1980 Week: The Last Metro

          Polished and sophisticated but also a bit on the trifling side, the World War II drama The Last Metro was the final major international success for François Truffaut, a titan of the French New Wave and one of the most gifted storytellers ever to work in cinema. Telling the story of theater people who defy the Nazis in occupied Paris, The Last Metro is among Truffaut’s most visually beautiful films, thanks to luminous photography by the great Néstor Almendros, and it pairs French-cinema grande dame Catherine Deneuve with Gérard Depardieu, then a rising star of Gallic films. All participants operate at the height of their powers, creating a movie that’s humane, intelligent, romantic, and suspenseful. The Last Metro is bloated at 131 minutes, and the ending is so tidy that it makes much of what came before seem inconsequential. Yet The Last Metro is unusual among movies about occupied France inasmuch as the material is not inherently depressing or tragic. The Last Metro is an inspirational story about survivors who refuse to compromise their principles, thereby getting the last laugh on their jack-booted oppressors. It’s not quite a feel-good WWII movie, but it’s certainly not a feel-bad WWII movie.

          When the picture opens, actor Bernard Granger (Depardieu) arrives for an audition at a theater operated by the beautiful actress Marion Steiner (Deneuve), who manages the acting troupe and the building because her husband, acclaimed director Lucas Steiner (Heinz Bennent), is Jew who fled Paris to escape the Nazis. Or so it seems. Turns out Lucas is living in seclusion, using the theater’s basement as a hideout. Once Marion begins rehearsals for a new play in which she costars with Bernard, Lucas listens to their acting through pipes carrying sound from the stage to the basement. At night, once everyone else has left the building, Marion joins Lucas to get notes on the day’s work. Lots of things conspire to disrupt this delicate situation. French citizens collaborating with the Nazis discover clues suggesting that Lucas never left the country. Lucas gets stir-crazy in the basement, threatening to risk capture by leaving his hideout. And Bernard becomes romantically attracted to Marion, creating a complex triangle while the actors play lovers onstage.

          Despite being written, directed, and acted with the utmost care and refinement, The Last Metro has the feel of a soap opera, with characters pursuing crisscrossing agendas while guarding dangerous secrets. And while the pulpy nature of the material probably contributed to the film’s popularity, demanding viewers can’t help but expect more given the level of talent involved and the sprawling length of the movie. Taken for what it is, however, The Last Metro goes down smoothly. Deneuve is so exquisite to behold that she commands the screen even when she’s doing nothing, Depardieu hits the right note of brash arrogance, and Bennent is believable as a high-minded artiste. As always, Truffaut conjures an immersive sense of time and place.

The Last Metro: GROOVY

Soldier of Orange (1977)

          Offering a fresh perspective on the German occupation of Europe during World War II, as well as bracing elements of sex and violence, the epic-length melodrama Soldier of Orange ticks several noteworthy boxes in film history. At the time of its release, it was the most ambitious and expensive Dutch film ever made, earning such international accolades as a Golden Globe nomination for Best Foreign Film. The picture was a milestone in the career of co-writer/director Paul Verhoeven, and it brought notoriety to leading man Rutger Hauer. (He soon found his way to Hollywood, and Verhoeven wasn’t far behind.) Finally, because the picture looks at World War II through a Dutch prism, Soldier of Orange became a point of national pride, and was, in 1999, named the second-best Dutch film of the 20th century. Tellingly, the first-place winner in that ranking was Turkish Delight (1973), a provocative romantic film that marked the first Hauer/Verhoeven collaboration.

          Based on a biographical novel by Erik Hazelhoff Roelfzema, Soldier of Orange tells a complex story that sprawls across nearly a decade of Dutch history. Following a prologue, the movie proper begins at a college in the late 1930s, with ambitious fraternity pledge Erik (Hauer) experiencing brutal hazing at the hands of an older student, Guus (Jeroen Krabbé). Feeling guilty for his behavior, Guus helps Erik get through life, so their fates become entwined even as history nudges the Netherlands toward involvement in the war. The movie also tracks the lives of Alex (Derek de Lint) and Robby (Eddy Habbema), two other members of Erik’s collegiate social circle. Without getting mired in details, the gist is that Soldier of Orange follows the way different men react to the invasion of their country by German forces. Some collaborate, some resist, and some fall victim to the Third Reich.

          In one important episode, Dutch resistance operatives create a pirate radio network to communicate with Allied forces in England. In another, Erik and Guus flee the Netherlands by steam ship, then accept orders from their queen-in-exile, Wilhemina (Andrea Domburg), to return home for a dangerous covert mission. Several highly eroticized love stories get woven into the mix, notably a triangle revolving around a British military secretary (Susan Penhaligon). By turns, the movie features adolescent tomfoolery, exciting spycraft, horrific torture, sexy romantic interludes, and the psychological horror of countrymen turning against each other.

          Nearly everything that happens during the 149 fast-paced minutes of Soldier of Orange is interesting, though tracking all the names and places is challenging. As always, Verhoven’s filmmaking is emphatic and robust, so even though he’s a skillful storyteller, he sometimes plows so brazenly into complicated scenes that it’s tricky to remember who’s doing what to whom and why. It doesn’t help that some of minor characters are interchangeable, or that Verhoeven mostly portrays Nazis as one-dimensional monsters. Yet the strongest elements of Soldier of Orange are world-class. Production values, including re-creations of period costume and design, are impeccable. Hauer and Krabbé give performances that are, respectively, earnest and sly, so key moments are specific and vivid. And if Verhoeven occasionally succumbs to his lower impulses, with overlong scenes of carnality and carnage, that can be forgiven as a way of imprinting the piece with an authorial stamp.

