3:10 to Yuma (2007)

Hi Aki,

Last night we watched 3:10 to Yuma the 2007 remake of the 1957 picture in a pan-and-scan version.

Story (briefly, this time) has poor rancher Dan Evans (Christian Bale) crossing paths with Ben Wade (Russell Crowe) when Wade robs the railroad payroll stage. Wade and his gang go on to town, have a drink, and depart for Nogales Mexico, but Wade himself stays behind to sleep with the pretty barmaid who is not at all unwilling.

Evans sends his sons back home but goes on to town himself to try to convince his banker to give him a break on what he owes on the ranch land, there’s a drought in Arizona and the banker seems to be doing everything he can to drive Evans off – including burning down Evans’s barn. The banker won’t listen to Evans’s plea because the railroad is coming through their town, and that land will be worth a lot more when the railroad is there.

In the bar, Wade sketches (his hobby) the nude barmaid in bed and when he goes downstairs, there’s Evans. Evans complains that Wade in using his cattle to rob the coach has cost him dead steers and time; Wade pays Evans for his cattle, his time, his son’s time. Evans asks for even more while the lawmen come in behind Wade and take him captive.

Evans then joins the deputies to take Wade to Contention, the railhead, so’s they can put him on the 3:10 to Yuma prison to be hanged. For this Evans is promised $200 if they put Wade on that train. $200 happens to be what Evans owes on the ranch land; it’s also what the Government paid him for losing his leg in the Civil War.

But it won’t be easy: Wade’s gang has got wind of his capture and are gathering to come rescue him.

The posse takes Wade to Evans’s ranch for the first night. There Wade romances Evans’s own wife (Gretchen Mol) and she seems a bit too interested in him, which angers Evans. More, Evans’s 14-year-old son William is impressed by the outlaw’s style and speed with a gun, and dismissive of his wimp dad.

This triangle, Evans and Wade sparring over the boy’s affection and admiration, is the main b-story here. Evans will stick to the deal to put Wade on the train even after he’s the last one, in part for the money, in part to prove to his boy that he’s not a wimp; in doing so Evans improbably earns the outlaw’s respect.

The second night the posse bed down in Apache territory – a shortcut they chose to beat Wade’s gang to Contention. But the Apaches fire on them, Wade manages to save them and kill the Apaches (winning Williams’ further admiration) and leaves with all the horses.

But the next day Wade finds himself forced through the tunnels the railroad is digging through the hills, and is taken by the railroad crew, and tortured. Evans and the posse catch up, but the railroad crew won’t hand Wade over alive, so there’s a shootout and the posse and Wade have to fight for their lives to escape. All that’s left of the posse now is the chief Pinkerton detective, Evans, and William.

(The chief implausibility of the movie is that nobody just kills Wade, even when he has a gun on them or is shooting at them. For some reason they do all they can to deliver him alive to the train so he can be killed at Yuma.)

In Contention, the gang catches up with the posse (holed up in the bridal suite of the hotel) and offer money to any citizen who’ll help them. Since the railroad seems unpopular with most of these folks, the whole town is now against them. The local marshall bows out, and the Pinkerton detective, reckoning the odds, also gives up. Only Evans is left. He makes a deal with the Pinkerton: if Evans will get Wade on the train, the Pinkerton will pay his wife $1000, and take William home. Deal.

Now Evans must fight his way through town to reach the rail station, and push Wade along before him. Halfway through their journey, Wade jumps Evans and has him at his mercy, but Evans explains that he wasn’t a hero in the war, and his son holds him in contempt, and implies he’s really doing all this to win his boy’s respect. At this Wade changes his tune, lets Evans up, and agrees to offer no more resistance but run with Evans to the station.

(This is the key moment in the story, and our acceptance of the end depends entirely on whether we accept this change in the outlaw. It did not convince me.)

Wade and Evans run, shoot, fight their way to the station. The train pulls in. Now they just have to get from the station to the rail car where there’s no cover – and the last members of the gang, including the Mexican sharpshooters, are waiting. But William has not left, and he looses the cattle from a nearby pen and drives them in between. Evans and Wade make it to the prison car, and Wade goes meekly into the cell on board.

But even as he has succeeded, Evans falls – shot in the back by Wade’s chief lieutenant, Charlie Prince. Wade comes out of the rail car and looks down on the dying man. William runs up and holds his father in his arms and congratulates him for having done it. It’s clear now that William respects his father and always will; he is now cleansed of outlaw-love and will lead his life, we presume, as a hard-working rancher supporting his mother and younger brother, and grow up to be a man like his father.

