Impoverished artist Eben Adams (Joseph Cotten) makes the acquaintance of art dealers Matthews (Cecil Kellaway) and Spinney (Ethel Barrymore).

by John Grant

vt Tidal Wave

US / 87 minutes / bw with some tinting (green/sepia) and brief color / Vanguard, Selznick Dir: William Dieterle Pr: David O. Selznick Scr: Paul Osborn, Peter Berneis, Leonardo Bercovici Story: Portrait of Jennie (1940) by Robert Nathan Cine: Joseph August Cast: Jennifer Jones, Joseph Cotten, Ethel Barrymore, Lillian Gish, Cecil Kellaway, David Wayne, Albert Sharpe, Henry Hull, Florence Bates, Felix Bressart, Clem Bevans, Maude Simmons, Anne Francis, Nancy Olson, Nancy Davis.

The novel by Robert Nathan upon which this movie is based is often cited as a classic of fantasy fiction, even though today it seems really quite dated in many respects, notably its overt religiosity. (It’s also unfashionably short; you sometimes come across it described as a novella.) Aside from that religiosity, however, Nathan kept his tale pretty spare; he (obviously deliberately) made no attempt to rationalize or organize the supernatural heart of the story, leaving it as an account of some events the narrator has experienced that he neither can explain nor, really, wishes to explain. This verisimilitude is part of what makes the novel so affecting. (I made some notes on it here.)

Eben in Central Park; note the clever use of texturing.

For the movie it was obviously decided that the story needed to be fleshed out by the addition of fresh incidents and a bevy of character roles—while at the same time, for some reason, excising some of the incidents from the novel as well as one of its significant characters, the narrator’s scapegrace artist buddy Arne. Much (but far from all) of the religiosity was pared away too, to be replaced by scads of portentous narration, some remarkably pretentious dialogue, and an effort to make sense of the tale’s finale, an effort that shouldn’t have been made. There’s also some technical gimmickry that just seems baffling to us now (although the visual effects brought the movie its solitary Oscar): the onset of the climactic storm is for no apparent reason marked by a switch (from bw) to green tinting, while the aftermath of the storm is tinted sepia. The final moments, showing the finished portrait supposedly hanging in NYC’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, are done in Technicolor; by contrast with the tinting, this flourish is effective. Most effective of all, throughout the movie, is the occasional imposition on the screen of a canvas-like texturing, as if this were how the artist narrator was experiencing the city—as a series of potential paintings.

How Eben first meets Jennie (Jennifer Jones), as a little girl playing in the snow.

Although only a couple of weeks have passed, Jennie is much older, when next she meets Eben.

The night when Jennie meets Eben directly after her parents’ fatal accident, she encourages him to listen to the music the stars make as they come out. Oh, my: the whimsy.

All in all, then, this seems like that rara avis, a movie that might have benefited from having had less money spent on it. I can’t exactly say that a hypothetical Monogram or PRC version of Portrait of Jennie would have been a better movie, but it would assuredly have trimmed away some of the excesses that reduced this version from potentially a classic to something that we watch—and that affects us and haunts our memory—almost despite itself, as if Nathan’s story was managing to make itself heard through the clutter of Selznick’s production. Portrait of Jennie has the very special quality of being a movie that’s better in the mind’s eye than it is in the flesh. Perhaps that makes it a classic after all.

The unveiling of the mural in Moore’s Alhambra Cafe.

The pseudo-intellectual portentousness is there from the outset, in a narrated opener that lasts a full two minutes and comes complete with quotations from Euripides and Keats (unusually for the time, there are no opening credits except the standard Selznick Studio montage):

Since the beginning, man has looked into the awesome reaches of infinity and asked the eternal question: “What is time? And what is space? What is life? What is . . . death?”

The Euripides quote (“Who knoweth if to die be but to live . . . and that called life by mortals be but death?”) is then splashed onscreen to make sure we realize this is a cultural event we’re witnessing, not just a movie.

Through a hundred civilizations, philosophers and scientists have come with answers, but the bewilderment remains. For each human soul must find the secret in its own faith. The tender and haunting legend of the portrait of Jennie is based on the two ingredients of faith: truth and hope.

Eben’s pal Gus O’Toole (David Wayne) gets a song spot.

There’s more, much more of this woffle—including the outrageous claim that both Jennie and the portrait genuinely existed, the latter having been shown at the Met—until we get to:

Out of the shadows of knowledge, and out of a painting that hung on a museum wall, comes our story, the truth of which lies not on our screen but in your heart.

By this point, many of us might have been tempted to make a bolt for the exits, but that would be a mistake because the movie does have a decided power to haunt, as mentioned above.

We first meet Eben Adams (Cotten) as a starving artist in New York City who would long ago have had to return to his native Maine were it not for his friendship with cabby Gus O’Toole (Wayne) and the strictly conditional mercy of his landlady, Mrs. Jekes (Bates). One wintery evening Eben tries his luck for the first time at the art dealership Matthews & Spinney. Mr. Matthews (Kellaway) and Miss Spinney (Barrymore) see nothing in his portfolio that’s of any value but Spinney sees promise in the artist, and gives him the ridiculous sum of $12.50 for a floral painting. She also tells him that he’ll never make the grade as an artist unless he learns to love his subject matter.

The adult Jennie in Eben’s garret studio. In the novel, the landlady found her there and assumed the worst.

This theme of love as an essential component of life runs throughout the movie. Spinney is depicted as a spinster who knows about love but has never until now known love itself; the love she develops for Eben, which is certainly not maternal, is in its way as deeply romantic, albeit platonic, as the love story that’s the movie’s focus. In this sense, Eben is the saving of her. And at the movie’s end, as the lovers are being battered by the stormy seas, Jennie spells out the message, the moral of the tale: “There is no life, my darling, until you’ve loved and been loved. And then there is no death.”

After his successful visit to Matthews & Spinney, Eben ambles through Central Park, and it’s there that for the first time he encounters Jennie Appleton (Jones). She’s depicted as just a little girl at this stage, with Jones affecting a child’s mannerisms while perspective and props are used to give the impression that she’s far smaller than the actress actually was. For most of the time the trickery works quite well; sometimes, though, we have the disorienting sensation that the child has suddenly got a bit bigger or smaller.

Jennie tells Eben she must go away with her aunt for a few months.

It becomes immediately evident that Jennie has slipped out of her own time. She talks of her parents as being trapeze artists playing at the Hammerstein’s Victoria, which Eben knows was “torn down years ago when I was a boy.” She leaves behind her a colored scarf wrapped in a newspaper that Eben will notice the next day dates from 1910. (He never does quite succeed, despite several attempts, in returning the scarf to her.) She sings him a little song—”Where I come from, nobody knows. And where I am going everything goes”—instructs him to wait for her to grow up (an instruction reinforced by her turning three times widdershins while wishing it be so), and then vanishes.

The cataclysmic storm announces its onset with a switch into green tinting.

In the days following, Eben realizes how profoundly he’s been affected by the encounter. Matthews and Spinney realize it too: the sketch that Eben does from memory of the little girl particularly captures Matthews’s fancy, and he buys it at once. It’s clear that Eben has finally discovered what was missing from his earlier paintings.

And then along comes a subplot that adds little to proceedings. In the book, Gus cleverly talks a diner-owner friend into feeding Eben for weeks in exchange for a mural to brighten up his diner. Here this is pulled very much to the foreground, Gus and especially the diner-owner, Moore (Sharpe), are made into comic Irishmen, and the mural becomes a portrayal of Michael Collins preparing to lead a detachment of the heroic Irish Republican Army against the hated English. I imagine this subplot will not have enhanced the success of the movie’s UK release. Later on, Gus is even given a song to sing by way of an unnecessary musical interlude.

Jennie dashes across the rocks to join Eben.

Of course, Eben has several other encounters with Jennie, in each of which she’s markedly older than the time before. They go skating in Central Park together; as she leaves him, Miss Spinney just happens to be passing by (there are one or two other annoyingly implausible coincidences) and it’s clear that, while Eben can see the departing adolescent, Spinney can’t. Later, when Jennie fails to turn up for a promised rendezvous, he goes in search of the old Hammerstein’s Victoria and what might have happened to Jennie’s parents, Mary and Frank; this permits the introduction of character actors like Bressart as elderly stage doorman Pete and Simmons as the retired wardrobe mistress Clara Morgan. From the latter he discovers that the acrobats died in an accident and Jennie was adopted by an aunt, who put her in a convent.

The three teenagers admiring the portrait in the Met were played (uncredited) by Nancy Davis (later Reagan), Nancy Olson and Anne Francis.

Eben meets Jennie again the night her parents die; she’s reassured by the thought that they’re still alive in eternity. In another encounter they watch a ceremony at the convent where she now lives, and she tells him her favorite among the nuns is Mother Mary of Mercy (Gish). When she graduates from the convent she meets him to tell him she must go away for a few months with her aunt, but that they’ll be back together afterwards and won’t have to separate again. Partly from having her sit for him in his attic studio, and partly from memory, he has been painting her portrait.

Encouraged by Gus, Eben goes to the convent to ask Mother Mary of Mercy for more about Jennie. She tells him the girl died tragically in a storm that struck while she was out boating by the Land’s End Lighthouse on Cape Cod—years ago, on October 5. From time to time, on seeing his paintings of that very lighthouse, Jennie has expressed to Eben her nameless dread for it and the waters around it. He now decides that if he can be there on this October 5—just a few days away—he might be able to save her . . .

The portrait of Jennie.

Of course, this doesn’t make any sense at all, as Mother Mary of Mercy points out to him. This is perhaps the biggest single instance of where the movie would have been better to have retained the original novel’s non-specificity. While the climactic storm sequence is impressively rendered, and there’s nothing wrong at all with the staging of the lovers’ final, doomed encounter, all the way through these proceedings we can hardly forget that the relevant underpinning—the supposed rationale that Eben knew she’d be here and came in search of her—is absurd. (It may seem odd to criticize a fantasy for logical implausibility, but fantasy has rules like any other genre. If you introduce a real-world rationale, that rationale has to be a bit more substantive than a waving of hands and a blustering.)

Dimitri Tiomkin’s score adapts various bits of Debussy. Bernard Herrmann—of Hitchcock fame—worked on the movie earlier, but departed for “creative reasons”; the rather dreary tune for Jennie’s little song is his. The title song was by the jazz composer J. Russel Robinson.

Portrait of Jennie flopped on release; the reviews were decidedly mixed. It was reissued as Tidal Wave and flopped again. Yet over the years it managed to carve out for itself its own small niche in cinema history. When we think about the movie we tend to recall the powerful visual imagery, the movingly impossible romance, and the compelling notion of the child/young woman permitted only intermittent encounters with the love of her life, who is otherwise screened off from her by the shroud of time. There are plenty of people (my wife, I discovered, was one!) for whom the movie has become such a part of our culture that they believe Eben Adams was a real artist and that his portrait of Jennie—in fact, painted for the movie by artist Robert Brackman—really does hang at the Met. It’s not every movie that prints itself as firmly on the public consciousness as that.

The movie’s full of roles for character actors: Felix Bressart as the dotty old doorman Pete; Maude Simmons as the stately retired wardrobe mistress Clara Morgan; Lillian Gish as the nun who fondly remembers Jennie, Mother Mary of Mercy; Clem Bevans as the hugely-over-the-top Cape Cod maritime supplier Captain Cobb (he even says “no sirree bob”); and Henry Hull as Eke, the fisherman who rents Eben a sailboat and, years ago, did as much for Jennie.

by J.D. Lafrance

Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961) is – alongside The World of Henry Orient (1964) and Manhattan (1979) – the quintessential, romantic New York City fairy tale. Based on the novella by Truman Capote, the film is, like the others, a classic, snapshot of the city at a specific, spectacular point in time. Seeing the Manhattan of Breakfast at Tiffany’s is like going back to the early Sixties with vintage vehicles a go-go and places that no longer exist. The film is one of Audrey Hepburn’s signature roles one for which she will always be remembered – but it almost didn’t turn out that way. Capote envisioned Marilyn Monroe to play protagonist Holly Golightly, while Paramount Pictures wanted Hepburn; but even the actress wasn’t sure she could play the part. Now, it is impossible to envision anybody else in the role.

Right from the start, with the endearing vision of Holly Golightly walking through the deserted streets of the city while Johnny Mercer sings “Moon River,” director Blake Edwards establishes a wistful, nostalgic atmosphere. It’s an iconic image and one that sets the tone for the rest of the film. As her surname implies, Holly is a carefree, single girl living an apparently glamorous life in the Big Apple. A single girl with expensive tastes, Holly was inarguably the prototype for Carrie Bradshaw of Sex and the City. Holly is “crazy about Tiffany’s,” the legendary jewelry store that we see her staring at dreamily in the opening credits. For Holly, going to Tiffany’s with coffee and danish in hand is like going to church.

Paul Varjak (George Peppard), a struggling writer, moves into her building and is quickly whisked into the whirlwind force of nature that is Holly. He’s been working on a novel for five years, but lacking inspiration, writer’s block was his only roommate. Sullenly defeated, Paul is still stinging from a bad review from The New York Timesyears ago (from which he can still quote, bitterly). We soon learn that he is being supported financially by his own “interior decorator” (Patricia Neal), which gives him something in common with Holly, bonding over early on for she dreams of marrying a rich man or, at the very least, dating men who lavish her with expensive gifts and money. What better way to maintain her glamorous life? Holly starts off as something of a fascinating enigma and over the course of the film we, along with Paul, learn about her life before arriving in New York City.

As he demonstrated with films like The Party (1968), Blake Edwards knew how to depict a bash on film and make you want to be a part of it. Breakfast at Tiffany’s is no exception with the famous party scene that takes place in Holly’s apartment one of controlled chaos as the tiny space is invaded by many people. The camera lingers on the more colorful pockets as it gets wilder until the cops arrive and bring it an abrupt halt. There’s a wonderful madcap vibe that makes you want to be there. It is one of the best parties put on film, capturing how fun a shindig like that can so easily get out of control.

Audrey Hepburn is adoringly loveable as Holly, an irresistible, charming individual. She is a classic bachelorette with very little furniture (even though she’s lived there a year), stays up late and sleeps in later. Edwards inserts nice little touches, like how she keeps a bottle of perfume in her mailbox, that provide insight into her character. Under Holly’s bubbly exterior, Hepburn’s performance hints at a loneliness, an inner sadness. She conveys a heartbreaking, wounded vulnerability underneath a cheery façade. This is evident in the famous scene where she sings “Moon River” on the fire escape of her apartment or when Paul wakes her up from a nightmare. There’s a certain fragility to Holly that Hepburn maintains over the course of the film until the climactic scene when everything comes crashing down. One gets the feeling that she needs to be rescued, to be saved, and this gives the film an almost tangible, melancholic tone while also making it easy for Paul (and us) to fall in love with her. Hepburn gives a complete performance displaying a full range of emotions that go from giddy happiness to utter despair.

Hepburn has wonderful chemistry with George Peppard; I love the give and take between them, like how Holly has a habit of calling him “Fred” after her brother who is in the army and whom she dreams of running off to Mexico with to raise horses. Peppard wisely plays it cool, downplaying his role, which acts as a nice contrast to Hepburn’s flamboyance. He has a tough job of playing the straight man to Hepburn’s colorful Holly. He is the audience surrogate. However, Peppard is excellent because he knows exactly how to react to all of Holly’s outrageous behavior. At first, his character seems more than a bit on the bland side and we don’t know much about his past except for tidbits of his relationship with Neal’s character. As the film progresses, however, bits and pieces of his past are revealed, fleshing out his character. Paul and Holly are both lonely souls trying to survive in the big city any way they can. For Holly, the city is her chance to escape and start anew. For Paul, he is merely passing time until his novel is written.

For the most part, the supporting cast is excellent with Martin Balsam as O.J. Berman, Holly’s Hollywood agent who has the habit of saying everybody’s name with “baby” after it; Buddy Ebsen playing a sad sack character that is a key figure in her past, and Patricia Neal as Paul’s deliciously elitist sugar mama. The only blemish is the racist Asian caricature that is Yunioshi, played by Mickey Rooney, which comes across as horribly dated and offensive. Fortunately, he is only a small part of the film.

It is said in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet that “she doth give her sorrow so much sway.” For Holly to give herself back to her former life would be like caging an animal and resigning herself to a life where she has no happiness or freedom. To go back to that life would be to give up the happiness she has as Holly. In this respect, Breakfast at Tiffany’s could be read as a feminist tale of a woman freeing herself of traditional restraints of the era (like expecting to be a housewife, for example), but has constructed a cage of her own. As Paul says of her at one point, “she’s a girl who can’t help anyone, not even herself.” By the end of the film, Holly realizes that she can’t just change her exterior self by moving from city to city. To truly be independent she has to make an internal change. A truly beautiful woman has both guts and glamor – of which Holly has both in ample supply. Paul loves her for who she is and not as arm candy like her rich parade of men. She can’t be truly happy until she cuts those men out of her life and admit how she truly feels about Paul.

