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Obsession (1976 review)

Starting with this review, which appeared in the October 1976 issue of Monthly Film Bulletin (vol. 43, no. 513), I’ve elected to reproduce some of my reviews from that magazine without the accompanying credits and synopses, simply to spare myself the drudgery (at least for the time being) of having to retype all this material, for which I hope I can be excused. –J.R.

Obsession

U.S.A., 1976                                                                             Director: Brian De Palma

Pondering over her restoration work in a Florence cathedral, Sandra (Geneviève Bujold) wonders aloud to Michael (Cliff Robertson) whether she should risk removing a painting’s surface to see what lies beneath it, or else restore only the first layer. “Hold on to it”, Michael replies, giving voice not only to his surface obsession but to De Palma’s cool strategy –- to reconstruct or “restore” the mood and manner of Hitchcock’s Vertigo some eighteen years after the fact without worrying too much about the reasons or impulses underlying them. An effective variant on the director’s earlier Sisters — with mother and daughter taking over the symmetrical “mirror” pattern formerly established by Siamese twins, and diverse echoes of Vertigo, Rebecca, Dial M for Murder, and Marnie assuming much the same function here as Rear Window and Psycho did in the earlier film — Obsession also resurrects some of Hitchcock’s most visible characteristics (tight plot construction, extended doppelgänger effects, precise control of point-of-view) while blithely neglecting others (above all, humor and a consistent moral position). What results is a lot closer to the pure engineering of a Spielberg or a Friedkin than to the “personal” nostalgia of a Truffaut or a Bogdanovich, revealing a cleanly constructed mechanism whose limitations are merely the reverse of its expediency (as in the outlandishly contrived scene where Robert improbably exposes his deceptions to Michael, a move dictated more by the spectator’s needs than those of either character). Apart from its obvious pastiche elements, Obsession is striking mainly for what it manages to get away with on its own rather narrow terms: a repeated shot of Geneviève Bujold during the Marnie-like flashback successfully uses one actress to bridge a physical and emotion distance of sixteen years, and the unexpected “happy” incestual ending –  conveyed in endless 360° camera movements around the lead couple, expanding a subtler romantic effect in Vertigo into pure pirouette and pyrotechnics –- makes limited sense while remaining quite adequate to the film’s schematic design. Interestingly enough, the latter comprises a female “wish fulfillment” fantasy at least as much as a male one, and by sailing off into the equivalent of pure metaphysics, it seems quite similar to the fanciful conclusion of Schrader’s Taxi Driver script, which capitulates to dreams that are equally narcissistic and isolated (at least in terms of verisimilitude) from the main body of the film. Reportedly, it was Bernard Herrmann who suggested to De Palma that he drastically abridge Schrader’s original script (which extended the hero’s obsession well into the 1980s before “resolving” it in a like manner), and there is every reason to suspect that the late composer’s instincts were right; the 98 minutes of Obsession could hardly be stretched into the 120 of Vertigo without severe risk of monotony. And if the current film seems to differ most sharply from its source in its self-conscious awareness of its own deliberations (one does not feel that De Palma, like Hitchcock, is ever working close to his unconscious), it remains seductive chiefly thanks to Herrmann’s rich and affecting score. It is a fitting tribute to the composer that in his last film score to be released –- drawing heavily on former work with Hitchcock -– his music guides, inflects, and shapes the narrative’s action more decisively than the mise en scène, the acting, or even the script, implying that Herrmann may indeed deserve consideration as the true auteur of the film, while De Palma, Schrader, Robertson and Bujold mainly serve as dutiful executors and illustrators.
JONATHAN ROSENBAUM

–Monthly Film Bulletin, October 1976

THE TENANT

From Sight and Sound (Autumn 1976). — J.R.

