foster Kane, people are fond of saying, predicts in his decline the subsequent decline of Welles, but I think this is a misguided assumption. If any Welles character can be said to predict what eventually happened to Welles, it’s George Minafer, the spoiled and arrogant rich kid of The Magnificent Ambersons, Welles’s second feature. Welles refused to play the character himself (after a clumsy effort to do so in the radio version), casting Tim Holt in the part; but he clearly identified with Minafer — and no doubt identified with him more when he, like Minafer, lost his wealth and power.

Minafer winds up learning humility the hard way, though hardly anyone in his family or circle is left to notice when he does. One might say a similar lesson has been learned by Bogdanovich, who in some respects has followed Minafer’s trajectory more than Welles. After all, Welles’s only substantial commercial successes were in radio and theater; Bogdanovich became a millionaire after directing three successive hits in Hollywood. But then Bogdanovich became a much-reviled has-been. He has had more opportunities for work than Welles, but his public profile has shrunk more. His hard-won humility may well have made him a better director, though few people noticed that Texasville (1990) was better directed than The Last Picture Show (1971), thanks to his diminished reputation in the film industry.

“Peter Bogdanovich returns to filmmaking,” reads the headline over Tad Friend’s story in the April 8 New Yorker, but of course he never really left. He was just banished to the purgatory of TV movies, an uncharted territory that doesn’t qualify as “filmmaking” as the New Yorker understands it. Friend’s entertaining profile of Bogdanovich points out that The Cat’s Meow is certainly a lesson in humility and modesty as far as production circumstances are concerned: it was shot in 31 days in Germany and Greece for $6 million, though it looks more polished than many Hollywood features costing ten times as much. In these terms, this picture might well be considered a more impressive accomplishment than many of his early pictures. But it speaks with a quieter voice, and what it says seems substantially more personal and thoughtful.

Backyard Ethics [REAR WINDOW]

From the Chicago Reader, February 25, 2000. This essay is also reprinted in my collection Essential Cinema. — J.R.

Rear Window

Rating **** Masterpiece

Directed by Alfred Hitchcock

Written by John Michael Hayes

With James Stewart, Grace Kelly, Thelma Ritter, Raymond Burr, Wendell Corey, Judith Evelyn, Ross Bagdasarian, Georgine Darcy, and Irene Winston.

Alfred Hitchcock’s greatest movie, Rear Window, is as fresh as it was when it came out, in part, paradoxically, because of how profoundly it belongs to its own period. It’s set in Greenwich Village during a sweltering summer of open windows, and it reeks of 1954. (A restored version, by Robert A. Harris, opens this week at the Music Box, and it’s so beautiful and precise it almost makes up for his botch of Hitchcock’s Vertigo a few years back.)

Peter Bogdanovich notes in Who the Devil Made It that Hitchcock “didn’t use a score” in the movie, “only source music and local sounds,” which isn’t exactly true. In fact, we get quite traditional theme music from Franz Waxman behind the opening credits, and, more important, the film subtly integrates hit tunes of the mid-50s into the ambient sound track, most noticeably “Mona Lisa” and “That’s Amore,” which was introduced the previous year by Dean Martin in another Paramount picture, The Caddy. The only serious flaw in Rear Window is the hokey use of a song to resolve a couple of subplots — which audiences in 1954 didn’t find convincing either.

When this romantic comedy-thriller was made, TV hadn’t yet posed a serious threat to radio, much less to movies, and there’s nary a TV set or TV screen in sight. The movie’s overall narrative form of scanning past windows in a courtyard seems to anticipate channel surfing, but it reflects the way one turns a radio knob, tuning in and out of frequencies while the station indicator moves horizontally or vertically along the dial. The same pattern is apparent in the beautifully calibrated camera movements as well as the brilliantly mixed and nuanced sound recording.

Turning a radio knob is actually the first decisive act by anyone in Rear Window. The camera briefly scans the courtyard that will remain the movie’s only location, showing the hero — L.B. Jefferies (James Stewart), better known as Jeff — fast asleep in the 92-degree morning heat. Then we see a composer (Ross Bagdasarian) across the way shaving, sufficiently irritated by a radio commercial (”Men, are you over 40? When you wake up in the morning, do you feel tired and run-down? Do you have that listless feeling?”) to switch stations to a rumba. The sound of an alarm clock shifts the focus to a middle-aged couple a few apartments away waking up on their fire escape, where they’ve bedded down to beat the heat. (In 1954 air conditioners were of course about as common as TV sets.) Then the camera dips down and to the left to show a curvy ballet dancer (Georgine Darcy) doing exercises while getting dressed — a musical-comedy heroine and va-va-voom 50s sex object, subsequently labeled “Miss Torso” by Jeff — before returning to Jeff and panning down to his left leg, which is in a plaster cast. It then crosses the room to show us succinctly who he is and how he broke his leg: we see a broken camera in front of a photograph of a racing-car accident, followed by other framed news photos, a negative close-up of a female model, and stacks of the Life-like magazine Jeff works for, with a positive image of the model’s photo on the cover.

This introduction to Jeff reminds us of Hitchcock’s roots in silent cinema, but the highly developed sense of being current never falters. Some of this impression undoubtedly comes from the bantering dialogue of screenwriter John Michael Hayes, adapting a Cornell Woolrich story about an invalid so that it features more glamorous characters; Jeff’s girlfriend, Lisa (Grace Kelly), a chic, wealthy fashion buyer and former model, was apparently based in part on Hayes’s own fashion-model wife. Hayes was a radio writer with a flair for romantic comedy, at least in his first three scripts for Hitchcock — Rear Window, To Catch a Thief, and the underrated and uncharacteristically utopian The Trouble With Harry — and he had a light touch that was never matched by Hitchcock’s subsequent screenwriters, with the exception of Ernest Lehman, who scripted North by Northwest and Family Plot. The high-gloss sophistication and wit extends to the treatment of sex in the movie, which is a lot more daring than most other Hollywood films of the period. When Lisa announces to Jeff that she’s staying overnight and then proceeds to model her tiny overnight bag and the negligee inside it — both items occasion a few uneasy leers from Jeff’s detective chum Tom (Wendell Corey) — one suspects the censors were placated only because Jeff’s plaster cast made sex between him and Lisa seem unlikely. It’s interesting that Hayes’s original script intimated that Lisa was somewhat frigid and that Jeff was frustrated about not having had sex with her — two hints Hitchcock presumably got Hayes to eliminate. (This production information, and much that follows, is drawn from Bill Krohn’s indispensable Hitchcock at Work, which is based on diverse production records and scheduled for publication by Phaidon in the near future.)

