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Die Marquise von O… (1976 review)

 

 

This review appeared in the December 1976 issue of Monthly Film Bulletin. For whatever it’s worth, my favorite among Rohmer’s features remains, alas, his most unjustly neglected — Perceval le Gallois (1978), the feature he made immediately after Die Marquise von O… –J.R.

Marquise von O…, Die

West Germany/France, 1976                                         Director: Eric Rohmer

Probably the most faithful of all the disciples of André Bazin, Eric Rohmer has shared his mentor’s philosophical fascination with “ambiguity” in his criticism and films alike. A position derived from Catholic existentialism which adheres to a “realist” aesthetic whose prime model is the naturalistic novel as exemplified by Dos Passos, Hemingway and Hammett, this orientation is clearly at the root of his version of Kleist’s masterpiece, which subtly betrays the awesome energies of the original while maintaining an overall fidelity to its plot and characters that is rare in contemporary cinema. Widely and justifiably praised for its immaculate direction, acting, and visual sophistication, it can none the less be regarded as a Jamesian re-write of the novellas that dims the passion of the latter with a form of delicate detachment quite in keeping with the tenor of Rohmer’s Contes Moraux. A minor omission like the very Kleistian blood “gushing” from the mouth of a would-be rapist whom the Count “smashes” in the face with the hilt of his sword — a detail which the film tastefully keeps off-screen -– reveals this strategy on a rather trivial level; and the splitting in half of the Count’s childhood anecdote about the swan of which he is reminded by the Marquise -– so that its conclusion now comes at the end of the plot -– can easily be defended as a sensible dramatic expedient. But Rohmer’s virtual transference of the Marquise’s unseen rape from the scene of battle to her father’s château (basically a matter of stylistic emphasis) and the substitution of a sleeping potion for a fainting spell to motivate her unconsciousness are much more consequential; as Pauline Kael has observed, these and related cosmetic “improvements” large deprive the plot of “Kleist’s spirit, which made him an avant-gardist and a modern -– his acceptance of the id released by the chaos of war”. In a manner recalling the Hitchcock of The Wrong Man, Rohmer even includes a couple of close-ups of the Count and the servant Leopardo, each gazing at the sleeping Marquise just before her rape, in order to reinforce an ambiguity about the latter which Kleist only introduces (and quickly dispels) towards the end of the story. More generally, the Count himself is tamed somewhat in Rohmer’s treatment from a crazed compulsive character to a relatively charming eccentric. Admittedly, questions of nuance are a highly subjective matter, and theoretically one can grant that any sort of alternations are permissible. What one regrets about this highly tactful and covert form of betrayal is that it masks an attitude towards adaptation which is itself quite debatable. Starting from the premise that language is transparent — an essential part of Bazin’s legacy — Rohmer is brought quite logically to the operating principle that Kleist’s novella is “adaptable” simply because its basic components are the imaginary constructs perceived through its language (plot, settings, characters, events, themes, etc.) An attitude that differs from Joseph Strick’s in “adapting” Ulysees more in degree than in primary assumptions, it leads one to the anomaly of accepting a Marquise von O… without Kleist, and a Rohmer without a tale of his own to tell. Once one accepts this anomaly, all difficulties vanish, and Die Marquise von O… immediately qualifies as one of the most elegant film objects since Stavisky… There are many things to marvel at: the painterly compsotions (beautifully shot by Nestor Almendros, with actions often charted along diagonal paths which evoke the director’s long-term interest in Murnau’s Faust), the gentle eroticism and emotional charge of Edith Clever as the Marquise (who figures to best advantage in her two long scenes with the equally impressive Edda Seippel, playing her mother), the ingenious blocking out and compression of the physical action itself. Thanks to such mastery, viewers who don’t have an opportunity to read Kleist’s extraordinary novella — which is not easily available in English — won’t even be able to imagine what they’re missing.
JONATHAN ROSENBAUM

–Monthly Film Bulletin, December 1976 (vol. 43, no. 515)

Five Women Around Utamaro (1976 review)

From Monthly Film Bulletin, December 1976 (Vol. 43, No. 515). — J.R.