Meanwhile Charlie Prince gives Wade his special gun, the one with the black handle and golden crucifix. In a moment of stupefying non-suspension-of-disbelief, rather than ride off to Mexico with his gang, Wade shoots down Charlie Prince and the sharpshooters, the last members of the Wade gang, then goes back into the prison car. (He has already told Evans that he has escaped Yuma prison twice, and seems confident he can escape a third time.)

As the train pulls away, Wade settles in the cell on the prison car, but he does whistle. His well trained horse obediently gallops alongside the train, and we are left to imagine Wade will bust out of the rail car as soon as the train gets out of town.

This is based on an Elmore Leonard story back when he was still doing mostly Western tales; the original movie from 1957 sounds like a cross between Shane (the rancher is played by Van Heflin in both) and High Noon (Frankie Laine sings the title song for both as a recurring motif and both share the clock ticking down to when the train comes in to town).

I must give special credit to the DP here. All the lighting is beautiful (though night interiors are too yellow for my taste). They shot on location in winter when the sun would always be low in the sky and the local colors would be at their peak. It’s the best thing in the movie and I wish I’d seen it widescreen on a film print in all its glory.

There are two big implausible elements to the story the filmmakers have to convince us to overlook:

1. Poor rancher (and one-legged man!) risks his life – and succeeds – in bringing an outlaw to the train
2. Charismatic psychotic outlaw feels so much respect for the one-legged rancher that he will not only help in his own incarceration but murder his own men to avenge the rancher.

The film succeeds in convincing me of neither of these.

More, the theme of the movie lies in persuading us as well as William, that the honest, hard-working life is a better one to choose than the outlaw’s life of danger excitement sex and riches. And although William ends convinced, the final moments of laughter as we see how Wade will easily escape the train to steal and kiss another day, leave us in the audience admiring him more. After all, Evans may have saved his ranch, but he has lost his life; Wade has his life and soon will regain his freedom.

On the recurring notion of the ‘badass’ in today’s movies, I have to mention especially Ben Foster’s portrayal as Charlie Prince. The way he moves and is garbed, the way he wears his pistols backwards in the holster, the way his hat is too big for his head, all contribute to one of the finest portrayals of a young punk in my memory. At the same time the film shows Charlie Prince as deadly quick and accurate with his guns, and a cruel punk who is actually hiding behind his guns, and has no real strength of character or guts. His desperate efforts to rescue Wade seem to be another implausibility of the story, until we see that Charlie without Wade is nothing, and Charlie knows it. Russell Crowe plays Ben Wade on the other hand more as Mephistopheles than badass, though in truth he is a more dangerous man than Charlie. But Wade is charming with the ladies, and this carries over to a seductive appeal to young William as well, it seems, to Dan Evans himself. Wade is here the Tempter trying to win Evans away from the hard-working honest life. But Evans (again improbably) resists all temptation and sticks to his principles.

(20 April 2009)

The Seeker: The Dark is Rising

Hi Aki,

Today I watched The Seeker: The Dark is Rising which is adapted from Susan Cooper’s YA novel The Dark is Rising. Cooper’s book is one of a series of 5 novels she published back in the 1960s and 70s. The adaptation is Fox Studio’s entry in the ‘Harry Potter Blockbuster Series Imitation’ sweepstakes but, like New Line’s The Golden Compass, is probably destined to be a one-shot money loser.

The story has the Stanton family in England from their native California. Will is the youngest of a big brood of 6 brothers and one sister. His brothers pick on him, and when he gets home from school for Christmas term break, he finds that his second-oldest brother has come back from college and has taken over his room. Well he’s not going to move in with the twins who are always picking on him, so he puts a futon up in the attic of the old house.

Strange things are happening in town, though, and Will is starting to see some strange things – usually swirling shapes in patterns. And there is a man all dressed in black who rides around town on a white horse, and stops Will on the road and demands that he hand over ‘the Signs.’ But Will doesn’t know what these are.

The answer is soon to come as the people of the Manor house take Will into an ancient church and tell him they are the Old Ones, who have been fighting on behalf of the Light against the Dark in an age-old struggle. Will they claim is an Old One himself, in fact the all-important Seeker – the one who can read The Book and know the Signs. Six Signs there are, hidden over the ages from the Rider who is the incarnation or representative of the Dark. The Rider’s powers are growing, for it is the time of the age once more when the Dark will rise and threaten to overwhelm the world, unless the Old Ones can assemble all Six Signs and use their power to counter the Rider. The Signs are made of different elements like glass, wood, iron; but the sixth Sign is in a human soul, and can never be found. On top of all this, Will can go through time to find the Signs where they were hidden. And there are only 5 days before the Rider’s powers will be at their peak, and if the Signs are not found before then, the world will be done for.