Another, less obvious aspect of the movie that feels very up-to-the-minute is the way it evokes the Sunday funnies. Apart from movies and radio, comic strips were probably the most popular vehicle for narrative at the time, and the movie’s repeated traversals of courtyard windows capture some of the experience of reading one of those strips — especially when the windows frame one neighbor, traveling salesman Lars Thorwald (Raymond Burr), as he moves from hallway to kitchen to living room to bedroom, a journey comprising roughly the same number of squares as a daily strip. As Jeff becomes increasingly intrigued by the movements of the harried Thorwald and his nagging, bedridden wife (Irene Winston) — especially after she mysteriously disappears and Jeff suspects a murder plot — he finds himself “reading” Thorwald in precisely this manner, and the viewer is increasingly encouraged to “read” Thorwald over Jeff’s shoulder.

It’s impossible to know whether Hitchcock had comic strips consciously in mind, but Krohn told me he’s encountered intriguing evidence that Hitchcock encouraged Raymond Chandler, his screenwriter for Strangers on a Train, and the film’s production designer to study Milton Caniff’s Terry and the Pirates while working on the film. Coincidentally or not, Frank Tashlin’s dazzling comedy about comic books, Artists and Models, was made at the same studio the following year and features a gag that’s explicitly about Rear Window. Fritz Lang read comic strips in the 30s to teach himself English, and Alain Resnais — surely the most Hitchcockian of all French directors — has said that most of what he knew about editing came from comics. (We do know that Hitchcock, in a private and intricate form of revenge, closely modeled Thorwald’s appearance after that of David O. Selznick, the control-freak producer who meddled in many of Hitchcock’s early Hollywood features. Five years later Hitchcock took another dig at Selznick in North by Northwest by giving his hero the same middle initial, which the character says stands “for nothing.”)

What do Hitchcock’s comic strips add up to? All the little stories about the people around the courtyard — who also include a honeymoon couple with a sexually insatiable wife who keeps calling her husband back to bed, a recurring gag few other Hollywood directors could have got away with in 1954; an avant-garde woman sculptor; and a love-starved single woman dubbed Miss Lonely Hearts (Judith Evelyn) — are variations on a theme concerning what it means to be part of a couple or to live alone, both situations being viewed darkly. It was an ideological staple of the Eisenhower 50s that family was everything and going it alone signified some form of quiet desperation and failure. Here, even the childless couple who sleep on the fire escape are perceived to be unhealthy because of their highly emotional attachment to their dog, and the lone, unattractive sculptor is seen working on a genderless figure with a gaping hole in its belly, a piece she calls “Hunger.” Hayes’s original script also had an adulterous love triangle involving two of the flats, which was replaced by the childless couple.

Two of the most poetic evocations of Greenwich Village to be found in movies, those in The Seventh Victim (1943, see below) and Rear Window, were shot in Hollywood studios, and both are models of cozy proximity and narrative economy, featuring lairlike garrets and densely populated neighborhoods filled with mysterious artists of various sorts. The Seventh Victim – the fourth and in some ways the best of all the horror quickies produced by Val Lewton, despite the convulsive beauty and dreamlike fluidity of the three Jacques Tourneur features preceding it — was shot largely on refashioned RKO sets built for The Magnificent Ambersons to create a claustrophobic vision of a nocturnal, bohemian Manhattan.

Rear Window, with considerably more money at its disposal, had a $100,000 set built — 38 feet wide, 185 feet long, and 40 feet high — combining Jeff’s living room, the only part of his flat we ever see, with the courtyard it overlooks. The set also included a short patch of sidewalk and street between two buildings and beyond that a bar, visible only when Jeff uses his telephoto lens to follow Miss Lonely Hearts when she leaves her flat. The fact that these buildings are supposed to be in the West Village may strike some viewers as beside the point, but to me it’s central: Lisa’s uptown and East Side trappings seem designed to contrast with Jeff’s humble abode and carefree manner, and when, late in the film, Thorwald is sent on a wild-goose chase so that Lisa can search his flat for evidence, Jeff arranges a bogus meeting with him at the Albert Hotel, a Village landmark — which suddenly makes it clear that the whole story has been set in a very distinctive location.

Simulating daylight on the monolithic set reportedly required practically every piece of lighting equipment on the Paramount lot. The set contained 31 apartments, a dozen of them fully furnished, and those in Thorwald’s building even had running water and electricity. Hitchcock gave some attention to color coding the background walls and costumes in these flats so that viewers could easily distinguish between them.

One reason Hitchcock loved working with such technical restrictions is that they forced him to use his ingenuity. In an impressive oeuvre, Rear Window is arguably the most exquisitely handcrafted feature, because Hitchcock mastered the spatial as well as behavioral coordinates of his chosen universe inch by inch. He can’t juggle foreground and background the way Tati could a decade later by using deep focus in Playtime, but it seems at times that he’s on the edge of some of the same perceptual possibilities — drafting the rudiments of a cinema of long shots that invites viewers to choose among the sights and events competing for their attention.

Rear Window has often been described as Hitchcock’s testament because it sums up so many of his ideas about filmmaking: his fascination with voyeurism, his love of technical restrictions (which had also motivated Lifeboat and Rope), and his cultivation of certain stars — it was the second time he’d used Stewart (Rope) and Kelly (Dial M for Murder). It also sums up his ideas about editing, especially as a means for soliciting the audience’s involvement in the action.

According to the famous “Kuleshov experiment” in silent Russian cinema, the same close-up of actor Ivan Mozhukhin seen by separate audiences with a bowl of soup, or a coffin, or a little girl automatically conjured up a hungry man, or a mourner, or a pervert. As Hitchcock was fond of pointing out, the same principle is at work whenever the camera cuts from Stewart to the neighbor he’s gazing at. Krohn reports that to give himself more creative leeway in editing — if not to create backup footage to mollify the censors — Hitchcock did many alternate versions of scenes and shots. (Perhaps the funniest of these involved the running gag of the honeymoon couple: Krohn writes, “Looking out at Jeff and Lisa, the groom is summoned once again by his wife and tells her to ’start without me’ — a shocking suggestion that is explained when the shade goes up and we see that they have been playing chess the whole time.”)

Perhaps because he’s a risk-taking news photographer — a conventional adventure hero, at least by reputation — Jeff can pursue his somewhat morbid interest in Thorwald as a way of combating boredom while sitting all day in a wheelchair and remain the movie’s hero. But this doesn’t mean the movie lets him off without a reprimand. For one thing, Lisa has marriage on her mind, and Jeff is determined not to marry her. In a way, the story of Thorwald’s married life becomes a dark, speculative glimpse into the life Jeff is fearfully contemplating; it’s also an inversion of his own setup, with the woman playing the part of the invalid instead of the man.