          Whether a resounding theme emerges, however, is another matter; Soldier of Orange has so much of everything that it feels more like an informative miniseries than a purposeful drama. Perhaps that was the idea. Instead of making a Grand Statement about the Dutch experience of World War II, maybe Verhoeven and his collaborators meant to show as many dimensions as possible of that experience. They did so, in forceful and unusual ways.

Soldier of Orange: GROOVY

A Touch of Zen (1971)

          Featuring a steady flow of exquisite images, A Touch of Zen takes the martial-arts genre to places it rarely goes, prioritizing characterization, pictorial wonderment, and spirituality as highly as action and dramatic tension. Produced and set in Taiwan, the picture takes place in the medieval past, with a simple painter drawn into complex intrigue, so even though the narrative inevitably involves martial-arts masters, A Touch of Zen doesn’t follow the usual frenetic template of bridging violent scenes with as little transitional material as possible. Written and directed by King Hu, the epic story sprawls across three hours, and the pacing is leisurely, so some viewers will find their patience tested waiting for the action to begin. Prior to that juncture, Hu creates an intoxicating mood while also building mysteries and illuminating characters. He’s not equally successful in each of these endeavors, and if there’s a major criticism here, it’s that A Touch of Zen is more of an aesthetic and intellectual exercise than an emotional experience. That said, it’s to Hu’s great credit that the picture commands attention as well as it does. The premise is interesting enough to carry things along, the payoff is unusual, and the style is intoxicating.

          Gu Sheng-tsai (Shih Chun) is an impoverished daydreamer who makes a meager living doing calligraphy and portraits from a storefront inside a ramshackle fort that several poor families have transformed into a makeshift village. He lives with his hectoring mother, who complains that Gu is over 30 but directionless and unmarried. When a beautiful young woman named Yang hui-zhen (Hsu Feng) moves into a nearby residence, Gu’s mother tries to arrange a marriage, but Yang refuses. Then another stranger arrives in town, and it emerges that the stranger is an agent from the tyrannical East Chamber, sent to find and capture Yang, a fugitive wanted by the despotic regime. Once the stranger discovers Yang’s whereabouts, he attacks her, but she defends herself with a spectacular display of martial-arts prowess, even defying gravity by leaping onto rooftops. Gu is beguiled by her mastery, and, upon learning about her past, he aligns with her cause, so he becomes a companion during  her subsequent adventures.

          Toward the third hour of A Touch of Zen, the story expands to include wandering monks who use their superlative martial-arts skills to aid Yang, hence the religious connotations of the title. Yet the involvement of the monks isn’t the picture’s only supernatural element, because during the mesmerizing combat sequence that comprises the movie’s centerpiece, Gu cleverly exploits widespread beliefs that the fort is haunted. A Touch of Zen is so long, moving through so many distinct phases, that the plot splinters into abstraction. The movie also gifts certain characters with abilities far beyond those of normal humans, as during the breathtaking fight that takes place in a misty bamboo forest. (The acrobatics of A Touch of Zen were among the influences on Ang Lee’s Oscar-winning 2000 film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.)

          In some ways, A Touch of Zen is a flight of fancy, seeing as how a goodhearted everyman becomes the consort to a supernatural warrior against a backdrop of demigods waging a titanic battle of good versus evil. And yet in other ways, A Touch of Zen is a meditation on existentialism, as demonstrated by the provocative ambiguities of the final scene and the implication of mortals and immortals communing to deliver a messiah. Therefore, perhaps the most fascinating thing about A Touch of Zen that it offers so much fodder for interpretation amid its visceral and visual delights.

A Touch of Zen: GROOVY

Lady Snowblood (1973)

          Yet another ultraviolent saga that made a deep impression on Quentin Tarantino, who borrowed heavily from this film for his epic Kill Bill project (originally released as two parts in 2003 and 2004), Lady Snowblood is among the most pictorially beautiful action films ever made. Not least among its visual wonderments is leading lady Meiko Kaji, who plays an immaculately dressed assassin with a sword blade hidden inside the handle of her ever-present umbrella. Adapted from a Japanese comic strip, Lady Snowblood tells a patently ridiculous story about a vengeance mission handed down from one generation to the next, and the way director Toshiya Fujita fills the screen with artfully staged dismemberments, geysers of blood, and impalements is not for the faint of heart. (Released unrated in the U.S., the picture almost certainly would have received an X-rating for gore.) Incredibly, Fujita manages to tell a fairly compelling story without benefit of realism and restraint, getting by on sheer intensity and style.

          Although events are presented in a jangled mosaic, a linear narrative emerges. In late 19th-century Japan, the government orders a military draft, and a band of criminals roams the countryside, pulling a vicious scam on gullible villagers. The criminals claim they can sell draft exceptions for cash. Occasionally, to create the illusion of governmental authority, the criminals attack and execute persons for “illegally dodging” the draft. One such innocent victim is a schoolteacher with a wife and a young child. The criminals kill the teacher and his son. His widow, Sayo (Miyoko Akaza), declares revenge, hunting down and killing one of the criminals. Captured and imprisoned for the murder, she has sex with every man in prison until she’s impregnated, then declares her daughter, Yuki, an “asura demon” with only one purpose in life—killing the remaining criminals. Sayo dies in prison, and her child finds a new home with a priest who teaches her subterfuge and swordplay. Upon reaching adulthood, Yuki (Kaji) begins her vengeance mission, but complications ensue.