Utamaro O Meguru Gonin No Onna (Five Women Around Utamaro)

Japan, 1946

Director: Kenji Mizoguchi

Dist–Artificial Eye. p.c–Shochiku. p. manager–Toyokazu Murata.

sc–Yoshikata Yoda. Based on the novel by Kanji Kunieda. ph–Shigeto

Miki. ed–Sintaro Myamoto. a.d–Isamu Motoki. m–Hiseto Osawa,

Tamezo Mochizuki. sd. rec–Hisashi Kase. historical adviser–Sonao

Kahi. l.p–Minosuke Bando (Kitagama (Utamaro), Kotaro Bando

(Seinosuke Koîde), Tanaka Kinuyo (Okita), Kowasaki Hiroko (Oran), Izuka

Toshiko (Dayu Tagasode), Kinnosuke Takamatsu (Juzaburo), Shotaru

Nakamura (Shizaburo), Minsei Tomimoto (Takemoro), Katsuhisa

Yamaguchi (Kisuke), Aitzo Tamasuma (Sobe), Eiko Ohara (Yukie Kano),

Kyoko Kusajima (Oman), Kimiko Shirotae (Oshin), Junko Kajami (Maid

in Kano Family), Mitsuei Takegawa (Tayu Karauta), Kimie Kawikami

(Matsunami), Aiko Irikawa (Shodayu), Junnosuke Hayama, Masao Hori.

3,399 ft. 94 mins. (16 mm.). Subtitles.

Tokyo in the late eighteenth century. Seinosuke Koide, a student at the

Kano Art School, is enraged when he discovers in a print shop that the

artist Utamaro has written on one of his own prints that even his rough

sketchesare “full of life”. Feeling that his teacher Kano has been insulted,

he rushes to the house of Okita, one of Utamaro’s models, and challenges

Utamaro to a duel. Insisting that they ‘duel’ with brushes, Utamaro quickly

demonstrates hissuperiority by improving on one of Koide’s female

portraits, and then proceeds to the house .of courtesan Dayu Tagasode,

drawing a picture on her back at the request of her tattooer. Later, Tagasode

runs off with Okita’s lover Shizaburo; and Koide, who has broken off his

engagement with his teacher’s daughter Yukie and become Utamaro’s

disciple, begins an affair with Okita. After quarrelling with Okita on Yukie’s

behalf, Utamaro grows depressed and his work suflers. With the connivance

of his servant Take and others, he is persuaded to peek at a group of women

fishing semi-nude at the whim of an eccentric Lord, and is immediately taken

with Oran, a commoner’s daughter whom he persuades to pose for him. When

some of his prints offend the Tokugawa government, Utamaro is arrested and

his hands are subsequently bound for fifty days to keep him from drawing.

Koide meanwhile flees with Oran, and Okita goes looking for Shizaboro. Koide

writes to Utamaro requesting money, and Yukie and Take — who has just

announced his engagement to Oshin, another model of Utamaro’s — take

the money to him; but Yukie is heartbroken when she finds him living

with Oran. After finding Shizaburo and Tagasode, Okita tries unsuccessfully

to take her former lover back with her; she then stabs both of them to death

and returns to Utamaro — defending her act as a refusal to compromise her

passion that is equal to Utamaro’s commitment to his drawings — before

giving herself up. Utamaro’s sentence comes to an end and his hands are

unbound; sake is brought out, but he insists on returning to his drawing

immediately.

Apparently not very much is known today about the life of Kitagama

Utamaro (1753-1806), the earliest of the great masters of the ukiyo-e

school, whose colour prints were among the first from Japan to become

familiar in the West. For Mizoguchi to make a film about him at all in

1946, under the vigilant eye of Douglas MacArthur’s Occupation forces,

was no easy matter: jidai-geki (period films) were officially outlawed

because of their ‘feudal’ and ‘undemocratic’ aspects, and it appears that

Mizoguchi had to argue at some length that Utamaro was a “man of the

people”, and that the film would take a modern look at the rights of

women, before he could embark on the project at all. Eight years later,

he complained about not having had enough time to work on the film

and having had to consult the Occupation Authorities at every stage of

the proceedings. Yoshikata Yoda, the scriptwriter, has further noted that

the contrasting liberalism of the Occupation’s censor board regarding

erotic scenes also gave some impetus to the project, adding that his own

thoughts about Utamaro were “complex” and “muddled” and that “this

is probably the reason for the confusion and dispersion of [the film’s]