Stella (Thelma Ritter), a plain-talking insurance-company nurse who turns up every day to give Jeff massages and take his temperature, serves as the voice of his reprimand for being a nosy snoop and the closest thing to a moral conscience in the movie. “We’ve become a race of Peeping Toms,” she says early on when she catches Jeff leering at Miss Torso. “What people oughta do is get outside their own house and look in for a change.” Yet as the evidence against Thorwald mounts, she gradually gets sucked in, spurred only by her curiosity and an abstract desire for justice. In this respect she becomes the spectator’s surrogate, an index of our own fluctuating moral relationship to the events occurring across the courtyard. (This may be Ritter’s best performance, though it wasn’t one of the six supporting roles for which she was nominated for an Oscar; the only other true contender is her police informant in Samuel Fuller’s Pickup on South Street, which was nominated.)

Jeff is the principal voyeur in Rear Window, but Hitchcock takes care to show us Lisa’s and Stella’s responses as well, which aren’t always the same as Jeff’s. Lisa, for instance, responds more than he does to the composer’s music, and each of them is intrigued at different junctures by the plight of Miss Lonely Hearts, who’s clearly tempted by suicide, though each subsequently loses interest in her. That they’re more concerned about being amateur sleuths and capturing a murderer than in saving someone’s life is disturbing, and members of the audience are also indicted if they buy into the same narrative priorities.

Though neither an existentialist nor a Brechtian, Hitchcock remains a moralist, particularly when it comes to the questions raised by these characters’ interests in their neighbors and by the transfer of guilt from one character to another — an essential Hitchcock theme discovered by French critics such as Eric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol in the 50s. Another essential theme is the degree to which morality is a matter of experiencing life in long shot or in close-up. Thorwald is a grim monster in long shot, the only way we see him for most of the film, but he’s quite different when he’s standing across the room from us — reminding us of Charlie Chaplin’s observation that comedy is life in long shot and tragedy is life in close-up. The suspense in this movie is most potent when it hovers over such moral issues, as when Lisa takes risks on Jeff’s behalf and he’s powerless to stop her; the love story and the mystery plot are interrelated most complexly when she breaks into Thorwald’s flat to retrieve his wife’s wedding ring as a crucial piece of evidence, places it on her own finger when the police arrive, and then signals to Jeff from across the courtyard that she has it.

More than anything, Rear Window, without ever ceasing to be a grand entertainment, is a moral investigation into what we do and what that implies whenever we follow a murder plot as armchair analysts. Hitchcock explores the question from just about every possible angle, including the issue of whether we ogle our neighbors the way we ogle characters in plays and movies — from a dark place and a safe distance. The movie begins and ends with a theatrical metaphor — the raising and lowering of the window shades in Jeff’s flat as if they were stage curtains, a symmetry that was brutally violated in Universal’s previous rerelease version, which ends instead with the Universal logo.

Significantly, both the raising and the lowering of Jeff’s shades are fantasy images of divine intervention. He’s asleep during both events, and he’s alone in his flat when the shades are pulled up; when they’re lowered Lisa is nearby, but she’s sneaking a look at Harper’s Bazaar, not pulling the shade cords. The shades go up and down one at a time, without human intervention, and it’s clearly Hitchcock himself, more deity than director, who’s inviting us into his world and then ushering us out.

The Choice Between Art and Life (LA BELLE NOISEUSE)

From the January 31, 1992 Chicago Reader. — J.R.

LA BELLE NOISEUSE

**** (Masterpiece)

Directed by Jacques Rivette

Written by Pascal Bonitzer, Christine Laurent, and Rivette

With Michel Piccoli, Emmanuelle Beart, Jane Birkin, David Bursztein, Gilles Arbona, Marianne Denicourt, and the hand of Bernard Dufour.

Considering how rarely the achievements of art match up with the achievements of commerce, it’s a pleasure to note that Jacques Rivette’s greatest film since 1976 (the end of his most fertile and exciting period, which began in 1968) — winner of the grand prix at last year’s Cannes film festival — also turns out to be the first commercial hit of his career. A few wags have been quick to point out that this is because the beautiful lead actress, Emmanuelle Béart (best known in this country for her part as Manon in Claude Berri’s Manon of the Spring), is nude, posing as a painter’s model, for about half of the film. Maybe they’re partially right, but it also seems to me that, without compromising or diluting his artistry, Rivette has finally hit on a subject — the collective and individual struggles that produce art and the prices that have to be paid for that art — that speaks to a wide audience.

The fact that La belle noiseuse is four hours long makes this even more of an achievement — and, incidentally, confirms that in spite of some disapproving guff over the years about Rivette’s long running times being overly self-indulgent, his best films, with very few exceptions, are his longest. Duration and process are central to what his movies are about, and the longer they run the more disciplined and purposeful they usually turn out to be. As it happens, Rivette has also edited a two-hour version of La belle noiseuse for French TV, using completely different takes, and I’m not surprised to hear that there’s been no stateside interest in distributing it. In the two other cases where authorized shorter versions of Rivette films exist — Out 1 (cut from 12 hours to 4 hours) and Love on the Ground (cut from three hours to two) — the superiority of the longer version is indisputable.

For spectators unfamiliar with Rivette, La belle noiseuse provides an ideal introduction, requiring no pointers or background material. But it’s also an unusually personal and autobiographical work — even a testament of sorts — from a man whose life is so hermetic that it scarcely seems to exist at all apart from his activities as a filmgoer and filmmaker. In Claire Denis’ excellent two-hour documentary about Rivette made for French TV a couple of years ago, Bulle Ogier, the actress he has worked with most often (in 7 features out of 14) is asked at one point if Rivette regards her as a friend. She replies, quite plausibly, that Rivette has no friends, at least in any ordinary sense. Having met Rivette on numerous occasions — at screenings, festivals, and during the shooting of two of his features — I can only assume she’s right; while one can speak to him for hours about film and other arts, his timidity and his monastic air are so absolute that he calls to mind the ravaged, semimad poet Antonin Artaud.

Now in his mid-60s, Rivette seems to have mellowed since the wilder forays of his earlier work as a founding member of the French New Wave, much of which teetered on the edge of madness. The four-hour L’amour fou (1968) alternates between scenes of a theater company rehearsing Racine’s Andromache and glimpses at the tragic relationship between the play’s director and his alienated wife (Ogier), who drops out of the production in the first sequence and begins a gradual descent into madness as she festers in isolation. Like La belle noiseuse, it’s a film about the struggles and choices that have to be made between art and life.

Theater and paranoia, insiders and outsiders are also at the roots of Out 1. But in the subsequent Duelle (1975) and Norôit (1976), two parts of an uncompleted fantasy quartet, the madness might be said to be incorporated into the plots and mise en scène — that is to say, into Rivette’s visions of rival goddesses (in Duelle) and warring female pirates (in Norôit), and into imaginary universes that are more psychoanalytical projections than worlds with social or historical referents. After suffering a nervous collapse a few days into the shooting of the third feature in the quartet, Rivette resumed his career a little further down on the scale of risk and intensity, at a degree he has maintained ever since.