          The film is structured into chapters with florid titles (e.g., “Bamboo Wives and Tears of Death”), and because Yuki befriends an illustrator who agrees to tell her story in book form, the screen occasionally fills with the panels from the comic that inspired the movie. It’s all very meta, sometimes absurdly so. Yet somehow Fujita pulls the disparate elements together, creating a crazy-quilt pattern of varied storytelling modes. Momentum sags during Act Two, but Fujita rights the ship for the outrageously violent climax.
          Nearly everything that makes Lady Snowblood interesting is visual, so it’s a uniquely immersive cinematic experience. Many battle scenes and even some important emotional moments are presented without dialogue, putting the emphasis on composition, editing, and sound design. All of Fujita’s collaborators bolster this approach with exemplary contributions; the costuming, production design, and special effects are gorgeous. In particular, a scene of Yuki attacking a victim in an alleyway while snow falls transforms savagery into a kind of horrific choreography. (Kill Bill features an homage to this scene.)

          As for how leading lady Kaji fits into the mix, she provides more than just her beauty, though her looks are an important aspect of the film’s visual splendor. Whether she’s summoning intensity for a fight or thrilling with adrenaline after vanquishing a foe, Kaji imbues the notion of a character bred only to kill with something resembling credibility. She returned for Lady Snowblood 2: Song of Vengeance (1974), again directed by Fujita; in that one, the title character goes to prison for her crimes in the first picture, then gets an offer of clemency in exchange for working as a government agent.

Lady Snowblood: GROOVY

That Obscure Object of Desire (1977)

          The final film of revered Spanish director Luis Buñuel, and also one of his most accessible movies, That Obscure Object of Desire uses several playful storytelling devices while presenting the tale of an older man driven to distraction by his love for a mercurial young woman. Unlike the many May-December movies of the ’60s and ’70s that show middle-aged dudes sharing wisdom with nymphets who open their eyes to new ways of seeing, That Obscure Object of Desire gets after something more, well, obscure. Articulating some of Buñuel’s themes would require giving away the resolution of the story, but in general the picture conveys ideas about class, gender, propriety, and self-image, among many other things. Naturally, Buñuel includes two his favorite tropes, radical politics and surrealism, though they don't render the picture impenetrable, as happened with the director’s previous effort, The Phantom of Liberty (1974). Instead, politics and surrealism function like grace notes, adding ambiguity, complexity, and relevance to a story that’s already rich.

          It should also be noted that Buñuel plays a tricky game by accentuating the breathtaking beauty of two starlets, both of whom play the same role (more on that later). It’s as Buñuel hoped to simultaneously satirize older men who court young ladies and beguile the audience with images of nubile flesh. One can only imagine what feminist critics have discovered while dissecting this picture, which somehow manages to celebrate and demonize women in equal measure.

          The picture begins with a droll vignette. After sophisticated gentleman Mathieu (Fernando Rey) boards a train, comely young Conchita (Carole Bouquet) boards a separate car. Matheiu pays an attendant to kick her off, and then Mathieu dumps a bucket of water on her head. The other passengers in his first-class car express shock at his behavior, so he offers to explain why humiliating the woman was preferable to his first impulse of killing her. Buñuel illustrates Mathieu’s story with extended flashbacks. After encountering Conchita for the first time in his own home, where she served briefly as a maid, Mathieu became obsessed with her, chasing Conchita across Europe, offering money to her mother as a sort of dowry, and eventually persuading Conchita to cohabitate. She drove Mathieu mad by repeatedly offering sexual favors, only to refuse them at the last moment. A final round of indignities led to the episode at the train station.

          Among the many peculiar things about That Obscure Object of Desire is the casting of the Conchita role. For no obvious narrative reason, Bouquet shares the role with the equally alluring Angelina Molina. In any given scene, the audience can’t predict which actress will appear, and sometimes, one actress replaces the other in the same scene, thanks to a convenient exit/entrance maneuver. It’s a typically whimsical touch on Buñuel’s part, forcing the audience to ask questions about identity and perception without providing any fodder for answers. The actresses radiate different types of sexiness, Bouqet icy and Molina sensual, so their collective effect on Rey’s character is more than believable. Still, he’s a tougher nut to crack, part worldly aesthete and part love-addled buffoon. These contradictions make his characterization consistent with Buñuel’s longstanding attitude toward the moneyed class. As to the question of whether That Obscure Object of Desire works, the answer is mostly yes. The movie is mysterious and sly and unpredictable, and the final gotcha moment says something bitterly funny about the ephemeral nature of life—after all the fuss, that’s how it ends? It’s a fitting final statement for Buñuel, frustrating and ridiculous and true all at once.

That Obscure Object of Desire: GROOVY

The Spider’s Strategem (1970)

          Having made a conscientious exploration of Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1970s films, I can say with confidence that I’m not impressed. More specifically, while I acknowledge that Bertolucci has a gorgeous visual style and a unique gift for capturing the sensual reality of moments, I find his storytelling consistently murky and pretentious. And even though The Spider’s Strategem lacks some of his usual distracting fetishism (i.e., erotic and scatological elements), the film epitomizes other shortcomings. Adapted from a short story about 1920s Ireland, the movie spins a complex and interesting yarn about the gulf between legacy and reality. As in the source material, a son returns to the town where his revered father was murdered, only to discover that the lore surrounding his father’s heroic demise is largely fabricated, thereby forcing the son to decide whether it’s best to reveal the facts or to leave his father’s inspirational myth intact. There’s enough thematic heft in that premise to support an entire movie, and, indeed, the narrative has shades of John Ford’s classic Western The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962).