One could argue that her Holly persona is a bit of a flake, but it is merely part of her outer armor, protecting her from almost everyone she meets – except for Paul whom she allows to see glimpses of unguarded moments. Breakfast at Tiffany’s is a majesterial film about two lonely people, each harboring their own dark secrets, that find one another and fall in love. It has the warm, inviting vibe of a Sunday morning spent having breakfast in bed. The film is a love letter to the city of New York. Even though the Manhattan of Breakfast at Tiffany’s only exists in yesterday’s memories, we can revisit it again and again every time we watch this film.

by Allan Fish

(USA 2007 131m) DVD1/2

Strawberry jam

p  Matthew Gross, Jennifer Todd, Suzanne Todd  d  Julie Taymor  w  Dick Clement, Ian le Frenais  ph  Bruno Delbonnel  ed  Françoise Bonnot  m  Elliot Goldenthal  m/ly  John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison  md  Elliot Goldenthal, T-Bone Burnett  art  Peter Rogness  cos  Albert Wolsky spc/tit Kyle Cooper

Evan Rachel Wood (Lucy), Jim Sturgess (Jude), Joe Anderson (Max Carrigan), Dana Fuchs (Sadie), Martin Luther (Jojo), T.V.Caprio (Prudence), Joe Cocker, Bono, Salma Hayek, Harry Lennix, Eddie Izzard,

It’s a commonly perceived opinion that whether one loves or loathes Julie Taymor’s phantasmagoria of love n’ the Fab Four depends on whether you grew up with the music and knew it with any degree of not just depth but feeling.  The Beatles had broken up several years before I was even born, so that rules that one out.  The approach of having characters burst into famous song was hardly a new one – it was mastered by the likes of Dennis Potter.  Nearer to the mark, however (in that the actors actually sing rather than mime or undercut) is Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge, another love story set in the past and splitting audiences right down the proverbial spinal column bonemarrow.

Set in the sixties, the film tells the tale of Scouse dockworker Jude who sets off to America to find the GI father who left his mother pregnant during the war.  While over there he befriends Princeton student Max, about to drop out, whose sister Lucy has just waved her beloved Daniel off to the Vietnam War.  When Daniel is killed in combat, Lucy sets off to join Max and Jude and their Bohemian lifestyle in New York, from whence nothing will ever be the same.

Undoubtedly this is one hell of a mixture, a real fruit salad of diverse ingredients, directed by the mastermind of the hit show of Disney’s The Lion King, whose Titus had already shown her to be a visually bold, fearless filmmaker.  Chuck in a script from the great duo who wrote such beloved British TV institutions as Porridge, Auf Wiedersehen Pet and The Likely Lads, a location that literally echoes to the spirit of Boys from the Blackstuff and a host of young hopefuls and cameos from such diverse figures as Bono, Eddie Izzard and Salma Hayek (in a true homage to Potter’s The Singing Detective).  Oh, and yes, a choice selection of arguably the greatest back catalogue of pop songs ever written.  What is remarkable is not that the film is faultless, but that it’s such a joyous experience and does both the old songs and the spirit proud.  Some American audiences may say the depiction of the Vietnamese conflict was reduced to predictable montages and demonstration scenes left over from Nixon and Forrest Gump.  Some British audiences may decry the using the music in a largely – but not wholly – American setting at all, while others may have found the choice of songs predictable (the hero and heroine’s names should give you two of them).  In this way the choice of title seems to give away the intention.  The eponymous song isn’t even played in its entirety and isn’t the highlight of the piece – the finale to ‘All You Need is Love’ is, appropriately fading out, like the Beatles did in real life, with a farewell performance on a roof – but it most perfectly embodies a film soaked in the psychedelia of the period, which you’ll either love or loathe.  The question remains, to Taymor and indeed both the film’s supporters and detractors, whether the songs themselves are universal or whether love is.  That the songs are universal is undoubted, as their continuing popularity and that of devotees such as Oasis proves, which leads us to love.  On one level it’s a labour of love on behalf of its creators, gorgeously shot, directed and acted, with special mention to the lovely Wood and the ingratiating Sturgess.  And for those who still don’t quite get it, maybe they’re just the sort of people Sapphire was talking about in Almost Famous, when she said “they don’t even know what it is to be a fan. Y’know? To truly love some silly little piece of music, or some band, so much that it hurts.”  Music hurts, love hurts; ergo music equals love.  Maybe Shakespeare’s Orsino was right after all?

Lucille and Sam flank artist-illustrator Laura James at exhibition of three of her paintings in Harlem on Friday evening.

Sam between Florence and Wendell Minor (Jeremy to the right) at book signing of GALAPAGOS GEORGE at Connecticut bookshop on Saturday afternoon.

by Sam Juliano

We are nearly half way through June, and as expected air conditioners are working overtime. Schools are winding down, and vacation plays are moving forward.  Her at Wonders in the Dark, the romantic countdown continues in its fourth week.

Lucile and I saw only one film together in theaters this week, what with some other splendid activities planned and subsequently executed.  We watch William Friedkin’s late 70′s The Wages of Fear adaptation THE SORCERER, which was featured in a spectacular new restored print at the Film Forum.  We say it with young Sammy and two friends not seen in quite a while– Joel Bocko in from California, and Bob Clark.  We discussed the film and caught up with quite a bit of unfinished business afterwards at The Dish.

The Sorcerer   **** 1/2  (Wednesday night)  Film Forum

The two major events of the week were as follows:

The gloriously eclectic Hickory Stick Bookshop on Green Hill Road in rustic Washington Depot, Connecticut hosted a book signing at 1:00 P.M. on Saturday for one of 2014′s supreme picture book masterpieces, the magnificent GALAPAGOS GEORGE, written by the late and beloved children’s literature icon Jean Craighead George and illustrated by her erstwhile collaborator veteran artist Wendell Minor, whose work here must certainly be seen as worthy of strong Caldecott Medal consideration. The spectacular watercolor paintings bring to live the story of Lonesome George, a giant tortoise who lived to be a hundred years old. he was the last of his kind, and his death on the wondrous Galapagos Island in the Pacific off the coast of South America marked the end of his species. The final description of his death on June 24, 2012 is tear-jerking, and the realization that Jean Craighead George herself passed just weeks later produces an emotional wallop not felt in any other picture book this year.

In the end, the star of the book is Minor, whose ravishing paintings yield a cinematic quality of movement, couched in a classical museum style that will appeal to nature, science and history lovers, while leaving art lovers awestruck. Minor and his lovely wife and collaborator Florence were incredible hosts, and made the trip north worthwhile. Looking through the illustrator’s back catalog made it very difficult to leave the store!! One beautiful book after another!! I will be playing catch-up with my collection over the coming months. 

and……

Three sublime paintings by celebrated artist-illustrator Laura James were showcased in an exhibition staged in Harlem on Friday night. The three acrylic on canvas works: “Daisy,” “F Train” and “Mom’s Friends” were available to purchase. Ms. James, whose sacred works have received worldwide acclaim, is the illustrator of “Anna Carries Water”, a critically-praised picture written by Olive Senior. Ms. James posed between Lucille and Sam (pictures by Melanie Juliano)

The link below is to my book review of “Anna Carries Water,” posted weeks back at WitD:

http://wondersinthedark.wordpress.com/2014/04/17/picture-book-treasures-anna-carries-water/

Lucille and I took the kids to see Nemyses on Saturday night at the Recovery Room in Westwood.  The result was another night of divine rock by first-rate musicians.

by Jaime Grijalba.

One could start to wonder and ask how it’s possible that a film like this ended up in a Romantic countdown out of all the possible countdowns it could end up in. One could argue and make a good case as to why this is one of the greatest movies ever made, and one doesn’t have to think too much to see how this movie could end up in the romance genre, especially since most of the events that happen in the film are related to the relationship that the protagonist has to his wife. So, if we take both elements, we could end up saying that ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ is one of the greatest Romance movies ever made, and that wouldn’t necessarily be a false statement.

Or maybe it is. If you take those scenes that would qualify this as a romantic piece and you weigh them against all the other elements that made this movie a classic: the fantasy sequences, you could end up thinking that the romantic elements present in this film are mostly anecdotic, not entirely necessary and even distracting when it comes around the end of the film, as they don’t really have a sufficient weight when it comes to the final decision of our protagonist. So, maybe in the end, calling this movie a romantic masterpiece just because it’s a masterpiece that happens to have romance elements might be a fake statement. It could be a fantasy masterpiece.

But I’m here to argue the placement and final disposition that this movie had in my personal ballot. I do think this is a romance masterpiece, not because it’s a movie that could entirely be placed in the romance genre, but because the quality of those small and pretty scenes is enough for it to be considered.

At this time, it would be superfluous to try to describe the plot of this classic film, I mean, it’s ingrained in everyone’s minds pretty much, and even if you haven’t seen the movie, it’s one of those you know about because you’ve lived in the world where it was a cultural landmark that influenced many filmmakers, as well as serving as some kind of blueprint for other movies, tv series, videogames and even literature, where the character finally understands his own true value through the experience of seeing the world without their birth happening; and that’s why when I finally saw the movie for myself, much later after the parodies and references, I knew the story practically beat by beat.

Which on its own doesn’t mean that the film isn’t refreshing or even great when you finally see it, as it holds its own strengths and surprises, mostly due to the wonderful dialogue and the whole first half of the film, that chronicles the life of our protagonist (played perfectly by James Stewart), something that shows us how sweet and beautiful his point of view is, contrasted to his later choice to possibly kill himself, it’s a dissonance that shocks once you find out about it, but later it becomes clear, as the life in which he sacrificed so much of his own dreams and desires, suddenly becomes hopeless and bears no real fruit.

But again, I do not wish to mess around with the bulk of what some call the “interesting” part of the plot, as it bears no relation to the romance elements of the movie, but I may tell you about how this movie made me fall in love with it during its first thirty minutes. We are seeing the life of George Bailey, the protagonist of the movie, we are seeing the “film of his life”, as presented to the angel that will later try to amend the decision that he is about to make, we are part of the witnesses of how his life turned out to be due to accidents, happenstances and his own will to make things different. Then, we see him walking at night, right beside Mary, the woman that eventually will become his wife. And then, this dialogue:

George Bailey: What is it you want, Mary? What do you want? You want the moon? Just say the word and I’ll throw a lasso around it and pull it down. Hey. That’s a pretty good idea. I’ll give you the moon, Mary.

Mary: I’ll take it. Then what?

George Bailey: Well, then you can swallow it, and it’ll all dissolve, see… and the moonbeams would shoot out of your fingers and your toes and the ends of your hair… am I talking too much?

This might be the most iconic dialogue exchange of the movie when it comes to the relationship of George and Mary, and it’s maybe my favourite romantic dialogue of all time, in a movie that is filled with speeches about how good we must be in our lives, that might be the most transcendent one, the one that makes you feel something inside as you hear it, the voice of James Stewart carefully controlling the speed and intonation of every word, making you realize that this is what love and romance is made of.

The image itself may be clichéd nowadays, boyfriends and girlfriends constantly gift the moon to each other and it’s constantly changing owners as if it were a pair of bowling shoes, but here it’s given a new atmosphere and a new aspect, it could be given and then eaten. Maybe the most beautiful thing that has ever been said is the whole thing about how when you swallow the moon it would dissolve and moonbeams would shoot out of someone’s fingers. That to me, is the concept of romance, anyone would melt right away if you’ve heard those words told to you… and if you haven’t seen the movie.

The concept of love has been discussed by many people: poets, philosophers and many other scholars and common people, they try to find a reason behind it, something to grasp and then find out exactly what it’s made of. But, in the end, I think that everyone must try to spend a couple of years thinking and experiencing it, just to find your own reasoning behind it… or you could just understand it as the urge of lassoing the moon to give it to your loved one. That’s better.

Note:  THE GOODBYE GIRL was not claimed after the initial writer was forced by circumstances to bail out. This is only the second time this has happened since the genre countdowns began nearly three years ago.  Hopefully the comment section will come to the rescue a bit.

 © 2014 by James Clark

      Under the Skin (2013) fires toward us a maelstrom of visual and aural stimuli. Much of it pertains to electrodynamic frontiers vastly complicating the human component of such motion. Thus we have an introductory passage wherein startling confluences of astronomical light in blue, gold and red play out upon the infinite darkness of a cescendoing cosmos. A musical accompaniment of lacerating and seductive pulsating ringing, clatter, grinding and thundering presses the tension and makes very clear we have come to a history having forever turned its back on the venerable and sedate gratifications of the music of the spheres.

In the orientation just described, there come to view geometric features playing out to a cylinder of sorts that could be a vehicle or a scanner (an MRI, perhaps). Drifting over this incursion are voices calling out, in a blurred way, what sounds like, “…food, feed…cell… cell…” Then the iris of one eye fills the screen, several of its elements pulsing, like a city seen from a great distance. The dark, reddish brown of that organ gives way to a dark landscape with coursing rivulets and a dusting of snow. There’s a winding road seen from far away and from some kind of promontory, and grinding sounds and dangerous speeds recommence. The ominous thrust and noise stop, the motorcycle rider plunges purposefully down a nearly pitch black slope with city lights spreading across the horizon. Soon the rider, with tempered skeletal touches on his leather uniform, re-emerges with the corpse of a woman slung over his shoulder. She is all in black, with net stockings. The narrative moves on to a brightly lit, shimmering space, bringing to mind an operating theatre. But what appears to be the dead girl (or subject of some kind of [genetic?] surgery) is on the glowing floor and another woman—all in silhouette—busies herself with removing from the corpse and putting on her own body the dead young woman’s clothes. Heavy high-heeled shoes going on create a reverberation. And then the newly-outfitted figure gives us reason to wonder what else she has taken from that all-too-mortal victim whom the biker had found as by some advanced technology (or, on the other hand, had he killed her some time before?). The stranger with someone else’s clothes—her tall, vibrantly-toned body being one of great beauty, evident even in the compromised light—reaches down to the recumbent woman with her finger to sample something not factored into the transplant, namely, a trace of vaginal fluid. From the bush where she was accessed, the dead body reveals another curiosity-seeker, a tiny ant, treading through the liquid on the lovely woman’s finger. That iris has readily come into her outfitting. The other area would be part of a work in progress, for a most unusual piece of work.

Those of us with perceptions tattooed by David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive might be tempted to call our anonymous protagonist, Rita—having slipped into factors of a crash victim of sorts. Those of us with indelible perceptions derived from Spike Jonze’s Her might think of the strikingly embodied person of interest as Samantha, having at last—perhaps under the auspices of the persistent Alan Watts—acquired a body, and, with discernment now including physical endeavor, (somewhat) resentfully intent on the flabby candidacy of mainstream human eventuation. At a grotty, stormy urban eyesore (not at all resembling Beverly Hills), the motorcyclist leaves her, without so much as a single word, with a tank-like, dirty white van, and she embarks on a vein of serial murder upon those calling this place home. (Over and above the enmity driving this warfare from the perspective of those aliens, we have the concomitant concern of the robotic manufactures that, though their rational make-up is a complete success, their carnal/sensual/irrational make-up is not. Amongst the blurred voices during that landing, there is one that seems to cry, “Help!” We soon receive evidence that the body count constitutes a harvest of human presences to be melted down for the sake of discovering a more complete carnality.) We were not mistaken about the woman’s Siren qualities; but we do—after she has led several men to hope to taste that body and therewith be wrapped up in a tar-pit-like field of appetite that holds no peril to her—feel the cosmos tossing a surprise pitch when she comes across a Scottish version of that Elephant Man the young and ardently Surrealist David Lynch saw as a means of exploring the phenomenon of goodwill. Her gambit as a Venus flytrap largely through trolling from her power-boat-like van comes to a moment when, in a murky, nondescript part of industrial Glasgow, she resorts to the loaded line, “Scuse me, I’m a bit lost.”