A sort of remake of L’amour fou, but with an alternate ending and with painting employed as a substitute for theater, La belle noiseuse might be said to recapitulate as well as reflect upon the personal history described above. In freely adapting a novella by Balzac, The Unknown Masterpiece, that I haven’t been able to locate (apparently an English translation is currently available only in England), Rivette once again ponders the choice between life and art. But where in L’amour fou it’s basically art that wins out, this film comes down squarely — if a little sadly — on the side of life. (This apparent philosophical shift is also reflected in the only significant change Rivette made in Out 1 when he recently and belatedly edited the 12-hour version into a serial for French TV: omitting a terrifying and climactic ten-minute take of Jean-Pierre Léaud, alone in his room, going to pieces.)

La belle noiseuse begins, as it ends, like a bantering 18th-century French comedy, something along the lines of Marivaux. At a village inn in the south of France, near Montpellier, a young painter (David Bursztein) sits sketching a couple of English tourists at a nearby table. A young woman (Béart) sneaks out of an upstairs room to snap his picture, and then sits down at his table and demands 10,000 francs for the photograph. It soon emerges that they’re lovers, Nicolas and Marianne, playfully pretending to be strangers. They’re awaiting the arrival of Porbus (Gilles Arbona), an art dealer who is about to introduce them to Edouard Frenhofer (Michel Piccoli), a once-famous and long-inactive painter whom Nicolas admires and who lives nearby with his wife and former model Liz (Jane Birkin) in a rambling 18th-century chateau.

After the visiting trio are welcomed by Liz, Frenhofer emerges, unshaven and unprepared for guests (”I completely forgot”), and shows everyone around his studio — a windowless former barn that reminds Marianne of a church (a significant comparison that she expands upon later). As the visitors poke around some of his old canvases, Liz alludes to his unfinished painting La belle noiseuse – his last attempt at a masterpiece, which she modeled for, abandoned a decade ago. (The title, archaic slang for “the beautiful nutty woman,” refers to Catherine Lescault, a 17th-century courtesan; in contemporary Canadian French, “noiseuse” means a woman who drives men to distraction and causes pain.) Agitated by Liz’s remarks, Frenhofer insists that the painting doesn’t exist. But later that evening, after Porbus suggests that Frenhofer use Marianne as a model and Nicolas gives his assent — Marianne is off with Liz at the time, discussing her career as a writer — he decides to make another stab at the work and asks Marianne to come back the next morning. (Porbus, who has left by this time, has already agreed to buy the painting if Frenhofer finishes it.)

Furious with Nicolas for committing her to this project without her consent (”You sold my ass”), Marianne nevertheless keeps the appointment. After an enormous amount of puttering around in his studio –rearranging diverse objects, adjusting his worktable — Frenhofer asks her to sit down and opens his sketchbook.

Throughout this leisurely opening, which takes up the film’s first hour, the sense of time and place is palpable; one can almost taste the sunlight and foliage outside and feel the dampness and darkness of the studio. Piccoli’s convincing portrait of an artist in hiding from himself, gradually nudged by himself and others into action, is little short of amazing; his comic prevarications in the studio and evasive conversational manner, showing remarkable powers of observation and synthesis, suggest the weight and complexity of an entire life behind the isolated gestures.

For most of the film’s second hour, Frenhofer executes a series of tentative sketches using both pen and brushes. Here’s where Rivette’s focus on duration and process comes in, making all the essential facts of the artist’s work — the scratch of pen against paper, the hesitations and decisions of hand and brush, the progress and revision of a design taking shape — as palpable as the sense of time and place was during the first hour. (Here and throughout the remainder of the film, the hand we see in close-up belongs to a real artist, Bernard Dufour, but the matching is done so well that the effect never looks contrived. One quite sophisticated critic, who missed the reference to Dufour in the credits, was fooled completely and assumed all of the drawing and painting was done by Piccoli.) While Rivette employs real time whenever it’s appropriate to his design, it would be quite wrong to assume that he simply lets the camera run on in the manner of Warhol; jump cuts are as essential to his sense of rhythm as long takes, and he uses both with equal judiciousness.

But more than just the artist’s work is being observed and charted. Almost an equal amount of attention is paid to the work of Marianne — tensely holding a pose, changing positions at Frenhofer’s request, improvising certain readjustments (at one point she uses a paintbrush to put back her hair), negotiating her physical discomforts in a variety of ways, and dealing emotionally with the fact that she’s being looked at constantly. After Frenhofer directs her to a dressing gown and she begins posing in the nude, the tensions of their collaboration — and the film constantly makes it clear that it is a collaboration — undergo a quantum leap. Over the course of the film, their sessions become increasingly charged with pain and passion, and it’s clear that Rivette is working from the complex interactions involved in his own art — between screenwriters, cinematographers, other crew members, and, above all, actors. (Much later in the film, a beautiful sequence is created out of Frenhofer’s efforts to find “the right angle” for viewing Marianne as she assumes “the right pose.”)

Meanwhile, Nicolas pays a visit to Liz, engaged in her own work in a separate part of the chateau, stuffing birds. She tries to assuage his worries about Marianne by assuring him that her husband is a gentleman, and he remarks that while Marianne was the one who initially needed him when they met three years ago, now he realizes that it’s he who needs her. As painter and model continue their work, Rivette cunningly keeps shifting the film’s emphasis so that sometimes we’re immersed in the sketch in progress and other times the work itself becomes a mere backdrop to the emotional state of Marianne.

At the end of the first day, we see both the older and younger couples together: Frenhofer and Liz are quite affectionate, but Marianne and Nicolas are still at loggerheads. By the time Frenhofer starts working with paint on canvas the next day, his conversations with Marianne have become much more intimate and charged — though not so intense that an affair between them seems imminent — and the stakes of this work in progress have become much higher for both of them.

For Marianne, an internal struggle has arisen between remaining a slave to Frenhofer’s vision by assuming the contorted positions he requests and striking out on her own. “Let me find my own place, my own way of moving,” she insists somewhat later, during the third hour, but her spirit of rebellion is there virtually from the beginning. Frenhofer’s struggle is a matter of differentiating will from necessity: “When I was a kid, I used to pull my toys to pieces,” he comments after placing her into a particularly difficult pose. But after he declares a little later, “I want the invisible,” he quickly corrects himself: “No, that’s not it. It’s not I who wants it, it’s the work.” Finally, he settles on a kind of mystic compromise: “It’s the line, the stroke. Nobody knows what a stroke is. And I’m after it.”

“Before the next pose, a five-minute intermission,” reads a printed title halfway through the film.