          Yet this wasn’t enough for Bertolucci. He transposed the plot to contemporary Italy, morphing the dead father into a famous anti-fascist activist. Fair enough. But then Bertolucci took a further step by integrating a trope of surrealism. Throughout The Spider’s Strategem, the protagonist has weird experiences leading him to question whether he’s dreaming or suffering at the hands of perverse conspirators. As a result, the movie starts and ends with clarity, but the middle of the film is confounding and shapeless. Bertolucci plays silly games like having the same actor play the son and the father, often having both characters appear during the same scene, ostensibly to reflect the protagonist’s tormented state of mind while he wrangles the mysteries of the past. All of this is hugely ambitious, and yet The Spider’s Strategem runs just 100 minutes, making it the shortest of Bertolucci’s major ’70s films. On one level, Bertolucci tried to accomplish too much, changing a linear narrative into something dreamlike and fractured, and on another level, he didn’t try to accomplish enough, because The Spider’s Strategem doesn’t have the epic sprawl that would have been necessary to effectively convey so many different layers of meaning.

          Worse, the picture is infused with heavy symbolism that only the most devoted viewers will bother parsing, as well as tiresome speeches about the nature of fascism. It’s not as if the film is impenetrable, but it’s needlessly dense and elusive. Presented without arthouse affectations, The Spider’s Strategem could have been the equivalent of a great Hitchcock thriller, conveying powerful notions about deception, family obligations, and political machinations. As is, viewers must peer through fog to find those themes. That said, The Spider’s Strategem is greatly elevated—as are all of Bertolucci’s major ’70s films—by the extraordinary cinematography of Vittorio Storaro. Employing his signature touches of subtle Rembrant lighting and balletic camera moves, Storaro makes even the most arbitrary and indulgent of Bertolucci’s images seem considered and purposeful.

The Spider’s Strategem: FUNKY

Effi Briest (1974)

          Watching this black-and-white period drama from iconoclastic German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder, I found myself getting pushed out of the story almost from the very first scenes. Since he usually shot his films in vibrant color, the choice to film Effi Briest in artsy monochromatic textures removed one of the tools Fassbinder customarily employed to create vivid realism. And while Fassbinder wasn’t averse to stylized compositions, many shots in Effi Briest put deliberate obstacles between the viewer and the subject, whether that means hiding actors behind gauzy curtains or peering at actors through mirrors and windows. Then there’s the peculiar rhythm of the picture’s storytelling. Quite frequently, Fassbinder halts scenes mid-conversation in order to fade to the next scene, interject a title card, or weave in narration. Seeing as how Effi Briest was adapted from a celebrated 19th-century German novel, Fassbinder may have felt obliged to include as much of the source material as possible. Furthermore, perhaps he wanted the style of Effi Briest to reflect a key tenet the original novel—the way social rules suppress emotion. Whatever his reasons, Fassbinder made a cold movie. It’s a respectable piece of work, no question, but it’s more of an intellectual exercise than a visceral experience.

          Based on Theodore Fontane’s 1894 novel, the picture tracks the life of an affluent young woman named Effi Briest (Hanna Schygulla) as she moves from her family’s home to her husband’s home. In clinical vignettes at the beginning of the picture, we learn about Effi’s various contradictions; for instance, she has little use for material things but demands only the best once she finds something she actually wants. Though only 17, the beautiful Effi accepts a marriage proposal from Baron Instetten (Wolfgang Schenck). Life with the Baron renders Effi into something of an art object, because he values propriety more than intimacy. So when Effi meets the charming Major Crampas (Ulli Lommel), she begins a friendship that leads inevitably to an affair. For the Baron, the shakeup in his marriage is a social inconvenience with minimal lasting repercussions, but for Effi, cuckolding her husband proves immeasurably damaging. Informing the storyline is the theme of repression causing misery among the ruling class. Also present is a component of modern-day feminism. Alas, the inherent irony of Effi Briest—a repressed film about repression—ensures that some viewers will have difficulty finding a way into the piece. Even appraising the acting is tricky. Fassbinder clearly asked his performers to underplay every moment, so the attractive visuals created by cinematographers Jürgen Jürges and Dietrick Lohmann sometimes carry more feeling than the portrayals.

Effi Briest: FUNKY

The Phantom of Liberty (1974)

          There’s a bad tendency in critical circles of attributing greatness to art simply because it’s made by great artists, which is to say that anything rendered by someone with a record of significant accomplishments is therefore, by definition, significant. I’ve certainly been guilty of this infraction, heaping undeserved praise on work that I wanted to be good simply because of my loyalty to the creator of that work. And, it should be said, important artists in any field deserve the benefit of the doubt, at least to a certain degree; sometimes it’s helpful for an artist to expand his or her body of work without necessarily bettering past accomplishments. The goal of this preamble is to contextualize my declaration that I don’t know what the hell to make of Luis Buñuel’s penultimate feature, The Phantom of Liberty.