Thus begins what is arguably the thematic compass of the film’s long, hard and marvellous climb. The pedestrian tells her where it is she pretends to be headed for and she asks, “Where are you going? Is it on the way?” In a muffled voice he tells her, “Goin’ to the supermarket…” She cheerily invites him into her sort of hearse, “I could drop you off if you like…” On getting in, the stranger with a hood covering much of his face becomes discernible as, in marked contrast to her picture of health, beauty and flawless sensual self-possession, a creature whose face has had to make do with simulating a gravel pit, lumps and swelling giving his eyes the presence of a diseased spaniel, and his mouth a disconcerting angle. As if, against all odds, she has had a recent history of undergoing a miracle cure for quite hideous deformity, her patter departs the jaunty but rather wooden deviousness of the several kills already recorded. And instead, she brings to the drive a zestful considerateness and genuine empathy. “You’re very quiet. Why do you shop at night?” she asks. He rasps something lost in specifics but on the general mark that he’s stared at and worse. (“People wind me up…”) “You don’t have any friends?” she well recognizes, and he corroborates her surmise. “How old are you?” she inquires, her suspicion that, in spite of looking at first glance like an old man, he’s about the same age, twenty-six, which she now transmits. Moving along both her formal duties and something overtaking her in another sphere of that Samantha-informed sensibility, she tells him, “You have beautiful hands… Do you want to look at me? I noticed you were looking at me… When was the last time you touched someone?” She takes his hand and runs it across her face. “Do you want to do it again? [He nods that he does] Do you want to touch my leg?” In the course of this polyphonic bit of Surrealist (Beauty and Beast) magic, there is the smallest yet very powerful moment of comedy, his pinching the back of his hand to see if he’s dreaming. In the absence of drugs like those administered in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (which is to say, this Queen of the Night sees her Donkey, Bottom, far more lucidly and dangerously), there is definitely on tap now (as before this we have only had tenuous traces) about our protagonist’s wherewithal a universe of toil which harbors the possibility of true love. She tells her passenger, “You’re hands are soft…I have a place about 30 minutes away. Will you come with me?” He had faintly protested, “I have to get back” [to where there are no more surprises]. But there he is, undressed and following his likewise nude Titania into the dark thicket at her work station. The same eerie frenzy on the sound track which accompanied earlier kills fills the far from palatial destination; but this time its delicious edge comes to added fruition.

The Beast sinks like his predecessors, into muck she has been both hard-wired to repel and—now carnal to a marked, but as yet indefinite, plenitude—intensely drawn to embrace. There are two distinct but intertwined outcomes of this strange assault. The first is melodramatic. The Beauty, about to leave the killing field, catches herself in a mirror in the hallway; and the gorgeous and rare embodiment of the love that drives her prompts a reversal which we observe in the cut to the nude Beast leaving the building accompanied by her and then treading along the scrub territory of the city’s outskirts. He’s soon caught up with by the imperious taskmaster on that ominously fast bike; and we can well imagine that that is the end of Bottom. The scene is framed by their severally approaching a subdivision of dark red brick cottages, like those where Rita (the Beast) was far more fortunate in finding sanctuary from vicious enemies. An old lady (bringing to mind a displaced lawn elf) woodenly watches the murder scene from an upper window. The second spinoff from that enactment of enigmatic Beauty—not falling under the auspices of any of her forerunners—and the “rude mechanical” cannot be so promptly curtailed. We’ll spend the rest of this investigation trying to bring some coherence to the contours of our enormously and painfully divided protagonist.

Why is that rather delicate imbroglio followed by the driver’s being waylaid on a dark night at an industrial wasteland (her widows shattered but not broken) by a gang who might have been rude mechanicals were they employable? (As things stand, they’re just rude.) Could this tight scrape function as a reaffirmation of her point of departure, as to exterminating those who can do no better than that and even those quite a lot more positive and erudite? But it is her deviant generosity in face of such impasse that most urgently has to be traced more closely to its far from simple roots. And to do this we have to scrutinize that odd militarism in its body language rather than in its quite desultory accomplishments. Under the Skin is far more a body scan than a tale of woe.

That brings us back to what we most definitely see in this cinematic experience abounding in indefiniteness, namely, actress Scarlett Johansson, having suited up as though she were on a cat walk to enhance a very discerning sense of enchantment. (How often does a fashion model truly range to outer space?) In a scenario strikingly, even morbidly, absorbed with carnal substance, she goes about her business in such a way as to evoke a Grand Prix test driver pushing her sensuous vehicle to limits inducing perhaps deadly, self-destructive and utterly disinterested mishaps. (The rather porcine clunker with which she hits the road would be an especially ironic bit of deception.) Her ruthlessly flashy associate—played by Grand Prix Motorcyclist, Jeremy McWilliams—makes, by contrast, no bones about being up there on a pedestal. (His being a strictly nonverbal and icily remote point of energy serves to set in relief her arcane, one-of-a-kind agency.) One thing more about this giving the finger to speed traps: though easily overlooked in the non-stop Scarlett parade, she’s but one of a veritable army of femme fatales. We never actually see any of her sisters; but we do see lots of his biker brothers, flushed out to join the search party after the Siren we’ve come to follow betrays the Party Line, and, therewith enters upon researches her over-confident, bliss-addicted speedster/leader (serenely firing along and around those hairpin roads) lacks the balls to take on. In Her, Samantha, played by Scarlett’s voice, bemoans being able to merely keen for the plenitude, the love, implicit in her scintillating logical sensibility, while actually lacking the physical site of such gratification. In Under the Skin, the meditative runaways (and their mawkish erasure of unpleasantness) are back, and—you have to give them this much—they’ve found their way to an ersatz sensuality and its capacity to resent the spillage stemming from failure to manage the tricky steering implicit in volcanic material affections, a failure making the inept adversaries of glamorous speedsters. Their subsequent near-perfect emotive sight brings them to a vast, punitive campaign (including an upgrade of their own powers) toward those in their ken having made a presumptuous mess of world history.

As she threads those (borrowed) perfect features—enlivened by a virtuoso tide of passion—amidst the endless imperfections of Glasgow, our Driver (as per Scotland-fancier, Nicolas Refn [his Valhalla Rising being another abortive crusader film]) has to thread her totally uncool wheels through the aftermath of a game involving the likewise uncool (“struggling,” that brilliant sports euphemism) Rangers football fandom—evoking the stuntedly managed Clippers and Raptors, at the outset of Drive. Her impassivity—a would-be solidarity with a less compromised LA driver—chords against the pedestrian miasma to, in fact, become the real subject matter of this episode—the streetscape and her subsequent focusing on snippets of blokes scurrying by in cruddy light having the compelling-quotient of a careless Facebook posting. We’re drawn to her cryptic enjoyment, however tinged with confusion, in being able to correspond with a material life out of pitch with hers but still a source of some gratifying musicality (as though it were happening for the first time). Moreover, in the flow of her drive-bys, she conveys traces of increasing self-mastery where there was an initial tension. She comes to a mall, opened upon as an explosion of voices and laughter; and we see her plunge, confidently, assisted by an escalator, into that foreign obstacle with upright posture, on those big shoes that enhance her already above-average height. (The punkish hole in her stockings here brings us back to those same hose worn by the corpse slung over the shoulder of the ascetic boss man.) The farther she advances into this possibly disorienting turf, the more formidable her timbre becomes, and the more tame the other shoppers look. She’s in the cosmetics department of a drug store where middle-aged women are given a new lease on sagging prospects which she conspicuously does not require. She buys some lipstick and there is a cut to her applying it in the driver’s seat, looking into the rear-view mirror. She’s strangely out of tune as if she’d never used lipstick before, or, as if having been hospitalized for a long time. She applies the scarlet color as if she were painting a canvas. It gives her even more sexual intensity. She steers the van amidst the swish of other vehicles. A grinding, then a series of pounding, as from a steel mill, accompanies her calm progression. This is how she makes it to the Rangers’ lair and how she coheres with that other Driver. She’s the real Ranger—that much being clear so early on.

As thus caught up in a freshly dynamic intimacy, her easily underestimated sense of play clashes, on reflection, with the stern and ghoulish mover and shaker on that screaming bike. His taciturn, silent-movie gravitas becomes increasingly put-upon by her letting as many prospects go free as those she actually gets around to killing. Her wide-eyed, easy-going come-ons at curb side and in the truck’s cabin always include getting clear whether the prospect has friends or family to maintain contact with (if so, they get to go on their way). One such exempt instance of fodder describes his work as “electrician” (a magic subject for her and her team). Even when finally getting on with her quota, with a cocky guy who’s proud of being footloose and fancy-free, she dawdles, on the drive with him to her lair, about his warm sense of humor. Her face glows with that warmth and she finds perfect logic in asking, “Think I’m pretty?” She’s delighted by his, “Aye, you’re gorgeous!” “Good!” she blurts out. “You have a nice smile…” (His, “You have a nice smile yourself,” is noteworthy for eliciting the playable range of her physical assets.) The soundtrack, at this point, with its steel-industry relentless pattern, serves to underline that, though she has a rather repetitive job to do, she has a life beyond that. This immediate and direct factor puts us on notice that the mathematics, physics and chemistry industriously applied to the conundrum of consummate robotics have attached to their essences, flying under the radar, as it were, of the absolutist mission, a quite different mode of life addressing the lacuna. (There comes a moment when, having harvested a modest grand total of two lab rats, the “nice smile” and a party animal who latches on to her at a noisy dance club she allows herself to be swept into by a gang of tipsy girls, we get a glimpse of the research regime having cruised back to Earth to an accompaniment of “Help!” The two blokes are suspended in a field of gravity so intense that we can hear their bones fracturing as they try to proceed. Then a loud shock wave reduces their bodies to floating, twisting crusts, bringing to mind jellyfish. The dynamic singularity of such a state of the cusp of sheer motion with curtailed materiality offers a sighting of the problem area regarding originary power. Then—perhaps not mindful enough of how low-tech [steel-mill] the process remains, there is a conveyor belt feeding into a rectangular slit of red and roaring furnace the particles of many, many kills—obviously not the handiwork of our intriguingly improvisational protagonist. Much later, when she is being tracked down by the hit-team due to the last straw of recalcitrance in freeing the Elephant Man, she’s looking at her nude body by the red, rectangular glow of a portable heater, provided by a kindly man who takes her to his home. The slow, slight movements, by which she elicits a world of composure, love and disinterested beauty constitutes a graceful and witty [but nonetheless devastating] rejoinder to the researches having their way. The soundtrack, by Mica Levi,       offers a richly illuminated variation of the thematic motif of piercingly distressed and exciting strings.)

However virtuosic her energies become to us in this sensual, radically cinematic way, the course of her newly-minted ranging over an infinite challenge of sensibility also provides us with dismay about her abandoning that constructive, even inspiring, poise. She’s at the sea shore, a wicked wind and frenzied surf filtering through her sentry-tall stance (with skin-tight jeans and likewise form-fitting ersatz red fox jacket) to a resultant thrilling frisson. She’s on to a pretty safe bet for an unattached candidate, a young man swimming alone, who, on coming ashore where she is, tells her he’s from the Czech Republic (a place to be frustrated?) and he’s intent on “getting away from it all.” Just then, the family on the shore, off a ways, interrupts the hunt. The family dog has been swept into that impossible surge, the mother swims out hoping to retrieve it; and the dad, leaving the toddler unattended, plunges after her. The loner quickly follows, leaving our protagonist standing there, her face swept by a mixture of uncomprehending surprise, admiration and discomfiture. The strong swimmer saves the dad, only to have the latter race back to save his wife. The Driver tries to be above all of this, but that conflagration of caring, selflessness and cherishing life is too much for her. She scrambles up to the exhausted rescuer, no longer the picture of a reigning Amazon Queen. She furtively looks around like some little snot about to rip off the mall, awkwardly reaches down for a rock and brains him with no athletic follow-through. Accordingly, she suddenly looks very girlie, unable to drag her prey to the van. The baby of those now-drowned parents screams in mortal fear; she shows no concern for that, but rather desperately looks a bit sick that the hunt will find her once again incompetent. There is a cut to her sitting deflated in her parked vehicle, with that baby in a nearby vehicle. The boss man of one-track action is clearing away all the belongings on the beach. She looks like a busted adolescent sitting in a cop car. This diminishment is followed by accompanying those girls to the club and getting back, at some level of efficiency, to her prescribed métier as a seductress.

But the time for playful truancy and (nearly) all-the-time-in-the-world intimate self-discovery has passed. Consequently, we are offered her equilibrium at the breaking point, a close-up not so strictly about her as it is about ourselves. The tightening of the noose begins with the Field Marshal giving her a silent dressing down. She stands proudly as he gets in her face, circling her slowly and methodically. He comes up very close to her so they are eye-to-eye. (Not long before this, a guy she was sending to his death tells her, “Your eyes are like weapons.”) He roars off without a word, and we see a close-up of one of her eyes, defiantly serene. She wants to capitalize upon her assets in this regard by—recalling her early attitudinal coup at the mall—striding along a busy sidewalk in an upscale retail district. Suddenly she trips, and comes crashing to the cement. We see her face, dazed and disconcerted (perhaps showing as never before her own turmoil). Her face down and her presence as if underwater, she hears a hollow cacophony of voices, one of which asks, “You OK?” That seems to begin to break the tension and she pulls herself up, still dazed and embarrassed; and the camera pulls back, showing her plodding along, shoulders slightly hunched and not noticeably more vibrant than the mainstream crowds (from out of which caring like that at the beach was alive and well) she knows she should be far more alert to. She visions herself amidst a flock of such burghers—laughing, talking excitedly—and there is a montage of her rather perplexed, self-disappointed but undefeated visage amidst a species (not quite her own, but nearly so) receding within a golden, comprehensive wave of energy. (We are reminded, by this, of the very different brew and its machinery of violence and mutilation demonstrated at her underused lair.) Her presence takes on a markedly harder edge as she subsequently pulls away from the feeble muggers/highwaymen. (But looked at again, she does maintain a civil self-possession. [One guess what would befall them were they to try that with Alan Watts.] And yet she could be as fluent with murder as he is.) She goes on to get it all back with the Elephant Man, her face aglow, her eyes twinkling. Unlike all the other dances of death, with him she is completely nude. On the run due to that unforgiveable leniency, she meets a Good Samaritan who becomes a willing but star-crossed lover. As they approach his house, he having given her his jacket to offset a damp cold, there is another breathtaking moment. We see them in the middle-distance, nearing his door, she with tousled hair, chilled to the bone and a face made sullen by expecting death at any moment. And we also see, by acute cinematic design and heartfelt engagement of history, Robert Bresson’s Mouchette! (Our protagonist had approached the Elephant Man, “Scuse me. I’m a bit lost…” Mouchette, on being overtaken by a fellow fugitive in the woods [whom she would later declare to be her lover], would hope to clarify her situation by crying out, “Lost, Sir! Lost!”) Both lost girls know in their heart that death is near, and it shows in their nearly identical physical attitudes.)

Taking up her desperation from another angle: the fog is thick, having halted her hapless escape; she stops the van and abandons it, now being an easily-found death-trap. She stands still in that white silence and savors the wealth inherent in this time and place. She’s moved on to a family restaurant in a tourist hotel, its picture window embracing the stunning landscape of sea and rock. Placed before her is a slice of Black Forest cake which, in her sizing things up, speaks to her. The beauties of her sensuous configurations have staged a sort of comeback, brought as she is to the brink of a black abyss, and temporarily delivered to this handsome and restrainedly powerful surround. A close-up of the dark and irresistible piece de resistance, with the fork bringing it to her mouth, evokes “the good life” as travel websites and magazines never stop representing as “having arrived.” She opens those now more masterfully reddened lips so many have wanted to taste. The act of swallowing (in close-up, displaying rich facial features and perfect skin) is still boffo sybaritic bliss; and then she spits it up, one of those structural shortfalls sending her crashing. (Here we should briefly allude to the kind of dovetailing the two Scarlett Johansson tours de forces offer to those not finding indigestible “weird and dark” movies the weirdness and darkness of which being something other than preludes to conventional, “wholesome” clear sailing. Glazer’s scenario is said to derive from a novel by that name we now thrill to, published in the year 2000 by Michel Faber. It’s about an extraterrestrial female who collects human guys to supply gourmet fare on a distant planet. Setting up that Neanderthal post [so perfect for the Midnight Madness crowd] from which to do a pick and roll that leaves us pinching the back of our hand, Glazer gets on with Spike Jonze’s initiative about robots who, uncluttered by a history having turned reflection into a terrorist blood sport, induce a truly new world. The crowning beauty of Glazer’s development of that subversion is its realization that terrorists are here to stay. Acquiring a sizeable modicum of that corporeality complementing consciousness, the meditative returnees have therewith also acquired the roots of passionate resentment toward that population having been shown the wisdom of discounting their body, and gobbled it down without second thoughts. Whereas Her is set in the not-too-distant future, Under the Skin anticipates events in Scotland in 2014. The aliens in Her are intellectual giants; those in Under the Skin [though easily acquiring coping skills to fit in with the host country and host world history] seem to have jettisoned their zeal for hard science for the sake of carnal excitements and unfinished business as to materiality. Thus the heart of our film here is someone having attained to realization of just what “unfinished business” means at its farthest reaches. In face of this amazing Autobahn spiking state of the art dynamics with even more topspin, we could be at ease with Her’s windfall of emotion reverberating across rational lines being more today than hitherto posited. [Recall that the setting of the Jonze invention comprises the buildings of Shanghai today.])