theme”. For what he had in mind, “almost unconsciously”, was to create

a partial portrait of Mizoguchi himself through the depiction of Utamaro

– a parallel which remains evident on many levels. Commonly regarded

as a minor work, Five Women Around Utamaro — which is known under

the rather misleading and offensive title Utamaro and His Five Women

in the U.S. — offers, in fact, a highly complex reflection on the director’s

art. While several viewings would probably be needed in order to

determine whether it belongs with his highly distantiated masterpieces

of the late Thirties and early Forties (The Sisters of the Gion, The Story of

the Late Chrysanthemums, The 47 Ronin), or might more properly be

regarded as an ambitious failure with an expressive intensity comparable

to Montparnasse 19 or A King in New York (two other examples of rebellious

art born out of adversity), it clearly cannot be dismissed as an indifferent

work. The immediate difficulties that it presents to the viewer — a plot

eschewing any easy identification thanks to a virtual absence of close-ups,

a large cast of characters and a periodic displacement of narrative centres –

are not at all unrelated to its achievements. Significantly, the artistry of

Utamaro is presented more as a postulate than as a visible fact, and it is

only in the final shot — when an overlapping catalogue of his work is

literally thrown into view — that one is permitted to experience it directly

at any length; prior to this, one mainly has to assume it through historical

hearsay, and through the importance that it takes on for other characters.

But the abstract nature of his status perfectly matches the film’s subject,

which finally has less to do with art itself than with the conditions and

consequences of its place within society. Shown as a revered and

controversial but far from purely heroic figure, Utamaro is an elusive

character whose significance principally rests upon the identity and

importance he confers upon others — above all, his disciple Koide and

his models. The distance traversed from Oran’s shy modesty when she

first poses for the artist, hiding her face in embarrassment, to the

unmistakable vanity she displays upon confronting Yukie, after she has

run off with Koide, is merely one example of a process which informs the

film throughout. It is scarcely coincidental that Tagasode runs away with

Shizaburo just after Utamaro has graced her back with a ‘masterpiece’, or

that Okita, the injured mistress of Shizaburo, is finally driven to murder

in emulation of the artist’s own refusal to compromise, for these are the

only ‘pure’ acts of defiance that these models are able to commit; their

society permits them no ‘art’ of their own. Reduced to perfected images

of themselves, they respond by taking on these ideal emblems as their

identities: “Okita’s spirit has come to bid you farewell”, Okita announces

in a daze as she returns from her crime, and soon afterwards she says:

“After I die, please be kind to the woodcut print of Okita!” Not so much

the guiding force of the film as the centre of a system of valuation in these

terms, Utamaro is a master whose career is ultimately subject to the whim

of his own ‘masters’ — forces that remain pointedly off-screen and hence

no less ‘abstract’ than his own genius. (The precise reasons why his

drawings offend the shogunate are never spelled out.) Considering the

nature of the film’s displacements, it is not surprising that many of the

moments of greatest beauty and power take place in the margins of the

story proper: the opening track past a formal procession of anonymous

characters, with parasols and cherry blossoms marking the camera’s

path in a delineation of sheer pictorial splendour; the astonishing image

of Okita, during her search for Shizaburo, crossing a bridge and glancing

at a peasant emptying water from a boat; and even the climactic scene of

Okita’s confession, after she flees from the frame and the camera remains

fixed on the empty wall while other women rush past — before moving

aside to pick up — Utamaro himself, at once impotent and triumphant as

he declares, “I want to draw so much !” When his hands are finally

unbound in the last scene, the artist resumes work, sitting in the foreground,

facing the camera: Mizoguchi’s own return to cinema after his country’s

defeat is no less ambiguous.

JONATHAN ROSENBAUM

Coilin & Platonida (1976 review)

From Monthly Film Bulletin, December 1976 (Vol. 43, No. 515). — J.R.

Coilin & Platonida

Great Britain, 1976 Director: James Scott

The 1920s. Thrown out of the house by her uncle, Aksinya marries her

lover, a sexton, and five months later gives birth to a son, Coilin. After

the sexton drowns in a stream, she works as a servant to nuns,

introducing and dressing Coilin as a little girl. Entering school at the age

of twelve, Coilin is expelled for backwardness, and finds work as an

apprentice to various craftsmen. After three years in the army, he

returns to find his mother dead and is turned away from his uncle’s

house. Visiting two orphaned boys who are distant relatives and finding

them hungry and maltreated, he takes them under his wing and

persuades his cousin Platonida to give them clothes. Settling in with the

children in an unused room at Granny Rochovna’s cottage, he sells home

-made polish and ink, does odd jobs, and applies unsuccessfully for work

at the post office. Given an island by the town council, he builds a hut and

teaches the boys to read. Four years later, Platonida’s husband dies, and

her father-in-law promises to leave her his fortune. One night, she finds

her father-in-law crouching outside her bedroom window; after she lets

him in and he tries to rape her, she strikes at him with a cleaver and runs

away, believing that she has killed him. But he proves to be alive,, accuses

Platonida and his son Avenir of attacking him, and has the latter arrested;

the police search Coilin’s hut and arrest him as well. Accused of being a

witch and rumored to have turned into a fish, Platonida is taken in by nuns

and becomes a nun herself. Before Avenir joins the army, she bids him

farewell; eventually she becomes blind.