          Conventional in its technical execution but abstract in most other regards, the movie comprises a series of loosely connected episodes, all of which seem to satirize the upper class, a lifelong target of Buñuel’s comedic invective. Some stand-alone vignettes are amusing, and others are pleasantly weird, but I didn’t lock into the film’s frequency at all, finding The Phantom of Liberty flat and pointless more often that not. However, many intelligent people swear the film is brilliant, and Buñuel said it was among his favorite creations. So who am I to say if it’s “bad” or “good”? After all, if I’ve gone too far in the other direction, lauding work that didn’t deserve accolades, it logically follows that I’ll periodically err in the other direction, missing the virtues of something wonderful. Accordingly, before I offer a bit of description, I’ll leave it at this—The Phantom of Liberty did nothing for me, but Buñuel was such a skilled filmmaker, even at this late stage of his life, that I’m confident something of value imbues the picture.

          The Phantom of Liberty opens in Spain during the time of Napoleon. Crude French soldiers invade a crypt, and a male statue swats one of the soldiers after the soldier kisses a female statue. On the surface, it’s a dumb sight gag right out of an Abbott and Costello flick, but underneath, it’s laden with all sorts of weighty political stuff about class and culture. And so it goes from there—every so often, The Phantom of Liberty provides something accessible and silly, like the image of monks drinking and smoking while they play poker with a woman, but more frequently, the film presents things that would require either a political-science degree or superhuman insight into Buñuel’s mind to correctly interpret. The movie’s code isn’t fully secret, which is to say that mindful viewers can arrive at valid interpretations, but, plainly, only the filmmaker truly knew what the sum effect of the movie was meant to be.

          As to the question of whether the picture genuinely has a grand design, it’s interesting to consider the most successful comedy scene, which is obvious and self-contained. In the scene, several well-to-do people gather for a dinner party, then sit on commodes that surround a table and perform excretory functions while chatting. Upon achieving relief, a guest discreetly asks the maid, “Excuse me, where is the dining room?” Also during the scene, a mother admonishes her child for being so rude as to mention food at the table. It’s a simple flip of social conventions, and the absurdity of the scene is entertaining, but what’s the point? To imply that everything normal and polite is inherently ridiculous, or simply to make viewers engage reality on a deeper level by presenting an upside-down version of reality? Like I said before, I recognize there’s something resonant here, but damned if I can figure out what that is.

The Phantom of Liberty: FUNKY

Two English Girls (1971)

          Exploring the hurtfulness of male caprice and the inner lives of complicated women with a novelistic style, François Truffaut’s Two English Girls is intelligent and meticulously constructed, though that can be said of nearly all of Truffaut’s films. Yet Two English Girls lacks the special fire that enlivens Truffaut’s chilly storytelling approach in his best pictures. As he evolved, Truffaut largely eschewed the guerilla-style filmmaking of his debut feature, The 400 Blows (1959), opting for polished classicism that prioritized character and plot over bravura camerawork. Whenever he got his teeth into a great story, this modality was effective, helping viewers get lost in the thickets of provocative narratives. In projects such as Two English Girls, the mannered storytelling has a nullifying effect, as if the movie is a pretty picture contained by a frame instead of something more immersive. One cannot fault Two English Girls for its acting, cinematography, or editing, et cetera, but the total experience is weirdly bloodless.

          Based on a novel by Henri-Pierre Roché, the picture opens in turn-of-the-century Paris. Handsome young Claude Roc (Jean-Pierre Léaud) and his mother receive a visitor from England, Ann Brown (Kate Markham). She’s charming and lovely and worldly, so Claude happily accepts her invitation to visit the Brown family in Wales. Once Claude arrives, Ann tries to forge a romantic match between the Frenchman and Ann’s peculiar sister, Muriel (Stacey Tendeter). Despite her eccentricities, Muriel makes her way into Claude’s heart, but then Claude’s mother—fearing the possibility of an inappropriate mate for her only son—demands the couple spend a year apart. The remainder of the picture explores the impact of the separation, which has a liberating effect on Claude but leads to heartbreak in the lives of the Brown sisters.

          Two English Girls tells a small story, and the idiosyncratic nuances that Truffaut inserts into the movie aren’t quite enough to make the picture feel special. Scenes of Muriel talking directly to the camera seem false, and the intrusive narration—spoken by Truffaut—drains the movie of subtlety by providing overly detailed explanations for what people feel and think during important scenes. It’s all very clinical, but not to any notably meritorious end; simply letting the characters and story breathe would have delivered something more intimate and resonant. Still, the technical execution is up to Truffaut’s usual high standards, and the performances are generally good. Léaud, best known for playing Truffaut’s cinematic alter ego in the Antoine Doinel movies, offers an opaque screen presence, so it’s hard to know whether we’re meant to perceive Claude as a cad, a naïf, or something in between. Markham is alluring in a buttoned-up sort of way, and Tendeter is fairly good at conveying quiet desperation. Alas, the moments when her character’s repressed emotions burst forth underwhelm, like so many other elements of this ultimately forgettable film.