Well Will doesn’t believe this, but the Rider comes again, and the representatives and allies of the Rider, and there are thousands of black crows over the town, and the Old Ones walk Will from winter into spring, so what’s so hard to believe? One by one Will finds the signs; he sees the swirling fractal pattern glowing, and walks through time into the past, and retrieves the Signs.

But even members of Will’s family, and even the girl he’s got the hots for, can be tempted by the Rider into betraying Will. And though Will gets the five elemental Signs, how on earth will he find the Sign that cannot be found?

Of course there is a happy ending and young Will Stanton, the Seeker, uses his growing super powers to defeat the Rider and save the town and the world from snow and ice and dark. But it isn’t the end. The age is still one of conflicts, and there will be more battles ahead for … the Seeker!!!

The movie makes several crucial changes from the novel. It’s a while since I read Cooper’s books, so I only know a bit of the changes they made. The basic one, that sums up all the others, is that Cooper told of a family of Londoners who were on vacation in a small town in England, a quaint old place where they had some relatives. But Hollywood is sure that American kids can’t sympathize with British kids, Harry Potter notwithstanding, so Fox has to have a California Stanton pack.

And in the book Will didn’t have the super powers – or not so much anyway – and he was humble. But Americans today aren’t humble, if we ever were, and Hollywood wants to pander to our self-deceptions, and feed our egos. So Will is American, he is the Destined One, the Chosen One, and a Superboy all in one.

The books have their faults. It’s quite difficult to show a world of fantasy coexisting with our modern world; in fact I don’t think anybody succeeded in doing so before Joanne Rowling. In addition, The Dark is Rising is hard to film because it’s a puzzle tale: six signs have been hidden about the town, and all six must be found. That makes for six sequences of clues and discovery, on top of which there must be a couple of opening sequences to show Will in his status quo ante and learning who and what he is, and then coming to terms with it, and a climactic battle scene. It makes for a movie with about 10 sequences, all of them involving flashy special effects, and a huge budget with a long running time.

Fox chose instead to short-change the puzzle sequences, making them very short, which makes the puzzles seem easy, and not true puzzle at all: Will is just going along, suddenly sees the swirling fractal pattern, and boom! – he’s in the past and sees a Sign, grabs it with a bit of a struggle, and boom! – he’s back in the present.

But each of the sequences, almost all the scenes in fact, are packed with typical Hollywood digital effects. And the director tries to shoot everything to make it look ‘magical’ so it’s all pretty crazy to look at. This movie almost qualifies in the ‘looks great, stupid script’ line of films I started keeping track of when I first noticed that The Avengers looked cool and awesome with the sound turned off. (Tomb Raider is another in that line.) But The Seeker: the Dark is Rising doesn’t look good enough to quite qualify, and the cutting is so crazy (probably to bring it in with a short running time; there are something like 3 credited editors) that I couldn’t really enjoy the production design and effects anyway.

In the end the most damning thing I can say of this movie is how bland and generic Fox has made it. If they wanted just to imitate Harry Potter, why not come up with their own script property – surely 50-year-old minor British books aren’t famous enough to warrant this treatment, and the rights to the book must be less than the shoot’s craft services budget – paltry in comparison to the hundred, two hundred million dollars or so it cost Fox to develop, shoot, post and launch it (and it only grossed 8 million in North America, and 22 million abroad, for a really dreadful 31 million dollars total – somebody for sure got fired for this one).

Nobody in power understood that the charm in Cooper’s book lay in the specificity of the time and place, and the humble and unassuming nature of the tale, meant to be read over a school break to while away boredom of being shut in while the bad weather raged outside.

Just a waste, in fact.

(16 April 2009)

The Young One

Hi Aki,

Last night we watched The Young One another Buñuel movie. It was shot in Mexico with mostly American actors, and supposed to be set of the coast of North or South Carolina.

Story is from writer/producer Hugo Butler, based on a Peter Mathiesson short story. Butler was a leftist who got kicked out of Hollywood in the blacklist purges of the early 1950s, so he went to Mexico, and made a couple of movies with Buñuel – Robinson Crusoe and this one. According to the commentary on the disk, Butler had wanted to make a movie about black-white racial tensions for awhile, and this was it.