Behind the credits, a face peering out through a window; a downward pan revealing a vertiginous drop to the courtyard below; a pan back to the window and round the court to another face, a girl’s, which quickly turns into Roman Polanski’s; a continuing movement past a chimney, across more windows-down one side of the building, over a railing and up another side — eventually coming round to the door leading to the street, which Polanski enters . . . If the remainder of The Tenant were as impressive as the first shot, we conceivably might have had a masterpiece on our hands. Nearly as concise as the extended crane shot opening Touch of Evil, it differs from the latter by arranging its arsenal of elements into a non-narrative pattern — a set of materials which, except for the girl turning into Polanski, are related spatially but nor chronologically, until Polanski’s entrance through the street door launches the story proper.

A naturalised Pole named Trelkovsky is interested in seeing a flat, and the unfriendly concierge (Shelley Winters) gives him a hard time about it, agreeing to take him upstairs only after he slips her some money. Showing him the rather stale two rooms and remarking that the toilet is down the hallway, she also notes, ‘The previous tenant threw herself out of the window’ and falls into jolly laughter, adding ‘She’s not dead yet’ but instantly reassuring him that she won’t recover. Before long, he is negotiating with the morose Mr. Zy (Melvyn Douglas), who warns him that it’s a quiet building and he won’t tolerate the tenant entertaining young ladies in his room.

A bitterly precise portrayal of the sort of ungenerous xenophobia a non-French tenant is likely to encounter in Paris, such attitudes are only forecasts of what Trelkovsky has to face once he moves in. Although the film’s French version confronts us with a dubbed Winters and Douglas –in contrast with a dubbed Isabelle Adjani in this [U.K.] version — it also makes the anti-French strain a lot more explicit. Beneath this is an expression of humane anguish, poignantly underlined by Polanski’s subtle performance, about the conditions imposed by city living, where the mere existence of a neighbour can be an imposition and a suicide can wind up functioning as a means of providing someone else with living space. The implication, duly borne out by the film itself, is that such a situation could drive anyone mad. But beneath this notion in turn are the formal operations through which Polanski develops it — providing an insight into both the strengths and limitations of his work.

Ever since Knife in the Water, his career has largely gravitated round the problem of reconciling certain formal interests with the more ’saleable’ sides of his artistic persona (principally black humour and a taste for Grand Guignol). It is significant that What?, the film where his formal concerns are probably most evident, might well be the least critically and commercially successful of his efforts to date; if satire, according to George S. Kaufman, is what closes in New Haven, formalism in mainstream cinema can’t even hope for an East Orange preview unless it sneaks in under another label, usually stylistic or thematic. In the case of Polanski, this taboo seems to have brought about a kind of schizophrenia no less troubling than some of his disordered characters — a sense of cross-purposes that finally splits The Tenant into virtually dissociated sections.

Film No. 1, roughly the first half, exhibits Polanski’s formalist side, above all in its accumulation of partis pris and its ambiguous treatment of ‘objective’ facts and subjective states of mind. As in What?, many of these factors can be located in the soundtrack. The water dripping from Trelkovsky’s kitchen tap, the rattle of pipes, the squeak of his cupboard door, the repetitive piano exercises heard from the stairway, the faint cooing of pigeons in the courtyard and the angry pounding of the neighbour upstairs all outline the space of a constricted consciousness; while the latter — always provoked by the sounds made in Trelkovsky’s flat — draws particular attention to this register of awareness. And when Trelkovsky turns from cooking to answer an apparent knock at the door — only to find no one there — one may well wonder whether or not one did hear a knock: the sensitivity to sound developed in the spectator combines with ambiguity to become an acute form of aggression. The bizarre bloodcurdling scream of Simone, the former tenant — bandaged from head to toe when Trelkovsky visits her in the hospital, where he meets her friend Stella (Isabelle Adjani) — is significantly accompanied by a zoom to her mouth. And on the verbal level of sound, who is to say when or how (or even if) the priest’s sermon at Simone’s funeral becomes the hero’s own projection when the subject turns to the putrefaction of corpses? Comparable uncertainties are created in visual terms: is the blonde girl Trelkovsky glimpses at the funeral the crippled daughter of his persecuted neighbour Mme. Gaderian (Lila Kedrova), whom we see Iater? Is her later appearance also an illusion — which is suggested when Mme. Dioz (Jo Van Fleet), her mother’s persecutor, flatly states that Mme. Gaderian has a son, not a daughter ? At what stage do the strange appearances of figures standing in the toilet across from Trelkovsky’s window stop being mysteries and start becoming hallucinations?