Two English Girls: FUNKY

A Special Day (1977)

          “I don’t think I’m anti-fascist,” the well-dressed man remarks. “If anything, fascism is anti-me.” Those simple words, revealing a world of sociopolitical significance, epitomize what makes the Italian drama A Special Day so resonant. By viewing cataclysmic historical events through the prism of one very specific relationship, the picture brings the past to vivid life while also conveying timeless truths about subjects ranging from compassion to tyranny. A Special Day is also noteworthy as one of the best collaborations between classic Italian stars Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni. Whereas many of their celebrated onscreen pairings are romantic comedies, A Special Day uses their easygoing chemistry in a more imaginative way, which nets powerful results.
          Set in 1938, the movie takes place in Rome on the day Adolf Hitler made a state visit to confer with Italy’s fascistic strongman, Benito Mussolini. The action revolves around a huge apartment building with a massive inner courtyard. In the morning, bedraggled housewife Antonietta (Loren) rouses her large family. Her husband, Emanule (John Vernon), is a staunch Mussolini supporter, so he plans to take all their kids to a rally celebrating Hitler’s visit. Given her backbreaking obligations of cleaning and cooking for the big family, Antonietta stays home. Once the apartment building is nearly empty, she happens into a conversation with a neighbor from across the courtyard, Gabriele (Mastroianni). We discover things about Gabriele gradually, learning that he’s a radio announcer recently fired from his position for mysterious reasons, and that just before he encountered Antonietta, he was close to attempting suicide.

          Giving away the other revelations about his character would diminish the experience of watching A Special Day, so broad strokes must suffice—over the course of a long day comprising conversations, flirtations, and intimacies, Antonietta discovers through her new friend a world of emotion and ideas and nonconformity that rocks her existence. By the end of the day, she’s almost a completely different person than the woman who first met Gabriele. And because the things we learn about Gabriele speak directly to the dangers of living under a totalitarian regime, he changes, too, if only in the sense of emerging from shadows by sharing provocative secrets with a friend.

          Directed by the acclaimed Ettore Scola, A Special Day achieves that rare trick in movies, presenting characters who are so fully realized they seem like real people; accordingly, even the most fanciful turns in the movie’s central relationship have credibility and depth. At different times, we experience Antonietta’s fear, loneliness, pride, and warmth, just as we experience Gabriele’s dignity, humor, joy, and sadness. Loren downplays her signature glamour, hewing closer to the earth-mother aspect of her screen persona, while Mastroianni effectively tweaks his urbane image. (Modern viewers may flinch at some aspects of the characterizations, but the portrayals fit the period during which the story takes place.) Also worth noting is the picture’s unique visual style. Scola and cinematographer Pasqualina de Santis employed a desaturated color scheme, putting the look of A Special Day somewhere between black-and-white and color, and while the look is jarring at first, it makes sense after a while; this is a story that exists between the margins of history, so it warrants an offbeat presentation.

          Given the way the horrors of World War II loom just outside the narrative, there’s something fundamentally grim about A Special Day. Surely, not every character we meet is destined to survive the next few years. Yet within the darkness, A Special Day provides much that is bright and uplifting, conveying how real human connection is the only way to bridge divides. Many well-deserved accolades came the film’s way, including two Oscar nominations (for Best Foreign Film and for Mastroianni as Best Actor), as well as a Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film.

A Special Day: RIGHT ON

L’Innocente (1976)

          Italian director Luchino Visconti died just months before the premiere of his final film, the grim period melodrama L’Innocente. (Advertising materials in English-speaking territories bore the translated title The Innocent.) In some ways, the picture makes a fitting cinematic epitaph, since it touches on issues of class and morality that infuse Vischonti’s more celebrated films, but in other ways, it’s a comedown from the intellectually ambitious triumphs of The Damned (1969), Death in Venice (1971), and Conversation Piece (1974). By comparison to those films, L’Innocente is a lurid soap opera without enough thematic weight to support its narrative extremes. The picture also suffers for inconsistent acting among the leading players, because American actress Jennifer O’Neill delivers merely serviceable work. (During post-production, O’Neill’s dialogue was dubbed into Italian by another performer.) Costar Laura Antonelli gives a more impressive performance, though her many nude scenes are distracting; as always, Antonelli’s erotic presence receives more attention than her respectable acting skills. Of the three principal players, only leading man Giancarlo Giannini truly elevates the material, investing his role as a borderline sociopath with real menace.

          Taking place in Italy circa the late 1900s, L’Innocente tells a simple story about lust, pride, and revenge. The marriage of rich Italians Guiliana (Antonelli) and Tullio (Giannini) has gone cold, not least because of Tullio’s open-secret affair with another wealthy aristocrat, Teresa (O’Neill). As tension grows because Teresa finds her position as the other woman more and more untenable, Giuliana begins an affair of her own with Filippo (Marc Porel). He treats Giuliana with respect, and their intimacy burns with a passion long missing from Guiliana’s marriage, hence the extensive bedroom scenes between Filippo and Guitliana. Despite having taken her for granted, Tullio becomes jealous of his wife’s newfound romance, and his jealousy informs the dark events of the movie’s second half.

          Based on a novel by Gabriele d’Annunzio, L’Innocente could easily have been presented as a taut morality tale running perhaps 90 minutes. As directed by Vischonti with his usual stately pacing, the movie loses intensity at regular intervals, even though the final half-hour, which is filled with horrific tragedy, commands attention. The question, of course, is whether the preceding hour and a half is enough to pull viewers along. For some, the answer will be yes, thanks to sumptuous costuming and production design, in addition to Giannini’s performance, the beauty of the leading ladies, and the general tawdriness of the storyline. For others, getting through the film’s slow stretches to reach the climax will require considerable willpower. And if there’s a profound theme buried inside L’Innocente, beyond trite assertions about how selfish men pay terrible costs for living empty lives, it’s not immediately apparent after one viewing.