It would be imprudent to reveal much more of the plot, but a few generalities are worth bringing up:

(1) Critics who have faulted the film because they don’t find Frenhofer’s painting sufficiently accomplished or trendy seem to be confusing an overall verisimilitude about artistic process with realism. The film has a great deal to say about the real world — particularly about the roles played by art and life in relationship to one another — but very little to say about “real” painting. We never see all of Frenhofer’s masterpiece in its finished state, but we catch a brief glimpse of its bright red lower portion, enough to know that it “has blood,” as Liz remarked of one of its earlier and unfinished incarnations in which she was the model. We also see the masterpiece in an unfinished state, when it’s already clear that Frenhofer has effected some emotional bloodletting in both his wife and himself by painting Marianne over portions of another unfinished canvas of Liz in order to arrive at a “bloody” synthesis. The idea that real art hurts — and hurts not only its makers but its spectators — is central to the film. Much of the work favored by the art market — which includes critics and spectators as well as dealers and gallery owners — entails little if any pain for the artist or for anyone else, and the film points out that art that is painful usually isn’t popular. (Indeed, most of Rivette’s own career bears this out; Norôit, perhaps his most daring film, has never received a commercial run anywhere in the world.)

(2) Over the course of the film, the identity of every major character becomes redefined by the masterpiece in progress. The only one left out of this process is Nicolas’ sister Julienne (Marianne Denicourt), a character who turns up at the eleventh hour, not, apparently, to effect any significant change in the action but to give Nicolas and Marianne someone besides each other to speak to. If the film has a flaw, it would be the distracting intrusion of Julienne — though she, like each of the other five characters, is an important part of the roundelay of exchanges that concludes the film.

(3) The best scene in the film features neither nudity nor painting but a confrontational dialogue between Liz and Frenhofer in their adjoining bedrooms and on a connecting terrace in the early hours of the morning. (The terrace, perhaps not coincidentally, recalls the ramparts where life-and-death struggles are waged in Norôit.) Rivette’s musical sense of mise en scène has never been more masterful or functional in charting both the literal movements of a couple and the various stations of their “passion” (in both the carnal and Christian senses of the word). This is the scene that establishes the reasons for Frenhofer’s choice of life over art. The equivalent scene in L’amour fou showed the theater director fully entering into the madness of his wife by collaborating with her in destroying their apartment — an act conceived and executed as a 60s “art gesture,” and an emblem of the artist despairingly choosing art over life.

(4) When I suggested above that Frenhofer and Marianne collaborated in the making of his painting, I didn’t mean to imply that they were the only ones involved. Porbus, who symbolizes the art market (and specifically commissions the work); Nicolas, the disciple (and the one who offers Marianne as model); and Liz, the initial inspiration and literal background are equally instrumental, not only in generating the masterpiece but also in determining its eventual fate. (Only Julienne, the sixth cog in a five-cog machine, seems extraneous to both activities.) “I am accustoming myself to the idea of regarding every sexual act as a process in which four persons are involved,” Freud once wrote in a letter. Similarly, it would be fair to say that Rivette regards the process of making art as one in which many more people are involved than simply artist and model. That idea corresponds, in any case, to his profoundly collaborative notion of his own art. And the playful comic charades that frame Rivette’s dark meditation suggest that the life he is opting for is merely a form of protection and survival — giggles to hold back the maelstrom of nightmarish possibilities that masterpieces, including this one, unleash.

The Holiday Glut: A Cautious Consumer Guide

From the Chicago Reader (December 21, 2001). — J.R.

The Affair of the Necklace

Rating * Has redeeming facet

Directed by Charles Shyer

Written by John Sweet

With Hilary Swank, Adrien Brody, Jonathan Pryce, Christopher Walken, and Joely Richardson.

Ali

Rating *** A must see

Directed by Michael Mann

Written by Gregory Allen Howard, Stephen Rivele, Christopher Wilkinson, Eric Roth, and Mann

With Will Smith, Jon Voight, Mario Van Peebles, Jamie Foxx, Ron Silver, Jeffrey Wright, and Giancarlo Esposito.

Kate & Leopold

Rating ** Worth seeing

Directed by James Mangold

Written by Steven Rogers and Mangold

With Meg Ryan, Hugh Jackman, Liev Schreiber, Breckin Meyer, and Philip Bosco.

Kiss Me Kate

Rating **** Masterpiece

Directed by George Sidney

Written by Sam and Bella Spewack and Dorothy Kingsley

With Howard Keel, Kathryn Grayson, Ann Miller, Bobby Van, Keenan Wynn, James Whitmore, and Bob Fosse.

The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

***

Directed by Peter Jackson

Written by Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, and Jackson

With Elijah Wood, Ian McKellen, Liv Tyler, Viggo Mortensen, Sean Astin, Cate Blanchett, and John Rhys-Davies.

The Majestic

Rating  0  Worthless

Directed by Frank Darabont

Written by Michael Sloane

With Jim Carrey, Martin Landau, Laurie Holden, David Ogden Stiers, James Whitmore, and Jeffrey DeMunn.

The Royal Tenenbaums

***

Directed by Wes Anderson

Written by Anderson and Owen Wilson

With Danny Glover, Gene Hackman, Anjelica Huston, Bill Murray, Gwyneth Paltrow, Ben Stiller, Luke Wilson, and Owen Wilson.

Vanilla Sky

**

Directed and written by Cameron Crowe

With Tom Cruise, Penelope Cruz, Cameron Diaz, Kurt Russell, Jason Lee, and Johnny Galecki.

An irate reader wrote to the paper last week complaining that he could never tell from my reviews whether I was recommending a movie or not. I don’t know which reviews he had in mind, but I’m willing to plead guilty as charged, at least in principle. Recommending particular movies is something I can do for friends or relatives, but trying to make recommendations for strangers — even though plenty of critics do — seems a little presumptuous. Why should strangers give up their own tastes and accept my interests and limitations as their own? I also have a problem with a reviewing policy that assumes all viewers should see the same movies; I firmly believe that people should have a wide range of choices and that they should choose among them according to their own desires. So I give ratings, descriptions, and evaluations of movies — including the eight Christmas choices listed above, and considered in alphabetical order — in the hope that readers will use them selectively and critically, weighing their biases against mine.

I wasn’t looking forward to the latest star vehicle of Hilary Swank (who won an Oscar for her role in Boys Don’t Cry), an opulent intrigue set in 18th-century France, or to any movie directed by Charles Shyer (whose credits include Baby Boom, the remake of Father of the Bride, and Father of the Bride Part II). Seeing his The Affair of the Necklace didn’t rouse me out of my apathy, even though it has Christopher Walken camping it up as the magician-alchemist-charlatan Count Cagliostro, Joely Richardson as Marie Antoinette, and Jonathan Pryce as a corrupt and depraved cardinal. If you were my friend I’d advise you to save your money, but that doesn’t mean that some of you won’t find the film worthwhile.