Bernie Hamilton plays ‘Traver’ a black jazz musician touring with his band. We see him first as he comes onto the island shore in a small dinghy; in flashbacks we find out why: accused of, maybe guilty of, rape, he had to flee the cops, stole the dinghy, and ended up here.

‘Here’ is a private island serving as a game reserve for a local hunting club. The only people who live on it are Miller (played by Zachary Scott, who had starred in the Butler-scripted, Jean Renoir film from 1945, The Southerner – Scott was a relatively minor star, and there he got to star in movies for two of the greatest directors of all time!) and the grand-daughter of Miller’s just-dead handyman, a sort of girl-woman who doesn’t know how old she is, and has grown up here half wild.

We see Miller at first pretty angry with the girl, and no reason why, and he makes her drop eggs on the floor, and he shouts at her, and orders her to clean herself up and comb her hair. But when she comes back and serves him his supper, she has undergone the usual movie transition into beauty, and Miller feels it. From then on he is lusting after her, and seems unable to control himself. He rapes her on two nights in the course of the movie.

But Traver and the girl develop an easier relationship. He too feels her appeal, but he can control himself; and she treats him as just another person, unlike the others in the story, who are all bigoted to different degrees. At first Miller, when he hears about the black man who’s left money for gasoline and tools to patch the damaged dinghy, he gets his gun and tries to shoot him. But he misses, and that night Traver busts into the cabin and gets the drop on Miller. Eventually a sort of uneasy truce develops between the two, although neither much likes the other, and Miller feels an angry jealousy whenever the girl hangs out with Traver and listens to him play his clarinet or ‘licorice stick’ (!!!)

When a preacher comes with Jackson, another employee of the hunting club, to say the rites over the girl’s grandfather’s grave, all hell breaks loose. First Jackson tells Miller that Traver is wanted for rape; then over night Miller crawls over Jackson’s body to rape the girl again, and Jackson finds out what’s been going on between them; then Miller and Jackson head out and catch Traver and tie him to the cabin porch; then the preacher also figures out that Traver has been ‘abusing the innocence of that child’ and Traver admits it and asks, ‘What if I marry her?’

(Oh, by the way, the girl’s name is Eve or Evie, short for Evelyn, and when she first feeds Miller and he notices how pretty she is, she hands him an apple for dessert.)

The preacher becomes convinced that Traver is innocent of the rape charges. The preacher tries to be open and liberal, but not even he can quite stand the notion of sleeping on a bed that a black man has slept on for one night. Jackson is an out and out racist, and in a speech to Traver tells him ‘I don’t even think you’re human, I think you people got something missing, you don’t have souls.’ So at the end of the movie, Miller, considering what he did to the girl, is willing to help Traver leave, but Jackson attacks Traver with a knife. Traver succeeds in defending himself, and escapes the island in the repaired dinghy with Miller’s help.

The black and white photography is excellent. Acting is so-so, but I think Zachary Scott does a better job here than in The Southerner because this role covers more range. Buñuel moves his camera in almost every shot he can, and gives the film a lot of energy and life.

What’s most interesting here is how Buñuel manages to satisfy his producer/co-writer’s intentions of delivering a ‘message’ film about racism, something that we can accept as a straightforward realistic story, and yet also fill it with his own flourishes and little touches of psychoanalytic bits, bits from legend and fairy-tale, surrealism, and subversion.

Also I liked how the movie refused to obey the tracks that it seemed to lay down ahead of itself. There were several points in the story when I thought I knew just how the story was going to develop, based on what the typical Hollywood film would do – every time the movie zigzagged off to one side and surprised me. For example, it looked like it was going to be a Most Dangerous Game for awhile, with the two men hunting each other through the thick island forests and swamps. Later it looked like Miller would rape the girl, then kill Traver and when the girl complained, blame the rape on the dead black man.

Finally, speaking outside the movie, what surprised me was that everybody in the story was more civilized, more decent, and less ruthlessly savage, than I expected. It seems a black mark against us today, that a movie made on this subject would now have much more violence, less trust, less understanding. Tim calls this attitude ‘badass’ and blames Quentin Tarantino for being the primary exponent of it – a sort of wallowing in, a thorough relishing of violence and treachery that knows no civilizing moderation, and even boasts of it.

(4 April 2009)

Nobody Knows (Dare mo shiranai)

Hi aki,

Tonight we watched Nobody Knows a 2004 movie directed by Hirokazu Koreeda. Original title comes up at imdb.com as Dare mo shiranai.

Very effective, though long, film. I think it’s too long, but the length works both to make me meditate on what’s unfolding, as well as to make the process seem endless.