L’Innocente: FUNKY

Orchestra Rehearsal (1978)

          For most of its running time, Orchestra Rehearsal is decidedly restrained, seeing as how it was made by Federico Fellini. Opening as a faux documentary, with the film camera standing in for the viewpoint of a crew making a TV special about the activities of a Roman orchestra, the picture progresses from light comedy to heated labor-themed satire and finally to a dose of Fellini’s signature overwrought symbolism. On one level, the movie is a simple study of group dynamics and a celebration of the intricate process by which orchestras create classical-music performances. It’s a valid endeavor made with intelligence and skill, but some of Fellini’s storytelling choices dull the picture’s impact.

          He spreads the focus around multiple members of the orchestra, with only the conductor receiving a measure of special attention because he’s ostensibly the villain driving the film’s slender excuse for a plot. Therefore, the movie doesn’t have a main character (beyond the collective entity of the orchestra), so the storytelling feels diffuse—each time Fellini lingers on remarks from this musician or that musician, the overall thrust of the piece falters. Even more problematically, at least in terms of generating conventional cinematic momentum, Fellini’s efforts to raise the stakes toward the end of the picture falter because viewers haven’t formed any special connections with the individuals who populate the story. Given its very short running time (the movie is only 70 minutes long), Fellini would have been better served presenting the piece as a slice of life without aspirations to dramatic impact.

          In any event, the action takes place inside the tomb beneath a 13th-century church. As an orchestra workshops several numbers for an upcoming concert, musicians bitch about their ostentatious conductor, debate which instrument is most important, and organize to defend the rights they previously gained through unionization. Some of this stuff is funny, as when two musicians fight about the personal space surrounding their chairs, and some of it is idiosyncratic, as when a male cellist derides the violin as an excessively feminine instrument. The movie sets up its premise fairly efficiently, then bounces from one random episode to the next until resolving into a melodrama once the conflict between the conductor and the musicians explodes. Fellini distributes screen time capriciously, lingering, for instance, on vignettes featuring an attractive female pianist. And once the final act arrives, Fellini succumbs to his customary appetite for cinematic excess, using flamboyant violence, grotesquerie, oversized props, and provocative sexual imagery to make points that could have been articulated more subtly. It’s hard to reconcile this overly stylized material with the talky stuff that came before.

Orchestra Rehearsal: FUNKY

Seven Beauties (1975)

          A nasty piece of business from Italy’s provocative Lina Wertmüller, Seven Beauties tells the grotesque story of a man who survives a violent life as a pimp only to become an inmate in a World War II concentration camp. The film is so deliberately vulgar that the climax involves the protagonist struggling to summon an erection with which to service a morbidly obese prison matron, even though she’s a despicable sadist. One of the overt themes in the challenging picture is that only whores can survive life on the sidelines of a war. Given Wertmüller’s proclivity for threading leftist politics into her narratives, it’s a fair statement of sorts; her movies depict the world as a battle zone pitting the apathetic against the engaged, with her sympathies clearly favoring the engaged. Therefore, a generous reading of Seven Beauties might identify the protagonist as a representation for everything Wertmüller finds craven in society. After all, the movie begins with a weird tone poem/dedication listing various types of people: “The ones who don’t enjoy themselves even when they laugh. Oh, yeah. . . . The ones who listen to the national anthem. Oh, yeah. . . . The ones who at a certain point in their lives create a secret weapon: Christ. Oh, yeah.”
          Seven Beauties is a Grand Statement, but it’s not the easiest one to decipher.

          The movie jumps back in forth in time, juxtaposing the main character’s civilian life with his military experience. Prior to the war, Pasqualino (Giancarlo Giannini) is a sharp-dressed hustler who seems conflicted about the carnal adventures of his sisters. He carries the pejorative nickname “Seven Beauties” because each of his siblings is unattractive. Pasqualino spends lots of time yelling at his sisters for their low morals, even though he’s a criminal. In one of the film’s many tasteless sequences, the dismembering of a corpse is played for laughs. In another, Pasqualino rapes a mental patient. If you’re wondering what the point is of watching a monster like Pasqualino, I don’t have a good answer for you.

          The protagonist’s wartime experiences are gruesome. Inside the concentration camp, he watches a rotund matron (Shirley Stoler) push inmates past their physical and psychological limits, then bonds, sort of, with a poetic activist named Pedro (Fernando Rey). That character’s ultimate fate is so vile as to approach the realm of perverse comedy. As noted earlier, the crescendo of the picture involves Pasqualino trying to gain favor with the matron through sex. Throughout Seven Beauties, Wertmüller devotes as much energy to provoking revulsion as she does to showcasing ideology. The sheer number of repugnant images and situations is distracting, as is dissonance between content and style.

          Like all of Wertmüller’s movies, Seven Beauties is beautifully photographed, and the production design is impressive. Moreover, frequent Wertmüller collaborator Giannini contributes his usual impassioned work. Seven Beauties is among Wertmüller’s most acclaimed films, having garnered accolades including four Oscar nominations, so, clearly, discerning viewers found much worth examining here. To these eyes, however, the picture has not aged as well as some other Wertmüller’s efforts. Seven Beauties speaks with more confidence than clarity, though a hint of the picture’s deeper meanings might come from Rey’s character, who claims that “a man in disorder is our only hope.” Disorder is something that Seven Beauties has in abundance.