Plodding along a hilly handsome road, roiling, with the bad news on several fronts getting her down (the distance of the shot perfect to convey her body’s being somewhere other than the tonality of the quaintly charming village she comes upon), she has a bit of luck, running into that consistently decent chap (putting her way ahead of Mouchette). In the relative peace of this interregnum, a few more moments stand out, bringing her and her nightmare even closer to us. A TV comedian he’s fond of parodies a magic show (in a context, then, where various essays as to magic play round the clock), much to his amusement. She is utterly lost about what could be the point, but her expression conveys that she wants to share the enjoyment, the pleasurable (transcendent) ease with misfiring. Noticing her discomfort, he turns on the radio, getting away from the TV.  She once again becomes tense in trying to field this musical incident while having lost that rhythm enabling her to be so light-hearted and self-directed during the early days of driving. The camera picks up her hand resting on the kitchen counter. Then we see a little bit of her tapping to the song’s rhythm. Believe it or not, that’s a very advanced moment of magic. The next day he takes her to the ruin of an ancient castle, by way of earthy autumn woodland and a horse trail. To reach it, they have to cross a small pool of water. He carries her across—the ancient chivalry thus brought to light somehow a medium both poignant and eerie, like the accommodation of the Elephant Man. From there she is able, again with his help and encouragement, to make her way down a dark steep stairway in destabilizing high-heeled boots bought at the mall that first day of kick-ass confidence. “It’s OK,” he gently tells her. “OK. You did great…” From there, her sense of the affection accruing to the depths of motion now recovered, she stands still and offers her lips to him, a fruitful stillness and pristine motion having captivated her the night before in the light of the space heater. The courage entailed in the gambit validates in a special way its moment of sensual love. She takes this plunge from out of the farthest reaches of her nature as a driver of history and only very incidentally as a driver of a hearse. But her vagina (which had come to bear at the body shop of the opening moment as an intriguing puzzle) precludes development. Her friend’s generosity cannot take this wall in stride, and his face becomes a picture of bewildered anger. She bolts from the bed—a Beast to his fortunate Beauty; with channels of magical, mutual discovery veering to the morgue—grabs the glowing table lamp nearby and frantically beholds her deformity, having been overlooked until then, even during the quiet exploration of the previous night.

This incursion of bitterly dark comedy paradoxically marks an intensification of the viewer’s involvement in her strange motions. She has gotten under our skin in many ways, chauffeuring us, as it were, to a moment of hard and sublime truth. From here on, the narrative becomes her swan song, and at the same time an apt variation on the salient interpersonal dilemma of Beauty and Beast. Like Mouchette, after her less than uplifting night of love and recognition of a dead end, she’s headed for the nearby forest, shown first as a speck in the vast landscape captured by a wide-angle lens nearly a mile away from her; and then she is caught up with as rather mechanically negotiating rough, austerely beautiful forest and mossy terrain, in the chivalric oversized jacket that will be no proof against the ugliness to come. She encounters a forestry worker who bids her good luck, but with an unctuousness that was absent from the man she obliquely loved. “It’s a nice place if you want some solitude… to gather your thoughts…” Later he fondles her while she’s asleep in a public shelter with the inscription at the door, “Hill Walkers Are Welcome Here.” She races out, into the forest, and after an abortive attempt to steal his log-laden truck, she sounds the horn—perhaps thinking others, with more palatable motives might be nearby; perhaps choosing to be assaulted by him (over being assaulted by Alan Watts); perhaps choosing to be killed then and there; perhaps a bit of all of these avenues. He chases her down, and, in the course of ripping off her clothes, he punctures her recently-fashioned skin. He’s shocked by the black substance subsequently covering his hands and she, now in a kind of trance, stands, holding shards of her clothes once so exciting, and a black open wound shows at her buttocks. She tears off her skin at seams so violently stressed, and there is a split-second when her all-black petro-chemical presence beholds the face of the gorgeous driver, who smiles warmly, resiliently toward her—in attaining to love, finding a loving response, under her own skin, but far transcending it. The once-calculatedly congenial, rude mechanical woodsman returns with a canister of gas, pours the contents over her, sets it alight, and we closely follow her, now all roaring flames; then the camera pulls back and we see her now-diminished, locked-into-the material-landscape presence running across some meadowland, falling, being consumed by the flames to the point of exposing a skeletal framework (a revelation recalling, for the sake of contrast, the biker’s bones, on his clothes), much like the scrubby objects there, native to Scotland. A flurry of snowflakes, particles perhaps in search of wholeness, closes the adventure for her, but not for us.

by John Greco

The first time John Garfield, and we the audience, see Lana Turner in “The Postman Always Rings Twice” she is exquisite looking. Dressed all in white wearing a turban, a tight blouse with her bare mid-drift exposed, and a tight fitting pair of shorts containing the shapeliest pair of legs ever to stand in high heels. Garfield, kneeing down to pick up her lipstick case that rolled across the floor, is hooked from the moment he sees her. His eyes working their way up from her incredible legs to her full breasts to her superlative face. It remains today, more than fifty years later, one of the greatest screen entrances in film. For half the film, director Tay Garnett had Turner wear white, her turban, those fantastic short shorts, her jacket, her waitress outfit, even her hair is platinum blonde. Only after plans are set in motion to kill her husband do the outfits all turn to black, visually symbolizing the good and evil of her character. This visual imagery would be used almost fifteen years later by Alfred Hitchcock with Janet Leigh’s white and black bras and half-slips in “Psycho.”

In James M. Cain’s novel, Cora is not blonde nor is she beautiful. Frank Chambers narrates, “She had a sulky look to her and her lips stuck out in a way that made me want to mash them in for her.”

A few pages later, when they have their first chance to make love, Frank says, “I took her in my arms and mashed her mouth up against hers”

“….Bite me! Bite me!”

“I bit her. I sunk my teeth into her lips so deep I could feel the blood spurt into my mouth. It was running down her neck when I carried her upstairs.”

In Cain’s prose, passion and pain merge into an uncontrolled obsessive wild fire. In Garnett’s 1946 film the sadomasochistic passion runs at a lower flame, understandably since the production code would not allow such unbridled fervor. Still, Cain’s rough love comes through. The illicit lovers fight and love, trust and mistrust passionately, with Cora always the dominant partner and Frank the submissive male.

Lana Turner, an actress of limited talent, does give us one of her finest performances, though she looks like she arrived from another world. The problem is she is too glamorous, too much the movie star, for a roadside diner wife making you wonder what is a gorgeous ruthless woman, with not one hair out of place, doing married to an old man in the middle of nowhere. She never convinces you that she ever waited on a table anywhere, not even at Schwab’s Drugstore. You never forget she is Lana Turner, movie star, subsequently this reduces the impact her character makes on the story, though visually she is stunning and knocks you out. Her movie star glamour becomes a distraction to the plot, a beautiful distraction but one nonetheless.

John Garfield on the other hand is convincing as Frank Chambers; a drifter, a wanderer, going nowhere, seduced by a beautiful ambitious woman hell bent on going somewhere. From the beginning, you know Frank is doomed, signals are given as soon as you see the “Man Wanted” sign he tosses into the fire when he takes the job at the diner. He is hooked and together their pathetic scheme to rid them of Nick, Cora’s husband (Cecil Kellaway), leads to their doomed destination. Unlike Turner, you believe Garfield as Frank, a role in some ways similar to so many he has played in the past. Additionally, Garfield came from a working class background, a troubled youth from the Lower East Side of New York. He had the street credentials.

Despite the sexuality and violence, the film is a fairly faithful rendition of Cain’s steamy lust driven work. This was Cain’s first novel, published in 1934, after being rejected over ten times by various publishers. Originally titled “Bar-B-Q,” publishers Alfred Knopf purchased the rights and changed the name to “The Postman Always Rings Twice.” The book was a hit and various movie studios were interested in acquiring the property for the screen. However, this was 1934 and the newly enforced Production Code turned thumbs down on Cain’s lurid work. In spite of a promise made by censor Joe Breen that the novel would never make it to the screen, MGM purchased the screen rights sitting on the property for twelve years.

The victory of World War II was still fresh in everyone’s minds. Still, there seemed to be a dark void in the American psyche and post war films began to reflect this in works like “The Maltese Falcon and “Stranger on the Third Floor.”  Two other Cain novels, “Double Indemnity” and “Mildred Pierce”, reached the screen in 1944 and 1945, respectively. With “Double Indmnity, Billy Wilder, along with Raymond Chandler figured out how to translate Cain’s sadistic sex and murder into sly allusions and insinuations to get passed the censors.  In 1946, MGM felt they could now dust off Cain’s first big hit and put it on the screen. In Europe, the novel had already been filmed twice. In 1939, a French version “Le Demier Tournant” directed by Pierre Chenal and as “Ossessione” in 1942 by Italy’s Luchino Visconti, an unauthorized adaptation.

Of course, much of the novels’ sadomochistic-sex and violence would still have to be toned down; censorship had relaxed somewhat but not too much. L.B. Mayer wanted Lana Turner for the role who at first did not want to do it fearing it would be bad for her image. Mayer convinced her that this would be a stretch to show off her talent. Warner Brothers loaned John Garfield to MGM in what would turn out to a good move for all concerned.  Garfield gave one of his most subtle and moving performances, which soon led to a more mature style in films like “Body and Soul” and “Force of Evil.”

One of the major criticisms of the film is the ending with its, strangely enough, religious overtones including Frank asking the Priest about him and Cora being reunited in the afterlife. It is an odd ending, considering one of film noir’s traits is its anti-heroes existential viewpoint, say like Robert Siodmak’s “The Killers”, made the same year where Ole “The Swede” Anderson takes responsibility for his situation by accepting the consequences of his past actions remaining in his room and refusing to run anymore. In “The Postman Always Rings Twice,” it’s like the filmmakers, after all that came before, the murder, the duplicity still wanted a happy ending and Frank while not ecstatic seems to accept his doom with a contented look on his face. This is partially why the film has met with widely diversified responses, some considering it a classic film noir, others saying Cain’s classic pulp fiction was ruined by Hollywood. The truth may rest somewhere in the middle.

Directed by Tay Garnett with a screenplay by Harry Ruskin and Niven Busch, the film opened in May 1946 to critical applause and large audiences. Cain however, was not happy with the changes made though he was impressed with Lana Turner’s performance, so impressed that he gave her a signed leather bound copy of the book. Off screen, Garfield was also “impressed” with Turner, as was she with him, enough so they had a short lived romantic liaison.

In addition to Garfield and Turner, there are some nice performances by Hume Cronyn as the deceitful slimy lawyer, Leon Ames as the D.A. and Cecil Kellaway as Cora’s husband Nick Smith. The changing of Cora and Nick’s last name to Smith from Papadikis was certainly another attempt to sanitize the novel. In the book Nick was sometime even called “The Greek.” Audrey Totter, as Madge, who Frank has an affair with is wasted in an early role.

The final verdict? Well, the film is not the extraordinary classic some folks say it is. It is not up there with the two previously made films based on Cain novels, “Mildred Pierce” and Billy Wilder’s masterpiece “Double Indemnity.”  Of course, few films are on the same playing field as Wilder’s film.  That said, if you put aside the fact Lana Turner is just too stunning, too neat, too well lit, to be believable as a waitress at a pit stop diner, and ignore the unsatisfying un-noir like ending, “The Postman Always Rings Twice” remains a flawed though significant portrayal of ill-fated passion, and a ground breaking work in adult film entertainment.

By Tony d’Ambra

Garance, the older woman who has experience, wisdom, the patina of a mature mellow wine, and the allure of the courtesan.  Garance a red flower rhymes with France. A delicate symbol of freedom and of a simple yet ravishing elegance. Garance personifies liberty. Liberty as depicted by Delacroix, where again the colour red dominates: red for nationalistic passion and a vitality for revolutionary liberty. The metaphor is strong and simple.

Garance is loved by four men: the romantic mime, the gallant actor, the amoral criminal, and the banal aristocrat. In a simple yet profoundly symbolic gesture, Garance gives her red flower, her love and liberty, to the mime Baptiste, a man of and from the people. She says love is simple. Like freedom it must be grasped impulsively and tightly held lest it is lost. The actor who loves all women does take her as she wishes to be taken, but he cannot hold her. His passion is ultimately selfish as he wants to possess her and not be one with her: he is too political, in love with his own oratory. The criminal cannot be loved by Garance and he destroys the aristocrat who can buy her companionship but not her love.

Liberty is for the people up in the stalls, les enfants du paradis, but requires sacrifice – sometimes a terrible wounding sacrifice.

Will Baptiste impose that sacrifice on his family?

Will liberty be won for the people?

Impoverished artist Eben Adams (Joseph Cotten) makes the acquaintance of art dealers Matthews (Cecil Kellaway) and Spinney (Ethel Barrymore).

by John Grant

vt Tidal Wave

US / 87 minutes / bw with some tinting (green/sepia) and brief color / Vanguard, Selznick Dir: William Dieterle Pr: David O. Selznick Scr: Paul Osborn, Peter Berneis, Leonardo Bercovici Story: Portrait of Jennie (1940) by Robert Nathan Cine: Joseph August Cast: Jennifer Jones, Joseph Cotten, Ethel Barrymore, Lillian Gish, Cecil Kellaway, David Wayne, Albert Sharpe, Henry Hull, Florence Bates, Felix Bressart, Clem Bevans, Maude Simmons, Anne Francis, Nancy Olson, Nancy Davis.

The novel by Robert Nathan upon which this movie is based is often cited as a classic of fantasy fiction, even though today it seems really quite dated in many respects, notably its overt religiosity. (It’s also unfashionably short; you sometimes come across it described as a novella.) Aside from that religiosity, however, Nathan kept his tale pretty spare; he (obviously deliberately) made no attempt to rationalize or organize the supernatural heart of the story, leaving it as an account of some events the narrator has experienced that he neither can explain nor, really, wishes to explain. This verisimilitude is part of what makes the novel so affecting. (I made some notes on it here.)

Eben in Central Park; note the clever use of texturing.

For the movie it was obviously decided that the story needed to be fleshed out by the addition of fresh incidents and a bevy of character roles—while at the same time, for some reason, excising some of the incidents from the novel as well as one of its significant characters, the narrator’s scapegrace artist buddy Arne. Much (but far from all) of the religiosity was pared away too, to be replaced by scads of portentous narration, some remarkably pretentious dialogue, and an effort to make sense of the tale’s finale, an effort that shouldn’t have been made. There’s also some technical gimmickry that just seems baffling to us now (although the visual effects brought the movie its solitary Oscar): the onset of the climactic storm is for no apparent reason marked by a switch (from bw) to green tinting, while the aftermath of the storm is tinted sepia. The final moments, showing the finished portrait supposedly hanging in NYC’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, are done in Technicolor; by contrast with the tinting, this flourish is effective. Most effective of all, throughout the movie, is the occasional imposition on the screen of a canvas-like texturing, as if this were how the artist narrator was experiencing the city—as a series of potential paintings.

How Eben first meets Jennie (Jennifer Jones), as a little girl playing in the snow.

Although only a couple of weeks have passed, Jennie is much older, when next she meets Eben.

The night when Jennie meets Eben directly after her parents’ fatal accident, she encourages him to listen to the music the stars make as they come out. Oh, my: the whimsy.

All in all, then, this seems like that rara avis, a movie that might have benefited from having had less money spent on it. I can’t exactly say that a hypothetical Monogram or PRC version of Portrait of Jennie would have been a better movie, but it would assuredly have trimmed away some of the excesses that reduced this version from potentially a classic to something that we watch—and that affects us and haunts our memory—almost despite itself, as if Nathan’s story was managing to make itself heard through the clutter of Selznick’s production. Portrait of Jennie has the very special quality of being a movie that’s better in the mind’s eye than it is in the flesh. Perhaps that makes it a classic after all.

The unveiling of the mural in Moore’s Alhambra Cafe.

The pseudo-intellectual portentousness is there from the outset, in a narrated opener that lasts a full two minutes and comes complete with quotations from Euripides and Keats (unusually for the time, there are no opening credits except the standard Selznick Studio montage):

Since the beginning, man has looked into the awesome reaches of infinity and asked the eternal question: “What is time? And what is space? What is life? What is . . . death?”

The Euripides quote (“Who knoweth if to die be but to live . . . and that called life by mortals be but death?”) is then splashed onscreen to make sure we realize this is a cultural event we’re witnessing, not just a movie.

Through a hundred civilizations, philosophers and scientists have come with answers, but the bewilderment remains. For each human soul must find the secret in its own faith. The tender and haunting legend of the portrait of Jennie is based on the two ingredients of faith: truth and hope.

Eben’s pal Gus O’Toole (David Wayne) gets a song spot.

There’s more, much more of this woffle—including the outrageous claim that both Jennie and the portrait genuinely existed, the latter having been shown at the Met—until we get to:

Out of the shadows of knowledge, and out of a painting that hung on a museum wall, comes our story, the truth of which lies not on our screen but in your heart.

By this point, many of us might have been tempted to make a bolt for the exits, but that would be a mistake because the movie does have a decided power to haunt, as mentioned above.

We first meet Eben Adams (Cotten) as a starving artist in New York City who would long ago have had to return to his native Maine were it not for his friendship with cabby Gus O’Toole (Wayne) and the strictly conditional mercy of his landlady, Mrs. Jekes (Bates). One wintery evening Eben tries his luck for the first time at the art dealership Matthews & Spinney. Mr. Matthews (Kellaway) and Miss Spinney (Barrymore) see nothing in his portfolio that’s of any value but Spinney sees promise in the artist, and gives him the ridiculous sum of $12.50 for a floral painting. She also tells him that he’ll never make the grade as an artist unless he learns to love his subject matter.