A mom who’s a bit weak, leaves her four kids alone in the apartment, and goes off with her boyfriend. The eldest child, Akira, is only 12, but he has to take care of the others. Because the mom also told the landlord it was just her and Akira, none of the kids can go to school or even leave the apartment. Months after mom is gone, though, they all start going out. They need to; The gas and electricity and water have all been turned off.

Finally the youngest, little Yuki, dies in an accident. Akira and Saki, a neighborhood girl, take the body to haneda and bury it there. Life goes on for the survivors. The conclusion to the story would naturally be the discovery by the authorities, charges against the mother, the kids in foster or group homes or whatever they do to such kids in Japan, and finally getting into school and some sort of future. But that conclusion is withheld from us. This is less satisfying but more powerful.

The director shoots in a documentary style, and gets good performances from the kids. They are practically the whole cast. The camera is almost always static, and almost every transition is a straight cut; The only expressionistic scenes involve dead Yuki, first on her birthday when she makes Akira take her to the train station to greet mom – who doesn’t show up of course – and for awhile Akira and Yuki stand below the monorail and he promises her one day he’ll take her to see the airplanes; then near the end as Akira has a fantasy or memory of walking with Yuki down the street, and she’s still alive. (Supposedly Koreeda oroginally planned to end with a fantasy of the whole family, mom and dad and all four kids, united in a sort of heaven, or at least happy household).

Lots of the film is shot and cut in a doc style with closeups, and cutaways, and offhand compositions. These telling details convey a lot and build, taking some pressure off the kids to perform. Every effort is made to keep away from big emotions, everything is lowkey, normal, everyday. In part this makes it so real, so haunting, so believable.

Do you remember the true case this was based on? I remember something like it in the news, but it was only a few years ago, and one of the comments on imdb.com said that Koreeda worked on the screenplay for 15 years – that would push back the incident to late 1980s. Or were there more than one such incident in Japan?

Of course it’s hard to talk about such a movie without talking about the wider social implications of the story – how could mom do this, how could the kids live without being detected, what kind of a world do we live in? but I’m only talking about the movie.

(27 March 2009)

PS — to read Aki's translation of this post in Japanese, click here.

Temptress Moon

Hi Aki,

Tonight we watched Temptress Moon a 1996 film from Chen Kaige, starring Leslie Cheung and Gong Li.

I’m sure you saw it, right? So here’s just a capsule storyline: in 1911 young Zhongliang is a student, and a minor relative of the powerful house of Pang. As a special ‘honor’ he is allowed to enter the Pang palace and serve to prepare the Young Master’s opium pipe (Young Master is married to Z’s sister). Meanwhile young Ruyi, the Young Master’s sister, is a hellion, a wild kid who’s been raised from the cradle smoking dope by the Old Master, her father. One fateful night, Young Master, crazy doped up, forces little Z to sleep with his own sister. The result of this is that little Z hates Pang and the whole lot of them, and runs away. He tries to go to Beijing to study, but is set upon by thieves at the railyard.

Ten years pass. Z is now living in Shanghai. He’s been raised by the triad gangs, and loves the Boss as a father; in turn the Boss loves Z like a son. Z’s ‘job’ involves making married women fall in love with him; then the gang blackmail the married woman.

He doesn’t seem too happy about his life, though.

Meanwhile the Old Master of the Pangs dies, and Young Master succeeds; but for ten years Young Master has been a vegetable. So Ruyi is chosen to be head of the house, but since she’s only a woman, a distant cousin is her ‘helper’ – really the old guys intend to go on ruling. What they don’t know yet is that Duanwon, the ‘helper’ has always been in love with Ruyi, so he backs whatever she says – she turns out to be the real head of the house.

In Shanghai, the Boss hears of this, and sends Z to seduce Ruyi and bring her back; the fortune of the Pangs is immense and he wants it. Z asks Boss not to send him back, but Z is sent all the same. He plays hot and cold with Ruyi, who is interested in him right away. Oddly enough, Ruyi as a woman is a totally different character from Ruyi as a child – not spoiled, not headstrong, never seen to smoke dope, and innocent. This doesn’t make a lot of sense, but this movie is about style, not logic.

But Z’s sister is crazy in love with him, too. She’s been so lonely without him, as her husband is only a vegetable, and in ten years Z hasn’t even written once. But he repulses her and tells her he hates her and everybody in the palace.