If Film No. 1 is largely devoted to posing such questions in the form of brilliant notations, Film No. 2 — by establishing that the hero has gone mad — laboriously proceeds to answer others. A cut from Trelkovsky grasping his own throat to Mme. Dioz attempting to strangle him clearly labels the second shot as a hallucination; and countless other juxtapositions between real and imagined torments lead one straight into the clinical context of Repulsion. To put it as crudely as the film does, this is the kind of violence that audiences pay to see, with ‘reality’ and ‘imagination’ slotted into separate compartments so that one can watch the hero’s agony from a safe voyeuristic distance. There is, to be sure, a moralistic point implied in much of this: the ‘unexplained’ ransacking of Trelkovsky’s flat is later echoed by his own ransacking of Stella’s flat in a paranoiac rage, suggesting that victims eventually take on the behaviour of their persecutors. And when, for instance, Trelkovsky flees to a hotel and gazes out of a window, where he and we see two workmen who might be looking up at him, the earlier terms of the film are briefly allowed to reverberate. But by this time it is too late: after Trelkovsky has gradually gone through the process of becoming Simone — even dressing up as a woman, and eventually jumping twice in succession from the same window — the see-sawing movement between ‘truth’ and ‘illusion’ has become too mechanical for either to carry much conviction. And when Polanski ends with a paraphrase of the previous hospital scene — Trelkovsky (apparently) encased like a mummy in bandages, looking up at Trelkovsky and Stella, then screaming while the camera zooms towards his mouth -– formal interest has shrunk to the level of stylistic pirouette, and ambiguity becomes just the other side of apathy.

JONATHAN ROSENBAUM

Reply to an article by Lucy Fischer about PLAYTIME

This appeared in the Autumn 1976 Sight and Sound, and I hope I can be excused for omitting the article that occasioned it, Lucy Fischer’s “’Beyond Freedom and Dignity’: an analysis of Jacques Tati’s Playtime,” that was included in the same issue. (In her subsequent book-length bibliography of writings about Tati, Fischer omitted this Afterword, along with much else, so I guess that this exhumation of my Afterword without her article could be interpreted as some form of tit for tat. But in fact, I don’t have the rights to her piece, which I don’t believe has ever been reprinted. However, even though I fully realize that most college students prefer to ignore texts that they can’t find on the Internet, this is a piece well worth looking up in a well-stocked library.)

Beginning with a quote from an article by B.K. Skinner entitled “Beyond Freedom and Dignity” -– “We attempt to gain credit for ourselves by disguising or concealing control” –- Fischer’s article sets about attempting to refute my claims that Playtime was a fulfillment of Andre Bazin’s claim that the “long-take style” accorded more freedom to the viewer by showing how Tati’s own style guides the viewer in various ways and towards certain details through his uses of color, camera movement, and sound. Fischer concludes, ‘To some extent, in entering the world of a Tati film we encounter the ‘democracy’ of style that critics like Jonathan Rosenbaum have acclaimed. But we should not be surprised to discover at the helm of that purported democratic ship of state a marvelously benevolent despot.”

Even though Lucy’s article disagrees with my basic thesis about the film, I made a strong case to Penelope Houston (my boss at the time) that she publish it, especially considering how little of any substance had been published about Tati’s masterpiece at the time, and, if memory serves, it was Penelope who suggested that I draft a response to it. -– J.R.

As a supplement to Lucy Fischer’s important article, I’d like to offer three points which seem worth noting in any comprehensive account of the film in relation to an audience’s real or imagined freedom.