I did, however, have a fine time at Ali, partly because I expected to. I’m even more indifferent to boxing than I was to the prospect of Swank and Shyer telling me something about 18th-century France, but I’m fascinated by the spiky, creative personality of Muhammad Ali, especially during the ten-year period covered by this film (1964-’74). And I know that director Michael Mann has an unusual ability to make long-winded movies absorbing. Ali, which runs almost three hours, eventually loses its focus, and by the time it was over I was hard put to say exactly what it was about, apart from the perils of rebellion. But I was never bored. I was particularly struck by Mario Van Peebles’s Malcolm X, a great improvement on the Hollywood-ized version offered by Denzel Washington and Spike Lee nine years ago; one scene in which Van Peebles’s Malcolm and Will Smith’s wonderfully realized and fully energized Ali compare their feelings of rage against southern racism and how these feelings have affected them physically carries more bite than anything in Lee’s Malcolm X. Some of this can undoubtedly be attributed to the script — credited to five writers, including Mann — but it’s also true that Mann’s epic directorial style allows for such moments.

I was also mightily impressed by Jon Voight’s impersonation of Howard Cosell (so uncanny I forgot I was watching Voight) and many smaller yet perfectly inflected turns, such as Giancarlo Esposito’s depiction of Ali’s father. One period detail in a flashback raised my eyebrows: a sign that said Coloreds Only; I spent my childhood in the jim crow south, and I only remember signs with the singular “colored,” which seemed calculated to make the people in mind even more abstract than any plural noun would have. But generally this is a high-level biopic, as impressive in detail as in its overall sweep.

Kate & Leopold belongs to a loose subgenre combining roughly equal amounts of time-travel whimsy, romantic comedy, and nostalgia for 19th-century Manhattan. (The first two are combined in, among other films, the 1980 Somewhere in Time, the first and third in Jack Finney’s popular novel Time and Again; both are probable influences.) An eligible 19th-century bachelor, Leopold (Hugh Jackman), gets transported to the 21st century by his great-great grandson — a science nerd (Liev Schreiber) who promptly falls down an elevator shaft, clearing the way for his girlfriend and downstairs neighbor Kate (Meg Ryan), an ambitious executive, to show the stranger around and fall in love with him. If you like the romantic leads, as I do, you probably won’t mind that Leopold adjusts to 134 years of progress — or devolution — with implausible speed, resourcefulness, and luck; if he has to borrow a horse to chase after a purse snatcher in Central Park, you can bet that a carriage driver on the street will happily lend him one in two seconds flat.

My favorite among these holiday offerings — Kiss Me Kate, one of the best MGM musicals of the 1950s not made by the Arthur Freed unit — is enhanced by being shown in 3-D and through a novel projection system involving the precise synchronization of two projectors and a magnetic sound track that guarantees the best sound and image this movie is ever likely to have. (Part of the credit should go to local projection virtuoso James Bond, who hooked it all up at the Music Box.) Fortunately, there’s an eyeful and an earful to make all this trouble worth the bother: George Sidney’s exuberantly vulgar direction, which makes more aggressive use of objects flung at the viewer than any other 3-D movie (apart from the early 80s ‘Scope Italian western Comin’ at Ya!) as well as fascinating uses of mirrors, windows, and neosurrealist stage decors evoking De Chirico and Tanguy; a modernist dovetailing of a stage musical version of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew with a bombastic feud between the formerly married leads (Howard Keel and Kathryn Grayson); some of the most exhilarating dancing to be found anywhere; and a fabulous Cole Porter score that manages to survive some Hollywood bowdlerizing. The best number, “From This Moment On,” wasn’t even included in the 40s stage version; here it’s performed by six dancers, including the very young Bob Fosse, who choreographed the number in a way that anticipates his full-blown style.

One could quibble, I suppose, about Grayson as Keel’s partner, but just about everyone else in the cast is delightful. Ann Miller, currently visible as the landlady in Mulholland Drive, achieves something close to her apotheosis in her tap-dancing; and James Whitmore, one of the few bearable elements in the new release The Majestic, here teams up with Keenan Wynn — playing hoods who resemble refugees from Guys and Dolls — to amiably (if amateurishly) hoof their way through the Porter tune “Brush Up Your Shakespeare.”

Since I’ve never read J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” trilogy and haven’t even dipped into The Hobbit since my childhood, I can’t say how faithful Peter Jackson’s big-budget 165-minute adaptation of the first volume, The Fellowship of the Ring, is. Nor can I claim to have been especially attentive to the narrative; as with Star Wars, pop myth and characters seem to count for more than story line. But I was impressed by the scale of the visual settings — which include real landscapes, sets, and uncanny amalgamations of the two — and the dreamlike and metaphysical appeals to the imagination made by the contrast between their vastnesses and the tiny human figures within them, which call to mind the fantasy locations of Mervyn Peake as well as Tolkien. For this reason alone, I was happier watching The Lord of the Rings than any of the chapters of Star Wars, becoming bored only during the battle scenes. But then my preference for nonnarrative over narrative in fantasy settings and my distaste for warfare may place me in a minority, which probably limits my usefulness as a guide to some viewers. (Based on what people have told me over the years, the war scenes in Star Wars provoke the most nostalgia and affection, apparently because they stimulated the most parent-child bonding; evidently, the family that slays together stays together.)

The most abject movie on my list, The Majestic, works overtime shamelessly constructing fantasies of goodwill out of vague memories of Frank Capra and even vaguer memories of the early 50s, when the story takes place. Mythically, it suggests Dorothy falling asleep in Oz and waking up in Kansas. An apolitical studio screenwriter (Jim Carrey) finds himself blacklisted and, having lost everything, drives idly up the California coast, suffers an accident and amnesia, and finds himself welcomed into the bosom of a small town as a missing-in-action World War II hero. His widowed father (Martin Landau), proprietor of the town’s now-closed movie palace, is inspired to resurrect the place, with the help of two faithful assistants, one a black usher who behaves like an obsequious servant — presumably to stir up nostalgia for even more remote periods.

Lurking behind the plot complications are plenty of fantasy assumptions. Among them: blacklist victims weren’t political (an absurd notion already indulged by Irwin Winkler’s Guilty by Suspicion); patriotic small-town populations — when they weren’t following war heroes around on the street and applauding when they kissed their girlfriends — were horrified by the communist witch-hunts; the witch-hunters could be cowed by the sincerity of apolitical vets speaking their mind; victims of amnesia still remember the movies they’ve seen because “movies aren’t part of one’s life”; and Ed Wood-ish B features (there’s a clumsy pastiche called Sand Pirates of the Sahara) played alongside A pictures such as The African Queen at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. Surrounding these hypocritical howlers are all sorts of “knowing” insider details, beginning with a nice gag about Hollywood screenwriters that starts the picture and concluding with an ironic gag about Invasion of the Body Snatchers playing at the restored Majestic — some of which suggests that some script doctor tried to shovel in disrespectful wisecracks whenever possible. But the phonies triumph over such glancing demurrals.

Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums was the movie in this batch I was most looking forward to, and the one that most disappointed me. It repeats many of the stylistic tropes and bittersweet notions about adolescence from Anderson’s Rushmore — increasing the overall cute tone and the paradoxical, Salinger-esque sense of snobbish populism that was slightly problematic in the earlier film, without increasing the imaginative or emotional depth. Of course viewers who haven’t seen Rushmore shouldn’t have these problems, and most people would probably enjoy a lot of this movie anyway. Expectations count for a good deal in these matters, and if you’re merely looking for fun while learning about a dysfunctional family’s neuroses and their various forms of sweetness, you probably won’t feel let down.

Similarly, how you respond to Vanilla Sky may depend on whether you saw Open Your Eyes – the Spanish fantasy thriller of Alejandro Amenabar that played here four years ago. I mainly liked Open Your Eyes, but I’d forgotten enough of the plot details and twists that I could enjoy Cameron Crowe’s slick remake. I’m sure your opinion of Tom Cruise would play an equally important role in whether you can enjoy the film. I now find him tolerable only when he’s in a movie that undercuts or ridicules his narcissism — as Eyes Wide Shut did and as this movie does even more noticeably. Though given that Cruise produced this movie, I may be deluding myself in precisely the way he wants me to. Of course, not knowing who’s calling the shots or what’s real and what’s not is partly what this movie is about. So sorry, I can’t tell you whether you should go see Vanilla Sky. That depends on factors about you I can’t claim to know.

Echoes of Old Hollywood [DESTINY & THE ADOPTED SON]

From the Chicago Reader, April 2, 1999. —J.R.

Destiny

Rating *** A must see

Directed by Youssef Chahine

Written by Chahine and Khaled Youssef

With Nour el-Cherif, Laila Eloui, Mahmoud Hemeida, Safia el-Emary, Mohamed Mounir, Khaled el-Nabaoui, Abdallah Mahmoud, and Ahmed Fouad-Selim.

The Adopted Son

Rating *** A must see

Directed by Aktan Abdikalikov

Written by Abdikalikov, Avtandil Adikulov, and Marat Sarulu

With Mirlan Abdikalikov, Albina Imasmeva, Adir Abilkassimov, Bakit Zilkieciev, and Mirlan Cinkozoev.

Apart from their exoticism, Youssef Chahine’s Destiny and Aktan Abdikalikov’s The Adopted Son don’t have much in common. Destiny is the 35th film by Chahine, a 73-year-old writer, director, and sometime actor who’s generally agreed to be the major figure in the history of Egyptian cinema. His subject here is Averroes (1126-1198), a dissident Spanish-Arab philosopher best known for his commentaries on Aristotle, and his film resembles a Hollywood period spectacular — exuberant, packed with action, and positively overflowing with energy. The Adopted Son is both the first independent feature ever made in Kyrgyzstan — a former Soviet republic in central Asia — and the first feature of 42-year-old writer-director Abdikalikov, who cast his own teenage son in the title role. It’s shot mainly in an exquisitely modulated black and white, though it periodically shifts to color, always with great dramatic effect. Its central focus is childhood and nature in a contemporary rural village, and its main event is the boy’s discovery about halfway through that he was adopted through an ancient local tradition in which parents of a large family offer a male baby to a childless couple after he’s been weaned.

By American standards, The Adopted Son (1998) qualifies as an art film as does Destiny (1997). Chahine’s colorful epic calls to mind certain MGM movies of the 50s, but that apparently counts for nothing given that it comes from Egypt — the only plausible reason it’s showing at the Music Box rather than McClurg Court. Similarly, one could argue that the only reason The Adopted Son is playing at Facets Multimedia and not at the Music Box is that it comes from Kyrgyzstan — anything from a country that difficult to spell must be esoteric. That it’s from the former Soviet Union only compounds the confusion, since we no longer know how to label the various people who live there. (Incidentally, both movies are French coproductions, a reflection of how much more open France’s film culture is to the aesthetics of MGM movies of the 50s and to contemporary art movies from the far-flung corners of the world.)

I don’t mean to suggest that movies from cultures as remote as these wouldn’t pose challenges for casual moviegoers, who might think watching them would be too much like going to school. But such challenges might often prove liberating and exciting — a vastly different experience from watching, say, The Matrix, which claims to be offering a new slant on how the universe works, though it’s recycling elements from just about every other SF action movie in recent memory. If any new ideas find their way into the mix, they’re inevitably obscured by all the shopworn trimmings.

Destiny may intermittently remind one of 50s studio productions as good as The Adventures of Hajji Baba or as mediocre as Kismet — it recalls a house style I associate mainly with MGM and secondarily with directors such as Anthony Mann, Richard Thorpe, Don Weis, Vincente Minnelli, George Sidney, and Mervyn LeRoy. Part of what makes this movie excitingly different is that Chahine has found a meeting ground for what he draws from Hollywood and what he draws from his own culture — a place where they can happily coexist and learn from each other.

MGM in the 50s furnishes me with one personal entry route into the film, and being Jewish provides me with another. The usual ethnocentric position is to see Jewish and Arab cultures in the Middle East at loggerheads, but one can also find similarities in body language, vocal inflections, complexions, forms of ironic humor, and many other subtle markers of common ancestral roots. It would be presumptuous of me to think that every viewer could find a way into Egyptian cinema through these particular routes, but all sorts of potential entry points can be found if viewers are inclined to look for them.

One entry point, for instance, might be Chahine’s personality. I’ve seen him at several festivals in recent years, and he’s as charismatic and outrageous as Samuel Fuller was. A short, wiry firecracker, he also makes no bones about being bisexual; the third movie in his autobiographical trilogy, Alexandria Always and Forever (1989), is comically frank about his sexual attraction to one of his young male leads and features the two of them doing an amorous tap dance on a studio set. Destiny is clearly an act of courage in the face of Islamic fundamentalism, and one of its acts of defiance is to view women and men as equally desirable.

Another such act is viewing genre boundaries with an equal amount of liberalism. Chahine was asked in an interview, “Is it fair to say that Destiny is a musical?” He replied, “In a single day, I expect to cry, laugh, dance, sing. I may even be locked up in jail. A film should contain all those things. What matters is style and pace. One of the things I found most painful is when fundamentalists say they want to stop artists singing and dancing. That’s serious. It is extremely serious….The streets of Cairo are full of laughter. People have [become] too serious in the West. Though there’s plenty to be serious about. I think you’re in a worse mess than we are. People are all mixed up about the difference between civilization and technology. In the Arab world, people are exceptionally civilized. They possess nothing, but what they’ve got they’ll give you with pleasure.”

What’s refreshing about such cultural effusions is the striking contrast they provide with American film culture, whose tastemakers have decided that the musical is dead and we’re all much happier sitting through explosions, mutilations, and cascades of broken glass. If the characters in The Mod Squad periodically broke into song, that movie would surely be more bearable — even if they couldn’t carry a tune. How lucky people are in India and Egypt, where they haven’t become sophisticated like us and decided that musicals are passé.