All the same, Z finds himself touched by Ruyi’s innocence, her frankness, her beauty. Who knows, maybe there is some trace of love for her from when they were kids? He gets her to agree to go away with him, but then he can’t go through with it. He goes to Shanghai and confesses his treachery to the Boss. The Boss turns out to love Z more than the loot, and forgives the betrayal. Instead he arranges for Ruyi to be brought to Shanghai so she can see Z in action; this will cure Z of his heartsickness when Ruyi scorns him, and everything can go back the way it was before.

It doesn’t quite work out the way the Boss intended though. Ruyi is still interested in Z despite how he’s been living, provided he does indeed love her. But he can’t say the phrase – Leslie Cheung is playing the cold bastard yet again just like in Days of Being Wild, the one all the women want, who doesn’t love women back. Sick at heart, Ruyi goes back home, and accepts another man’s marriage proposal. But Z goes back after her, breaking from the triads once and for all. He finally gains courage to tell Ruyi he loves her. But it’s too late. In despair Z determines to go to complete his studies in Beijing after all, but in a final act of madness, he prepares Ruyi’s opium pipe, just the way he did for Young Master on that fateful night ten years back – spiking the opium with arsenic.

Halfway out of the estate grounds, Z has a change of heart. He rushes back to save Ruyi, to warn her – too late again! She has smoked the fatal pipe. From now on Duanwon will be the head of the Pang house, speaking for the brain-dead Ruyi; the triads catch up to Z on the docks and shoot him, and there’s the end to our happy little love story.

Chen Kaige and DP Christopher Doyle try to splash color everywhere on the screen. This is Chen Kaige’s version of Wong Kar Wai, with the emotions always hyped and pushed and exaggerated, characters stylized, narrative stripped of connections and logic until it pushes up against the edge of incoherence. Every character is passionate to the extreme – you could call them crazy. Mirrors are everywhere for shooting things frontward then reversed. Steadicam shots follow people running through the mazes of the palace; wide angle lenses are used to distortion; diffusion filters over a lot of the shots, with frames allowed to go completely out of focus at times. Light is splashed across faces so one part blows out – it’s just that kind of movie.

I didn’t like it much, but I respected it, and I’m glad I watched it. It strikes me that Chinese film is now like Hollywood in the 30s or French films in early 60s. People aren’t afraid to try stunts like this, and can get huge budgets to shoot sweeping period epics like this one, anchored on major stars. It really makes Hollywood films of the past 20 years or so look like timid piles of steaming cliches. Temptress Moon is like a Jean Jacques Beineix film, just delirous, or crazy. I guess if you’re really into Leslie Cheung, you might go for this, and it’s a woman’s picture, so it’s not a knock on the film if I don’t like it much.

(26 March 2009)

Soufle au Coeur (Murmur of the Heart)

Hi Aki,

Tonight it was another Louis Malle movie, Soufle au Coeur or Murmur of the Heart – the term for an arrhythmic heart condition which the boy seems to have.

Another coming of age film. Another look back, this time post-war, 1954 in Dijon, France. The French are fighting, and losing, in Vietnam. Young Laurent is a rich kid, spoiled, and the baby. He has two older brothers who are even bigger brats than he is. He is at least smart in school. At least with literature and philosophy. Like the kid in Au Revoir les Enfants he goes to private Catholic school.

Like the other Malle films, this one has a very loose structure, not Hollywood in any sense. A great many small scenes, fragmentary, add up to a portrait of this kid. There is no real structure, but the illusion of a structure is provided by the ‘climax scene.’ This is the scene that when you look back on it, the whole movie has been moving towards – it just didn’t move that way in the Hollywood sense.

In Hollywood all this movement would be on the surface. The hero would say, ‘I want this and I’m going to get it’ and they others would say, ‘You’ll never get it while we’re around’ and then they would struggle and fight over it until the hero either gets it or fails definitively.

OK, so to set this up, let’s look at it backwards the way Malle must have ended up doing: this is the story of a 14 year old boy whose first full sexual experience is with his mother.

So the structure has two sides: the long build up to the incest scene, and the much shorter aftermath.

Malle wants to say, ‘Yes it happened, but it didn’t cripple the kid, it wasn’t bad, it didn’t leave him fixated on his mother.’

So the aftermath scene has the mother telling the kid, ‘It was a beautiful tender moment and nothing to regard with any shame or disgust, it was love, and it will never happen again. It will be our secret, and we will treasure it.’ After this, the same night, the mother falls asleep, the kid gets dressed and goes to the room of a girl he’s been wooing (they are at a spa to take the waters, as part of the treatment for the soufle au coeur (which of course has a double meaning) – isolating mother and son in this vacation setting is part of the strategy to push them into a heightened extraordinary intimacy). He tries to attack helene, but she repulses him. He shrugs. ‘What room is Daphne in?’ he asks, and goes to her, and Daphne does not repulse him. These two scenes tell us that the kid is still interested in girls his own age and not fixated on mom. In the morning he goes back to the room he shares with his mom, and finds his brothers and father have come to visit.