(1) All the examples of ‘benevolent’ despotism cited above — whether effected by color, sound or camera movements — are, it is true, designed to urge the spectator to ‘notice’ certain things. (One might add to this list the use of dummies and/or cut-out figures in addition to real extras in the backgrounds of certain shots.) But just as clearly, they are designed to divert the spectator from other things, some of which later develop into events or gags which take one entirely by surprise. During the later stages of the Royal Garden festivities, one gag at the bar is repeated twice: a drunk and the stool he is sitting on simultaneously crash to the floor when he leans back too far. What makes this event a great deal funnier the first and third time it happens is its unexpectedness; amidst a flurry of other focal points, Tati’s mise en scène has insured that we notice its occurrence only after we hear the crash, interrupting our attention elsewhere and immediately refocusing it. The third occurrence, for example, interrupts Hulot’s efforts in the foreground to give another drunk street directions — a detail which itself plays on confusions, as the young man’s fingers trace beyond a plan de Paris to the similarly patterned pillar he is holding it against. (As a play on the continuity and discontinuity of separate ’signs’, this gag, like countless others, parodies our own organizational capacities while watching the film.)

Another example occurs much earlier at the Royal Garden, and although it is not a ‘gag’ in any ordinary sense, it has come to represent for me of the most beautiful moments in all of cinema: the instant that the first of the restaurant’s bands starts to play. How could such a fleeting detail seem so extraordinary? Because over repeated viewings of the film I have nearly always been unable to anticipate this instant even by a fraction of a second; each time, Tati’s complex strategies — which include his unobtrusive time abridgements — have contrived to prevent me from taking notice of the musicians’ assembly on the bandstand. In short, the film is predicated on one’s inattentiveness as much as one’s attentiveness, which in turn affects one’s sense of real or imagined freedom. After missing a detail, one naturally concludes that one could have chosen to see it, and tries to become more vigilant in anticipating future surprises, playing a sort of guessing-game that is ironically more fun to lose than to win.

(2) Between those areas on the screen which one is encouraged to ‘notice’ or ‘not notice’ are other areas where the emphasis is more unstable and shifting — a terrain perhaps best described by Noël Burch in Cahiers du Cinéma No. 199 as that of the ‘refused gag’, where a gag that has been ’started in one sequence, completed in another, developed in a third and repeated in a fourth’ can be ‘refused in a fifth. This teasing ‘promise’ of a gag that is never quite delivered comes in many forms (a random example: the street worker’s slabs of cement which almost splatter a well-dressed lady pedestrian), and is a crucial part of Tati’s tactics, whereby the mere possibility or preparation of a gag alters the overall dynamics of the image and soundtrack.

(3) Repeated viewings have a very special bearing on the extent of a spectator’s ‘real’ freedom in relation to Playtime. Although the falling drunk on the bar-stool has made my own ‘controlled’ inattention the virtual subject of a gag in Tati’s terms, the gag has never been experienced twice in the same way because the degrees of relative attention and awareness have fluctuated with each viewing. However firm Tati’s guidelines may be in ‘directing’ attention, one nevertheless acquires increasing freedom in how much one willingly submits to this pressure as one increases one’s familiarity with the film.

Indeed, a paradoxical aspect of Playtime’s fascination is that it yields up its greatest treasures only after one becomes aware of its brilliantly deceptive manipulations and begins to chart one’s own mise en scène in relation to Tati’s — a collaborative act that combines the rigorous work of a land-surveyor with the improvisational play of a tourist. (A central function to the film’s use of music is to provide a rhythmical ‘anchor’ and guideline to the spectator in plotting out his or her movements in this activity; it enables one to experience the process of observation itself as a kind of spontaneous, joyous and continuous dance.) Even here, it goes without saying that one’s freedom operates within well-defined constraints: the fact that Tati’s  mise en scène remains necessarily stronger than one’s own. All existing democracies, one might add, exhibit comparable ambiguities about freedom. But if one familiarises oneself with the powers that be — a step few citizens seem willing to take — one can participate in the decision-making process with open eyes, receptive ears and an active mind. Within these conditions, Tati functions rather less as a ‘benevolent despot’ and somewhat more as a duly elected official.