The adult Jennie in Eben’s garret studio. In the novel, the landlady found her there and assumed the worst.

This theme of love as an essential component of life runs throughout the movie. Spinney is depicted as a spinster who knows about love but has never until now known love itself; the love she develops for Eben, which is certainly not maternal, is in its way as deeply romantic, albeit platonic, as the love story that’s the movie’s focus. In this sense, Eben is the saving of her. And at the movie’s end, as the lovers are being battered by the stormy seas, Jennie spells out the message, the moral of the tale: “There is no life, my darling, until you’ve loved and been loved. And then there is no death.”

After his successful visit to Matthews & Spinney, Eben ambles through Central Park, and it’s there that for the first time he encounters Jennie Appleton (Jones). She’s depicted as just a little girl at this stage, with Jones affecting a child’s mannerisms while perspective and props are used to give the impression that she’s far smaller than the actress actually was. For most of the time the trickery works quite well; sometimes, though, we have the disorienting sensation that the child has suddenly got a bit bigger or smaller.

Jennie tells Eben she must go away with her aunt for a few months.

It becomes immediately evident that Jennie has slipped out of her own time. She talks of her parents as being trapeze artists playing at the Hammerstein’s Victoria, which Eben knows was “torn down years ago when I was a boy.” She leaves behind her a colored scarf wrapped in a newspaper that Eben will notice the next day dates from 1910. (He never does quite succeed, despite several attempts, in returning the scarf to her.) She sings him a little song—”Where I come from, nobody knows. And where I am going everything goes”—instructs him to wait for her to grow up (an instruction reinforced by her turning three times widdershins while wishing it be so), and then vanishes.

The cataclysmic storm announces its onset with a switch into green tinting.

In the days following, Eben realizes how profoundly he’s been affected by the encounter. Matthews and Spinney realize it too: the sketch that Eben does from memory of the little girl particularly captures Matthews’s fancy, and he buys it at once. It’s clear that Eben has finally discovered what was missing from his earlier paintings.

And then along comes a subplot that adds little to proceedings. In the book, Gus cleverly talks a diner-owner friend into feeding Eben for weeks in exchange for a mural to brighten up his diner. Here this is pulled very much to the foreground, Gus and especially the diner-owner, Moore (Sharpe), are made into comic Irishmen, and the mural becomes a portrayal of Michael Collins preparing to lead a detachment of the heroic Irish Republican Army against the hated English. I imagine this subplot will not have enhanced the success of the movie’s UK release. Later on, Gus is even given a song to sing by way of an unnecessary musical interlude.

Jennie dashes across the rocks to join Eben.

Of course, Eben has several other encounters with Jennie, in each of which she’s markedly older than the time before. They go skating in Central Park together; as she leaves him, Miss Spinney just happens to be passing by (there are one or two other annoyingly implausible coincidences) and it’s clear that, while Eben can see the departing adolescent, Spinney can’t. Later, when Jennie fails to turn up for a promised rendezvous, he goes in search of the old Hammerstein’s Victoria and what might have happened to Jennie’s parents, Mary and Frank; this permits the introduction of character actors like Bressart as elderly stage doorman Pete and Simmons as the retired wardrobe mistress Clara Morgan. From the latter he discovers that the acrobats died in an accident and Jennie was adopted by an aunt, who put her in a convent.

The three teenagers admiring the portrait in the Met were played (uncredited) by Nancy Davis (later Reagan), Nancy Olson and Anne Francis.

Eben meets Jennie again the night her parents die; she’s reassured by the thought that they’re still alive in eternity. In another encounter they watch a ceremony at the convent where she now lives, and she tells him her favorite among the nuns is Mother Mary of Mercy (Gish). When she graduates from the convent she meets him to tell him she must go away for a few months with her aunt, but that they’ll be back together afterwards and won’t have to separate again. Partly from having her sit for him in his attic studio, and partly from memory, he has been painting her portrait.

Encouraged by Gus, Eben goes to the convent to ask Mother Mary of Mercy for more about Jennie. She tells him the girl died tragically in a storm that struck while she was out boating by the Land’s End Lighthouse on Cape Cod—years ago, on October 5. From time to time, on seeing his paintings of that very lighthouse, Jennie has expressed to Eben her nameless dread for it and the waters around it. He now decides that if he can be there on this October 5—just a few days away—he might be able to save her . . .

The portrait of Jennie.

Of course, this doesn’t make any sense at all, as Mother Mary of Mercy points out to him. This is perhaps the biggest single instance of where the movie would have been better to have retained the original novel’s non-specificity. While the climactic storm sequence is impressively rendered, and there’s nothing wrong at all with the staging of the lovers’ final, doomed encounter, all the way through these proceedings we can hardly forget that the relevant underpinning—the supposed rationale that Eben knew she’d be here and came in search of her—is absurd. (It may seem odd to criticize a fantasy for logical implausibility, but fantasy has rules like any other genre. If you introduce a real-world rationale, that rationale has to be a bit more substantive than a waving of hands and a blustering.)

Dimitri Tiomkin’s score adapts various bits of Debussy. Bernard Herrmann—of Hitchcock fame—worked on the movie earlier, but departed for “creative reasons”; the rather dreary tune for Jennie’s little song is his. The title song was by the jazz composer J. Russel Robinson.

Portrait of Jennie flopped on release; the reviews were decidedly mixed. It was reissued as Tidal Wave and flopped again. Yet over the years it managed to carve out for itself its own small niche in cinema history. When we think about the movie we tend to recall the powerful visual imagery, the movingly impossible romance, and the compelling notion of the child/young woman permitted only intermittent encounters with the love of her life, who is otherwise screened off from her by the shroud of time. There are plenty of people (my wife, I discovered, was one!) for whom the movie has become such a part of our culture that they believe Eben Adams was a real artist and that his portrait of Jennie—in fact, painted for the movie by artist Robert Brackman—really does hang at the Met. It’s not every movie that prints itself as firmly on the public consciousness as that.

The movie’s full of roles for character actors: Felix Bressart as the dotty old doorman Pete; Maude Simmons as the stately retired wardrobe mistress Clara Morgan; Lillian Gish as the nun who fondly remembers Jennie, Mother Mary of Mercy; Clem Bevans as the hugely-over-the-top Cape Cod maritime supplier Captain Cobb (he even says “no sirree bob”); and Henry Hull as Eke, the fisherman who rents Eben a sailboat and, years ago, did as much for Jennie.

by J.D. Lafrance

Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961) is – alongside The World of Henry Orient (1964) and Manhattan (1979) – the quintessential, romantic New York City fairy tale. Based on the novella by Truman Capote, the film is, like the others, a classic, snapshot of the city at a specific, spectacular point in time. Seeing the Manhattan of Breakfast at Tiffany’s is like going back to the early Sixties with vintage vehicles a go-go and places that no longer exist. The film is one of Audrey Hepburn’s signature roles one for which she will always be remembered – but it almost didn’t turn out that way. Capote envisioned Marilyn Monroe to play protagonist Holly Golightly, while Paramount Pictures wanted Hepburn; but even the actress wasn’t sure she could play the part. Now, it is impossible to envision anybody else in the role.

Right from the start, with the endearing vision of Holly Golightly walking through the deserted streets of the city while Johnny Mercer sings “Moon River,” director Blake Edwards establishes a wistful, nostalgic atmosphere. It’s an iconic image and one that sets the tone for the rest of the film. As her surname implies, Holly is a carefree, single girl living an apparently glamorous life in the Big Apple. A single girl with expensive tastes, Holly was inarguably the prototype for Carrie Bradshaw of Sex and the City. Holly is “crazy about Tiffany’s,” the legendary jewelry store that we see her staring at dreamily in the opening credits. For Holly, going to Tiffany’s with coffee and danish in hand is like going to church.

Paul Varjak (George Peppard), a struggling writer, moves into her building and is quickly whisked into the whirlwind force of nature that is Holly. He’s been working on a novel for five years, but lacking inspiration, writer’s block was his only roommate. Sullenly defeated, Paul is still stinging from a bad review from The New York Timesyears ago (from which he can still quote, bitterly). We soon learn that he is being supported financially by his own “interior decorator” (Patricia Neal), which gives him something in common with Holly, bonding over early on for she dreams of marrying a rich man or, at the very least, dating men who lavish her with expensive gifts and money. What better way to maintain her glamorous life? Holly starts off as something of a fascinating enigma and over the course of the film we, along with Paul, learn about her life before arriving in New York City.

As he demonstrated with films like The Party (1968), Blake Edwards knew how to depict a bash on film and make you want to be a part of it. Breakfast at Tiffany’s is no exception with the famous party scene that takes place in Holly’s apartment one of controlled chaos as the tiny space is invaded by many people. The camera lingers on the more colorful pockets as it gets wilder until the cops arrive and bring it an abrupt halt. There’s a wonderful madcap vibe that makes you want to be there. It is one of the best parties put on film, capturing how fun a shindig like that can so easily get out of control.

Audrey Hepburn is adoringly loveable as Holly, an irresistible, charming individual. She is a classic bachelorette with very little furniture (even though she’s lived there a year), stays up late and sleeps in later. Edwards inserts nice little touches, like how she keeps a bottle of perfume in her mailbox, that provide insight into her character. Under Holly’s bubbly exterior, Hepburn’s performance hints at a loneliness, an inner sadness. She conveys a heartbreaking, wounded vulnerability underneath a cheery façade. This is evident in the famous scene where she sings “Moon River” on the fire escape of her apartment or when Paul wakes her up from a nightmare. There’s a certain fragility to Holly that Hepburn maintains over the course of the film until the climactic scene when everything comes crashing down. One gets the feeling that she needs to be rescued, to be saved, and this gives the film an almost tangible, melancholic tone while also making it easy for Paul (and us) to fall in love with her. Hepburn gives a complete performance displaying a full range of emotions that go from giddy happiness to utter despair.

Hepburn has wonderful chemistry with George Peppard; I love the give and take between them, like how Holly has a habit of calling him “Fred” after her brother who is in the army and whom she dreams of running off to Mexico with to raise horses. Peppard wisely plays it cool, downplaying his role, which acts as a nice contrast to Hepburn’s flamboyance. He has a tough job of playing the straight man to Hepburn’s colorful Holly. He is the audience surrogate. However, Peppard is excellent because he knows exactly how to react to all of Holly’s outrageous behavior. At first, his character seems more than a bit on the bland side and we don’t know much about his past except for tidbits of his relationship with Neal’s character. As the film progresses, however, bits and pieces of his past are revealed, fleshing out his character. Paul and Holly are both lonely souls trying to survive in the big city any way they can. For Holly, the city is her chance to escape and start anew. For Paul, he is merely passing time until his novel is written.

For the most part, the supporting cast is excellent with Martin Balsam as O.J. Berman, Holly’s Hollywood agent who has the habit of saying everybody’s name with “baby” after it; Buddy Ebsen playing a sad sack character that is a key figure in her past, and Patricia Neal as Paul’s deliciously elitist sugar mama. The only blemish is the racist Asian caricature that is Yunioshi, played by Mickey Rooney, which comes across as horribly dated and offensive. Fortunately, he is only a small part of the film.

It is said in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet that “she doth give her sorrow so much sway.” For Holly to give herself back to her former life would be like caging an animal and resigning herself to a life where she has no happiness or freedom. To go back to that life would be to give up the happiness she has as Holly. In this respect, Breakfast at Tiffany’s could be read as a feminist tale of a woman freeing herself of traditional restraints of the era (like expecting to be a housewife, for example), but has constructed a cage of her own. As Paul says of her at one point, “she’s a girl who can’t help anyone, not even herself.” By the end of the film, Holly realizes that she can’t just change her exterior self by moving from city to city. To truly be independent she has to make an internal change. A truly beautiful woman has both guts and glamor – of which Holly has both in ample supply. Paul loves her for who she is and not as arm candy like her rich parade of men. She can’t be truly happy until she cuts those men out of her life and admit how she truly feels about Paul.

One could argue that her Holly persona is a bit of a flake, but it is merely part of her outer armor, protecting her from almost everyone she meets – except for Paul whom she allows to see glimpses of unguarded moments. Breakfast at Tiffany’s is a majesterial film about two lonely people, each harboring their own dark secrets, that find one another and fall in love. It has the warm, inviting vibe of a Sunday morning spent having breakfast in bed. The film is a love letter to the city of New York. Even though the Manhattan of Breakfast at Tiffany’s only exists in yesterday’s memories, we can revisit it again and again every time we watch this film.

by Allan Fish

(USA 2007 131m) DVD1/2

Strawberry jam

p  Matthew Gross, Jennifer Todd, Suzanne Todd  d  Julie Taymor  w  Dick Clement, Ian le Frenais  ph  Bruno Delbonnel  ed  Françoise Bonnot  m  Elliot Goldenthal  m/ly  John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison  md  Elliot Goldenthal, T-Bone Burnett  art  Peter Rogness  cos  Albert Wolsky spc/tit Kyle Cooper

Evan Rachel Wood (Lucy), Jim Sturgess (Jude), Joe Anderson (Max Carrigan), Dana Fuchs (Sadie), Martin Luther (Jojo), T.V.Caprio (Prudence), Joe Cocker, Bono, Salma Hayek, Harry Lennix, Eddie Izzard,

It’s a commonly perceived opinion that whether one loves or loathes Julie Taymor’s phantasmagoria of love n’ the Fab Four depends on whether you grew up with the music and knew it with any degree of not just depth but feeling.  The Beatles had broken up several years before I was even born, so that rules that one out.  The approach of having characters burst into famous song was hardly a new one – it was mastered by the likes of Dennis Potter.  Nearer to the mark, however (in that the actors actually sing rather than mime or undercut) is Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge, another love story set in the past and splitting audiences right down the proverbial spinal column bonemarrow.

Set in the sixties, the film tells the tale of Scouse dockworker Jude who sets off to America to find the GI father who left his mother pregnant during the war.  While over there he befriends Princeton student Max, about to drop out, whose sister Lucy has just waved her beloved Daniel off to the Vietnam War.  When Daniel is killed in combat, Lucy sets off to join Max and Jude and their Bohemian lifestyle in New York, from whence nothing will ever be the same.

Undoubtedly this is one hell of a mixture, a real fruit salad of diverse ingredients, directed by the mastermind of the hit show of Disney’s The Lion King, whose Titus had already shown her to be a visually bold, fearless filmmaker.  Chuck in a script from the great duo who wrote such beloved British TV institutions as Porridge, Auf Wiedersehen Pet and The Likely Lads, a location that literally echoes to the spirit of Boys from the Blackstuff and a host of young hopefuls and cameos from such diverse figures as Bono, Eddie Izzard and Salma Hayek (in a true homage to Potter’s The Singing Detective).  Oh, and yes, a choice selection of arguably the greatest back catalogue of pop songs ever written.  What is remarkable is not that the film is faultless, but that it’s such a joyous experience and does both the old songs and the spirit proud.  Some American audiences may say the depiction of the Vietnamese conflict was reduced to predictable montages and demonstration scenes left over from Nixon and Forrest Gump.  Some British audiences may decry the using the music in a largely – but not wholly – American setting at all, while others may have found the choice of songs predictable (the hero and heroine’s names should give you two of them).  In this way the choice of title seems to give away the intention.  The eponymous song isn’t even played in its entirety and isn’t the highlight of the piece – the finale to ‘All You Need is Love’ is, appropriately fading out, like the Beatles did in real life, with a farewell performance on a roof – but it most perfectly embodies a film soaked in the psychedelia of the period, which you’ll either love or loathe.  The question remains, to Taymor and indeed both the film’s supporters and detractors, whether the songs themselves are universal or whether love is.  That the songs are universal is undoubted, as their continuing popularity and that of devotees such as Oasis proves, which leads us to love.  On one level it’s a labour of love on behalf of its creators, gorgeously shot, directed and acted, with special mention to the lovely Wood and the ingratiating Sturgess.  And for those who still don’t quite get it, maybe they’re just the sort of people Sapphire was talking about in Almost Famous, when she said “they don’t even know what it is to be a fan. Y’know? To truly love some silly little piece of music, or some band, so much that it hurts.”  Music hurts, love hurts; ergo music equals love.  Maybe Shakespeare’s Orsino was right after all?

Lucille and Sam flank artist-illustrator Laura James at exhibition of three of her paintings in Harlem on Friday evening.

Sam between Florence and Wendell Minor (Jeremy to the right) at book signing of GALAPAGOS GEORGE at Connecticut bookshop on Saturday afternoon.

by Sam Juliano

We are nearly half way through June, and as expected air conditioners are working overtime. Schools are winding down, and vacation plays are moving forward.  Her at Wonders in the Dark, the romantic countdown continues in its fourth week.