I’ve seen seven of Chahine’s films and sampled a couple of others — most of them at a complete retrospective held in Locarno in 1996 (perceptively written about by Dave Kehr in Film Comment). But I haven’t seen the immediate predecessor of Destiny, The Emigrant (1994), a story of the biblical Joseph that was banned in Egypt under pressure from fundamentalists after an estimated 900,000 people saw it (the stated reason was that it was illegal to represent a prophet in a film). One of the key inspirations for Destiny — which ends with all of Averroes’s books in Andalusia being burned by the caliph as a concession to fundamentalist groups — was clearly Chahine’s own experience. If I’m not mistaken, the books we see burning in the final sequence are modern volumes rather than medieval manuscripts, which is part of the movie’s point. (Averroes’s writings survived because some of his followers copied them and sent the copies to Egypt — the medieval equivalent of copying films on video today, perhaps the major way the film legacy of the late 20th century is being preserved.)

That Averroes was a humanist whose ideas went on to influence Western as well as Islamic thought and that two of his followers were sons of the caliph are also part of Chahine’s inspiration: the film’s closing motto is “Ideas have wings. No one can stop their flight,” and Chahine has expressly stated that his movie is addressed to everyone, not simply to Egyptians or Islamic fundamentalists. “Yes, this film is a drama, it’s a western, it’s [Alexandre] Dumas [whom he read prior to shooting], whatever, but it’s also a call to resistance.”

Chahine grew up speaking four languages, and as a teenager, after the end of World War II, he came to America to study theater directing at the Pasadena Playhouse, an experience recounted in his Why Alexandria? (1978). So universality is not merely part of his aim but part of his cultural baggage. He makes the visual style of Destiny universal not just through being familiar with the tropes of both Hollywood and Egyptian cinema (the latter of which he helped to invent), but also through his gift for pageantry that favors inclusiveness over stylistic rigor. The generous impulse that makes the movie resemble at separate times a musical, a comedy, a western, a biopic, a biblical epic, a medieval legend, and a Dumas adventure story also results in beautifully lit, framed, and composed shots and sequences that coexist with ones that are more hastily and casually put together. It’s an overflowing smorgasbord of a movie, and one reason its echoes of old Hollywood are so appealing is that new Hollywood probably couldn’t come up with such an intoxicating mixture if it tried — industry wisdom would undoubtedly deem such a project naive and outdated.

In contrast with Destiny, just about everything in The Adopted Son is circumscribed and rigorous — even though its style is flexible enough to include one experimental, handheld sequence that wouldn’t be out of place in a Stan Brakhage work. The film cost about half a million dollars to make, and I would surmise that this means that every shot and every sound recorded on the sound track was made to count. It also suggests that Aktan Abdikalikov, like Robert Bresson (whose current retrospective at the Film Center, with new 35-millimeter prints, is one of the major local film events of the year), operates according to a principle of aesthetic economy: images are developed in relation to other images, sounds are developed in relation to other sounds, and sounds and images are developed in tandem as a way of defining and shaping one another. One can’t come away from The Adopted Son with any sense of deprivation as long as one’s expectations can be adjusted to the size of Abdikalikov’s canvas. That canvas may be small, but in more ways than one, phenomenologically as well as conceptually, some version of the entire world can be found in it. Part of the pleasure of watching this film is seeing that world reconstructed piece by piece.

Abdikalikov’s sparing use of color — clearly a matter of aesthetic rather than financial economy — reinvents our perception of color as well as of black and white in movies: every shift between these registers is experienced as an epiphany, a bursting re-creation of the world. When Abdikalikov was asked in Locarno last summer after the first screening of his film what motivated this eccentric construction, he replied that it was inspired by the way rugs in Kyrgyzstan are woven and patched together. A lateral camera movement over one of these gorgeous rugs in color is the film’s first image, and everything that follows conforms to this beautifully abstract pattern, much the way a musical theme would be developed.

This “carpet connection” has prompted some commentators to compare The Adopted Son to Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s Iranian film Gabbeh (see below), but I think the differences between these films are more important than the similarities. The ethnographic world of Gabbeh isn’t even remotely that of the filmmaker, who’s a talented and imaginative observer, and the somewhat touristic packaging of that world was in some ways Makhmalbaf’s calculated bid to “sell” Iranian cinema in folkloric and consumerist terms to a wider market; his effort succeeded, as did the similarly distanced efforts of Abolfazl Jalili, whose Dance of Dust has been a recent favorite on the festival circuit.

But Abdikalikov’s project is to tell us something about his own life and background. His film’s original title is Beshkempir — the name traditionally given in Kyrgyzstan to a baby son passed over to a childless couple (baby girls — as in Jewish, Islamic, Chinese, and, alas, many other cultures — are considered less desirable). Abdikalikov wasn’t given that name himself, but he did undergo something of an identity crisis when he found out at 13 that his mother and father weren’t his biological parents. Part of this experience is transferred to his teenage hero, who makes a similarly traumatic discovery of his true origins when he’s ridiculed by his playmates for being adopted, then winds up fighting with them. (The film as a whole is more poetic evocation than social criticism, but the sexist brutality of Kyrgyzstan life isn’t entirely ignored: the angry mother of one of the hero’s playmates tells Beshkempir, “He’s not your wife to beat up like that.”)

This identity crisis is only one of the more colorful threads in the tapestry. Before culminating in the stately funeral of Beshkempir’s grandmother — a ritual made to rhyme with the adoption ceremony at the beginning of the film — The Adopted Son concentrates on everyday activities in the village, including the games and pranks of Beshkempir and his pals as they splash and bathe in mud, steal eggs, flee from bees, spy on women. They consolidate some of their discoveries by sculpting a nude female body out of dirt and taking turns pantomiming sex with it — until a passing herd of cattle tramples their masterpiece.

The locations are as much a part of the story as the people, and the selective sounds we hear — of birds, dogs, cows, sheep, water, wind — are as important as the images. One of the best sequences comes when Beshkempir finally gets permission from his parents to go to the movies, an outdoor screening of a Hindi musical shown a reel at a time. Abdikalikov alternates black-and-white shots of the enraptured villagers with color glimpses of the movie on the freestanding screen. I suppose this could be interpreted as a trite dialectic between the drabness of everyday village life and the colorful nature of its fantasy life, but it doesn’t come across that way at all, thanks to the way Abdikalikov articulates it, using the rich palette of his black-and-white cinematography and the musical interweavings of his editing in relation to the Hindi musical’s sound track. It made me think that Kyrgyzstan spectators are in some ways freer in their aesthetic choices than their mainstream American counterparts — maybe they don’t get quite as much broken glass as we do, but they can see musicals, and black-and-white movies in the bargain.