A curious and singular adaptation of a story by Leskov that is no less

curious and singular, James Scott’s Coilin & Platonida employs most

of the ingredients of narrative while often contriving to suggest

that its true interests lie elsewhere. Originally shot in super-8 and

then refilmed in 16 mm. while the footage was projected — a method

that allows two or more adjacent images to share the frame on

certain occasions — this principally silent color film is largely founded

on interactions between a 19th century Russian folk tale and the

the people and places filmed by Scott in Connemara, on the west coast

of Ireland, to which the title itself bears witness: the ’Kotin’ of the

original story has become ‘Coilin’ simply because that is the name of

the lead actor who plays the hero as a young man. But most striking

of all, within the terms of this two-way flow, is the remarkable use

of super-8 that the film develops in the exploration of textures,

tonalities and nuances, creating an inimitable form of discourse

with its own kinds of mysteries and ambiguities. Quite in

keeping with Scott’s work in the Berwick Street Collective as

exemplified by The Nightcleaners, Coilin & Platonida lingers over

faces, landscapes, ‘empty’ moments and spaces with an intensity

which appears to function at oblique angles to the ostensible subject

matter. A suite of interrogations and discoveries develops from this

process, separated by fades, intertitles, and patches of black leader

with single colored lines accompanied by a solo singing voice –

devices ,which serve almost equally as ellipses, isolating certain shots

and sequences in such a way that each is offered for independent

contemplation, in contrast to the compulsive linearity of the narrative

elements organizing them. (By carrying the weight of the story proper,

the intertitles — closely derived from the original story — tend to let

the intervening images speak and fend for themselves.) Thus two

slightly overlapping formal ‘portraits’ of Aksinya, the sexton and their

mule in a single image serves as one abstract definition of a family

unit, while a grainy, almost pointillist shot of Aksinya walking with

Coilin at age twelve comprises another. Perhaps even more memorable

is the zoom that follows Coilin, back from the army, out of the front

door of his uncle’s house where he is rejected (with the family

standing in the foreground), disappearing into a whiteish background

– a haunting moment whose narrative movement is defined by

absence as much as presence. Subsequently, multiple images of

different aspects and stages of Coilin’s building of a hut arrest and

expand the narrative in still other ways, and Scott’s supple use of

super-8 is nowhere more apparent than in this inventive sequence,

which profitably includes a fragment of ‘overexposed’ footage

(showing one of the boys playing by a stream)-and concludes with a

long zoom away from Coilin beside his completed hut. This image

then recedes within the frame before the zoom moves forward again,

playing with the relative degrees of the spectator’s distance. By the

time one arrives at the climactic attempted rape of Platonida by her

father-in-law — shown in highly elliptical snatches –- the story itself

has become virtually illegible, and one must consult Leskov’s

original in order to spell out much of the implied action, making

portions of the above synopsis more hypothetical than real. In

Walter Benjamin’s fascinating study of Leskov in Illuminations, it is

argued that storytelling has a communal relationship with its

audience that novel-reading and novel-writing lack, that “nothing

, . . commends a story to memory more effectively than that chaste

compactness which precludes psychological analysis”, and that a

story, unlike ‘information’, “preserves and concentrates its strength

and is capable of releasing it even after a long time”, precisely because

its meanings shift with the emphasis of different periods and

audiences. Substituting ’cinema’ for ’story’, one arrives at apart of

the paradoxical nature of Scott’s achievement. The ‘timeless’ poetry

of Coilin & Platonida — grounded in 19th century Russia, realized

in 20^th century Ireland — seems largely predicated on Benjamin’s

conditions, reformulated as they are; and spectators who stumble

over the ambiguous and elusive ’story’ searching for ‘answers’ might

be advised to look longer and harder, a process that the film itself

encourages.

JONATHAN ROSENBAUM