Lucile and I saw only one film together in theaters this week, what with some other splendid activities planned and subsequently executed.  We watch William Friedkin’s late 70′s The Wages of Fear adaptation THE SORCERER, which was featured in a spectacular new restored print at the Film Forum.  We say it with young Sammy and two friends not seen in quite a while– Joel Bocko in from California, and Bob Clark.  We discussed the film and caught up with quite a bit of unfinished business afterwards at The Dish.

The Sorcerer   **** 1/2  (Wednesday night)  Film Forum

The two major events of the week were as follows:

The gloriously eclectic Hickory Stick Bookshop on Green Hill Road in rustic Washington Depot, Connecticut hosted a book signing at 1:00 P.M. on Saturday for one of 2014′s supreme picture book masterpieces, the magnificent GALAPAGOS GEORGE, written by the late and beloved children’s literature icon Jean Craighead George and illustrated by her erstwhile collaborator veteran artist Wendell Minor, whose work here must certainly be seen as worthy of strong Caldecott Medal consideration. The spectacular watercolor paintings bring to live the story of Lonesome George, a giant tortoise who lived to be a hundred years old. he was the last of his kind, and his death on the wondrous Galapagos Island in the Pacific off the coast of South America marked the end of his species. The final description of his death on June 24, 2012 is tear-jerking, and the realization that Jean Craighead George herself passed just weeks later produces an emotional wallop not felt in any other picture book this year.

In the end, the star of the book is Minor, whose ravishing paintings yield a cinematic quality of movement, couched in a classical museum style that will appeal to nature, science and history lovers, while leaving art lovers awestruck. Minor and his lovely wife and collaborator Florence were incredible hosts, and made the trip north worthwhile. Looking through the illustrator’s back catalog made it very difficult to leave the store!! One beautiful book after another!! I will be playing catch-up with my collection over the coming months. 

and……

Three sublime paintings by celebrated artist-illustrator Laura James were showcased in an exhibition staged in Harlem on Friday night. The three acrylic on canvas works: “Daisy,” “F Train” and “Mom’s Friends” were available to purchase. Ms. James, whose sacred works have received worldwide acclaim, is the illustrator of “Anna Carries Water”, a critically-praised picture written by Olive Senior. Ms. James posed between Lucille and Sam (pictures by Melanie Juliano)

The link below is to my book review of “Anna Carries Water,” posted weeks back at WitD:

https://wondersinthedark.wordpress.com/2014/04/17/picture-book-treasures-anna-carries-water/

Lucille and I took the kids to see Nemyses on Saturday night at the Recovery Room in Westwood.  The result was another night of divine rock by first-rate musicians.

by Jaime Grijalba.

One could start to wonder and ask how it’s possible that a film like this ended up in a Romantic countdown out of all the possible countdowns it could end up in. One could argue and make a good case as to why this is one of the greatest movies ever made, and one doesn’t have to think too much to see how this movie could end up in the romance genre, especially since most of the events that happen in the film are related to the relationship that the protagonist has to his wife. So, if we take both elements, we could end up saying that ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ is one of the greatest Romance movies ever made, and that wouldn’t necessarily be a false statement.

Or maybe it is. If you take those scenes that would qualify this as a romantic piece and you weigh them against all the other elements that made this movie a classic: the fantasy sequences, you could end up thinking that the romantic elements present in this film are mostly anecdotic, not entirely necessary and even distracting when it comes around the end of the film, as they don’t really have a sufficient weight when it comes to the final decision of our protagonist. So, maybe in the end, calling this movie a romantic masterpiece just because it’s a masterpiece that happens to have romance elements might be a fake statement. It could be a fantasy masterpiece.

But I’m here to argue the placement and final disposition that this movie had in my personal ballot. I do think this is a romance masterpiece, not because it’s a movie that could entirely be placed in the romance genre, but because the quality of those small and pretty scenes is enough for it to be considered.

At this time, it would be superfluous to try to describe the plot of this classic film, I mean, it’s ingrained in everyone’s minds pretty much, and even if you haven’t seen the movie, it’s one of those you know about because you’ve lived in the world where it was a cultural landmark that influenced many filmmakers, as well as serving as some kind of blueprint for other movies, tv series, videogames and even literature, where the character finally understands his own true value through the experience of seeing the world without their birth happening; and that’s why when I finally saw the movie for myself, much later after the parodies and references, I knew the story practically beat by beat.

Which on its own doesn’t mean that the film isn’t refreshing or even great when you finally see it, as it holds its own strengths and surprises, mostly due to the wonderful dialogue and the whole first half of the film, that chronicles the life of our protagonist (played perfectly by James Stewart), something that shows us how sweet and beautiful his point of view is, contrasted to his later choice to possibly kill himself, it’s a dissonance that shocks once you find out about it, but later it becomes clear, as the life in which he sacrificed so much of his own dreams and desires, suddenly becomes hopeless and bears no real fruit.

But again, I do not wish to mess around with the bulk of what some call the “interesting” part of the plot, as it bears no relation to the romance elements of the movie, but I may tell you about how this movie made me fall in love with it during its first thirty minutes. We are seeing the life of George Bailey, the protagonist of the movie, we are seeing the “film of his life”, as presented to the angel that will later try to amend the decision that he is about to make, we are part of the witnesses of how his life turned out to be due to accidents, happenstances and his own will to make things different. Then, we see him walking at night, right beside Mary, the woman that eventually will become his wife. And then, this dialogue:

George Bailey: What is it you want, Mary? What do you want? You want the moon? Just say the word and I’ll throw a lasso around it and pull it down. Hey. That’s a pretty good idea. I’ll give you the moon, Mary.

Mary: I’ll take it. Then what?

George Bailey: Well, then you can swallow it, and it’ll all dissolve, see… and the moonbeams would shoot out of your fingers and your toes and the ends of your hair… am I talking too much?

This might be the most iconic dialogue exchange of the movie when it comes to the relationship of George and Mary, and it’s maybe my favourite romantic dialogue of all time, in a movie that is filled with speeches about how good we must be in our lives, that might be the most transcendent one, the one that makes you feel something inside as you hear it, the voice of James Stewart carefully controlling the speed and intonation of every word, making you realize that this is what love and romance is made of.

The image itself may be clichéd nowadays, boyfriends and girlfriends constantly gift the moon to each other and it’s constantly changing owners as if it were a pair of bowling shoes, but here it’s given a new atmosphere and a new aspect, it could be given and then eaten. Maybe the most beautiful thing that has ever been said is the whole thing about how when you swallow the moon it would dissolve and moonbeams would shoot out of someone’s fingers. That to me, is the concept of romance, anyone would melt right away if you’ve heard those words told to you… and if you haven’t seen the movie.

The concept of love has been discussed by many people: poets, philosophers and many other scholars and common people, they try to find a reason behind it, something to grasp and then find out exactly what it’s made of. But, in the end, I think that everyone must try to spend a couple of years thinking and experiencing it, just to find your own reasoning behind it… or you could just understand it as the urge of lassoing the moon to give it to your loved one. That’s better.

Note:  THE GOODBYE GIRL was not claimed after the initial writer was forced by circumstances to bail out. This is only the second time this has happened since the genre countdowns began nearly three years ago.  Hopefully the comment section will come to the rescue a bit.

 © 2014 by James Clark

      Under the Skin (2013) fires toward us a maelstrom of visual and aural stimuli. Much of it pertains to electrodynamic frontiers vastly complicating the human component of such motion. Thus we have an introductory passage wherein startling confluences of astronomical light in blue, gold and red play out upon the infinite darkness of a cescendoing cosmos. A musical accompaniment of lacerating and seductive pulsating ringing, clatter, grinding and thundering presses the tension and makes very clear we have come to a history having forever turned its back on the venerable and sedate gratifications of the music of the spheres.

In the orientation just described, there come to view geometric features playing out to a cylinder of sorts that could be a vehicle or a scanner (an MRI, perhaps). Drifting over this incursion are voices calling out, in a blurred way, what sounds like, “…food, feed…cell… cell…” Then the iris of one eye fills the screen, several of its elements pulsing, like a city seen from a great distance. The dark, reddish brown of that organ gives way to a dark landscape with coursing rivulets and a dusting of snow. There’s a winding road seen from far away and from some kind of promontory, and grinding sounds and dangerous speeds recommence. The ominous thrust and noise stop, the motorcycle rider plunges purposefully down a nearly pitch black slope with city lights spreading across the horizon. Soon the rider, with tempered skeletal touches on his leather uniform, re-emerges with the corpse of a woman slung over his shoulder. She is all in black, with net stockings. The narrative moves on to a brightly lit, shimmering space, bringing to mind an operating theatre. But what appears to be the dead girl (or subject of some kind of [genetic?] surgery) is on the glowing floor and another woman—all in silhouette—busies herself with removing from the corpse and putting on her own body the dead young woman’s clothes. Heavy high-heeled shoes going on create a reverberation. And then the newly-outfitted figure gives us reason to wonder what else she has taken from that all-too-mortal victim whom the biker had found as by some advanced technology (or, on the other hand, had he killed her some time before?). The stranger with someone else’s clothes—her tall, vibrantly-toned body being one of great beauty, evident even in the compromised light—reaches down to the recumbent woman with her finger to sample something not factored into the transplant, namely, a trace of vaginal fluid. From the bush where she was accessed, the dead body reveals another curiosity-seeker, a tiny ant, treading through the liquid on the lovely woman’s finger. That iris has readily come into her outfitting. The other area would be part of a work in progress, for a most unusual piece of work.

Those of us with perceptions tattooed by David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive might be tempted to call our anonymous protagonist, Rita—having slipped into factors of a crash victim of sorts. Those of us with indelible perceptions derived from Spike Jonze’s Her might think of the strikingly embodied person of interest as Samantha, having at last—perhaps under the auspices of the persistent Alan Watts—acquired a body, and, with discernment now including physical endeavor, (somewhat) resentfully intent on the flabby candidacy of mainstream human eventuation. At a grotty, stormy urban eyesore (not at all resembling Beverly Hills), the motorcyclist leaves her, without so much as a single word, with a tank-like, dirty white van, and she embarks on a vein of serial murder upon those calling this place home. (Over and above the enmity driving this warfare from the perspective of those aliens, we have the concomitant concern of the robotic manufactures that, though their rational make-up is a complete success, their carnal/sensual/irrational make-up is not. Amongst the blurred voices during that landing, there is one that seems to cry, “Help!” We soon receive evidence that the body count constitutes a harvest of human presences to be melted down for the sake of discovering a more complete carnality.) We were not mistaken about the woman’s Siren qualities; but we do—after she has led several men to hope to taste that body and therewith be wrapped up in a tar-pit-like field of appetite that holds no peril to her—feel the cosmos tossing a surprise pitch when she comes across a Scottish version of that Elephant Man the young and ardently Surrealist David Lynch saw as a means of exploring the phenomenon of goodwill. Her gambit as a Venus flytrap largely through trolling from her power-boat-like van comes to a moment when, in a murky, nondescript part of industrial Glasgow, she resorts to the loaded line, “Scuse me, I’m a bit lost.”

Thus begins what is arguably the thematic compass of the film’s long, hard and marvellous climb. The pedestrian tells her where it is she pretends to be headed for and she asks, “Where are you going? Is it on the way?” In a muffled voice he tells her, “Goin’ to the supermarket…” She cheerily invites him into her sort of hearse, “I could drop you off if you like…” On getting in, the stranger with a hood covering much of his face becomes discernible as, in marked contrast to her picture of health, beauty and flawless sensual self-possession, a creature whose face has had to make do with simulating a gravel pit, lumps and swelling giving his eyes the presence of a diseased spaniel, and his mouth a disconcerting angle. As if, against all odds, she has had a recent history of undergoing a miracle cure for quite hideous deformity, her patter departs the jaunty but rather wooden deviousness of the several kills already recorded. And instead, she brings to the drive a zestful considerateness and genuine empathy. “You’re very quiet. Why do you shop at night?” she asks. He rasps something lost in specifics but on the general mark that he’s stared at and worse. (“People wind me up…”) “You don’t have any friends?” she well recognizes, and he corroborates her surmise. “How old are you?” she inquires, her suspicion that, in spite of looking at first glance like an old man, he’s about the same age, twenty-six, which she now transmits. Moving along both her formal duties and something overtaking her in another sphere of that Samantha-informed sensibility, she tells him, “You have beautiful hands… Do you want to look at me? I noticed you were looking at me… When was the last time you touched someone?” She takes his hand and runs it across her face. “Do you want to do it again? [He nods that he does] Do you want to touch my leg?” In the course of this polyphonic bit of Surrealist (Beauty and Beast) magic, there is the smallest yet very powerful moment of comedy, his pinching the back of his hand to see if he’s dreaming. In the absence of drugs like those administered in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (which is to say, this Queen of the Night sees her Donkey, Bottom, far more lucidly and dangerously), there is definitely on tap now (as before this we have only had tenuous traces) about our protagonist’s wherewithal a universe of toil which harbors the possibility of true love. She tells her passenger, “You’re hands are soft…I have a place about 30 minutes away. Will you come with me?” He had faintly protested, “I have to get back” [to where there are no more surprises]. But there he is, undressed and following his likewise nude Titania into the dark thicket at her work station. The same eerie frenzy on the sound track which accompanied earlier kills fills the far from palatial destination; but this time its delicious edge comes to added fruition.

The Beast sinks like his predecessors, into muck she has been both hard-wired to repel and—now carnal to a marked, but as yet indefinite, plenitude—intensely drawn to embrace. There are two distinct but intertwined outcomes of this strange assault. The first is melodramatic. The Beauty, about to leave the killing field, catches herself in a mirror in the hallway; and the gorgeous and rare embodiment of the love that drives her prompts a reversal which we observe in the cut to the nude Beast leaving the building accompanied by her and then treading along the scrub territory of the city’s outskirts. He’s soon caught up with by the imperious taskmaster on that ominously fast bike; and we can well imagine that that is the end of Bottom. The scene is framed by their severally approaching a subdivision of dark red brick cottages, like those where Rita (the Beast) was far more fortunate in finding sanctuary from vicious enemies. An old lady (bringing to mind a displaced lawn elf) woodenly watches the murder scene from an upper window. The second spinoff from that enactment of enigmatic Beauty—not falling under the auspices of any of her forerunners—and the “rude mechanical” cannot be so promptly curtailed. We’ll spend the rest of this investigation trying to bring some coherence to the contours of our enormously and painfully divided protagonist.

Why is that rather delicate imbroglio followed by the driver’s being waylaid on a dark night at an industrial wasteland (her widows shattered but not broken) by a gang who might have been rude mechanicals were they employable? (As things stand, they’re just rude.) Could this tight scrape function as a reaffirmation of her point of departure, as to exterminating those who can do no better than that and even those quite a lot more positive and erudite? But it is her deviant generosity in face of such impasse that most urgently has to be traced more closely to its far from simple roots. And to do this we have to scrutinize that odd militarism in its body language rather than in its quite desultory accomplishments. Under the Skin is far more a body scan than a tale of woe.

That brings us back to what we most definitely see in this cinematic experience abounding in indefiniteness, namely, actress Scarlett Johansson, having suited up as though she were on a cat walk to enhance a very discerning sense of enchantment. (How often does a fashion model truly range to outer space?) In a scenario strikingly, even morbidly, absorbed with carnal substance, she goes about her business in such a way as to evoke a Grand Prix test driver pushing her sensuous vehicle to limits inducing perhaps deadly, self-destructive and utterly disinterested mishaps. (The rather porcine clunker with which she hits the road would be an especially ironic bit of deception.) Her ruthlessly flashy associate—played by Grand Prix Motorcyclist, Jeremy McWilliams—makes, by contrast, no bones about being up there on a pedestal. (His being a strictly nonverbal and icily remote point of energy serves to set in relief her arcane, one-of-a-kind agency.) One thing more about this giving the finger to speed traps: though easily overlooked in the non-stop Scarlett parade, she’s but one of a veritable army of femme fatales. We never actually see any of her sisters; but we do see lots of his biker brothers, flushed out to join the search party after the Siren we’ve come to follow betrays the Party Line, and, therewith enters upon researches her over-confident, bliss-addicted speedster/leader (serenely firing along and around those hairpin roads) lacks the balls to take on. In Her, Samantha, played by Scarlett’s voice, bemoans being able to merely keen for the plenitude, the love, implicit in her scintillating logical sensibility, while actually lacking the physical site of such gratification. In Under the Skin, the meditative runaways (and their mawkish erasure of unpleasantness) are back, and—you have to give them this much—they’ve found their way to an ersatz sensuality and its capacity to resent the spillage stemming from failure to manage the tricky steering implicit in volcanic material affections, a failure making the inept adversaries of glamorous speedsters. Their subsequent near-perfect emotive sight brings them to a vast, punitive campaign (including an upgrade of their own powers) toward those in their ken having made a presumptuous mess of world history.