Caught red-handed sneaking back after not being in his room all night, the kid doesn’t know what to do. The father seems mad at first, but his brothers just laugh, and then the father laughs, and the kid laughs, and the mother laughs, and the whole family laughs together. This tells us that the family is not going to be split apart by this secret but they can go on. Indeed, this is the only moment when the whole family seems to be enjoying one another and not fighting – it is as if the tension of the boy’s being a virgin has now left, and that ghost is removed; but I doubt Malle wanted to say, ‘A little incest helps a family’ rather just ‘It didn’t ruin anybody.’

The long buildup involves many many scenes, and they get a little tiresome, as Malle is really pushing it – he shows Laurent and both his brothers as real spoiled rich bastards, and I can’t say I liked any of them or enjoyed their hijinks, though maybe teenagers would enjoy the fantasy of being a brat like that.

The older boys (who are only about 17 and 18 themselves) take young Laurent to a brothel to have his first sex experience, but just as Laurent is on top of the very nice young whore the madam has chosen for him, and he’s going along nicely, in come his drunk brothers and drag him off! So he doesn’t climax, and only counts himself half a virgin at this point.

Then he is after some other girls, but is rather a bashful fellow, just not saying anything then leaping on a girl. But he’s regarded as cute by all the girls, so they don’t get too mad at him.

An interesting strategy Malle uses is to make the mother foreign (Italian), as though he couldn’t imagine a bourgeois French mother going along with it. But I think an American could imagine a French mother doing it, so I think that the strategy works, kind of: the mother being a bit of a free spirit, rather young (35) and Italian kind of makes it ‘all right’ the way we can accept fantasy when it is set in a foreign country or the past.

There was no doubt a lot of discussion and negotiation over how to handle the incest scene. As usual with Malle, the dramatic moments – sex with the mother and then with Daphne afterward – are not what he wants to focus on, so he cuts past both of them. You’ve been in writing groups, you know what showing the script around is like. I’ll bet that the mother was in earlier drafts accepting of the son’s advances on that fatal night. But people reacted in shock and disbelief. The version might even have made it through preproduction into production, and the actress balked, and Malle had to negotiate with her.

So it happens on the night of Bastille Day, and mother is very drunk. Not quite passed out, she responds and kisses her son passionately, many kisses on his head and cheeks before we cut away to the aftermath. But her eyes are closed, she has just broken up with her boyfriend (yes she was having an affair, and son and mother discuss the affair and breakup in a scene that is used to advance the tension between them and bring them more intimacy as one of the final stages of the buildup to the incest scene) – and so we can’t be sure she is even totally aware of what she is doing, does she know who she is with, is she completely in control of her actions? This tends to exculpate her in the eyes of the audience who would otherwise condemn her.

Malle knows he’s dealing with dynamite here, a shocking taboo, and so he has to handle the buildup very carefully.

The movie thus is a good one to study to watch several times if you are interested in the strategies Malle used to try to make this most-shocking, taboo act come off as natural and acceptable and even beautiful.

One final note of interest is the credit given to a co-director. The final credit is ‘written and directed by Louis Malle’ but a few title screens before that there is acknowledgment of the ‘co-metteur en scene’ and I don’t really know what that means, but it is a woman’s name. Maybe she helped with the child actors, which is what I guessed when I saw the title, but at the end now I’m wondering if she was not trying to give the woman’s point of view, and the mother’s point of view. Malle provides the personal recollection or fantasy (I don’t know how autobiographical this might be, but the kid in Au Revoir Les Enfants also had a young, very beautiful mother to whom he was overly attached, and a distant indeed never-seen, father) of the boy.

The whole film is dubbed, which gives it an odd feeling of performances being a little off; but again I was reading subtitles and not seeing the faces too much. The main kid actor can’t act too well, like the kids in Malle’s other films, and so we get the blank looks all too often – they were kind of annoying me in this one. It just seemed like bad acting, bad directing.

The old Hollywood movies when they had child stars, they had kids who could act, but only in the hammy, fake Hollywood style. Malle comes after the Method school changes everything, as well as the new wave, so when he casts kids he’s mostly condemned to amateurs and about the most he can manage is to get a kid who looks right, and then hope that the mosaic of the scenes in the screenplay will add up to a sense of the character that the actor can’t provide.