Seven Beauties: FUNKY

Love & Anarchy (1973)

          Like her mentor Federico Fellini, Italian director Lina Wertmüller generally avoids understatement. Although technically brilliant and unrelentingly intense, her movies are often so loud, overbearing, and vulgar that it’s hard to sift the artistry from the assault. Plus, because she’s among the most deeply political filmmakers ever to achieve international fame, her pictures exist on literal and metaphorical levels, meaning that themes one discovers upon reflection add depth to what initially seem like undisciplined statements. In other words, it’s never prudent to dismiss a Wertmüller movie. Unfortunately, it can often be difficult to actually enjoy a Wertmüller movie. So it is with Love & Anarchy, which I found almost interminable until the final act. Given the film’s rarified critical status, it’s possible that I’m either in the critical minority or that I just plain missed something important during the setup phase of the narrative. In any event, watching Love and Anarchy felt like having Wertmüller scream at me for two hours, even though I eventually found a grudging respect for the way the piece resolved.

          Wertmüller’s favorite leading man, Giancarlo Giannini, plays Antonio, a provincial type who travels to Rome during Mussolini’s reign. (Backstory: Antonio became radicalized when Mussolini’s thugs killed one of his friends, so he’s determined to assassinate Il Duce.) Giving the would-be killer sanctuary while he plans the murder is a prostitute name Salomé (Mariangela Melato). Telling fellow sex workers at a bordello that Antonio is her cousin, she lets Antonio stay in her chambers and even proffers carnal favors. The first two-thirds of Love and Anarchy follow romantic-comedy rhythms as the cynical Salomé falls for the guileless Antonio, even as he becomes enamored of another prostitute, Tripolina (Lina Polito). Eventually, the film catches fire because Antonio reveals that he’s terrified about trying to kill Mussolini, leading the women to passionately argue against Antonio throwing his life away on a likely futile assassination attempt.

          This material gives Wertmüller a fine dramatic vehicle for exploring the costs of idealism and the roles of individuals in oppressive times. Just as the film comes to life in its last stretch, Giannini’s performance crystallizes. His suave good looks buried behind huge freckles and wild red hair, Giannini spends the first two-thirds of the movie looking lost, his eyes bulging stupidly, but then we realize he’s simply been scared out of his wits the whole time. Why withhold that insight from the audience? Why waste time on Fellini-esque scenes at the bordello, replete with grotesque images of painted ladies? And why get so caught up in the romantic-triangle contrivance? Such are the mysteries of Wertmüller’s work.

          Dubious narrative choices notwithstanding, Love and Anarchy is gorgeous from a technical perspective, with Giuseppe Rotunno contributing characteristically vivid camerawork and a number of vibrant locations providing texture. Visual splendor aside, so much of what makes this movie hard to watch is contained in Melato’s performance. Her makeup is extreme, all bleached hair and pale skin, so she looks like a vampire, and she never stops talking or lowers her volume to less than a caterwaul. She incarnates all the extreme things that make Love & Anarchy challenging to endure, even though the film contains many provocative insights.

Love & Anarchy: FUNKY

The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (1970)

          Winner of the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film, stately drama The Garden of the Finzi-Continis explores tensions among wealthy Italian Jews during the run-up to World War II, when Benito Mussolini escalated an ethnic-cleansing campaign in lockstep with the anti-Semitic purge wrought by the Nazis in Germany. Adapted from a novel by Giorgio Bassani and directed with rarified style by Vittorio De Sica, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis is a melodrama with a social purpose, so every scene of interpersonal friction and romantic strife is shot through with foreshadowing. Some characters see where things are headed while others play ostrich, so viewers get a close view at what happens when citizens rebel against totalitarianism and what happens when citizens spend too long ignoring the storm clouds gathering overhead. Many, many films explore similar terrain, and some—notably Bob Fosse’s Cabaret (1972)—inject the American perspective for a broader geopolitical view. Perhaps because of its narrow focus on the moneyed class, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis lacks gut-punch impact. Nonetheless, the question of how societies allow demagogues to gain power is one of timeless importance, and De Sica dramatizes issues with intelligence and precision.

          At the beginning of the story, young adults from throughout the city of Ferrara meet in the sprawling private estate of the Finzi-Contini family for leisurely games of tennis. (Among the story’s central metaphors is the notion of a walled-in compound as a island of tolerance in a sea of hateful madness; it’s the familiar binary argument of involvement versus isolation.) Though he inhabits a slightly lower social station, Giorgio (Lino Capolicchio) is in love with Micòl (Dominique Sanda), eldest daughter of the Finzi-Contini family and also his friend since childhood. Yet she’s drawn the handsome and politically expedient Malnate (Fabio Testi), and the situation is complicated by Micòl’s concern for her frail brother, Alberto (Helmut Berger), another childhood friend of Giorgio’s. Adding more layers to the narrative are scenes set in Giorgio’s home, since his father (Romolo Valli) champions Mussolini. In fact, the father joins the Fascist Party, somehow believing he can stop the spread of anti-Semitism from within the political machine.

         Those with a strong grasp of world history will get more from The Garden of the Finzi-Continis than others, since the movie’s philosophical debates occur on an elevated plane. Similarly, the narrative’s symbolism is intricate and subtle, so those looking to be lead by the hand toward one viewpoint or another will be lost. The broad strokes are plainly evident, but The Garden of the Finzi-Continis explores incremental differences between people who share many common values, rather than outright conflict between oceans-apart enemies. Undoubtedly, that’s why the picture enjoys its enviable reputation. By surgically extracting a sample of diseased tissue, De Sica and his collaborators explore something even more troubling than the rise of tyrants—the ease with which tyrants can seize control while those with the most cultural and economic influence are distracted by petty strife. 

The Garden of the Finzi-Continis: GROOVY