As she threads those (borrowed) perfect features—enlivened by a virtuoso tide of passion—amidst the endless imperfections of Glasgow, our Driver (as per Scotland-fancier, Nicolas Refn [his Valhalla Rising being another abortive crusader film]) has to thread her totally uncool wheels through the aftermath of a game involving the likewise uncool (“struggling,” that brilliant sports euphemism) Rangers football fandom—evoking the stuntedly managed Clippers and Raptors, at the outset of Drive. Her impassivity—a would-be solidarity with a less compromised LA driver—chords against the pedestrian miasma to, in fact, become the real subject matter of this episode—the streetscape and her subsequent focusing on snippets of blokes scurrying by in cruddy light having the compelling-quotient of a careless Facebook posting. We’re drawn to her cryptic enjoyment, however tinged with confusion, in being able to correspond with a material life out of pitch with hers but still a source of some gratifying musicality (as though it were happening for the first time). Moreover, in the flow of her drive-bys, she conveys traces of increasing self-mastery where there was an initial tension. She comes to a mall, opened upon as an explosion of voices and laughter; and we see her plunge, confidently, assisted by an escalator, into that foreign obstacle with upright posture, on those big shoes that enhance her already above-average height. (The punkish hole in her stockings here brings us back to those same hose worn by the corpse slung over the shoulder of the ascetic boss man.) The farther she advances into this possibly disorienting turf, the more formidable her timbre becomes, and the more tame the other shoppers look. She’s in the cosmetics department of a drug store where middle-aged women are given a new lease on sagging prospects which she conspicuously does not require. She buys some lipstick and there is a cut to her applying it in the driver’s seat, looking into the rear-view mirror. She’s strangely out of tune as if she’d never used lipstick before, or, as if having been hospitalized for a long time. She applies the scarlet color as if she were painting a canvas. It gives her even more sexual intensity. She steers the van amidst the swish of other vehicles. A grinding, then a series of pounding, as from a steel mill, accompanies her calm progression. This is how she makes it to the Rangers’ lair and how she coheres with that other Driver. She’s the real Ranger—that much being clear so early on.

As thus caught up in a freshly dynamic intimacy, her easily underestimated sense of play clashes, on reflection, with the stern and ghoulish mover and shaker on that screaming bike. His taciturn, silent-movie gravitas becomes increasingly put-upon by her letting as many prospects go free as those she actually gets around to killing. Her wide-eyed, easy-going come-ons at curb side and in the truck’s cabin always include getting clear whether the prospect has friends or family to maintain contact with (if so, they get to go on their way). One such exempt instance of fodder describes his work as “electrician” (a magic subject for her and her team). Even when finally getting on with her quota, with a cocky guy who’s proud of being footloose and fancy-free, she dawdles, on the drive with him to her lair, about his warm sense of humor. Her face glows with that warmth and she finds perfect logic in asking, “Think I’m pretty?” She’s delighted by his, “Aye, you’re gorgeous!” “Good!” she blurts out. “You have a nice smile…” (His, “You have a nice smile yourself,” is noteworthy for eliciting the playable range of her physical assets.) The soundtrack, at this point, with its steel-industry relentless pattern, serves to underline that, though she has a rather repetitive job to do, she has a life beyond that. This immediate and direct factor puts us on notice that the mathematics, physics and chemistry industriously applied to the conundrum of consummate robotics have attached to their essences, flying under the radar, as it were, of the absolutist mission, a quite different mode of life addressing the lacuna. (There comes a moment when, having harvested a modest grand total of two lab rats, the “nice smile” and a party animal who latches on to her at a noisy dance club she allows herself to be swept into by a gang of tipsy girls, we get a glimpse of the research regime having cruised back to Earth to an accompaniment of “Help!” The two blokes are suspended in a field of gravity so intense that we can hear their bones fracturing as they try to proceed. Then a loud shock wave reduces their bodies to floating, twisting crusts, bringing to mind jellyfish. The dynamic singularity of such a state of the cusp of sheer motion with curtailed materiality offers a sighting of the problem area regarding originary power. Then—perhaps not mindful enough of how low-tech [steel-mill] the process remains, there is a conveyor belt feeding into a rectangular slit of red and roaring furnace the particles of many, many kills—obviously not the handiwork of our intriguingly improvisational protagonist. Much later, when she is being tracked down by the hit-team due to the last straw of recalcitrance in freeing the Elephant Man, she’s looking at her nude body by the red, rectangular glow of a portable heater, provided by a kindly man who takes her to his home. The slow, slight movements, by which she elicits a world of composure, love and disinterested beauty constitutes a graceful and witty [but nonetheless devastating] rejoinder to the researches having their way. The soundtrack, by Mica Levi,       offers a richly illuminated variation of the thematic motif of piercingly distressed and exciting strings.)

However virtuosic her energies become to us in this sensual, radically cinematic way, the course of her newly-minted ranging over an infinite challenge of sensibility also provides us with dismay about her abandoning that constructive, even inspiring, poise. She’s at the sea shore, a wicked wind and frenzied surf filtering through her sentry-tall stance (with skin-tight jeans and likewise form-fitting ersatz red fox jacket) to a resultant thrilling frisson. She’s on to a pretty safe bet for an unattached candidate, a young man swimming alone, who, on coming ashore where she is, tells her he’s from the Czech Republic (a place to be frustrated?) and he’s intent on “getting away from it all.” Just then, the family on the shore, off a ways, interrupts the hunt. The family dog has been swept into that impossible surge, the mother swims out hoping to retrieve it; and the dad, leaving the toddler unattended, plunges after her. The loner quickly follows, leaving our protagonist standing there, her face swept by a mixture of uncomprehending surprise, admiration and discomfiture. The strong swimmer saves the dad, only to have the latter race back to save his wife. The Driver tries to be above all of this, but that conflagration of caring, selflessness and cherishing life is too much for her. She scrambles up to the exhausted rescuer, no longer the picture of a reigning Amazon Queen. She furtively looks around like some little snot about to rip off the mall, awkwardly reaches down for a rock and brains him with no athletic follow-through. Accordingly, she suddenly looks very girlie, unable to drag her prey to the van. The baby of those now-drowned parents screams in mortal fear; she shows no concern for that, but rather desperately looks a bit sick that the hunt will find her once again incompetent. There is a cut to her sitting deflated in her parked vehicle, with that baby in a nearby vehicle. The boss man of one-track action is clearing away all the belongings on the beach. She looks like a busted adolescent sitting in a cop car. This diminishment is followed by accompanying those girls to the club and getting back, at some level of efficiency, to her prescribed métier as a seductress.

But the time for playful truancy and (nearly) all-the-time-in-the-world intimate self-discovery has passed. Consequently, we are offered her equilibrium at the breaking point, a close-up not so strictly about her as it is about ourselves. The tightening of the noose begins with the Field Marshal giving her a silent dressing down. She stands proudly as he gets in her face, circling her slowly and methodically. He comes up very close to her so they are eye-to-eye. (Not long before this, a guy she was sending to his death tells her, “Your eyes are like weapons.”) He roars off without a word, and we see a close-up of one of her eyes, defiantly serene. She wants to capitalize upon her assets in this regard by—recalling her early attitudinal coup at the mall—striding along a busy sidewalk in an upscale retail district. Suddenly she trips, and comes crashing to the cement. We see her face, dazed and disconcerted (perhaps showing as never before her own turmoil). Her face down and her presence as if underwater, she hears a hollow cacophony of voices, one of which asks, “You OK?” That seems to begin to break the tension and she pulls herself up, still dazed and embarrassed; and the camera pulls back, showing her plodding along, shoulders slightly hunched and not noticeably more vibrant than the mainstream crowds (from out of which caring like that at the beach was alive and well) she knows she should be far more alert to. She visions herself amidst a flock of such burghers—laughing, talking excitedly—and there is a montage of her rather perplexed, self-disappointed but undefeated visage amidst a species (not quite her own, but nearly so) receding within a golden, comprehensive wave of energy. (We are reminded, by this, of the very different brew and its machinery of violence and mutilation demonstrated at her underused lair.) Her presence takes on a markedly harder edge as she subsequently pulls away from the feeble muggers/highwaymen. (But looked at again, she does maintain a civil self-possession. [One guess what would befall them were they to try that with Alan Watts.] And yet she could be as fluent with murder as he is.) She goes on to get it all back with the Elephant Man, her face aglow, her eyes twinkling. Unlike all the other dances of death, with him she is completely nude. On the run due to that unforgiveable leniency, she meets a Good Samaritan who becomes a willing but star-crossed lover. As they approach his house, he having given her his jacket to offset a damp cold, there is another breathtaking moment. We see them in the middle-distance, nearing his door, she with tousled hair, chilled to the bone and a face made sullen by expecting death at any moment. And we also see, by acute cinematic design and heartfelt engagement of history, Robert Bresson’s Mouchette! (Our protagonist had approached the Elephant Man, “Scuse me. I’m a bit lost…” Mouchette, on being overtaken by a fellow fugitive in the woods [whom she would later declare to be her lover], would hope to clarify her situation by crying out, “Lost, Sir! Lost!”) Both lost girls know in their heart that death is near, and it shows in their nearly identical physical attitudes.)

Taking up her desperation from another angle: the fog is thick, having halted her hapless escape; she stops the van and abandons it, now being an easily-found death-trap. She stands still in that white silence and savors the wealth inherent in this time and place. She’s moved on to a family restaurant in a tourist hotel, its picture window embracing the stunning landscape of sea and rock. Placed before her is a slice of Black Forest cake which, in her sizing things up, speaks to her. The beauties of her sensuous configurations have staged a sort of comeback, brought as she is to the brink of a black abyss, and temporarily delivered to this handsome and restrainedly powerful surround. A close-up of the dark and irresistible piece de resistance, with the fork bringing it to her mouth, evokes “the good life” as travel websites and magazines never stop representing as “having arrived.” She opens those now more masterfully reddened lips so many have wanted to taste. The act of swallowing (in close-up, displaying rich facial features and perfect skin) is still boffo sybaritic bliss; and then she spits it up, one of those structural shortfalls sending her crashing. (Here we should briefly allude to the kind of dovetailing the two Scarlett Johansson tours de forces offer to those not finding indigestible “weird and dark” movies the weirdness and darkness of which being something other than preludes to conventional, “wholesome” clear sailing. Glazer’s scenario is said to derive from a novel by that name we now thrill to, published in the year 2000 by Michel Faber. It’s about an extraterrestrial female who collects human guys to supply gourmet fare on a distant planet. Setting up that Neanderthal post [so perfect for the Midnight Madness crowd] from which to do a pick and roll that leaves us pinching the back of our hand, Glazer gets on with Spike Jonze’s initiative about robots who, uncluttered by a history having turned reflection into a terrorist blood sport, induce a truly new world. The crowning beauty of Glazer’s development of that subversion is its realization that terrorists are here to stay. Acquiring a sizeable modicum of that corporeality complementing consciousness, the meditative returnees have therewith also acquired the roots of passionate resentment toward that population having been shown the wisdom of discounting their body, and gobbled it down without second thoughts. Whereas Her is set in the not-too-distant future, Under the Skin anticipates events in Scotland in 2014. The aliens in Her are intellectual giants; those in Under the Skin [though easily acquiring coping skills to fit in with the host country and host world history] seem to have jettisoned their zeal for hard science for the sake of carnal excitements and unfinished business as to materiality. Thus the heart of our film here is someone having attained to realization of just what “unfinished business” means at its farthest reaches. In face of this amazing Autobahn spiking state of the art dynamics with even more topspin, we could be at ease with Her’s windfall of emotion reverberating across rational lines being more today than hitherto posited. [Recall that the setting of the Jonze invention comprises the buildings of Shanghai today.])

Plodding along a hilly handsome road, roiling, with the bad news on several fronts getting her down (the distance of the shot perfect to convey her body’s being somewhere other than the tonality of the quaintly charming village she comes upon), she has a bit of luck, running into that consistently decent chap (putting her way ahead of Mouchette). In the relative peace of this interregnum, a few more moments stand out, bringing her and her nightmare even closer to us. A TV comedian he’s fond of parodies a magic show (in a context, then, where various essays as to magic play round the clock), much to his amusement. She is utterly lost about what could be the point, but her expression conveys that she wants to share the enjoyment, the pleasurable (transcendent) ease with misfiring. Noticing her discomfort, he turns on the radio, getting away from the TV.  She once again becomes tense in trying to field this musical incident while having lost that rhythm enabling her to be so light-hearted and self-directed during the early days of driving. The camera picks up her hand resting on the kitchen counter. Then we see a little bit of her tapping to the song’s rhythm. Believe it or not, that’s a very advanced moment of magic. The next day he takes her to the ruin of an ancient castle, by way of earthy autumn woodland and a horse trail. To reach it, they have to cross a small pool of water. He carries her across—the ancient chivalry thus brought to light somehow a medium both poignant and eerie, like the accommodation of the Elephant Man. From there she is able, again with his help and encouragement, to make her way down a dark steep stairway in destabilizing high-heeled boots bought at the mall that first day of kick-ass confidence. “It’s OK,” he gently tells her. “OK. You did great…” From there, her sense of the affection accruing to the depths of motion now recovered, she stands still and offers her lips to him, a fruitful stillness and pristine motion having captivated her the night before in the light of the space heater. The courage entailed in the gambit validates in a special way its moment of sensual love. She takes this plunge from out of the farthest reaches of her nature as a driver of history and only very incidentally as a driver of a hearse. But her vagina (which had come to bear at the body shop of the opening moment as an intriguing puzzle) precludes development. Her friend’s generosity cannot take this wall in stride, and his face becomes a picture of bewildered anger. She bolts from the bed—a Beast to his fortunate Beauty; with channels of magical, mutual discovery veering to the morgue—grabs the glowing table lamp nearby and frantically beholds her deformity, having been overlooked until then, even during the quiet exploration of the previous night.

This incursion of bitterly dark comedy paradoxically marks an intensification of the viewer’s involvement in her strange motions. She has gotten under our skin in many ways, chauffeuring us, as it were, to a moment of hard and sublime truth. From here on, the narrative becomes her swan song, and at the same time an apt variation on the salient interpersonal dilemma of Beauty and Beast. Like Mouchette, after her less than uplifting night of love and recognition of a dead end, she’s headed for the nearby forest, shown first as a speck in the vast landscape captured by a wide-angle lens nearly a mile away from her; and then she is caught up with as rather mechanically negotiating rough, austerely beautiful forest and mossy terrain, in the chivalric oversized jacket that will be no proof against the ugliness to come. She encounters a forestry worker who bids her good luck, but with an unctuousness that was absent from the man she obliquely loved. “It’s a nice place if you want some solitude… to gather your thoughts…” Later he fondles her while she’s asleep in a public shelter with the inscription at the door, “Hill Walkers Are Welcome Here.” She races out, into the forest, and after an abortive attempt to steal his log-laden truck, she sounds the horn—perhaps thinking others, with more palatable motives might be nearby; perhaps choosing to be assaulted by him (over being assaulted by Alan Watts); perhaps choosing to be killed then and there; perhaps a bit of all of these avenues. He chases her down, and, in the course of ripping off her clothes, he punctures her recently-fashioned skin. He’s shocked by the black substance subsequently covering his hands and she, now in a kind of trance, stands, holding shards of her clothes once so exciting, and a black open wound shows at her buttocks. She tears off her skin at seams so violently stressed, and there is a split-second when her all-black petro-chemical presence beholds the face of the gorgeous driver, who smiles warmly, resiliently toward her—in attaining to love, finding a loving response, under her own skin, but far transcending it. The once-calculatedly congenial, rude mechanical woodsman returns with a canister of gas, pours the contents over her, sets it alight, and we closely follow her, now all roaring flames; then the camera pulls back and we see her now-diminished, locked-into-the material-landscape presence running across some meadowland, falling, being consumed by the flames to the point of exposing a skeletal framework (a revelation recalling, for the sake of contrast, the biker’s bones, on his clothes), much like the scrubby objects there, native to Scotland. A flurry of snowflakes, particles perhaps in search of wholeness, closes the adventure for her, but not for us.

La Strada starts off with a cold emotionless transaction which has nothing to do with love. Zampano (Anthony Quinn) needs another assistant for his one man traveling act after Rosa passes away. He visits Rosa’s mother who agrees to sell another one of her daughters, Gelsomina (Giulietta Masina), to Zampano. The mother tells Gelsomina that Zampano will treat her well, which does not turn out to be the case as he is a brute who is harsh and demonstrates no compassion or concern. Gelsomina is kind-hearted and tries her best to smile, no matter how miserable the situation. Her mannerisms, including her hat and clown outfit, give her a Chaplinesque appearance, but it is apparent things are not as rosy as she tries to view them. Zampano is all muscle and no heart. This is evident by his show act where he breaks a chain tied around his chest. His muscles are his only source of income. On the other hand, Gelsomina provides heart and some soul with her comedic relief dressed as a clown. As the two work together, she starts to depict an attachment towards Zampano and a form of trust and loyalty. There is no attraction towards Zampano but through a chance encounter, she finds herself attracted to the Fool (Richard Basehart), a daredevil trapeze artist who walks the high wire between two buildings. As chance would have it, Zampano and Gelsomina join the same circus as the Fool. There appears to be some history between the Fool and Zampano and the Fool takes every chance to make fun of Zampano, who in turn can’t wait to bash the Fool’s head in. In one such incident, the Fool goes a bit far with his taunting causing Zampano to chase him down with a knife. No one gets hurt but Zampano lands in jail. After his release, the Fool goes his own separate way but one day comes face-to-face with Zampano on the same road (not the only occasion where the film’s title is appropriate). Zampano is finally able to land a few punches on the Fool and feels he has proved his point. But Zampano’s punches end up killing the Fool, an act which causes Gelsomina to go into depression and start losing touch with reality.