(written around 10 March 2009)

Shadow of a Doubt

Hi Aki,

Well, You’ve seen that movie, right? All I can say is a couple things struck me as wrong notes. In general the movie is an example of prime Hitchcock in his film noir period of the late 40s.

But there are two lines offscreen in the beginning, that strike me as added by the producer, for added exposition, to make it even clearer where we are and who is who. I don’t think Hitchcock wanted them there, though it is possible.

The other thing was more fundamental. The girl Charlie has a sort of sixth sense, a premonition, a weird way of knowing what her uncle Charlie, the serial killer, is thinking. Now, this plot element is an extravagant one for a realistic filmmaker like Hitchcock. I don’t remember him ever using such a device in any other of his films. He is more likely to be debunking telepaths and psychics. This just isn’t his style.

More: he went to the real Santa Rosa California (Hitchcock loved to drive up and down the California coast on weekends or when he was in between films) and this location shooting gives the film an even firmer basis in realism, and the psychic ability stands out even more.

It would be one thing if the psychic stuff were the center of the film; it can be pretty powerful to make us believe in a realistic location, and then have a monster show up, or something alien or weird against the very-real backdrop. But that’s not how it works here. Instead the psychic angle seems to be thrown in only as a plot crutch: somehow the writers must get the girl to believe her beloved uncle is a murderer, even when the FBI are convinced another suspect, who died running away, was the real killer. And yet the girl has only circumstantial evidence, nothing that would stand up in a court of law. There are other ways they might have done it, but the psychic angle was the one they chose.

I think it could be argued against me that the point really lies in something the killer tells his neice, ‘Tear off the fronts of these houses and you find swine within, the world is ugly, monstrous.’ There is a sort of uneasy undercurrent running beneath this cheerful small town. One of Charlie’s classmates now works in a bar, and seems to be one sigh away from becoming a prostitute. Charlie’s dad and his pal like to read crime novels and invent ways to commit the perfect murder (this is played for laughs).

Young Charlie’s weird psychic attunement to her uncle indicates that perhaps she is not the sweet, bright girl she seems; that she might be just as bad as he is. In fact after he tries to kill her once, to shut her up, she tells him he better leave town, or she will kill him herself. She never does work any evil against him, but in the game of cat and mouse she plays with him, she proves as adept at lies and manipulation as he is.

There is also the image of old timers dancing a waltz, that just appears now and then, sometimes linking Charlie and her uncle. We will see her, dissolve to the image of the dancers, dissolve to uncle. I’m not entirely sure what to make of it.

It might be uncle’s memories from his youth, from the happy time he speaks of once (in the little back story we get of him, we are told he was a quiet, studious child, who crashed his bicycle and hit his head, and after this his personality changed; this also suggests that anyone can turn into a serial killer, as well as providing a very weak explanation for his crimes). it might merely represent a vertiginous state of mind, suggesting something going round and round and round, driving him to madness, to murder. I don’t know. It is another stylistic flourish quite unlike Hitchcock, and perhaps forced on him by skirball, the producer – though I think this is more likely to be from Hitchcock. He was doing some experimenting in this stage of his career – he would go on to do some experiments in extremely long takes in under capricorn and then in rope, a film constructed almost entirely out of camera-magazine-long, 11 minute takes, exhausting for crew and performers, which made for weaker performances. And just after Shadow, I think, Hitchcock did Strangers On a Train at Warner Brothers (Shadow is at Universal) which has a similar musical motif for a madman’s murders, an old music hall song that plays at a carnival while the killer strangles a girl – the killer in Shadow also strangles, and the papers refer to him as the ‘strong-handed strangler.’

Beautiful photography, fine cast, polished filmmaking. Just these things stand out. Three writers get credit, including Thornton Wilder, a famous novelist of the time who also gets a full title credit thanking him for his ‘participation’ in the film – what I guess from that is that it was his story and his idea, but Hitchcock changed the script enormously with the second screenwriter, and then patched it up with #3, Alma Reville, who was a longtime collaborator with Hitchcock (and his wife!). Whereupon mr wilder got angry, and producer skirball, not wishing the famous man to complain about the movie to the press, soothed wilder’s feathers with the big second credit.

But that’s conjecture on my part. I’m sure there are bios that tell the full story.

Oh yes: I looked up the film, and Hitchcock is said to have called this his favorite of all the movies he made in America. And another site tells me that Hitchcock acted as his own producer and got the film done the way he wanted, with no compromises. If true, I am wrong about the odd touched coming from someone else.

(written around 17 February 2009)