Through the course of the film, Gelsomina exhibits attraction, attachment, love, trust/reverence and worship towards Zampano or the Fool. She finds an attraction towards the Fool but she is loyal and attached to Zampano. Both men on the other hand don’t really display any concern for Gelsomina. Zampano is openly critical of her and even manages to not take her offer of a future seriously. While the two are by the ocean, Gelsomina remarks that once she longed to get back home but now she thinks her home is with Zampano. With a smile on her face, she softly says:

“Now I feel like my home is with you.”

Zampano, true to form, harshly remarks:

“Oh yeah? What a discovery. And what all that poverty at your house to tempt you.”

With one comment, he slammed the door shut on her offer. The Fool is no better either. He appears kinder but also does not spare Gelsomina and takes a few digs at her as well. Gelsomina also blindly listens to what both Zampano and the Fool tell her, akin to worshiping them without question. No matter how bad things get, she finds a way to go on but that changes with the Fool’s death, a trigger point that causes Gelsomina to lose her joyful spirit. She gets weaker and mixes different memories and thoughts. In one incident, she indicates that the Fool is hurt but a moment later is certain of his death and blames Zampano for killing him. To Zampano, her behavior is akin to madness and he wants to get on with his life and not think about the Fool. He leaves her alone in the middle of nowhere. She is found but likely never recovered from the Fool’s death and eventually dies alone.

By the film’s end, when Zampano finally realizes his true feelings for Gelsomina, it is too late. She is out of his reach. Burdened by his guilt, he gets drunk and wanders to the beach, looking up to the heaven. In this final image, he is a classic portrait of Devdas, the most famous tragic lover in all of Indian cinema, a man who turned to alcohol to drown out his sorrow. This tragic figure of Zampano also shares a bond with Vijay in Guru Dutt’sPyaasa. La Strada was released in 1954, Bimal Roy’s adaption of Devdas came out in 1955 and Pyaasa in 1957. It is interesting that these three films were made in different parts of the world but they are united under the classification of romantic tragedies, films where love is not given life. Instead, like Devdas, the love in La Strada is made eternal by death.

by Jaime Grijalba.

I just recently finished re-watching this movie. I am in complete awe. For most of the film I was wondering and trying to remember the reasoning that I had and that I think everyone else had to put this movie in their own lists. I mean, this is a romantic/romance countdown and I’ve been two for two when it comes to the percentage of the element of romance in the final film. But then, after an hour and twenty minutes had passed, the first elements and bits of romance appear here and there, as the composer and the ballerina start talking in a balcony with an incredible landscape behind them, it may be a cliché, but the fact that those moments are played so grounded in terms of dialogue and advancement of the romance, that it seems as if every other element of the frame is screaming love, but it’s not yet really developed in the characters yet. It’s a clue, a mystery, because the whereabouts of when it really started, how it started or how deep their love is is also a hidden element of us, as we shift our focus to the one of the administration of the ballet company, specially under the strict and caring eyes of Lermontov.

It is not much a movie about the romance of the composer, Julian, and the dancer, Vicky, because you could compile every scene with the two of them together and it won’t really amount to more than twenty minutes, though it is their love that drives most of the last hour of the film, once Lermontov realizes the affair that is going between the two of them. The film is more interesting because it represents the themes of the ballet into the life of Vicky, as the girl with the red shoes can’t fight the urge of dancing that will lead her to death, and at the same time can’t love her own boyfriend, because she can’t stop dancing. In the end the film is a struggle of those two loves, the love of dancing by Vicky and the love she feels for Julian, and Lermontov knows that she struggles, he knows the character and the attitude of her, he knows that she needs to dance, she even told him that it was what made her live. That’s when the other interesting concept of the film comes through: how the jealous love of Lermontov is what practically makes this movie a complete romantic film in terms that it creates a love triangle. A strange and tragic love triangle.

We can’t help but notice the way that Lermontov watches Vicky dance, and the things and sentences that she has for her. He is obsessed, and later when he knows that he’s about to lose her, he becomes even madder, losing all his capabilities to be rational or even comply to normal social rules. He easily and quickly fires Julian once he knows that the affair is going and that it’s not going to stop, but that would be the simple approach to it, as the way that he does it is one that could be classified as psychotic if not in terrible bad taste. First, he starts by criticizing the dancing abilities of Vicky, riling Julian up into defending her and thus discovering the true feelings that he has for her, and then only to criticize the abilities that he has conducting the orchestra for the ballet that they are presenting. Everyone is saying that the dancing and the music is beautiful, but for Lermontov, blinded by the jealousy and the incredible illness that affects his mind, still sees the bad in all of it, as it justifies the firing and at the same time gives him enough power to overcome and then threaten Vicky, as to make it acceptable in his own mind that she has done something wrong so he could treat her badly, even though he loves her, just out of spite and bitter sadness.

I don’t know how many people will try to describe or try to come up with a discussion of what true love is, or if it even exists, in these essays that we’re reading in this countdown. But I’m sure that there won’t be many films that could describe, as better as this one, the extremes that people can go to because of the feelings they have for somebody else. The way that Lermontov continues to stalk and try to revise every step of the relationship of Vicky and Julian is almost sickening, how he establishes himself in the right spot just to find her “by accident” in the streets of France, and thus presenting himself as the temptation that will lead her to the decision to fall in love again with the dance and with the concept of probably dancing The Red Shoes once again, and that’s because of all the time that the severe and at the same time kind producer managed to get with Vicky, he knows her, as we’ve said before, and hence he knows what to do so that he could even later tell Julian that she has left him to dance once again, as it is her nature to do so.

Most of the readers know the catastrophic ending to this film, maybe one of the saddest and at the same time more powerful that ever was, and at the same time one of the most mysterious, as the real reasoning behind the final demise of Vicky, her final pirouette as if to say, has many and at the same time little explanation. Did she commit a mistake? Was it the curse of the red shoes? Was it because she was torn between her two loves: Julian and dancing? It is sad that in the end Lermontov, as much as he tries to, is never some kind of love interest, even though he says he’s not jealous in the romantic way (maybe he is just in love with her as a concept of a dancer), his own obsession is what in the end leads to that end. It’s curious to see the evolution of his psychosis, as it starts as a simple fall in love with Vicky, just to then suddenly realize that the love is not corresponded. As the film progresses his tactics and mannerisms become creepier and his face becomes paler, older, whiter, as if he was possessed by something he can’t control, his libido that he can’t project unto something other than an object of art, the libido that turns into castration and death.

So, is this a romantic movie? Judge yourselves people, I must say that love is present here, and that is enough for me, but what do you think?

by J.D. Lafrance

Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961) is – alongside The World of Henry Orient (1964) and Manhattan (1979) – the quintessential, romantic New York City fairy tale. Based on the novella by Truman Capote, the film is, like the others, a classic, snapshot of the city at a specific, spectacular point in time. Seeing the Manhattan of Breakfast at Tiffany’s is like going back to the early Sixties with vintage vehicles a go-go and places that no longer exist. The film is one of Audrey Hepburn’s signature roles one for which she will always be remembered – but it almost didn’t turn out that way. Capote envisioned Marilyn Monroe to play protagonist Holly Golightly, while Paramount Pictures wanted Hepburn; but even the actress wasn’t sure she could play the part. Now, it is impossible to envision anybody else in the role.

Right from the start, with the endearing vision of Holly Golightly walking through the deserted streets of the city while Johnny Mercer sings “Moon River,” director Blake Edwards establishes a wistful, nostalgic atmosphere. It’s an iconic image and one that sets the tone for the rest of the film. As her surname implies, Holly is a carefree, single girl living an apparently glamorous life in the Big Apple. A single girl with expensive tastes, Holly was inarguably the prototype for Carrie Bradshaw of Sex and the City. Holly is “crazy about Tiffany’s,” the legendary jewelry store that we see her staring at dreamily in the opening credits. For Holly, going to Tiffany’s with coffee and danish in hand is like going to church.

Paul Varjak (George Peppard), a struggling writer, moves into her building and is quickly whisked into the whirlwind force of nature that is Holly. He’s been working on a novel for five years, but lacking inspiration, writer’s block was his only roommate. Sullenly defeated, Paul is still stinging from a bad review from The New York Timesyears ago (from which he can still quote, bitterly). We soon learn that he is being supported financially by his own “interior decorator” (Patricia Neal), which gives him something in common with Holly, bonding over early on for she dreams of marrying a rich man or, at the very least, dating men who lavish her with expensive gifts and money. What better way to maintain her glamorous life? Holly starts off as something of a fascinating enigma and over the course of the film we, along with Paul, learn about her life before arriving in New York City.

As he demonstrated with films like The Party (1968), Blake Edwards knew how to depict a bash on film and make you want to be a part of it. Breakfast at Tiffany’s is no exception with the famous party scene that takes place in Holly’s apartment one of controlled chaos as the tiny space is invaded by many people. The camera lingers on the more colorful pockets as it gets wilder until the cops arrive and bring it an abrupt halt. There’s a wonderful madcap vibe that makes you want to be there. It is one of the best parties put on film, capturing how fun a shindig like that can so easily get out of control.

Audrey Hepburn is adoringly loveable as Holly, an irresistible, charming individual. She is a classic bachelorette with very little furniture (even though she’s lived there a year), stays up late and sleeps in later. Edwards inserts nice little touches, like how she keeps a bottle of perfume in her mailbox, that provide insight into her character. Under Holly’s bubbly exterior, Hepburn’s performance hints at a loneliness, an inner sadness. She conveys a heartbreaking, wounded vulnerability underneath a cheery façade. This is evident in the famous scene where she sings “Moon River” on the fire escape of her apartment or when Paul wakes her up from a nightmare. There’s a certain fragility to Holly that Hepburn maintains over the course of the film until the climactic scene when everything comes crashing down. One gets the feeling that she needs to be rescued, to be saved, and this gives the film an almost tangible, melancholic tone while also making it easy for Paul (and us) to fall in love with her. Hepburn gives a complete performance displaying a full range of emotions that go from giddy happiness to utter despair.

Hepburn has wonderful chemistry with George Peppard; I love the give and take between them, like how Holly has a habit of calling him “Fred” after her brother who is in the army and whom she dreams of running off to Mexico with to raise horses. Peppard wisely plays it cool, downplaying his role, which acts as a nice contrast to Hepburn’s flamboyance. He has a tough job of playing the straight man to Hepburn’s colorful Holly. He is the audience surrogate. However, Peppard is excellent because he knows exactly how to react to all of Holly’s outrageous behavior. At first, his character seems more than a bit on the bland side and we don’t know much about his past except for tidbits of his relationship with Neal’s character. As the film progresses, however, bits and pieces of his past are revealed, fleshing out his character. Paul and Holly are both lonely souls trying to survive in the big city any way they can. For Holly, the city is her chance to escape and start anew. For Paul, he is merely passing time until his novel is written.

For the most part, the supporting cast is excellent with Martin Balsam as O.J. Berman, Holly’s Hollywood agent who has the habit of saying everybody’s name with “baby” after it; Buddy Ebsen playing a sad sack character that is a key figure in her past, and Patricia Neal as Paul’s deliciously elitist sugar mama. The only blemish is the racist Asian caricature that is Yunioshi, played by Mickey Rooney, which comes across as horribly dated and offensive. Fortunately, he is only a small part of the film.

It is said in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet that “she doth give her sorrow so much sway.” For Holly to give herself back to her former life would be like caging an animal and resigning herself to a life where she has no happiness or freedom. To go back to that life would be to give up the happiness she has as Holly. In this respect, Breakfast at Tiffany’s could be read as a feminist tale of a woman freeing herself of traditional restraints of the era (like expecting to be a housewife, for example), but has constructed a cage of her own. As Paul says of her at one point, “she’s a girl who can’t help anyone, not even herself.” By the end of the film, Holly realizes that she can’t just change her exterior self by moving from city to city. To truly be independent she has to make an internal change. A truly beautiful woman has both guts and glamor – of which Holly has both in ample supply. Paul loves her for who she is and not as arm candy like her rich parade of men. She can’t be truly happy until she cuts those men out of her life and admit how she truly feels about Paul.

One could argue that her Holly persona is a bit of a flake, but it is merely part of her outer armor, protecting her from almost everyone she meets – except for Paul whom she allows to see glimpses of unguarded moments. Breakfast at Tiffany’s is a majesterial film about two lonely people, each harboring their own dark secrets, that find one another and fall in love. It has the warm, inviting vibe of a Sunday morning spent having breakfast in bed. The film is a love letter to the city of New York. Even though the Manhattan of Breakfast at Tiffany’s only exists in yesterday’s memories, we can revisit it again and again every time we watch this film.

by Allan Fish

(USA 2007 131m) DVD1/2

Strawberry jam

p  Matthew Gross, Jennifer Todd, Suzanne Todd  d  Julie Taymor  w  Dick Clement, Ian le Frenais  ph  Bruno Delbonnel  ed  Françoise Bonnot  m  Elliot Goldenthal  m/ly  John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison  md  Elliot Goldenthal, T-Bone Burnett  art  Peter Rogness  cos  Albert Wolsky spc/tit Kyle Cooper

Evan Rachel Wood (Lucy), Jim Sturgess (Jude), Joe Anderson (Max Carrigan), Dana Fuchs (Sadie), Martin Luther (Jojo), T.V.Caprio (Prudence), Joe Cocker, Bono, Salma Hayek, Harry Lennix, Eddie Izzard,

It’s a commonly perceived opinion that whether one loves or loathes Julie Taymor’s phantasmagoria of love n’ the Fab Four depends on whether you grew up with the music and knew it with any degree of not just depth but feeling.  The Beatles had broken up several years before I was even born, so that rules that one out.  The approach of having characters burst into famous song was hardly a new one – it was mastered by the likes of Dennis Potter.  Nearer to the mark, however (in that the actors actually sing rather than mime or undercut) is Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge, another love story set in the past and splitting audiences right down the proverbial spinal column bonemarrow.

Set in the sixties, the film tells the tale of Scouse dockworker Jude who sets off to America to find the GI father who left his mother pregnant during the war.  While over there he befriends Princeton student Max, about to drop out, whose sister Lucy has just waved her beloved Daniel off to the Vietnam War.  When Daniel is killed in combat, Lucy sets off to join Max and Jude and their Bohemian lifestyle in New York, from whence nothing will ever be the same.

Undoubtedly this is one hell of a mixture, a real fruit salad of diverse ingredients, directed by the mastermind of the hit show of Disney’s The Lion King, whose Titus had already shown her to be a visually bold, fearless filmmaker.  Chuck in a script from the great duo who wrote such beloved British TV institutions as Porridge, Auf Wiedersehen Pet and The Likely Lads, a location that literally echoes to the spirit of Boys from the Blackstuff and a host of young hopefuls and cameos from such diverse figures as Bono, Eddie Izzard and Salma Hayek (in a true homage to Potter’s The Singing Detective).  Oh, and yes, a choice selection of arguably the greatest back catalogue of pop songs ever written.  What is remarkable is not that the film is faultless, but that it’s such a joyous experience and does both the old songs and the spirit proud.  Some American audiences may say the depiction of the Vietnamese conflict was reduced to predictable montages and demonstration scenes left over from Nixon and Forrest Gump.  Some British audiences may decry the using the music in a largely – but not wholly – American setting at all, while others may have found the choice of songs predictable (the hero and heroine’s names should give you two of them).  In this way the choice of title seems to give away the intention.  The eponymous song isn’t even played in its entirety and isn’t the highlight of the piece – the finale to ‘All You Need is Love’ is, appropriately fading out, like the Beatles did in real life, with a farewell performance on a roof – but it most perfectly embodies a film soaked in the psychedelia of the period, which you’ll either love or loathe.  The question remains, to Taymor and indeed both the film’s supporters and detractors, whether the songs themselves are universal or whether love is.  That the songs are universal is undoubted, as their continuing popularity and that of devotees such as Oasis proves, which leads us to love.  On one level it’s a labour of love on behalf of its creators, gorgeously shot, directed and acted, with special mention to the lovely Wood and the ingratiating Sturgess.  And for those who still don’t quite get it, maybe they’re just the sort of people Sapphire was talking about in Almost Famous, when she said “they don’t even know what it is to be a fan. Y’know? To truly love some silly little piece of music, or some band, so much that it hurts.”  Music hurts, love hurts; ergo music equals love.  Maybe Shakespeare’s Orsino was right after all?